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News Is national security state in the USA gone rogue ? Recommended Links  Neoliberal Brainwashing -- Journalism in the Service of the Powerful Few Neoliberal war on reality or the importance of controlling the narrative Label "conspiracy theorist" as a form of censorship
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Originally published at Foreign Policy Journal by Shawn Hamilton on 10/27/14

The terms “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy nut” are used frequently to discredit a perceived adversary using emotional rather than logical appeals. It’s important for the sake of true argument that we define the term “conspiracy” and use it appropriately, not as an ad hominem attack on someone whose point of view we don’t share.

According to my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the word “conspiracy” derives from the Latin “conspirare,” which means literally “to breathe together” in the sense of agreeing to commit a crime. The primary definition is “planning and acting together secretly, especially for a harmful or unlawful purpose, such as murder or treason.”

It was in this sense that Mark Twain astutely observed,

“A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.”

Conspiracies are common. If they weren’t, police stations would not need conspiracy units to investigate and prosecute crimes such as “conspiracy to import cocaine” or any other collusion on the part of two or more people to subvert the law.

Unfortunately, too many people smugly chide “conspiracy theories” as if they imagine that such a derisive characterization reflects superior intellect—whether or not they know anything about the issue in question. It’s a pitiful display of ego inflation and intellectual dishonesty, yet it appears to be a common approach preferred by those either short on information and critical thinking skills or harboring a hidden agenda.

Here are a few examples of past “conspiracy theories” that have been commonly derided but were later determined to be credible:

1933 Business PlotSmedley Butler, a decorated United States Marine Corps major general, who wrote a book called War is a Racket, testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans’ group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler’s allegations were credible, although no-one was prosecuted.

Project Paperclip:  After “winning” World War II, the US imported hundreds of Nazis and their families through “Project Paperclip,” so-named because ID photos were clipped to paper dossiers. It was set up by an agency within the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA. Along with creating false identities and political biographies, Paperclip operatives expunged or altered Nazi records and other criminal histories in order to illegally circumvent President Truman’s edict that prohibited Nazis from obtaining security clearances. Thus, high-level Nazis waltzed into sensitive positions of authority and secrecy in the US military-industrial establishment, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), major corporations, and universities. These Germans were conveniently referred to as “former Nazis,” but “former” was commonly just a euphemism for “active” and “ardent.”

Consider the irony of the United States’ moon mission. In order to successfully land men on the lunar surface and return them to Earth, the US depended almost exclusively on Nazis. A notable example was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a member of the Allgemeine SS, who would eventually lead the US space program. Von Braun had exploited concentration camp labor in Germany to build V-2 rockets at Peenemünde, and German aviation doctors’ gruesome and often fatal experiments at Dachau and other prisons afforded information that would help keep American astronauts alive in space.

While many Americans would prefer to call it a conspiracy theory, the United States defeated the Nazi organization in Germany only to transplant that ideology directly into the US after the war, and not just among members of the lay population but, more significantly, among members of the very “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower (a five-star general during WWII) had presciently warned the nation about in his 1961 message of leave-taking and farewell.

Operation Northwoods:  Declassified documents revealed that in 1962 the CIA was planning to execute false flag terrorist attacks, such as killing random American citizens and blowing up civilian targets, including a US airliner and ship, in order to blame Castro and justify invading Cuba.

Gulf of Tonkin:  President Lyndon Johnson used a contrived version of this 1964 event to justify escalation of the Vietnam War. It was claimed that Vietnamese gunboats had fired on the USS Maddox. It never happened—or at best was grossly distorted and overblown—yet the story served to prompt Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided the public justification Johnson needed to attack North Vietnam. This led to the deaths of about two million Vietnamese people and fifty thousand Americans.

MK-ULTRA:  As its code name suggests, MK-ULTRA was a mind control program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence for the ostensible purpose of discovering ways to glean information from Communist spies although its applications were undoubtedly more far-reaching. It employed various methodologies including sensory deprivation and isolation, sexual abuse, and the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs such as LSD to unwitting subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and college students. Many of them suffered serious consequences. One biochemist, Frank Olson, who was secretly slipped a strong dose of LSD at a CIA meeting, suffered a severe psychotic break and died when, for whatever reason, he plummeted from his apartment window to the pavement below. Such revelations came to light in 1975 during hearings by the congressional Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. These investigations were hindered by CIA Director Richard Helms who in 1973 had ordered the MK-ULTRA files destroyed.

Operation Mockingbird: This was a CIA media control program exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. It revealed the CIA’s efforts from the 1950s through the 1970s to pay well-known foreign and domestic journalists from “reputable” media agencies such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Miami News, and CBS, among others, to publish CIA propaganda, manipulating the news by planting stories in domestic and foreign news outlets. During the hearings, Senator Church asked an agency representative, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” The speaker eyed his lawyer then replied, “This I think gets into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in executive session.” In other words, he didn’t want to admit the truth publicly. He gave the same response when asked if the CIA planted stories with the major wire services United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP). In his 1997 book, Virtual Government — in the chapter “’And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA': The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion” — Alex Constantine claims that during the 1950s “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” I’m curious to know what the estimate would be today.

CIA Drug Smuggling: It’s no longer a secret that clandestine arms of US Intelligence have profited from running drugs for many years. I first became aware of the issue when a Vietnam veteran claimed he had helped load opium cultivated in Laos onto military transport planes. The opium was turned into heroin and shipped around the world, sometimes in the visceral cavities of dead soldiers. A Hollywood version of these events is portrayed in the film Air America, but the movie is based on historical truth. When the US military presence in Southeast Asia declined and the focus shifted to Central America, cocaine became the new revenue source. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb ran a well-documented three-part series in the San Jose Mercury News called “Dark Alliance” alleging that traffickers with US intelligence ties had marketed the cocaine in Los Angeles and other cities where it was turned into the new and highly addictive form known as “crack,” inflicting a scourge that claimed the lives and freedom of thousands. One guy I met in Compton who had been arrested for crack possession described the drug this way: “It doesn’t really get you high,” he said. “You just want more.” Webb’s allegations were confirmed by an LAPD Narcotics Officer and whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, and the story received additional confirmation from CIA contract pilot Terry Reed, whose story is revealed in his 1994 book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA. According to Reed, the sale of cocaine was used to finance the Contras in Central America when congressional funding was blocked by the Boland Amendment. He claimed the operation was run out of Mena, Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. Military cargo planes were flown to Central America with military hardware, he said, and then returned to Mena loaded with coke.

I could add to the list, and it would be a long one. The Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Tuskegee syphilis experiment—there is no shortage of crimes that were planned and committed by two or more people and thus constituted conspiracy. Conspiracies happen, and before any crime is solved it spawns theories. There are people who look at these theories rationally using logic and discernment, and there are others who are illogical, engaging in fallacious, emotion-based thinking and jumping to unjustified conclusions based on little or no evidence. The term “conspiracy theorist,” however, has been manipulated to suggest only those in the latter category.

The John F. Kennedy assassination provides a good example of how the term “conspiracy” has been misapplied to disparage people who find fault with official versions of major events. After Kennedy was murdered, very few people questioned the Warren Commission’s verdict that Lee Oswald had shot the president unassisted, and anyone who challenged that belief was branded a “conspiracy nut” (or buff) unworthy of respect or consideration. Forty years later, a 2003 Gallup poll revealed that 75% of the US population believed there had been a conspiracy to kill JFK.

Apparently some people have a psychological need to protect themselves from unpleasant realities, so it’s easier for them to label others as conspiracy nuts than to assimilate hard but discomforting facts. In the case of the John Kennedy assassination, even a congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded in 1979 that there had been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. They tried to soften that reality by calling it a “limited conspiracy” as if Oswald’s drunken cousin had helped him and not elements of US Intelligence, but the fact remains that the US government has officially admitted there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. “Conspiracy theorists” were finally vindicated, but I’ve never heard anyone apologize for disparaging their names and questioning their sanity.

“9/11,” of course, is the current topic that yields the most accusations of conspiracy nuttiness. Anyone who challenges the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions are branded “conspiracy theorists” (or nuts, wackos or kooks) as were their predecessors when JFK was killed.

