August 25/26 Edition of Clout!: Thom Hartmann, Greg Palast, Rep. Rush Holt, Prof. David Ray Griffin

I guess #3I think that China and Russia bad guys, arranged it....and our second level guys knew that something was up...and Bush asked Cheney for guidance, Cheney formed his own opinion and evaded President Bush's questions, for legal protection, leaving Bush to fend for himself, and Bush did the prudent thing, wait till he has incontrovertable evidence! Like I said, #3!

stand down on the 14thI'll give you a reason. There is a big anti-war march in D.C. on the 15th. Think about it.

SingsingYou flooded the blog.

People don't read posts this long. Turn this poost into a blog by itself. It's really rather rude to do that on someone else's blog, no matter what the issue.

~~"Damned right (I'm an agitator). An agitator is the center pole in a washing machine.  It gets the dirt out! That's a good thing!"   Jim Hightower (paraphrased)

POll on 9/11I think it's both 3 and 4...

They saw an opportunity for the PNAC plan and they enabled it.

TRUTH SQUAD Obama VIDEO!!! 08/24/2007 - 8:46pmSenator Barack Obama paid a visit to Coastal Carolina University yesterday and 911 Truth Myrtle Beach asked him some very important questions.http://www.911blogger.com/node/10856 http://nyc911initiative.org 

NEADS/NORAD Cheyenne Mountain LOCK DOWN!!! INTERCEPT STANDOWN!!!Cheyenne went into LOCK DOWN on 9/11 based on a "CREDIBLE THREAT" but did NOT halt the 4 war-games including Vigilant Guardian in progress that inserted ghost radar blips in FAA & NORAD/NEADS air traffic control systems.http://www.airamerica.com/clout/node/36/132#comment-132   Mr. William Thomas, journalist and author of  "Days of Deception: Ground Zero and Beyond"Flash Stream:polstream.podbean.com/ ... podPressPlayer/ Will_Thomas_Days_of_Deception_Ground_Zero_and_Beyond -2007-08-24MP3 DL:podbean.com/ ...  Will_Thomas_Days_of_Deception_Ground_Zero_and_Beyond -2007-08-24.mp3  Per Greene's Conversation with Griffin Andrew Card's MIS-INFORMATION and 9/11 Orchestration http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=andrew_card#a855bushfirsttold  One account states that Rove tells Bush the WTC has been hit by a large commercial airliner. However, Bush later remembers Rove saying it appeared to be an accident involving a small, twin-engine plane. In a third version of the story, Bush later recalls that he first learns of the crash from chief of Staff Andrew Card, who says, “‘Here’s what you’re going to be doing; you’re going to meet so-and-so, such-and-such.’ And Andy Card says, ‘By the way, an aircraft flew into the World Trade Center.’” “From the demeanor of the president, grinning at the children, it appeared that the enormity of what he had been told was taking a while to sink in,” according to a reporter standing nearby at the time.      NEW REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION Debunking 9/11 Debunking - An Answer to Popular Mechanics and the Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory By David Ray GriffinBy virtue of his previous four books on the subject, David Ray Griffin is widely recognized as one of the leading spokespersons of the 9/11 truth movement, which rejects the official conspirac...  The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions - A Critique of the Kean-Zelikow Report By David Ray Griffin With US political leaders Democrat and Republican alike rushing to embrace the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and an eager media receiving the Commission’s 567-page report as the whole story, the history we can stand upon forevermore,... David Ray GriffinReveals Major 9/11 Cover-up On C-SPAN and in Washington Posthttp://www.wanttoknow.info/050504davidraygriffin   Prof. Griffin was initially very skeptical of claims of a major cover-up around 9/11. But in April of 2003, a trusted friend sent him an email referring him to the reliable, easily verifiable information on the two-page 9/11 summary from our website, WantToKnow.info. After exploring the links to revealing articles on major media websites and progressing eventually to our 60-page 9/11 timeline and other excellent resources, he became convinced of a major cover-up around 9/11. Putting aside all of his work in theology, Prof. Griffin then devoted himself to writing The New Pearl Harbor, a devastating book with detailed footnotes which systematically presents a powerful account questioning the official story of 9/11. Critics of Griffin's thesis, such as Chip Berlet, say that many of the claims in the book are refutable. Griffin has rejected these criticisms and debated Berlet. Other reviewers like Mike Williams claim to have found various problems .Concise summaries of a number of other major media articles on David Ray Griffin with links for verification http://www.WantToKnow.info/davidraygriffinnewsarticles The American Empire and 9/112007-03-00, Tikkun Magazine - March/April 2007 Issuehttp://www.tikkun.org/magazine/tik0703/frontpage/empire911Literally dozens of people – including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters – reported hearing explosions in the Twin Towers, with some of them explicitly saying that the collapses appeared to be instances of controlled demolition. One fire captain said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom." paramedic said: "It was professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors." One firefighter said: "It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings." Given all the features that indicate controlled demolition, it is not surprising that when a controlled demolition expert in Holland was shown videos of the collapse of WTC 7, without being told what the building was ... he said: "They have simply blown away columns. A team of experts did this. This is controlled demolition." Profile: Michael Springmannhttp://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_springmann Michael Springmann, head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that  is “repeatedly ordered… to issue visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. The decision is reversed by the chief of the consular section. Springman realizes that even the ambassador, Walter Cutler, is aware of the situation, which becomes “more brazen and blatant” as time goes on. On one occasion Springman is even told, “If you want a job in the State Department in future, you will change your mind.” According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system continued at least through 9/11, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah as part of this program.  Why Is the White House Pretending That Saudi Insurgents in Iraq Are Iranian?   By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! July 20, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/57391 Toby Jones, a former Persian Gulf analyst with the International Crisis Group and history professor at Rutgers University: Nearly half of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops in Iraq have come from Saudi Arabia – one of Washington's closest allies in the Middle East. U.S. officials have so far refused to publicly criticize Saudi Arabia's role in Iraq, focusing instead on Iran. Saudis have been involved in Iraq since early in 2003. As early as 2004 and 2005. There were upwards of 2,500 to 3,000 Saudis to that point who had traveled from the kingdom to Iraq to participate in the insurgency. Saudi security and police officials are unable to or have proven unwilling to crack down on the ideologues within the kingdom who foment both anti-American sentiment and a growing anti-Shiism, which supports Saudis who desire to go and fight in the jihad.Gonzalez: The press attention and the emphasis of our political leaders in this country don't deal with the fact either that so many of the foreign fighters are coming from Saudi Arabia or that they are retraining and regrouping in Pakistan, in terms of the continuing war of al-Qaeda. These are, of course, two American allies in the Middle East.Jones: It's symptomatic of the war more generally, in that the United States has proven mostly incapable of managing the political forces that are driving violence in both of those two places. It's unwilling to sacrifice its alliances for whatever -- however it defines its interests in the region. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it's both because the US considers Saudi Arabia to be a stabilizing ally, perhaps ironically, given its role in destabilizing Iraq, and Pakistan similarly in Central Asia. So the inability of the United States to manage its political affairs at this point shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but I think that's the lesson, also, about the question of addressing Saudi fighters in Iraq, is that the US has been disinterested, more inclined to talk about Iran and the regional threat that Iran allegedly represents than the details on the ground.The New Pearl Harbor:  The Bush Administration Was Behind The 9/11 Attackshttp://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/26/150221DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: There's clear evidence that the war in Afghanistan was planned before September 11. After 9/11, the same process continued. There were many times when it looked like the military deliberately allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape. Obstructions of investigations continued, and those who did the obstruction were promoted rather than fired. They covered up the evidence that the head of the ISI, that is the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, was in Washington the week before and during 9/11, and that he was meeting with George Tenet, head of the CIA. -- Afterwards it was learned that he had ordered a fellow ISI Agent to wire $100,000 to Mohammad Atta. This is just incredible. What if we had learned that Saddam Hussein had ordered that money to be wired? That would have been the main reason we gave to attack Iraq, and yet the United States Government covered up that fact.The head of the ISI, it was learned later, had ordered one of his agents to have that $100,000 transferred to Mohammad Atta who has always been considered the leader of the hijackers. And yet after that it was learned that the United States, rather than pursuing the head of the ISI, had him quietly dismissed by the Pakistani intelligence agency. So it seemed to be clear example of trying to hush up the fact that the Pakistani intelligence was involved in the events of 9/11. But the most important evidence pointing to official complicity involves the events of 9/11 itself. Presenting a deductive argument is when we say that no chain is stronger than its weakest link. Then  if there are a couple premises of the argument that are at fault, then the whole thing falls. But with the cumulative argument that isn't the case. MIHOP debunking begins from the premise that it's not a good thing to believe that this was the result of a governmental conspiracy, and then his method is to look at those parts of the overall cumulative argument that seem like they're most easy to cast doubt on, and ignores the strongest points. I do not make charges in the book. I do not draw conclusions. What I do is say that we have a prima facie case here and a massive prima facie case that involves every aspect of the official story, and these things need to be checked. The Bush administration created a halo over 9/11, so it became not only unpatriotic, but almost sack religious to raise any questions. Therefore, the main line press has not raised these questions such as was the hole in the Pentagon only 18 feet in diameter as this picture suggests? They have not raised questions about why the photograph doesn't show any plane on the pentagon lawn. They haven't raised questions about the official story which says that somehow the plane went inside, and then the fire was so hot that it vaporized, it vaporized aluminum and tempered steel and yet somehow left the bodies in tact enough that they could be identified either through DNA -- these are ludicrous. It's a matter of being willing to look at the evidence, and again, my book is a presentation, a cumulative argument summarizing the work of a lot of other researchers. We got this information to the 9/11 commission. The members have it, but thus far, they have refused to raise any of the questions that would go beyond incompetence. See, the major official story is that 9/11 came about through massive incompetence, miscommunication, and yet not a single person has been reprimanded. Is that credible? In fact, many of the people were promoted.War Games by the US military on 9/11 paralysis of air defenses that ensured the success of the attacks? who coordinated these efforts? http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html#ruppertThe FBI promoted agents who deliberately inhibited pre-911 investigations, and its punishing those who saw it coming and tried to stop it. What message did this send, and could it be anything but the one intended? There has been virtually no media coverage of the issues of the 9/11 war games, the "amazing coincidence" of a "plane into building" exercise being conducted that morning, or the alleged role of Vice President Richard Cheney in overseeing the war games that morning. related pages: NORAD / Air Force wargames on 9/11: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern VigilanceNational Reconnaissance Office "plane into building" exercise on 9/11CIA / National Reconnaissance Office "plane into building" exercise     Associated Press, August 21, 2002     simulation of a plane crash into the NRO headquarters (near Dulles Airport, Virginia) - this was not a "terrorism" exercise but it did result in the evacuation of most NRO employees just as the "real" 9/11 was taking place, making it more difficult for the nation's spy satellites to be used to track the hijacked planesVigilant Guardian     Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 3, 2002, Newhouse News, others (these articles are reproduced below)     The publicly available mass media articles about these exercises state that they were similar enough to the actual events that top NORAD personnel were confused, not sure if 9/11 was "part of the drill" or a real world event.Vigilant Warrior     Richard Clark, "Against All Enemies" (March 2004)     referenced by Richard Clark.Northern Vigilance     Toronto Star, December 9, 2001     "Operation Northern Vigilance, planned months in advance, involves deploying fighter jets to locations in Alaska and northern Canada." This ensured that there would be fewer fighter planes available to protect the East Coast on 9/11. Simulated information was fed into radar screens - is this what confused the air defenses that morning?Northern Guardian     Toronto Star, December 9, 2001     only mention was in the early edition of this article, no details publicly available (probably related to Northern Vigilance)Tripod IIUS Department of Justice and City of New York     Rudolph Giuliani's testimony to the 9/11 Commission, May 2004     biowar exercise in New York City scheduled for September 12, 2001The official fable about 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory I ever heard. It involves a rich cave dweller, who sent 19 hard-drinking, drugging, womanizing Islamic fundamentalists, armed with boxcutters and prepared to die for Allah, to crash planes into U.S. buildings "because they hate our freedom".   However, I must admit I bought it for a while myself, as a result of the spectacular false flag operation, which was envisioned by the Neocons as "A New Pearl Harbor" in their manifesto, The Project for a New American Century. Of course, I also used to believe the one about the sweet little man who drove a sleigh, pulled by reindeer, who delivered toys to every good little girl and boy in the world.   At least believing that one did not mean killing innocents, bankrupting the U.S. treasury, sanctioning illegal detentions, renditions and torture, promoting fear and hatred around the world, or giving up our cherished ideals and civil liberties.   We were told by Donald Rumsfeld that he intends to wage a war on the internet to deal with "news informers" and bloggers who do not affirm his version of reality. Thanks to all the truth tellers who refuse to remain silent about the phony "War on Terror".    After all, we don't know how much longer we will be permitted to comment or what retribution we may suffer for merely speaking the truth. If you find this post overly dramatic, then perhaps you have not had your emails and phone calls monitored.   And maybe you don't know about the hundreds of detention camps positioned all over the United States. General Tommy Franks has revealed that if we are hit with another major "terrorist attack", the plans are already in place for Bush to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution.   Things are getting pretty surreal here now, although we hear "freedom is on the march" elsewhere, Bush has declared the Constitution "just a god-damned piece of paper" and decided a peace activist can be arrested for wearing a t-shirt or forced to protest in a caged area known as "a free-speech zone".   Engineers and Architects for 9/11 Truth have completely destroyed the Popular Mechanics explanation of SYMMETRICAL FREE FALL COLLAPSES resulting from random fires. CONTROLLED DEMOLITION is NOT a theory, IT'S A PROVABLE FACT!!!!!!! The IMPEACHMENT is self explanatory. There is a shopping list / rap sheet two blocks long that cannot be dismissed as a consequence of WAR TIME AUTHORITY since #1) the "WAR" / invasion - occupation was - is ILLEGAL #2) there is no insurrection or even a credible threat to national security. END OF STORY. As far as ending the US occupation of Iraq and addressing the gathering storm in Afghanistan - Pakistan, once Cheney and Bush are removed in that order, the Biden-Murtha-Kucinich plan will hand off sovereignty to the natives before Easter and 99% of GI's will be home by next Independence day. The Contractors are free to work for the UN or the states that result from Iraq's partitioning, but they cant stay in the US as PRIVATE ARMED MILITIAS. On labor day '08 if the replacement POTUS doesn't reverse all the shrub's signing statements and fix the USA Patriot ACT, IMPEACH HIM TOO!!! Ought to be a fireworks filled general election in the shadow of that hoopla. How better to turn out the vote?9/11 demo proof video from Sonoma State Univ. — sponsored by Project Censored 9/11: Re-examining the 3 WTC High-rise Building "Collapses"ae911truth.org/ v1ae911truth.org/ v2ae911truth.org/ v3 airamerica.com/ ... ringoffire/176/904"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -Sherlock Holmes "Always remember, Watson: Crime is common. Logic is rare. And justice even rarer. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. The real culprits of 9-11 still lurk in the shadows and may even be disguised as friends." "Evildoers, I would call them," Watson grunted. We’ve been ambushed by a yet-unidentified enemyhttp://www.airamerica.com/ringoffire/node/176#comment-918As we all continue to learn more about this topic, we start to comprehend the grandiosity of the thefts and fraudulent transactions that took place under the umbrella of 9-11- specifically hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gold bricks which were surreptitiously liberated from their safety deposit vaults under the World Trade Center. Couple that with the realization of the verifiably true statement made by Donald Rumsfeld on September 10th 2001- wherein he announced that $2.3 trillion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds had been misappropriated by Pentagon accountants and “lost”. Let me do a quick thought experiment with you: If I drew a line, one foot in length on a white board, and that line represented 1 million dollars, how long would a line representing a billion dollars be? What about a Trillion Dollars? The answers are 1,000 feet, and 189 miles, respectively, and keep in mind, that using 1 unit= 1 million dollars, if one dollar was = to 1 foot, a trillion dollars would be 189,000,000 miles- or in everyday terms- to the Sun, and back. My point is that when we’re talking about Trillions of Dollars missing, we’re talking about the largest crime ever committed- right in front of all of our lives and using 9-11 as the getaway vehicle- and what was stolen, was our collective Future, it’s about time we realized it. Not only did Rumsfeld’s September 10th ,2001 announcement not draw much attention then, but even today it’s widely unknown… and it’s worth mentioning here that DynCorp, which is partially responsible for the bogus Pentagon accounting, is still receiving tens of billions annually in Pentagon contracts… in other words, it’s my contention that what America doesn’t know is exactly what’s killing America, and Americans. Based on that contention- if we simply build a mechanism to restore the unrestricted flow of information to the People, the country should self-resuscitate. In layman’s terms: A Drug Syndicate has infiltrated the highest levels of our Constitutional Republic…Without the Black Markets created when you make certain plants illegal, there would be no War on Drugs, no War on Terror, and without the Drug Syndicate (i.e. the Pirates, who used to fly the jolly roger flag now sport the crest of skull and bones) deriving their power via laundered Drug Money; there might even cease to be ANY type of War. Who’s going to fight to defend the Drug Syndicate after they discover for themselves how it basically ties our investments, retirements, and pensions into the schemes killing our children, inner-cities, and rural towns? Without the Drug Trade, Insurance Companies and Enterprise Software Companies would no longer be able to manipulate, threaten, and continue to control, the financial integrity of our lifetime investments and savings. That’s what’s at risk- all of your life’s work, savings, and investments. There are trillions of dollars being stolen in broad daylight, from both Pension and Retirement Funds, as well as tax dollars, via Pentagon fraudulent accounting schemes. Almost all of these schemes are software dependent, and yet software is continually used as the virtual scapegoat by the Drug Syndicate. Hormats' The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars http://www.airamerica.com/thomhartmannpage/node/58#comment-1890  Robert D. Hormats: Senior Economic Advisor to Dr. Henry Kissinger, General Brent Scowcroft and Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski.Charlie Rose with Robert D. Hormats Google Video http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/lofiversion/index.php/t116821.html Estimates that 25,000 civilian and military employees work on NSA's sprawling Fort Meade campus off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, although the exact number is classified. At least an additional 10,000 eavesdroppers are scattered elsewhere in the United States and around the world, he says. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer is a Bronze Star Medal recipient who is a CIA trained senior intelligence operations officer and reserve Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years of experience in the intelligence community; he has served his entire career at the forefront of this country’s secret intelligence battles in cutting edge, often dangerous, assignments and leadership positions.As the director of DIA Task Force STRATUS IVY, he led this special mission unit in the conduct of some of the most daring and innovative Human Intelligence collection and information operations support projects ever undertaken by the Department of Defense, to include providing direct support to ABLE DANGER. Many of these highly classified operations are still ongoing and continue to provide critical information on many of this nation’s most challenging adversaries. 9/11 Left Gatekeepers http://www.oilempire.us/democracynow.html All of us, no matter how long we've been activists and how much we know of our nation's history--especially contemporary history--eventually come to a place in the road where we cannot go. For many of us, it is the killing of our own. Its heinous nature is such that we try to find every other explanation except the evident one. We've already had to suspend our belief systems to accept that our government would condone, actively encourage and actually commit crimes against humanity in foreign lands. But to suspend our beliefs even further to acknowledge our government is now using those well-honed tactics against its own people, is a difficult threshold to cross. I suspect that this is the reason the Progressive Left and what little media there is on the Left has so steadfastly avoided 9/11. The Left can report on East Timor, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, etc. etc. etc. and describe in great detail US involvement. Our current UN Ambassador Nicholas Negroponte's involvement in Honduras, for example, supplying the contras to over through the government in Nicaragua and now his appointment as the replacement for Bremer in Iraq in June, etc. These associations, this "institutional history," the malfeasance--the Left can expose this stuff and does, but those same skills, that memory of names and places and people from the past that needs to be applied to 9/11 has simply not been forthcoming. It has been left to hundreds of disparate amateur investigators to parse together the story, while those with the skills and tools and resources at their disposal to do this work have looked outward and not within. Exposing the 9/11 cover-up is the most important thing we can do to stop this Administration and their global agenda of war and empire, and many of us on the left who have been your most avid supporters are utterly bewildered that you have not done so. The non-corporate, independent media has a moral responsibility to at least ask the difficult questions -- for the sake of our fragile democracy, as well as the victims of US imperialism around the world. Most of your 9/11 guests have simply repeated the official story that 9/11 resulted merely from “intelligence failures.” None has even implied possible complicity on the part of the Bush Administration, CIA or Pentagon. Last week you even had on your show “CIA analyst” Mel Goodman, who offended all the 9/11 family members when he said, “We don’t need to investigate what happened on 9/11. We already know what happened.” Even the National Green Party in a recent press release has come out in support of the 9/11 families and called for a new investigation into 9/11 that focuses on the evidence for US government complicity – like, for example, why NORAD violated standard operating procedures and did not launch jets to intercept the hijacked planes until it was too late. The 9/11 families have been screaming for an answer to this question for almost three years, and not once has Democracy Now addressed this issue. Why? And why has Ellen Mariani not yet appeared on Democracy Now? She’s the 9/11 widow from New Hampshire who is suing the Bush Administration under the RICO Act for allowing 9/11 to happen as a pretext for the war on terror. Her case has been recently nominated for the award of “most-censored news story” of the year.  Peter Dale Scott: 9/11, Canada, left gatekeepes & ZelikowVancouver 9/11 Truth Conference, June 22, 2007.  