History repeats itself

One of the strange truths about the 9/11 affair is that members of the 9/11 Commission also called the event a conspiracy. That alone shows the term is being intentionally manipulated. In the Commission’s view, the conspirators were exclusively fanatical Muslims, but somehow that investigative body has been exempt from accusations of conspiracy theorizing even though they called the event a conspiracy. Apparently one must challenge the official version of events to qualify as a “conspiracy theorist.”

I asked Jim Marrs, the popular author and critic of various official versions of history, what he considered to be the origin of “conspiracy” as a derogatory term and how it has been manipulated: “The term ‘conspiracy theory’ was consciously submitted to assets of the CIA back in a document from the 1960s to be used to counter factual information that was continually being made public regarding the Kennedy assassination. From there, these assets, including media personalities, pundits, academics and government officials, expanded the term to become a pejorative for any statements not complying with the Establishment line,” Marrs said. “However, its repetitive overuse, plus the fact that the 9/11 attacks obviously involved a conspiracy, today has lessened the impact of the term.”

Many critics of the 9/11 Commission report make some valid points, and it’s not fair to simply dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when the very people they’re countering also claim there was a conspiracy. The question is simply: whose conspiracy was it?

Even officials tasked with investigating 9/11 knew there was plenty of deception involved. Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, said on page four of his book The Ground Truth, “At some level of government, at some point in time, there was an agreement not to tell the people the truth about what happened.” In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, the two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, outlined reasons they believe the government established the Commission in a manner that ensured its failure. These reasons included delay in initiating the proceedings, too short a deadline for the scope of the work, insufficient funding, and lack of cooperation by politicians and key government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and NORAD. “So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail,” the chairmen said.

How much clearer can they be?

Conspiracies exist. They have always existed, and not wanting them to be true does not invalidate their existence. I think it’s time we reject the intentional misappropriation of the term “conspiracy” by forces attempting to manipulate public opinion and restore the term to its original and proper meaning. As long as we observe logic and reason, there is no intellectual dishonor in contemplating and discussing conspiracies, and doing so is imperative if we wish to retain what’s left of our liberties.

A version of this article was originally published at OpEdNews.com.

[Correction, Oct. 28, 2014: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that a chapter title of Alex Constantine’s 1997 book Virtual Government is “Mockingbird: The Subversion of The Free Press by the CIA”. The chapter is titled “‘And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA': The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion.” The text has been revised to correct the error.]


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[Jan 14, 2017] Position Statement in support of a new investigation into the total collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001

Sponsors: Daniel Barnum, FAIA and Fifty Members of the Institute

Intent: To adopt a Position Statement in support of a new investigation into the total collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001.

Text of Resolution

WHEREAS, according to the AIA Public Policies and Position Statements, architects are professionally obligated to use their knowledge, skill, and experience to engage in civic life; and

WHEREAS, World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7), a 47-story, steel-framed high-rise building, suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on the afternoon of September 11, 2001; and

WHEREAS, the cause of the collapse of WTC 7 has become the subject of vigorous public debate, such that establishing the true cause of the collapse
of WTC 7 is of great civic importance; and|

WHEREAS, the cause of the collapse of WTC 7 has become the subject of vigorous public debate, such that establishing the true cause of the collapse of WTC 7 is of great civic importance; and

WHEREAS, prior to and since September 11, 2001, no steel-framed high-rise building has ever suffered a total collapse, except buildings demolished through the procedure known as controlled demolition; and

WHEREAS, the collapse of WTC 7 exemplified many of the signature features of controlled demolition, including:

WHEREAS, first responders and bystanders reported explosions and other phenomena suggestive of controlled demolition immediately prior to and during the collapse of WTC 7, as exemplified in the following account by a first-year NYU medical student identified as "Darryl" on 1010 Wins Radio: "[W]e heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder. Turned around. We were shocked to see that the building was, uh Well, it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out. It was horrifying. And then about a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that"; and

WHEREAS, a CNN video captured both the sound of an explosion coming from WTC 7 and the following statements prior to the onset of the collapse:

Unidentified voice: "You hear that?"

Voice of emergency worker #1: "Keep your eye on that building. It'll be coming down soon."

Voice of emergency worker #2: "Building is about to blow up, move it back . We are walking back, there's a building about to blow up. Flame and debris coming down"; and

WHEREAS, numerous experts in controlled demolition and structural engineering have attested that the collapse of WTC 7 could have only been caused by controlled demolition, as exemplified in the following statement made by Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko after viewing video of the collapse: "This is controlled demolition . It's been imploded. It's a hired job, done by a team of experts"; and

WHEREAS, in spite of the fact that WTC 7 had only few, small, and scattered fires and modest structural damage, the NYC Office of Emergency Management and the New York Fire Department predicted the collapse of WTC 7 with extraordinary confidence and precision, deciding to establish a safety zone around WTC 7 early in the afternoon and waiting several hours in anticipation of the building's collapse; and

WHEREAS, local authorities were so certain of WTC 7's eventual collapse that anticipation of the collapse was widely reported in the media, as exemplified by MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield, who reported, "I've heard several reports from several different officers now that that is the building that is gonna go down next. In fact, one officer told me they're just waiting for that to come down at this point" - and by the BBC, who erroneously began reporting the collapse 23 minutes before it actually occurred; and

WHEREAS, in spite of the fact that local authorities predicted the collapse of WTC 7 with extraordinary confidence and precision, investigators for the Building Performance Study, conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), were "stunned" by the collapse of WTC 7 and concluded in May 2002: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence"; and

WHEREAS, three and a half years after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began its investigation into the World Trade Center disaster, NIST's lead investigator, Dr. Shyam Sunder, stated that NIST had some "preliminary hypotheses," but conceded, "[T]ruthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7"; and

WHEREAS, NIST finally concluded in its 2008 report that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by "normal office fires," thus abandoning earlier hypotheses that diesel fuel fires or structural damage caused the collapse; and

WHEREAS, according to NIST, the fires that it alleges triggered the total collapse of WTC 7 burned at temperatures "hundreds of degrees below those typically considered in design practice for establishing structural fire resistance ratings"; and

WHEREAS, NIST neglected to examine steel from WTC 7 with a "Swiss cheese appearance" that had been attacked by molten iron - as documented in Appendix C of the FEMA/ASCE Building Performance Study - and instead falsely alleged that no identifiable steel was recovered from WTC 7; and

WHEREAS, in its draft report for public comment, NIST falsely denied that WTC 7 entered free fall, and then acknowledged the occurrence of free fall in its final report, but falsely alleged that the occurrence of free fall was consistent with its computer model, which, in fact, does not show a period of free fall, nor does it come close to replicating the observed collapse; and

WHEREAS, NIST's computer model omitted critical structural features of WTC 7, which, in the opinion of independent engineers, had they been included, the computer model would have shown that NIST's alleged collapse initiation mechanism had zero probability of occurring; and

WHEREAS, NIST has refused to release key portions of its modeling data to engineers studying the collapse of WTC 7, claiming that to do so "might jeopardize public safety"; and

WHEREAS, thousands of members of the architecture and engineering professions, including the 97 sponsors of this resolution, believe there is sufficient evidence contradicting NIST's explanation of the collapse of WTC 7 to warrant a new investigation.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the AIA Board of Directors shall commence the process to adopt a Position Statement, to be published in the AIA Directory of Public Policies and Position Statements, stating both:

 The AIA's belief that incidents involving the catastrophic failure of buildings and other structures must be investigated using the highest standards of science-based investigation and analysis; and

 The AIA's support for a new investigation into the total collapse of WTC 7.

[Nov 04, 2016] The 11th Anniversary of 9/11

Nov 04, 2016 | www.unz.com

Anon

October 25, 2016 at 9:25 pm GMT • 100 Words

The 11th Anniversary of 9/11 ~ Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/11/the-11th-anniversary-911-paul-craig-roberts/

9/11 and the Orwellian Redefinition of "Conspiracy Theory"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-and-the-orwellian-redefinition-of-conspiracy-theory/25339

9/11 After 13 years
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/10/911-13-years-paul-craig-roberts/

The Tide is Turning: The Official Story Is Now The Conspiracy Theory - Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/09/07/the-tide-is-turning-the-official-story-is-now-the-conspiracy-theory-paul-craig-roberts/

No Airliner Black Boxes Found at the World Trade Center? Senior Officials Dispute Official 9/11 Claim
http://www.globalresearch.ca/no-airliner-black-boxes-found-at-the-world-trade-center-senior-officials-dispute-official-911-claim/5400891

[Nov 04, 2016] 9-11 Truth - The Unz Review

Oct 25, 2016 | The Unz Review

For the first time a presidential candidate, admittedly from a fringe party, is calling for a reexamination of 9/11. Jill Stein of the Green Party has recognized that exercises in which the United States government examines its own behavior are certain to come up with a result that basically exonerates the politicians and the federal bureaucracy. This has been the case since the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which, inter alia, failed to thoroughly investigate key players like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and came up with a single gunman scenario in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary.

When it comes to 9/11, I have been reluctant to enter the fray largely because I do not have the scientific and technical chops to seriously assess how buildings collapse or how a large passenger airliner might be completely consumed by a fire. In my own area, of expertise, which is intelligence, I have repeatedly noted that the Commission investigators failed to look into the potential foreign government involvement in the events that took place that day. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan just for starters may have been involved in or had knowledge relating to 9/11 but the only investigation that took place, insofar as I can determine, was a perfunctory look at the possible Saudi role, the notorious 28 pages, which have recently been released in a redacted form.

A friend recently recommended that I take a look at a film on 9/11 that was first produced back in 2005. It is called Loose Change 9/11 and is available on Amazon Video or in DVD form as well as elsewhere in a number of updated versions. The first version reportedly provides the most coherent account, though the later updates certainly are worth watching, add significantly to the narrative, and are currently more accessible.

Loose Change is an examination of the inconsistencies in the standard 9/11 narrative, a subject that has been thoroughly poked and prodded in a number of other documentaries and books, but it benefits from the immediacy of the account and the fresh memories of the participants in the events who were interviewed by the documentary's director Dylan Avery starting in 2004. It also includes a bit of a history lesson for the average viewer, recalling Hitler's Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, all of which were essentially fraudulent and led to the assumption of emergency powers by the respective heads of state.

The underlying premise of most 9/11 revisionism is that the United States government, or at least parts of it, is capable of almost anything. Loose Change describes how leading hawkish Republicans were, as early as 2000, pushing to increase U.S. military capabilities so that the country would be able to fight multi-front wars. The signatories of the neocon Project for the New American Century paper observed that was needed was a catalyst to produce a public demand to "do something," that "something" being an event comparable to Pearl Harbor. Seventeen signatories of the document wound up in senior positions in the Bush Administration.

The new Pearl Harbor turned out to be 9/11. Given developments since 9/11 itself, to include the way the U.S. has persisted in going to war and the constant search for enemies worldwide to justify our own form of Deep State government, I would, to a large extent, have to believe that PNAC was either prescient or perhaps, more diabolically, actively engaged in creating a new reality.

That is not to suggest that either then or now most federal employees in the national security industry were part of some vast conspiracy but rather an indictment of the behavior and values of those at the top of the food chain, people who are characteristically singularly devoid of any ethical compass and base their decisions largely on personal and peer group ambition.

9/11 Truthers are characteristically very passionate about their beliefs, which is part of their problem in relating to a broader public. They frequently demand full adherence to their version of what passes for reality. In my own experience of more than twenty years on the intelligence side of government I have frequently found that truth is in fact elusive, often lying concealed in conflicting narratives. This is, I believe, the strength of Loose Change as it identifies and challenges inconsistencies in the established account without pontificating and, even though it has a definite point of view and draws conclusions, it avoids going over to the dark side and speculating on any number of the wilder "what-if" scenarios.

I recommend that readers watch Loose Change as it runs through discussions of U.S. military exercises and inexplicable stand-downs that occurred on 9/11, together with convincing accounts of engineering and technical issues related to how the World Trade Center and WTC7 collapsed. Particularly intriguing are the initial eyewitness accounts from the site of the alleged downing of UA 93 in Pennsylvania, a hole in the ground that otherwise showed absolutely no evidence of a plane having actually crashed. Nor have I ever seen any traces of a plane in photos taken at the Pentagon point of impact.

The film describes the subsequent investigative failures that took place, perhaps deliberately and arranged from inside the government, and concludes that the event amounts to an "American coup" which changed the United States both in terms of its domestic liberties and its foreign policy. After watching the film, one must accept that there are numerous inconsistencies that emerge from any examination of the standard narrative promoted by the 9/11 Commission and covered up by every White House since 2001. The film calls the existing corpus of government investigations into 9/11 a lie, a conclusion that I would certainly agree with.

The consequences of 9/11 are indeed more important than the event itself. Even those who have come to accept the established narrative would have to concede that "that day of infamy" changed America for the worse, as the film notes. While the United States government had previously engaged in illegal activity directed against for suspected spies, terrorists and a variety of international criminals, wholesale surveillance of what amounts to the entire population of the country was a new development brought in by the Patriot Acts. And, for the first time, secret prisons were set up overseas and citizens were arrested without being charged and held indefinitely. Under the authority of the Military Commissions Act tribunals were established to try those individuals who were suspected of being material supporters of terrorism, "material supporters" being loosely interpreted to make arrest, prosecution and imprisonment easier.

More recently, executive authority based on the anti-terror legislation has been used to execute American citizens overseas and, under the Authorization to Use Military Force, to attack suspects in a number of countries with which the United States is not at war. This all takes place with hardly a squeak from Congress or from the media. And when citizens object to any or all of the above they are blocked from taking action in the courts by the government's invocation of State Secrets Privilege, claiming that judicial review would reveal national secrets. Many believe that the United States has now become a precursor police state, all as a result of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror which developed from that event.

So who benefited from 9/11? Clearly the executive branch of the government itself, which has seen an enormous expansion in its power and control over both the economy and people's lives, but there are also other entities like the military industrial complex, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, and the financial services sector, all of which have gained considerably from the anti-terror largesse coming from the American taxpayer. Together these entities constitute an American Deep State, which controls both government and much of the private sector without ever being mentioned or seriously contested.

Suggesting government connivance in the events of 9/11 inevitably raises the question of who exactly might have ordered or carried out the attacks if they were in fact not fully and completely the work of a handful of Arab hijackers? The film suggests that one should perhaps consider the possibility of a sophisticated "false flag" operation, by which we mean that the apparent perpetrators of the act were not, in fact, the drivers or originators of what took place. Blowing up huge buildings and causing them to pancake from within, if indeed that is what took place, is the work of governments, not of a handful of terrorists. Only two governments would have had that capability, the United States itself and also Israel, unfortunately mentioned only once in passing in the film, a state player heavily engaged in attempting to bring America into its fight with the Arab world, with Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently saying that "We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq swung American public opinion in our favor."

To be honest I would prefer not to think that 9/11 might have been an inside job, but I am now convinced that a new 9/11 Commission is in order, one that is not run and guided by the government itself. If it can be demonstrated that the attacks carried out on that day were quite possibly set up by major figures both inside and outside the political establishment it might produce such a powerful reaction that the public would demand a reversal of the laws and policies that have so gravely damaged our republic. It is admittedly unlikely that anything like that could ever take place, but it is at least something to hope for.

NosytheDuke, October 25, 2016 at 4:36 am GMT • 100 Words

Only by constantly repeating to all and sundry the blatant falsehoods, frauds and meddling that are evident which absolutely contradict the official narrative of what happened can a tipping point be reached and the demands for a new, open and independent investigation be the unavoidable topic in political and social life.

Only after a new, open and independent investigation and a ruthless holding to account of those responsible has taken place can America go about its business of being great because it is good. Good luck with that.

3.MarkinLA, October 25, 2016 at 4:39 am GMT • 200 Words

Remember Korean Air flight 007. At that time the conspiracy theory was that the US and South Korean governments got the pilot to invade Soviet air space while the Space Shuttle was in the vicinity along with the electronic surveillance plane that crossed KAL007′s path in order to light up USSR air defenses and collect data.

Whether it was true or not, the Reagan administration used it to vilify the USSR and push it's hawkish agenda.

9/11 doesn't have to have been done by the government for Deep State entities to take advantage. Any preplanning of what to do afterward could also be explained by them knowing what was going to happen (ala Pearl Harbor) and letting it happen. There were plenty of intelligence reports in the commission proceedings that have indicated something was up but not acted upon. They didn't have an admiral they could blame like they did at Pearl so the whole system was blamed which made expanding the security apparatus so much easier.