Veteran political analyst Peter Dale Scott critiques the role of left gatekeepers for their superficial analysis of American politics which leaves the criminal structure intact.youtube link  BOOK REVIEW: MODUS OPERANDI 9/11Does Cheney get immunity for ratting out Bush? Does Bush cop an insanity plea, defended by Dershowitz? Guilty? Not Guilty? Does he go into witness protection? Is Bush pardoned by President Romney? Does the PNAC group have motive, means and opportunity? Does Bush confess? Was Bush in the loop before 9/11? Who's the Nostril? Who's Rove? Where's Condi? Are Harry Palm and Armand Legge expendables? Who's on the New World Odor's Omission Commission? What's the modus operandi? Excitus acta probat? Does the end justify the means, Wolfowitz? READ THE BOOK, don't wait for the movie. published by Global Outlook.  get the book 106 second vid - youtube link  9/11: THE UNDENIABLE UNIFYING FRAMEWORK - John McMurtry (part 1 of a series) Philosopher John McMurtry notes that 9/11 is appropriately recognized as a major turning point in modern history, perhaps western civilization. It is therefore of great importance that 9/11 be properly understood. McMurtry calls attention to the most prominent left gatekeeper, Noam Chomsky, who is 'normally critical of established official stories,' but holds on to the official conspiracy theory, the 'least plausible conspiracy theory,' despite its many 'gaping holes.' As such, McMurtry states, left gatekeepers 'are blocking out the same things the official mainstream media and governments are blocking out which is...what in fact went on on 9/11?' The absolute falsity of the official story is undeniable, the philosopher says. "It's scientifically confirmable; we have evidence for it and we don't have good evidence against it...it's a scientific hypothesis...we can regard as valid.'-22meg quicktime  and 19meg winmedia 7.7meg quicktime and 6.1meg winmedia links below: 9/11: Wild Conspiracies and Rational Concerns By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. alternet.org/ ... 37046 Even when you cut through the conspiracy theories about 9/11 and head straight for the facts, the government's version still seems fuzzy. According to a recent Zogby poll, less than half of all Americans agree that "the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about U.S. government involvement is nonsense." You could almost hear a wail of frustration rising up from the gatekeepers of acceptable discourse. Just after the Zogby poll was released, William Arkin, the Washington Post's normally circumspect military affairs columnist, had a fit of apoplexy over some e-mail from 9/11 skeptics. "National security is men's work," he wrote -- absurdly bringing gender politics into a debate that's already quite muddled -- and conspiracy theorists are, presumably, not real men, but "predatory and devious, seekers of polarization and not light, abusive of the political system contemptuous of anything that even resembles the 'truth.'" One wonders what he really thinks. Outside of the world of punditry, the 9/11 conspiracies should come as no surprise, especially when you consider how ripe the events of 9/11 are for "alternative" analysis. That begins with the basic premise that underlies the most common conspiracy theories. I, for one, have no problem accepting the notion that a small group of true believers -- people like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the neocon "cabal" -- used the attacks of 9/11 to seize and consolidate power. And I'm comfortable accepting that they view liberal democracy as a threat, their political opponents as a national weakness, and American militarism as the best hope for humanity. They've proved, to my mind, that they're happiest when governing in secrecy -- a prerequisite for a conspiracy. Think about the administration's obsession with classifying everything under the sun, or Dick Cheney going all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid divulging who, exactly, crafted America's energy policy. The administration's hardliners also represent a nexus between the more authoritarian end of our political spectrum and the anti-egalitarian business Right; the administration and its backers, allies and former partners are making an unprecedented fortune in all corners of the "war on terror," and that goes to motive. It's a group of ideologues that knows its prescriptions aren't popular. The Project for a New American Century, where a "White House in waiting" of hard-right operatives weathered the Clinton years, urged a massive "rebuilding" of America's military capabilities (PDF), but warned that it wouldn't be easy unless there was a major attack on the American homeland. "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor," they wrote. And while Arkin might consider the preceding paragraph evidence of the most "predatory and devious" kind of fringe thinking, I’d say it’s simply naïve to dismiss the many occasions in history when exaggerated or false external threats were used to rally a nation to a war footing (and abridge civil rights at home) -- from the explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor to the Reichstag fire to the Gulf of Tonkin. So you have suspects and motive, and they accord more or less with some distinctly mainstream progressive analyses. That's not, however, evidence of anything. So, to repeat, while there's a pretty clear record of Bush Republicans taking advantage of 9/11 - think Rudy Giuliani's 2004 GOP convention speech that mentioned September 11 four score times - indictable evidence has yet to be presented in open court. Indeed the place to start considering the events behind 9/11 is to look at the federal government's official version of what happened and see if it's accurate. If there are holes or serious flaws -- and there are -- then we should try to get an accurate version of what happened and proceed from there. Let's start with a simple fundamental problem with the 9/11 report: We may not know who all the hijackers really were. Three days after the attack, the FBI released the names of those infamous 19 hijackers (photos here). But the following was reported, not on some fringe website, but by the BBC on Sept. 23: Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well. Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September. His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. … He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. … Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports. Abdelaziz Al Omari "lost his passport in Denver." He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver. … Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi. Khalid Al-Midhar may also be alive. He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt. But if you go to the 9/11 Commission report, and look at pages 38 and 39 in section seven (PDF) you'll see the same 19 hijackers without any suggestion that there's a doubt about their identities. Mueller later said all the doubts were resolved, according to CBS. But what about the guys who are saying that the rumors of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated? In my research for this article, I went through several websites dedicated to debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, but was unable to find anything disputing the BBC story (and anyone who has contrary evidence is invited to send it to me or post a refutation in the comments section of this article). Besides the doubt around the identities of the hijackers, there were also two passports belonging to the hijackers that were supposedly found, intact, near the World Trade Center. That was reported by the Associated Press (citing CBS News) and the British newspaper, the Guardian. There's a pretty clear dividing line between the idea that the Bush administration's ideologues used the attacks of 9/11 to consolidate power and the idea that they participated in those attacks. The former is a fairly mainstream liberal critique; the latter is rank conspiracy theory, unsupported by any serious evidence. Having taken a long bath in the world of 9/11 conspiracism, I still think the most likely scenario is that the Bush administration was obsessed with rival powers -- Russia and China -- and ignored the terror issue. After the attacks, the security agencies were under enormous, unrelenting pressure to show Americans they were in control and they needed to show that they were on top of the investigation at all costs. These things would certainly require sanitizing in the 9/11 report and other official narratives for the sake of expediency and creating the appearance that the government was on the job. Having said that, I'd also be receptive to evidence that the Bush administration had a far greater degree of knowledge about the how and why of the attacks, and looked the other way and let them happen. All I'd need to buy that would be a bit of evidence. After all, we've recently learned in a report published on AlterNet that New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had a direct link to the most powerful office in Washington (Dick Cheney's), said she had been warned of a terrorist attack. ... FLASH VIDEO via google http://tinyurl.com/yqfqkg  9/11 ballot question won't have congressional helpBy John Briggs, Free Press Staff Writer, Jan 21, 2007 burlingtonfreepress.com/ ... 