Brabantian, Website

October 25, 2016 at 8:59 am GMT • 300 Words

In the European press, Italy's President Francesco Cossiga exposed that the NYC towers destruction of 11 September 2001 was done by the USA & Israel's Mossad , and that all Europe's governments know this

Too few people know, that the New York Times itself, a few weeks before the NYC towers fell, photographed 'Israeli art students' (!) working in-between the walls of the those towers, amidst stacks of boxes with certain markings which … identify the box contents as components of bomb detonators
World Trade Center's Infamous 91st-Floor Israeli 'Art Student' Project

Also, too few people know that Osama Bin Laden himself denied being involved in the 11 Sep. 2001 NYC towers destruction, & that the 'Osama Bin Laden' videos & tapes shown for several years afterwards, are clearly-proven fakes with actors

The claimed discoverer of those 'bin Laden' videos & tapes – allegedly scouring the 'Jihadi YouTubes' for material no one else 'finds' – is Israeli-American Rita Katz of the laughable 'SITE' – 'Search for International Terrorist Entities'

Dissident US military-intel veterans tell us:

" The truth about [Osama] Bin Laden, that his last known communication was December 3rd, 2001, received by the CIA / NSA intercept facility in Doha, in which he accused American Neocons of staging 9-11.

" This was less than two weeks before his death, as reported in Egypt, Pakistan, India, Iran and even by Fox News, until Rita Katz brought him back to life in the guise of a Mercedes repair shop owner of Somali parentage living in Haifa, Israel.

" The new short, fat Bin Laden, who lost his ability to speak Oxford English, continued to drop audio tapes in the dumpster behind Katz's Brooklyn apartment for years, until his frozen corpse was dumped into the Indian Ocean. "

- Gordon Duff, Veterans Today

Hans Vogel, October 25, 2016 at 9:07 am GMT

If I recall correctly, it was Thierry Meyssan who in 2002 in his book La terrible imposture first suggested that 9/11 was a coup. John Kerry's brother-in-law Sarkozy later forced Meyssan into exile, because he was becoming a nuisance to the US and their French puppets.

AmericaFirstNow , October 25, 2016 at 11:59 am GMT
@AmericaFirstNow 9/11 Motive & Media Betrayal :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ncn5Q16N4&list=PL3C32560738EF3C30&feature=plpp

For actual 9/11 truth about how fire brought down Building 7 as well see the links at following URL:

http://america-hijacked.com/2011/07/14/alan-sabrosky-911-interview-with-press-tv-host-susan-modaress/

Rehmat, October 25, 2016 at 12:35 pm GMT • 200 Words

Dr. Giraldi is missing the point. While Washington and Zionist-controlled mainstream media had blamed the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, and lately Saudi Arabia – they never mentioned the 800-pound Gorilla – the Zionist regime.

The most vilified person had been head of Pakistan's intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who pointed his finger to Israel Mossad two weeks after the 9/11 – even before media ridiculously blamed Osama Bin Laden in order to invade and occupy Afghanistan – a country which did not had a single tank, helicopter, fighter jet or even a commercial plane to defend itself from the so-called ONLY WORLD POWER.

Hamid Gul's claim on September 26, 2001, is now supported by thousands of scientists, scholars, politicians, architects and even a Jewish member of the so-called 9/11 COMISSION, Philip Zelikow (Zionist Jew) admitted in 2004 that America invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam Hussein became an existential threat to the Zionist entity.

In December 2001, US historian Michael Collins Piper claimed that the so-called "19 Arab hijackers" could have been Israeli agents.

On September 10, 2016, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts posted an article, entitled, 9/11: 15 years of a transparent lie.

https://rehmat1.com/2015/08/17/gen-hamid-gul-the-muslim-soparno-dies/

Fred Reed , October 25, 2016 at 2:22 pm GMT

Nine-Eleven Conspiracy Exam (Note: This was written when Israel was the most popular culprit. Some questions may need to be changed to reflect changes in guilt. Failure to answer all questions will result in a grade of F.)

Diogenes, October 25, 2016 at 2:24 pm GMT

9/11 was an amazing sociological event for what it can tell us about human psychology. The vast majority of people uncritically swallowed the official explanation, a few critical observers cast suspicions on the official story, then a group of chronically suspicious people, known as conspiracy theorists, who believe the government cannot be trusted had a cause celebre, then a group of anti conspiracy theorists and pro-government reactionaries devoted their energies to discredit the 9/11 Truthers while the vast majority of people are as a result confused and paralyzed into indecision and apathy. I will take note of who in these comments are 9/11 naysayers and observe what they say about other controversial topics!

Rurik , October 25, 2016 at 2:55 pm GMT

The underlying premise of most 9/11 revisionism is that the United States government, or at least parts of it, is capable of almost anything.

we now know that they set the Waco compound on fire, and that they were firing machine guns into the only exit once the flames had engulfed the building. Bodies were piled up at the site of the exit that the coroner ruled were homicide deaths from bullet wounds. Homicides that our government committed. Most American yawn at such news. 'Those people (including the children) were 'whackos'.

Recently our government has murdered or maimed or displaced millions upon millions of innocent men, women and children in the Middle East, and destroyed several countries, all based on by now well-established lies. Most Americans yawn at such knowledge. Those people 'hate our freedom'.

Our government is also running a permanent torture camp. A 'Ministry of Love', or Minluv, in Orwell's Newspeak parlance.

The signatories of the neocon Project for the New American Century paper observed that was needed was a catalyst to produce a public demand to "do something," that "something" being an event comparable to Pearl Harbor. Seventeen signatories of the document wound up in senior positions in the Bush Administration.

the "something" that these neocon Zionists demanded from their "new Pearl Harbor like event" was for America to set about destroying all Muslim nations considered inconvenient to Israel. Without the 'event', Americans just were not willing to sacrifice their children to the Zionist cause.

One of the central figures demanding that America act in Israel's interest was a one Phillip D. Zelikow. A neocon insider extraordinaire.

This from his Wiki page:

In the November–December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article Catastrophic Terrorism, with Ashton B. Carter , and John M. Deutch, in which they speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently." [24]

Yes, that Ashton Carter, our current Secretary of Defense. And John Deutch was the director of the CIA at one time. (perhaps Mr. Giraldi knows of him)

This Jewish neocon war mongering Zionist who called for a Peal Harbor like event to catalyze Americans to go to war for Israel, ended up being the executive director of the 911 Commission. The same 911 Commission that is universally recognized as a fraud and a cover up. Even by some of the men who were on it.

I'm going to stop here. My head simply swims from the sheer evil of these people.

Miro23, October 25, 2016 at 3:20 pm

@Fred Reed

A simpler 9/11 questionnaire for Fred;

"Did right wing elements in Israel close to Likud, and US Neocons close to the Bush administration engineer the attacks to enable the Iraq war?" Yes____ No____ Don't know____

Essay question: Are there any similarities between these events and other False Flag attacks aimed at Great Britain and the US such as 1) The King David Hotel bombing 2) Operation Susannah – Lavon Affair 3) USS Liberty?

Jon Gold , October 25, 2016 at 3:31 pm GMT • 200 Words

Loose Change? C'mon Phil…

9/11: Press For Truth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmHPfXemf10

In Their Own Words: The Untold Stories Of The 9/11 Families
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBblyIPxZFE

9/11 Family Members, Jersey Girls, and member of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee Lorie Van Auken and Mindy Kleinberg released a report showing how poorly the 9/11 Commission answered their questions:

http://wewereliedtoabout911.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/fsc_review.pdf

The September Eleventh Advocates (Jersey Girls) have released a multitude of press releases over the years bringing attention to and calling into question certain aspects of 9/11:

http://wewereliedtoabout911.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/911advocates.pdf

Here are the 9/11 Family Steering Committee's list of unanswered questions. The final statement from the 9/11 Family Steering Committee states "the report did not answer all of our questions…":

http://www.911independentcommission.org/questions.html

Here is essential testimony from different 9/11 Family Members during the 9/11 Commission:

http://www.911independentcommission.org/testimony.html

Here are all of the different statements released by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee during the time of the 9/11 Commission. They show extremely well the corruption and compromise within the 9/11 Commission:

http://www.911independentcommission.org/news.html

My EXTREMELY extensive show "We Were Lied To About 9/11."