20070121 Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, a persistent critic of the Bush administration, said in an e-mail from his spokesman, David Carle, that he "respects the work and the findings of the 9/11 Commission. Their report was highly critical of the failures and miscues they discovered, and they recommended a wide range of reforms. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Peter Welch said they wouldn't push for a new investigation of Sept. 11, making the congressional delegation unanimous in its answer to the ballot question. Welch said, through a spokesman, he believed the official report was "both thorough and complete in outlining the events of September 11 and the mistakes made leading up to the attacks." Sanders' chief of staff, Jeff Weaver, said in an e-mail that Sanders believes the official report was "thorough" and provided "important suggestions to help our country combat terrorism." Sanders also believes, Weaver wrote, "we should continue to work to make sure that all the recommendations of the commission are implemented." NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder saying "When you have a significant portion of of a floor collapsing it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window" without explaining where the concrete dust came from, or even attempting to quantify the amount of dust that should be expected in the absence of explosives. The article mentions none of the other features of the collapses that indicate controlled demolition, such as: The towers fell straight down through themselves maintaining radial symmetry, The towers' tops mushroomed into vast clouds of pulverized concrete and shattered steel. The collapses exhibited demolition squibs shooting out of the towers well below the zones of total destruction. The collapses generated vast dust clouds that expanded to many times the towers' volumes -- more than occurs in typical controlled demolitions. The towers came down suddenly and completely, at a rate only slightly slower than free fall in a vacuum. The flat top of the North Tower's rubble cloud revealed in these photos show the rubble falling at the same speed inside and outside the former building's profile, an impossibility unless demolition were removing the building's structure ahead of the falling rubble. The explosions of the towers were characterized by intense blast waves that shattered windows in buildings 400 feet away. The steel skeletons were consistently shredded into short pieces which could be carried easily by the equipment used to dispose of the evidence. Eyewitnesses reported explosions before and at the outset of the collapses.   Documentary about 9/11 that spread across the Internet and threw millions for a loopvanityfair.com/... 060731roco01 One of the first American officials to publicly acknowledge conspiracy theories in connection with 9/11 was President George Bush, who on November 10, 2001, in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, said, "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11."The 9/11 Commission Report says "there was no one to blame." The film points to a 20-page instruction from June 1, 2001, issued by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which reassigned the authority for aircraft interceptions and shoot-downs to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Titled "Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) and Destruction of Derelict Airborne Objects," the instruction states that henceforth "the NMCC will … forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval." Neither the president nor the vice president is mentioned in the new directive as being part of the chain of command. By military protocol, the authority belonged to Rumsfeld, who later claimed he was "out of the loop." 'Are you sort of suggesting that worked in the favor of the Bush administration?," Mick O'Regan asks Hunter S. Thompson in Loose Change. "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely," Thompson says. "You sort of wonder when something happens like this, well, who stands to benefit? Who had the opportunity and the motive?" FAR WORSE THAN WATERGATE: 9/11 tapes expose flaws in military chiefs' testimony LATEST NORAD KEAN 9/11 COVER UP NEWS · Top brass misled attack inquiry, transcripts show · Read the Vanity Fair article in full and listen to the Norad tapes here. by Oliver Burkeman in New York, The Guardian, Aug 3, 2006 guardian.co.uk/ ... september11 America's military top brass deliberately misled the 9/11 commission, painting a picture of a swift response to the unfolding terrorist attacks emerged yesterday. Tape transcripts published for the first time in this month's Vanity Fair magazine show in vivid new detail how air defence commanders sent two armed planes - out of only four at their disposal to defend a quarter of the country - on a wild-goose chase. Meanwhile, contrary to what the commission was told, the military did not even hear about United flight 93 until after it had crashed. Members and staff of the 9/11 commission believe the discrepancies were part of a deliberate effort to mislead, and they discussed asking the justice department to consider criminal charges against senior members of the military, sources told the Washington Post. Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor who led the commission, described what his panel had been told by the North American Aerospace Defence Command as "just so far from the truth". To this day, he said, commission members still "don't know why Norad told us what they told us". John Farmer, a senior counsel to the commission, told Vanity Fair that the military's story was "a whole different order of magnitude than spin. It simply wasn't true". 9/11: The Roots of Paranoiaby CHRISTOPHER HAYES, The Nation, Dec 25, 2006 thenation.com/ ... 20061225 According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding? This pattern of deception has not only fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories--propounded by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement--seep toward the edges of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return (if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics." But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia. Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary Loose Change. A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing Loose Change are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the "truthers." A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the website www.911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed inquiries for candidates, just like the US Chamber of Commerce or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. Truth activists often maintain they are simply "raising questions," and as such tend to focus with dogged persistence on physical minutiae: the lampposts near the Pentagon that should have been knocked down by Flight 77, the altitude in Pennsylvania at which cellphones on Flight 93 should have stopped working, the temperature at which jet fuel burns and at which steel melts. They then use these perceived inconsistencies to argue that the central events of 9/11--the plane hitting the Pentagon, the towers collapsing--were not what they appeared to be. So: The eyewitness accounts of those who heard explosions in the World Trade Center, combined with the facts that jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,500, shows that the towers were brought down by controlled explosions from inside the buildings, not by the planes crashing into them. If the official story is wrong, then what did happen? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of dissension on this point. Like any movement, the Truth Movement is beset by internecine fights between different factions: those who subscribe to what are termed LIHOP theories (that the government "let it happen on purpose") and the more radical MIHOP ("made it happen on purpose") contingent. Even within these groups, there are divisions: Some believe the WTC was detonated with explosives after the planes hit and some don't even think there were any planes. To the extent that there is a unified theory of the nature of the conspiracy, it is based, in part, on the precedent of the Reichstag fire in Germany in the 1930s. The idea is that just as the Nazis staged a fire in the Reichstag in order to frighten the populace and consolidate power, the Bush Administration, military contractors, oil barons and the CIA staged 9/11 so as to provide cause and latitude to pursue its imperial ambitions unfettered by dissent and criticism. But the example of the Reichstag fire itself is instructive. While during and after the war many observers, including officials of the US government, suspected the fire was a Nazi plot, the consensus among historians is that it was, in fact, the product of a lone zealous anarchist. That fact changes little about the Nazi regime, or its use of the fire for its own ends. It's true the Nazis were the chief beneficiaries of the fire, but that doesn't mean they started it, and the same goes for the Bush Administration and 9/11. The Reichstag example also holds a lesson for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible. In March 2005 Popular Mechanics assembled a team of engineers, physicists, flight experts and the like to critically examine some