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/we-were-lied-to-about-9-11/id955030348?mt=2

Rurik October 25, 2016 at 3:56 pm GMT • 1,000 Words
@Fred Reed Nine-Eleven Conspiracy Exam (Note: This was written when Israel was the most popular culprit. Some questions may need to be changed to reflect changes in guilt. Failure to answer all questions will result in a grade of F.)

Was the US government solely responsible for the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___


Was Israel solely responsible for the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___


Did Israel and the US government together engineer the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___


Was neither Israel nor the US government responsible? yes___no___Don't know___


Were Saudis involved in any way in the plot? yes___no___Don't know___


If Israel was responsible, did the CIA know? yes___no___Don't know___


Was President Bush, through the CIA or otherwise, aware of the Israeli participation, making the President and the CIA part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___


Did AA77 hit the Pentagon. yes___no___Don't know___


Essay question: If no, What happened to AA77? ____________ Don't know___


If not AA77, did a missile hit the Pentagon? yes___no___Don't know___


If a missile, was ws it fired by the US military, making the military part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___


If no, fired by whom? ____________ Don't know___


Did the NTSB fake the data from the flight data recorders, making it part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___


Were the Towers destroyed by a controlled demolition? yes___no___Don't know___


Did aircraft hit the the Towers? yes___no___Don't know___


If so, who flew them? ____________ Don't know__


Essay question: Why both controlled demolition and aircraft? Ignore this question if the two were not used together


Essay question: If a controlled demolition, describe the placement and quantities needed, and the source of your information.


Was the FBI involved in the cover-up, and therefore part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___


Was Larry Silverstein, owner of the Towers, part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___


Did the media cover up the conspiracy, thereby making them part of it? yes___no___Don't know___


Essay question: If Israel was involved, should America bomb Tel Aviv?

Was the US government solely responsible for the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___

no, Israel was also responsible

Was Israel solely responsible for the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___

No, elements in the US gov and controlled media were also responsible

Did Israel and the US government together engineer the attacks? yes___no___Don't know___

not governments per se, but elements in those governments. Like "the orders still stand" Dick Cheney, but certainly not all the assorted minions of the US or Israeli governments.

Was neither Israel nor the US government responsible? yes___no___Don't know___

not governments per se. If you restrict the question to this broadly defined blanket condemnation, then the answer would be 'yes'.

Were Saudis involved in any way in the plot? yes___no___Don't know___

there's zero reason for thinking so

If Israel was responsible, did the CIA know? yes___no___Don't know___

at the highest levels, yes, but there again, that certainly doesn't mean every single employee

Was President Bush, through the CIA or otherwise, aware of the Israeli participation, making the President and the CIA part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___

Don't know

Did AA77 hit the Pentagon. yes___no___Don't know___

there's no evidence of it. And if it had, they'd show us one of the scores (hundreds?) of videos

Essay question: If no, What happened to AA77? ____________ Don't know___

the reason the flights were wildly diverted was probably to land the planes, liquidate the passengers and crew, and then send up specially outfitted jets for the purpose of crashing into the towers. (as the pretext for them to collapse, as the pretext to start the Eternal Wars for Israel and to turn us all into Palestinians)

If not AA77, did a missile hit the Pentagon? yes___no___Don't know___

it looks like it

If a missile, was ws it fired by the US military, making the military part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___

Don't know. And again, it wouldn't be "the military", as in some monolithic entity that is fully aware of everything that "it' does. There are fringe sub-sets of the military that are often engaged in illegal and covert ops.

If no, fired by whom? ____________ Don't know___

Don't know

Did the NTSB fake the data from the flight data recorders, making it part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___

what data?!

From what I understand, we have not been made privy to any of the information on any of the flight data recorders. If you're aware of any data from the flight data recorders then you should give us a link!

Were the Towers destroyed by a controlled demolition? yes___no___Don't know___

yes

it's *obvious* that building seven was thus demolished, and so it follows that the other two were also.

Did aircraft hit the the Towers? yes___no___Don't know___

two of them, yes. The third was not hit by a plane, it simply plopped down in nicely cut pieces ready for shipment to China.

If so, who flew them? ____________ Don't know__

In all likelihood, remote control. Check out the comptroller of the Pentagon at the time and his sundry organizations. Nice little rabbit hole of its own.

Essay question: Why both controlled demolition and aircraft? Ignore this question if the two were not used together

horror

they needed to horrify and anger the American people to rally us to war on Israel's neighbors. (+ there was the added benefit to lucky Larry of a few billion shekels and an opportunity to get rid of a couple of financial boondoggles. Such a deal!)

Essay question: If a controlled demolition, describe the placement and quantities needed, and the source of your information.

this is silly

we don't need to know the exact caliber of bullet that hit JFK to know that the government and Warren commission was lying. And they likely used military type crap that we're not even privy to. Come on Fred.

Was the FBI involved in the cover-up, and therefore part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___

elements, sure

like the people that went around and collected all the videos that might have showed what hit the Pentagon. Certainly the people at the top were and are privy to the crime and cover up. Just like with JFK.

Was Larry Silverstein, owner of the Towers, part of the conspiracy? yes___no___Don't know___

Yes, of course he was

Did the media cover up the conspiracy, thereby making them part of it? yes___no___Don't know___

not your local channel seven, but the media as it's controlled from the top, and lie about EVERTYING. Yes Fred, that media was complicit. And still are. And are the ones that are going to hand the reins of this nations to Hillary Clinton. That media, you betcha.

Essay question: If Israel was involved, should America bomb Tel Aviv?

of course not. There again you're being silly Fred.

what America should do is the same thing is should (and still needs to) do as regards the other cowardly and treacherous false flag that *elements* in the Israeli government and security forces were responsible for- the attack on the USS Liberty. We should have a real investigation that ferrets out these uber-criminals and brings them to justice.

911 was a coup to turn the US into Israel's rabid dog in the Levant. And create a police state for any Americans that object, even with our very own torture camp. Isn't that something?

You should write about it someday Fred. I can't think of a person more suited to mock the American idea of the free and the brave running a torture camp for goat herders and Afghans who don't want America making them free too.

as for 911, all you have to know is that building seven was an obvious controlled demolition. From there it doesn't matter if George Dubya Bush was in on it or what type of materials specifically were used to bring the buildings down. That shit is all academic. We know they lied, and are lying. Only a deluded fool or moral coward (or worse) would pretend to themselves otherwise once he's seen the irrefutable evidence that they're lying.

TheJester October 25, 2016 at 4:31 pm GMT • 200 Words

There are multiple ways to engineer a "False Flag" attack:

1. You do it yourself, flying someone else's "flag" and hope no one notices. (Very primitive … rarely works unless you are a wooden frigate at sea attacking enemy maritime commerce.)

2. You hire someone else to do it and hope none of them get caught. (Moderately primitive … but it worked for awhile in the Kennedy assassination.)

3. You infiltrate a hostile terrorist organization, take control, and redirect it to the attack. (Very difficult to do … but this was done in the NATO-sponsored Gladio terrorist attacks in Europe in the 1960s as well as the Black Hand attacks that precipitated WWI.)

4. You infiltrate a hostile terrorist organization, discover what they have planned, and QUIETLY remove all of YOUR obstacles that would otherwise have prevented the attack. (This is the best if you can pull it off since you leave no fingerprints. You might, as in 911, be accused of incompetent but, okay, you missed that one, so what!)

BTW: #4 doesn't mean you don't help the terrorists with a little demolition work to make sure the spectacle unfolds as planned. You really need grand firework displays in these things to get them the attention they deserve.

Si1ver1ock, October 25, 2016 at 5:04 pm GMT

For those just coming into the 911 Truth movement, you should probably look at the hard evidence first to see if it merits further consideration. After that, you can go to he circumstantial evidence.

Start with the physics and engineering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HNIIdpMhFg

The question isn't whether this theory or that theory is absolutely correct. The question is whether there is sufficient cause for a new investigation. I never hear a good argument from the anti-Truth crowd as to why we shouldn't have another investigation.

We want a new investigation. They don't want one. Why?

Miro23, October 25, 2016 at 7:17 pm GMT

A key to instant identification of the faith-based C-theorist is the loud claim that "steel-framed buildings" don't collapse as a result of fire. Fact is, yes they do - known, verified, fully-explained using real, verifiable data.