of the Truth Movement's most common claims. They found them almost entirely without merit. To pick just one example, steel might not melt at 1,500 degrees, the temperature at which jet fuel burns, but it does begin to lose a lot of its strength, enough to cause the support beams to fail. And yet no amount of debunking seems to work. The Internet empowers people with esoteric interests to spend all kinds of time pursuing their hobbies, and if the Truth Movement was the political equivalent of Lord of the Rings fan fiction or furries, there wouldn't be much reason to pay attention. But the public opinion trend lines are moving in the truthers' direction, even after the official 9/11 Commission report was supposed to settle the matter once and for all. Of course, the commission report was something of a whitewash--Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses and just this year we learned of a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about Al Qaeda's plotting, a meeting that was nowhere mentioned in the report. So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error. Ahmad Chalabi summed up this worldview perfectly. Faced with the utter absence of the WMD he and his cohorts had long touted in Iraq, he replied, "We are heroes in error." For a long time the credulous style has dominated the establishment, but its hold intensified after 9/11. When the government speaks, particularly about the Enemy, it must be presumed to be telling the truth. From the reporting about Iraq's alleged WMD to the current spate of stories about how "dangerous" Iran is, time and again the press has reacted to official pronouncements about threats with a near total absence of skepticism. Each time the government announces the indictment of domestic terrorists allegedly plotting our demise, the press devotes itself to the story with obsessive relish, only to later note, on page A22 or in a casual aside, that the whole thing was bunk. In August 2003, to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported what one US official called an "incredible triumph in the war against terrorism," the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that the "plot" consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called up Lakhani and offered to sell him one. Yet after nearly a dozen such instances, the establishment media continue to earnestly report each new alleged threat or indictment, secure in the belief that their proximity to policy-makers gets it closer to the truth. But proximity can obscure more than clarify. It's hard to imagine that the guy sitting next to you at the White House correspondents' dinner is plotting to, say, send the country into a disastrous and illegal war, or is spying on Americans in blatant defiance of federal statutes. Bob Woodward, the journalist with the most access to the Bush Administration, was just about the last one to realize that the White House is disingenuous and cynical, that it has manipulated the machinery of state for its narrow political ends. Meanwhile, those who realized this was the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist." A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired, he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil reserves. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father, Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations to which the public is not privy. The public has been presented with two worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory. The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11? Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid theories reflects a cynicism that the credulous media have failed to address, because they posit a world of good intentions and face-value pronouncements, one in which the suggestion that a government would mislead or abuse its citizens for its own gains or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd. The danger is that the more this government's cynicism and deception are laid bare, the more people--on the left in particular and among the public in general--will be drawn down the rabbit hole of delusion of the 9/11 Truth Movement. To avoid such a fate, the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie. Documentary about 9/11 that spread across the Internet and threw millions for a loopvanityfair.com/... 060731roco01 One of the first American officials to publicly acknowledge conspiracy theories in connection with 9/11 was President George Bush, who on November 10, 2001, in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, said, "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11."The 9/11 Commission Report says "there was no one to blame." The film points to a 20-page instruction from June 1, 2001, issued by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which reassigned the authority for aircraft interceptions and shoot-downs to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Titled "Aircraft Piracy (Hijacking) and Destruction of Derelict Airborne Objects," the instruction states that henceforth "the NMCC will … forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval." Neither the president nor the vice president is mentioned in the new directive as being part of the chain of command. By military protocol, the authority belonged to Rumsfeld, who later claimed he was "out of the loop." 'Are you sort of suggesting that worked in the favor of the Bush administration?," Mick O'Regan asks Hunter S. Thompson in Loose Change. "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely," Thompson says. "You sort of wonder when something happens like this, well, who stands to benefit? Who had the opportunity and the motive?" FAR WORSE THAN WATERGATE: 9/11 tapes expose flaws in military chiefs' testimony LATEST NORAD KEAN 9/11 COVER UP NEWS · Top brass misled attack inquiry, transcripts show · Read the Vanity Fair article in full and listen to the Norad tapes here. by Oliver Burkeman in New York, The Guardian, Aug 3, 2006 guardian.co.uk/ ... september11 America's military top brass deliberately misled the 9/11 commission, painting a picture of a swift response to the unfolding terrorist attacks emerged yesterday. Tape transcripts published for the first time in this month's Vanity Fair magazine show in vivid new detail how air defence commanders sent two armed planes - out of only four at their disposal to defend a quarter of the country - on a wild-goose chase. Meanwhile, contrary to what the commission was told, the military did not even hear about United flight 93 until after it had crashed. Members and staff of the 9/11 commission believe the discrepancies were part of a deliberate effort to mislead, and they discussed asking the justice department to consider criminal charges against senior members of the military, sources told the Washington Post. Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor who led the commission, described what his panel had been told by the North American Aerospace Defence Command as "just so far from the truth". To this day, he said, commission members still "don't know why Norad told us what they told us". John Farmer, a senior counsel to the commission, told Vanity Fair that the military's story was "a whole different order of magnitude than spin. It simply wasn't true". 9/11: The Roots of Paranoiaby CHRISTOPHER HAYES, The Nation, Dec 25, 2006 thenation.com/ ... 20061225 According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding? This pattern of deception has not only fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories--propounded by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement--seep toward the edges of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return (if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics." But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia. Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary Loose Change. A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing Loose Change are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the "truthers." A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the website www.911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed inquiries for candidates, just like the US Chamber of Commerce or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. Truth activists often maintain they are simply "raising questions," and as such tend to focus with dogged persistence on physical minutiae: the lampposts near the Pentagon that should have been knocked down by Flight 77, the altitude in Pennsylvania at which cellphones on Flight 93 should have stopped working, the temperature at which jet fuel burns and at which steel melts. They then use these perceived inconsistencies to argue that the central events of 9/11--the plane hitting the Pentagon, the towers collapsing--were not what they appeared to be. So: The eyewitness accounts of those who heard explosions in the World Trade Center, combined with the facts that jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,500, shows that the towers were brought down by controlled explosions from inside the buildings, not by the planes crashing into them. If the official story is wrong, then what did happen? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of dissension on this point. Like any movement, the Truth Movement is beset by internecine fights between different factions: those who subscribe to what are termed LIHOP theories (that the government "let it happen on purpose") and the more radical MIHOP ("made it happen on purpose") contingent. Even within these groups, there are divisions: Some believe the WTC was detonated with explosives after the planes hit and some don't even think there were any planes. To the extent that there is a unified theory of the nature of the conspiracy, it is based, in part, on the precedent of the Reichstag fire in Germany in the 1930s. The idea is that just as the Nazis staged a fire in the Reichstag in order to frighten the populace and consolidate power, the Bush Administration, military contractors, oil barons and the CIA staged 9/11 so as to provide cause and latitude to pursue its imperial ambitions unfettered by dissent and criticism. But the example of the Reichstag fire itself is instructive. While during and after the war many observers, including officials of the US government, suspected the fire was a Nazi plot, the consensus among historians is that it was, in fact, the product of a lone zealous anarchist. That fact changes little about the Nazi regime, or its use of the fire for its own ends. It's true the Nazis were the chief beneficiaries of the fire, but that doesn't mean they started it, and the same goes for the Bush Administration and 9/11. The Reichstag example also holds a lesson for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible. In March 2005 Popular Mechanics assembled a team of engineers, physicists, flight experts and the like to critically examine some of the Truth Movement's most common claims. They found them almost entirely without merit. To pick just one example, steel might not melt at 1,500 degrees, the temperature at which jet fuel burns, but it does begin to lose a lot of its strength, enough to cause the support beams to fail. And yet no amount of debunking seems to work. The Internet empowers people with esoteric interests to spend all kinds of time pursuing their hobbies, and if the Truth Movement was the political equivalent of Lord of the Rings fan fiction or furries, there wouldn't be much reason to pay attention. But the public opinion trend lines are moving in the truthers' direction, even after the official 9/11 Commission report was supposed to settle the matter once and for all. Of course, the commission report was something of a whitewash--Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses and just this year we learned of a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about Al Qaeda's plotting, a meeting that was nowhere mentioned in the report. So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error. Ahmad Chalabi summed up this worldview perfectly. Faced with the utter absence of the WMD he and his cohorts had long touted in Iraq, he replied, "We are heroes in error." For a long time the credulous style has dominated the establishment, but its hold intensified after 9/11. When the government speaks, particularly about the Enemy, it must be presumed to be telling the truth. From the reporting about Iraq's alleged WMD to the current spate of stories about how "dangerous" Iran is, time and again the press has reacted to official pronouncements about threats with a near total absence of skepticism. Each time the government announces the indictment of domestic terrorists allegedly plotting our demise, the press devotes itself to the story with obsessive relish, only to later note, on page A22 or in a casual aside, that the whole thing was bunk. In August 2003, to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported what one US official called an "incredible triumph in the war against terrorism," the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that the "plot" consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called up Lakhani and offered to sell him one. Yet after nearly a dozen such instances, the establishment media continue to earnestly report each new alleged threat or indictment, secure in the belief that their proximity to policy-makers gets it closer to the truth. But proximity can obscure more than clarify. It's hard to imagine that the guy sitting next to you at the White House correspondents' dinner is plotting to, say, send the country into a disastrous and illegal war, or is spying on Americans in blatant defiance of federal statutes. Bob Woodward, the journalist with the most access to the Bush Administration, was just about the last one to realize that the White House is disingenuous and cynical, that it has manipulated the machinery of state for its narrow political ends. Meanwhile, those who realized this was the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist." A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired, he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil reserves. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father, Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations to which the public is not privy. The public has been presented with two worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory. The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11? Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid theories reflects a cynicism that the credulous media have failed to address, because they posit a world of good intentions and face-value pronouncements, one in which the suggestion that a government would mislead or abuse its citizens for its own gains or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd. The danger is that the more this government's cynicism and deception are laid bare, the more people--on the left in particular and among the public in general--will be drawn down the rabbit hole of delusion of the 9/11 Truth Movement. To avoid such a fate, the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie.  Gandhi, Popular Mechanics, and The 9/11 Truth MovementBen Chaput | March 16 2005 prisonplanet.tv/ ... ghanditruth “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.” -- Mahatma Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi said this referring to his struggles for Indian independence from Britain, but it is just as relevant to the 9/11 truth movement today. If we look at the movement in terms of these stages we can see the progress we have made, and how far we still have to go. 1. “First they ignore you”From the minute the first plane hit the towers many Americans knew that something was fishy about the whole thing. From the incredible collapse of the towers that looked like a controlled demolition, to the instant naming of Osama Bin Laden as the prime suspect, real students of history saw this tragedy as a classic CIA psy-ops. Almost immediately on websites and chatrooms, small papers and magazines, patriots voiced their concerns and suspicions. However the mainstream media quickly began the cover-up. Nineteen Muslim terrorists hijacked planes with boxcutters. Two of the biggest buildings in the world collapsed from relatively small fires in hours. Osama Bin Laden planned it all from a cave in Afghanistan, and financed the whole operation for less than a million dollars. Anyone who thought critically about the attacks saw through the lies and realized that something was wrong. But no one in the mainstream media would report about these questions. Instead they began to beat the war drums and fan the flames of hatred with false videos of Palestinians celebrating the attacks. It would be months before information began coming out in dribs and drabs: public officials warned not to fly, firemen reporting bombs going off in the buildings, Israelis receiving mysterious warnings about the attacks. Eventually there were simply too many questions being asked to simply ignore them. 2. “Then they laugh at you”Now the globalist-controlled media had to do something about the thousands of people who weren’t buying the government’s official story. So anyone who didn’t fall in line was ridiculed. “Loonies”, “Wingnuts”, “Tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists”. It didn’t matter that the governments official story was more far-fetched than something out of The X-Files, they had the big microphones in front of them and could say whatever they wanted, because they didn’t dare interview anyone credible who questioned their story. But brave men and women still kept it up on webpages and independent newspapers, refusing to be cowed by the propaganda machine of the globalists, and the movement kept growing. 