Here's a list of steel framed high rises and other high rises that experienced major fires:

– One New York Plaza, New York. 50 stories steel. Dropped beams on 33rd & 34th floors.
– Alexis Nihon Plaza, Montreal. 15 stories steel. Partial collapse on 11th floor.
– Windsor Tower, Madrid. 29 stories steel/concrete. Partial collapse.
– One Meridian Plaza, Philadelphia. 38 stories. No collapse.
– Broadgate Phase 8, London. 14 stories. No collapse.
– First Interstate Bank, Los Angeles. 62 stories. No collapse.
– MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas. 26 stories. No collapse.
– Joelma Building, Sao Paulo. 25 stories. No collapse.
– Andraus Building, Sao Paulo. 31 stories. No collapse.

These fires were much longer lasting and more intense than the WTC fires and none of these buildings experienced a complete collapse.
Can you give a list of modern steel frame 20 storey+ buildings similar to WTC 1, 2 & 7 that have experienced a complete collapse due to fire – known and verified.

Miro23 , October 25, 2016 at 8:23 pm GMT • 300 Words

I have repeatedly noted that the Commission investigators failed to look into the potential foreign government involvement in the events that took place that day. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan just for starters may have been involved in or had knowledge relating to 9/11 but the only investigation that took place, insofar as I can determine, was a perfunctory look at the possible Saudi role, the notorious 28 pages, which have recently been released in a redacted form.

It might have been worth checking out Israel a bit more closely. They have been running False Flag operations against the British and the US for years, aimed at engaging them in war against Arab states. For example:

The Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British Mandate Government of Palestine) in which Zionists dressed as Arabs placed milk churns filled with explosives against the main columns of the building killing 91 people and injuring 44. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu attended a celebration to commemorate the event.

Operation Susannah (Lavon Affair) where Israeli operatives impersonating Arabs bombed British and American cinemas, libraries and educational centres in Egypt to destabilize the country and keep British troops committed to the Middle East.

Or on June 8th 1967, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty with unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats. 34 men were killed and 171 wounded, with the attack in international waters following nine hours of close surveillance. When the ship failed to sink, the Israeli government concocted an elaborate story to cover the crime. Original plan to blame the sinking with all lives lost on the Egyptians and draw the US into the 6 Day War.

Or Israelis and U.S. Zionists appearing all over the more recent WTC 9/11 "Operation" with Israelis once again impersonating Arabs in a historic deception/terror action of a type that carries a lot of kudos with old ex-terrorist Likudniks. In any event, Israelis were sent to film the historic day (as they later admitted on Israeli TV), with the celebrations including photos of themselves with a background of the burning towers.

CanSpeccy says: • Website October 25, 2016 at 9:57 pm GMT •
@War for Blair Mountain
add in the fact that the steel support beams only had to be softened not melted to cause catastrophic structural failure.
You are absolutely correct about that. If the beams had melted, or even softened, then the building would have collapsed. But not straight down at near free-fall speed into its own footprint, while crushing all the concrete to dust.

If the columns had melted, or merely softened, they would not have melted or softened uniformly across the the building, so the result would have been an asymetric collapse resulting in the top of the building toppling over and crashing onto the roof of adjacent buildings. The portion of the building beneath the fire zone would have been left standing.

But, as we know, nothing like that happened.

CanSpeccy , October 26, 2016 at 2:07 am GMT • 400 Words @Oldeguy
Pretty much my response. Something, I know not what, is amiss with Our Favorite Expatriate.
Not being sure of what really happened in an event this pivotal is a reason to proceed with further discussion and investigation- not to shut it down.
The most successful, by far, commando operation in history performed flawlessly by a bunch of guys with boxcutters directed by cell phone by a fugitive hiding out in a cave in Afghanistan ?
On the the face of it, that matches the goofiest of any of the conspiracy theories.

On the the face of it, that [the theory about 19 guys with box-cutters under the direction of fugitive in a cave in Afghanistan] matches the goofiest of any of the conspiracy theories.

And even the members of the 9/11 Commission have admitted they don't really believe it.

Thus:

The co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission (Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton) said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation".

The co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission also said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements , yet didn't bother to tell the American people (free subscription required).

Indeed, the co-chairs of the Commission now admit that the Commission largely operated based upon political considerations .

9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, that the 9/11 debate should continue, and that the 9/11 Commission report was only "the first draft" of history .

9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ."

9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"

Former 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal" ; "This investigation is now compromised" ; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up" .

9/11 Commissioner John Lehman said that " We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way – conflicts of interest ".

The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry, said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true."

[Oct 25, 2016] 11 Truth? Was it an American coup?

Notable quotes:
"... Jill Stein of the Green Party has recognized that exercises in which the United States government examines its own behavior are certain to come up with a result that basically exonerates the politicians and the federal bureaucracy. ..."
"... A friend recently recommended that I take a look at a film on 9/11 that was first produced back in 2005. It is called Loose Change 9/11 and is available on Amazon Video or in DVD form as well as elsewhere in a number of updated versions. The first version reportedly provides the most coherent account, though the later updates certainly are worth watching, add significantly to the narrative, and are currently more accessible. ..."
"... Loose Change is an examination of the inconsistencies in the standard 9/11 narrative, a subject that has been thoroughly poked and prodded in a number of other documentaries and books, but it benefits from the immediacy of the account and the fresh memories of the participants in the events who were interviewed by the documentary's director Dylan Avery starting in 2004. It also includes a bit of a history lesson for the average viewer, recalling Hitler's Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, all of which were essentially fraudulent and led to the assumption of emergency powers by the respective heads of state. ..."
"... The underlying premise of most 9/11 revisionism is that the United States government, or at least parts of it, is capable of almost anything. ..."
"... The signatories of the neocon Project for the New American Century paper observed that was needed was a catalyst to produce a public demand to "do something," that "something" being an event comparable to Pearl Harbor. Seventeen signatories of the document wound up in senior positions in the Bush Administration. ..."
"... The new Pearl Harbor turned out to be 9/11. Given developments since 9/11 itself, to include the way the U.S. has persisted in going to war and the constant search for enemies worldwide to justify our own form of Deep State government, I would, to a large extent, have to believe that PNAC was either prescient or perhaps, more diabolically, actively engaged in creating a new reality. ..."
"... the strength of Loose Change as it identifies and challenges inconsistencies in the established account without pontificating and, even though it has a definite point of view and draws conclusions, it avoids going over to the dark side and speculating on any number of the wilder "what-if" scenarios. ..."
"... I recommend that readers watch Loose Change as it runs through discussions of U.S. military exercises and inexplicable stand-downs that occurred on 9/11, together with convincing accounts of engineering and technical issues related to how the World Trade Center and WTC7 collapsed. Particularly intriguing are the initial eyewitness accounts from the site of the alleged downing of UA 93 in Pennsylvania, a hole in the ground that otherwise showed absolutely no evidence of a plane having actually crashed. Nor have I ever seen any traces of a plane in photos taken at the Pentagon point of impact. ..."
Oct 25, 2016 | www.unz.com
11 Truth? Was it an "American coup?" Leave a Comment For the first time a presidential candidate, admittedly from a fringe party, is calling for a reexamination of 9/11. Jill Stein of the Green Party has recognized that exercises in which the United States government examines its own behavior are certain to come up with a result that basically exonerates the politicians and the federal bureaucracy. This has been the case since the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which, inter alia, failed to thoroughly investigate key players like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and came up with a single gunman scenario in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary.

When it comes to 9/11, I have been reluctant to enter the fray largely because I do not have the scientific and technical chops to seriously assess how buildings collapse or how a large passenger airliner might be completely consumed by a fire. In my own area, of expertise, which is intelligence, I have repeatedly noted that the Commission investigators failed to look into the potential foreign government involvement in the events that took place that day. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan just for starters may have been involved in or had knowledge relating to 9/11 but the only investigation that took place, insofar as I can determine, was a perfunctory look at the possible Saudi role, the notorious 28 pages, which have recently been released in a redacted form.

A friend recently recommended that I take a look at a film on 9/11 that was first produced back in 2005. It is called Loose Change 9/11 and is available on Amazon Video or in DVD form as well as elsewhere in a number of updated versions. The first version reportedly provides the most coherent account, though the later updates certainly are worth watching, add significantly to the narrative, and are currently more accessible.

Loose Change is an examination of the inconsistencies in the standard 9/11 narrative, a subject that has been thoroughly poked and prodded in a number of other documentaries and books, but it benefits from the immediacy of the account and the fresh memories of the participants in the events who were interviewed by the documentary's director Dylan Avery starting in 2004. It also includes a bit of a history lesson for the average viewer, recalling Hitler's Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, all of which were essentially fraudulent and led to the assumption of emergency powers by the respective heads of state.

The underlying premise of most 9/11 revisionism is that the United States government, or at least parts of it, is capable of almost anything. Loose Change describes how leading hawkish Republicans were, as early as 2000, pushing to increase U.S. military capabilities so that the country would be able to fight multi-front wars. The signatories of the neocon Project for the New American Century paper observed that was needed was a catalyst to produce a public demand to "do something," that "something" being an event comparable to Pearl Harbor. Seventeen signatories of the document wound up in senior positions in the Bush Administration.

The new Pearl Harbor turned out to be 9/11. Given developments since 9/11 itself, to include the way the U.S. has persisted in going to war and the constant search for enemies worldwide to justify our own form of Deep State government, I would, to a large extent, have to believe that PNAC was either prescient or perhaps, more diabolically, actively engaged in creating a new reality.

That is not to suggest that either then or now most federal employees in the national security industry were part of some vast conspiracy but rather an indictment of the behavior and values of those at the top of the food chain, people who are characteristically singularly devoid of any ethical compass and base their decisions largely on personal and peer group ambition.

9/11 Truthers are characteristically very passionate about their beliefs, which is part of their problem in relating to a broader public. They frequently demand full adherence to their version of what passes for reality. In my own experience of more than twenty years on the intelligence side of government I have frequently found that truth is in fact elusive, often lying concealed in conflicting narratives. This is, I believe, the strength of Loose Change as it identifies and challenges inconsistencies in the established account without pontificating and, even though it has a definite point of view and draws conclusions, it avoids going over to the dark side and speculating on any number of the wilder "what-if" scenarios.

I recommend that readers watch Loose Change as it runs through discussions of U.S. military exercises and inexplicable stand-downs that occurred on 9/11, together with convincing accounts of engineering and technical issues related to how the World Trade Center and WTC7 collapsed. Particularly intriguing are the initial eyewitness accounts from the site of the alleged downing of UA 93 in Pennsylvania, a hole in the ground that otherwise showed absolutely no evidence of a plane having actually crashed. Nor have I ever seen any traces of a plane in photos taken at the Pentagon point of impact.

The film describes the subsequent investigative failures that took place, perhaps deliberately and arranged from inside the government, and concludes that the event amounts to an "American coup" which changed the United States both in terms of its domestic liberties and its foreign policy. After watching the film, one must accept that there are numerous inconsistencies that emerge from any examination of the standard narrative promoted by the 9/11 Commission and covered up by every White House since 2001. The film calls the existing corpus of government investigations into 9/11 a lie, a conclusion that I would certainly agree with.

The consequences of 9/11 are indeed more important than the event itself. Even those who have come to accept the established narrative would have to concede that "that day of infamy" changed America for the worse, as the film notes. While the United States government had previously engaged in illegal activity directed against for suspected spies, terrorists and a variety of international criminals, wholesale surveillance of what amounts to the entire population of the country was a new development brought in by the Patriot Acts. And, for the first time, secret prisons were set up overseas and citizens were arrested without being charged and held indefinitely. Under the authority of the Military Commissions Act tribunals were established to try those individuals who were suspected of being material supporters of terrorism, "material supporters" being loosely interpreted to make arrest, prosecution and imprisonment easier.

More recently, executive authority based on the anti-terror legislation has been used to execute American citizens overseas and, under the Authorization to Use Military Force, to attack suspects in a number of countries with which the United States is not at war. This all takes place with hardly a squeak from Congress or from the media. And when citizens object to any or all of the above they are blocked from taking action in the courts by the government's invocation of State Secrets Privilege, claiming that judicial review would reveal national secrets. Many believe that the United States has now become a precursor police state, all as a result of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror which developed from that event.

So who benefited from 9/11? Clearly the executive branch of the government itself, which has seen an enormous expansion in its power and control over both the economy and people's lives, but there are also other entities like the military industrial complex, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, and the financial services sector, all of which have gained considerably from the anti-terror largesse coming from the American taxpayer. Together these entities constitute an American Deep State, which controls both government and much of the private sector without ever being mentioned or seriously contested.

Suggesting government connivance in the events of 9/11 inevitably raises the question of who exactly might have ordered or carried out the attacks if they were in fact not fully and completely the work of a handful of Arab hijackers? The film suggests that one should perhaps consider the possibility of a sophisticated "false flag" operation, by which we mean that the apparent perpetrators of the act were not, in fact, the drivers or originators of what took place. Blowing up huge buildings and causing them to pancake from within, if indeed that is what took place, is the work of governments, not of a handful of terrorists. Only two governments would have had that capability, the United States itself and also Israel, unfortunately mentioned only once in passing in the film, a state player heavily engaged in attempting to bring America into its fight with the Arab world, with Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently saying that "We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq swung American public opinion in our favor."

To be honest I would prefer not to think that 9/11 might have been an inside job, but I am now convinced that a new 9/11 Commission is in order, one that is not run and guided by the government itself. If it can be demonstrated that the attacks carried out on that day were quite possibly set up by major figures both inside and outside the political establishment it might produce such a powerful reaction that the public would demand a reversal of the laws and policies that have so gravely damaged our republic. It is admittedly unlikely that anything like that could ever take place, but it is at least something to hope for.

[Oct 16, 2016] The Deep State

Notable quotes:
"... "deep state" - the Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment - is a far greater threat to liberty than you think ..."
"... Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. ..."
"... Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." ..."
Feb 28, 2014 | The American Conservative

Steve Sailer links to this unsettling essay by former career Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who says the "deep state" - the Washington-Wall-Street-Silicon-Valley Establishment - is a far greater threat to liberty than you think. The partisan rancor and gridlock in Washington conceals a more fundamental and pervasive agreement.

Excerpts:

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi's regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country's intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an "establishment." All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State's protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.

More:

Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." This, from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee. [3]

The corridor between Manhattan and Washington is a well trodden highway for the personalities we have all gotten to know in the period since the massive deregulation of Wall Street: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and many others. Not all the traffic involves persons connected with the purely financial operations of the government: In 2013, General David Petraeus joined KKR (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) of 9 West 57th Street, New York, a private equity firm with $62.3 billion in assets. KKR specializes in management buyouts and leveraged finance. General Petraeus' expertise in these areas is unclear. His ability to peddle influence, however, is a known and valued commodity. Unlike Cincinnatus, the military commanders of the Deep State do not take up the plow once they lay down the sword. Petraeus also obtained a sinecure as a non-resident senior fellow at theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The Ivy League is, of course, the preferred bleaching tub and charm school of the American oligarchy.

Lofgren goes on to say that Silicon Valley is a node of the Deep State too, and that despite the protestations of its chieftains against NSA spying, it's a vital part of the Deep State's apparatus. More:

The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to "live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face."

Read the whole thing.

... I would love to see a study comparing the press coverage from 9/11 leading up to the Iraq War with press coverage of the gay marriage issue from about 2006 till today. Specifically, I'd be curious to know about how thoroughly the media covered the cases against the policies that the Deep State and the Shallow State decided should prevail. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy here, not at all. I'm only thinking back to how it seemed so obvious to me in 2002 that we should go to war with Iraq, so perfectly clear that the only people who opposed it were fools or villains. The same consensus has emerged around same-sex marriage. I know how overwhelmingly the news media have believed this for some time, such that many American journalists simply cannot conceive that anyone against same-sex marriage is anything other than a fool or a villain. Again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's in the nature of the thing. Lofgren:

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called "groupthink," the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town's cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it's 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one's consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: "You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?" No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one's surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn't know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

When all you know is the people who surround you in your professional class bubble and your social circles, you can think the whole world agrees with you, or should. It's probably not a coincidence that the American media elite live, work, and socialize in New York and Washington, the two cities that were attacked on 9/11, and whose elites - political, military, financial - were so genuinely traumatized by the events.

Anyway, that's just a small part of it, about how the elite media manufacture consent. Here's a final quote, one from the Moyers interview with Lofgren:

BILL MOYERS: If, as you write, the ideology of the Deep State is not democrat or republican, not left or right, what is it?