3. “Then they attack you”This is the stage we are reaching now. The tidal wave of anger and suspicion has grown too big to simply ignore or laugh off as the ramblings of madmen. The criminal cabal we call the U.S. government realizes that real patriots won’t be silenced that easily and have went on the attack. The Popular Mechanics cover story: Debunking 9/11 Lies is a classic piece of yellow journalism by the corporate creator the term, Hearst Corporation. The article is written by Benjamin Chertoff, allegedly a cousin of Department of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff. If you look into Michael Chertoff’s past you will find he has been accused of representing alleged terrorists. This shows how the globalists are all tied together in this gross conspiracy against the United States of America. Chertoff’s article takes some easily disputed fringe theories and attacks them, trying to discredit the entire movement. This tactic is known as setting up a straw man, and is typical of yellow journalism. The article ignores such evidence as CIA insider trading, hard evidence of explosions in the WTC, and the mysterious collapse of WTC building 7. It also outright lies about NORAD intercepting planes before 9/11. This is what the mainstream media considers “debunking”. This is a good sign, it shows that our efforts are starting to have an effect, but it is only the beginning. We can’t get complacent or slow down our work because the globalists have a huge advantage in money, power, influence, and exposure. But the one advantage we have is numbers. More and more people are waking up every day and rejecting the government lies, demanding that the truth be told to all Americans. It may seem impossible, but we should look to Gandhi for inspiration. He stood up to the British Empire at the height of its power and eventually succeeded. If we stay true to our beliefs and do what we know is right we will succeed as well, and return our great Republic to the People once and for all. WORLD TRADE CENTER RESCUE HERO SUES BUSH AND OTHERS UNDER RICO STATUTE, ALLEGES WILLFUL COMPLICITY IN ATTACKS THAT KILLED 3,000septembereleventh.orgOn September 11, 2001, William Rodriguez, a maintenance worker at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, single-handedly rescued fifteen people. The only employee with the master key to the North Tower staircases, he led firefighters up the stairs, unlocking doors as he went, aiding in the evacuation of hundreds of additional people who, but for his efforts, might have perished. Although his job description did not include saving lives, Rodriguez re-entered the building three times after the first plane struck, and was the last person to exit the North Tower alive. He survived the collapse of the North Tower by diving beneath a fire truck to avoid the avalanche of concrete and steel. Asked why he decided to bring this controversial lawsuit, Rodriguez explains that, having survived the World Trade Center disaster when so many did not, he feels he must learn the truth of what happened on that day. “If what the government has told us about 9-11 is a lie,” he says, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth. Since that plane hit the North Tower on 9-11, like it or not my life’s meaning has become to reduce the number of victims, and the amount of suffering from those attacks. If suing President Bush is what I have to do to accomplish that, so be it.” The action, filed in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, is Rodriguez v. Bush, et al., Civil Action No. 04 cv 4952. http://www.911forthetruth.com Congressional hopeful says 9/11 attacks were a hoax Republican Mary Maxwell of Concord told The Telegraph said the government was complicit in the attack so it could make Americans hate Arabs and allow the military to bomb Muslim nations such as Iraq. She also says the attacks were meant to make Americans more willing to accept laws that restrict civil liberties. Learn More Under Fire! U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Targeted For Suggesting New Independent 9/11 Investigation Learn More A Republican congressman has given strong words of praise for the video by Professor Steven E. Jones of BYU which accuses the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen and placing explosives in three of the World Trade Center buildings to make sure they would be totally destroyed.Here's a transcript of a Town Hall Meeting from April 2006 held with Representative Curt Weldon (PA 7th district): Learn More The Veterans for 9/11 Truth are banned, from Camp Hypocrisy: Veterans for 9/11 Truth requested more information about the upcoming Camp Democracy events in Washington, D.C. beginning September 5, 2006. Our goal was to tell the Truth about 9/11 to these people who advocate peace. The Veterans for 9/11 Truth are banned, from Camp Hypocrisy. Learn More 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon, Allegations Brought to Inspectors General, the Washington Post Reports: Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said. Learn More Alfons interviews Dr. Steven E. Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Brigham Young University. Dr. Jones explains the science of the collapse of the WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7, in New York City on 09/11/2006. Based on empirical observation of the videos, and laboratory analysis of samples of the metal from the WTC, the evidence begs this scientific conclusion, the buildings collapsed due the use of explosive cutter charges. Dr. Steven Jones.mp3 Watch a video that shows molten metal flowing out of the WTC tower just before collapse. Watch this video of a Thermite experiment, it is hot stuff.     911 Demolition Conclusive, By Estanislao Carter:With a growing base of evidence, it finally seems we can officially make a case for a controlled demolition of the World Trade Centers, buildings #1, #2, and #7. So much happened, and didn't happen on that day that it is to easy to get lost in the woods. To not see the proverbial tree right in front of us. Learn More   MADISON, Wisconsin (AP) -- More than 60 state lawmakers are urging the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire an instructor who has argued that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Read More Mineta's 9/11 Commission Testimony. How did Cheney know where the hijacked plane was going? Learn More Rick Seigel at the Scholars 9/11 Symposium Watch "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.?"-- William Casey, CIA Director (from first staff meeting, 1981)   Representative Of Largest 9/11 Families Group Says Government Complicit In AttackTells radio host 9/11 Commission a sham, "cover-up beyond belief"The representative of the largest group of 9/11 families says that the official version of events is a fallacy and that the NORAD stand down and evidence of incendiary devices used to bring down the towers amount to government complicity in the attacks - a conclusion shared by half of the 9/11 families he represents. Read More Norge 'Le Monde' puts 9/11 on Front Page.Was September 11th an inside job?Kim BredesenJournalist for Le Monde diplomatique. --- Learn More June 30 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court. --- Read More MADISON, Wis. A state lawmaker is calling on the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire a part-time instructor, Dr. Kevin Barrett, who has spoken out on his beliefs that figures in the U-S government, not al-Qaida, were behind the September eleventh terrorist attacks. Learn More Dr. Steve Jones.mp3 --- Dr. Steve Jones talks with Alex Jones about the physics, chemistry, metallurgy, archaeometry, thermite, thermate, super thermite, and the newly discovered samples of the metal from the World Trade Center ground zero. The research of Dr. Steve Jones does not just add to the veracity of the controlled demolition hypothesis of the WTC towers, he slam dunks it. Learn More at Scholars for 9/11 Truth     An Open Letter to the 9/11 CommissionSo what should patriotic Americans do with our grievances? We have called for a debate. Not just a few Americans want this debate – Tens of millions of Americans are demanding answers to be derived from a public – people’s forum. It is the enormity of those that oppose the government’s account of 9/11 that has prompted me to draw the line in the sand, to pick a date, time, and location to have a public debate on 9/11. I then sought out the most reputable and credentialed experts from the 9/11 Truth Movement to debate members of the 9/11 Commission and the NIST scientists. Learn More What first woke you up to the Truth of 911? Take the Survey at the Veterans for 911 Truth Group.   "Three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon & the truth"-Buddha Zogby Poll: Over 70 Million American Adults Support New 9/11 Investigation(PRWEB) - Utica, NY (PRWEB) May 22, 2006 -- Although the Bush administration continues to exploit September 11 to justify domestic spying, unprecedented spending and a permanent state of war, a new Zogby poll reveals that less than half of the American public trusts the official 9/11 story or believes the attacks were adequately investigated. --- Learn More  What may have happened Operation Pearl A. K. Dewdney Calculations on the Possible Use of Thermite to Melt Sections of the WTC Core Columns Derrick Grimmer A3 Skywarrior: The Probable Pentagon Attack Aircraft? Karl W. Schwarz How to fake a terrorist attack How to Fake a Terrorist Campaign Report from the Panel The London Bombing Paul Joseph Watson Background Information The German Intelligence Report Unknown Source The DEA Report Drug Enforcement Administration General Partin's Report Benton K. Partin Israel, Iran and a Nuclear False Flag Attack R. Leland Lehrman Larry Franklin and Two AIPAC Members Indicted for Espionage US Department of Justice