MIKE LOFGREN: It's an ideology. I just don't think we've named it. It's a kind of corporatism. Now, the actors in this drama tend to steer clear of social issues. They pretend to be merrily neutral servants of the state, giving the best advice possible on national security or financial matters. But they hold a very deep ideology of the Washington consensus at home, which is deregulation, outsourcing, de-industrialization and financialization. And they believe in American exceptionalism abroad, which is boots on the ground everywhere, it's our right to meddle everywhere in the world. And the result of that is perpetual war.

This can't last. We'd better hope it can't last. And we'd better hope it unwinds peacefully.

[Oct 01, 2016] If civilians can sue sovereign states it should be obvious to everybody that the drone maniacal US would be on top of the list of targets for such suits

Oct 01, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com

DeDude : September 30, 2016 at 07:38 AM

Amazing how stupid congress can be. I know the politics that drove this mistake, but why did the leadership in congress allow this to be voted on?

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/29/politics/obama-911-veto-congressional-concerns/index.html

If civilians can sue sovereign states it should be obvious to everybody that the drone maniacal US would be on top of the list of targets for such suits. Our government and soldiers would be the most vulnerable in the whole world.

If our courts were to begin collections of judgments from sovereign states the results would be that no foreign government would want to hold assets in this country.

I certainly sympathize with the 9/11 victim families, although they have been compensated for their loss with way more money than any of the foreign collateral damage victims of our military actions.

The families may not understand this, but they will never collect a dime. On the other hand, this legislation to "help" them will do a lot of damage to the country and its soldiers.

How did sympathy for these families let our congress members trap themselves in such a stupendous blunder. I guess election season is a time for that kind of stuff.

reason -> DeDude... , Friday, September 30, 2016 at 07:52 AM
It is this sort of legislation that has made the US so hated around the world. The US just can't seem to internalize that being sovereign doesn't imply sovereignty over the rest of the world, that that sovereignty ends at the border.

As far as I know, the US is the only country that taxes its non-resident citizens. This alone is nuts.

The US is also as far as I know the only country that thinks it has the right to kill the citizens of other countries outside its borders.

And then it seems that many US citizens seem to think they are not bound by the rules of physics, or logic or arithmetic.

US exceptionalism has gone on long enough. It is about time the US came back to earth and decided it is just another country on earth.

efcdons -> reason ... , Friday, September 30, 2016 at 11:48 AM
"As far as I know, the US is the only country that taxes its non-resident citizens. This alone is nuts."

Why is that nuts? Do non-resident citizens no longer have access to consulate services? Does the citizenship lapse such that one can't come back to the US whenever they want?

The US keeps going while the citizen is abroad. It's not outrageous to ask them to contribute something (not much, the credit for overseas taxes paid is pretty high).

DeDude -> efcdons... , -1
We are the only ones that assume people will come back unless they renounce their citizenship.

It is only fair that you get taxed for the government services you receive. Therefore, you should be taxed in the country where you live. There is no justification for taxing income earned in a foreign country.

The value of consulate services are so small that it cost more to recover them than deliver them. So the rest of the world does not use that lame excuse to tax citizens living abroad.

[Sep 24, 2016] 9-11 Firefighter Blows WTC 7 Cover-Up Wide Open

Impressive interview
Notable quotes:
"... That guy knows what he's talking about. It's about time someone came forward with what may be true according to what he saw and knows. ..."
YouTube

Infowars reporter Lee Ann McAdoo talks to Rudy Dent, 32 year veteran of NYC fire department and the NYPD, about his incredible first hand experience of the lies surrounding WTC 7.

Jeanne O'Mara 13 hours ago

This retired fireman feels that it was a a controlled demolition. He has never heard of a high rise being brought down by a fire. There were other bldgs that were hit by debris from the burning towers. He was also suspicious that all the evidence from WTC 7 was taken away and sent to china.

The crime scene should have protected but wasn't. He believe as many now do that t was a "false Flag" operation to get people all riled up so they could get into react. He saw molten LAVA like pockets of steel which is like what you see when a volcano explodes. It's called pyroclastic flow. Thermite, a very special explosive was found and it can only be made a very specialized labs like Los Alamos.

The bush family has a very creepy history. Prescott Bush had holdings in a bank that funded the Nazis (Union Bank). It was seized by the CONGRESS. The Harrimans were also involved w this bank.

It's also clear that Bush Sr had a role in JFK's assassination. JFK had asked A. Harriman to negotiate w Vietnam and Harriman cross out that part. This was treason.

lora savage 1 week ago

That guy knows what he's talking about. It's about time someone came forward with what may be true according to what he saw and knows.

[Sep 24, 2016] 9 11 John Kerry admits that WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition!

www.youtube.com
al murphy 1 year ago
9/11 is a cover-up and World Trade Center 7 collapse is the smoking gun. Why is that so?? WTC-7 fully collapsed in a manner that resembles a controlled demolition. For 2.25 seconds it collapsed at freefall and National Institute of Standards and Technology now admits this. In order for it to freefall for 2.25 seconds you need a uniform gap of approx. 80ft free of any physical impediments (equivalent of blowing out 7 floors almost instantaneously).

Fire is not magic and cannot do that and only can be precisely done through human intervention. It takes the prepositioning of demolition components that are finely timed throughout the building to accomplish this. WTC-7 had GOV agencies as part of its tenant (US Secret Service, CIA, IRS, DOD...) With tenants like that it is impossible for an outsider to get access to the building to preposition demolition components. Whoever did had to have their consent!

[Sep 14, 2016] the motives of which are transparently political and actually create disinformation around veritable realities

Notable quotes:
"... It's unclear how a jetliner is [more] powerful than an earthquake, and how, if such requirements failed to save the WTC towers, preparing for even more powerful earthquakes is going to prevent a recurrence of the same. ..."
"... The heavy, black smoke emanating from the structures belies your premise. ..."
Sep 12, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

JSM September 12, 2016 at 5:10 pm

No offense is meant but fewer articles from Ms. Scofield, please, with transparent, dubious, questionable, or propagandistic angles. The article 'How building design changed after 9/11' has been written annually for fifteen years.

"In fact, for years building codes from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Steel Construction and the American Concrete Institute have required structural supports to be designed with high enough ductility to withstand a major earthquake so rare its probability of happening is once every 2,000 years. "

It's unclear how a jetliner is [more] powerful than an earthquake, and how, if such requirements failed to save the WTC towers, preparing for even more powerful earthquakes is going to prevent a recurrence of the same.

This would also go for any articles entitled 'How the US Can Win the War in Syria' in which no objectives are articulated, non-evidential articles entitled 'U.S. Could Pay a High Price for Suing the Saudis,' any more New Yorker articles, the motives of which are transparently political and actually create disinformation around veritable realities, about 'Trump and the Truth', e.g. 'The Unemployment Rate Hoax,' etc. I'm sure posting links is largely a thankless job, but if I wanted to I could turn on CNN and 'learn' these very things.

Jess , September 12, 2016 at 6:31 pm

"In fact, for years building codes from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Steel Construction and the American Concrete Institute have required structural supports to be designed with high enough ductility to withstand a major earthquake so rare its probability of happening is once every 2,000 years."

Hate to break it to you, but earthquake forces - seismic events - are considerably different than thermal events. Granted, fire often erupt as a result of severed gas and electric lines caused by an earthquake, but an earthquake is a brief, violent, hard shaking or rolling. A high-rise fire of sustained intensity sits in one place and does its work within a confined setting. In the case of the multiple floors damaged by the impact of the planes in 9-11, that confined setting bore a striking resemblance to a combination blast furnace and chimney. (People tend to forget that skyscrapers tend to create their own wind patterns, in this case well over 500 feet high. Just like air being pumped into a fire by a bellows.

human -> Jess , September 12, 2016 at 8:47 pm

The heavy, black smoke emanating from the structures belies your premise.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , September 12, 2016 at 10:17 pm

The second order partial differentiation equation* governing structure responding during a dynamic event like an earthquakes shows that the force on the structure is related to its mass.

The heavier a structure, the bigger force it is subjected to, going through the same quake.

The force of an impacting plane is same regardless of the building size, all else being equal.

*(mass x acceleration) + (damping coefficient x velocity) + (stiffness modulus x displacement) = zero.

[Sep 11, 2016] The Mysterious Collapse of WTC Building 7

Is this a plan of the elite to introduce national security state in action. Are they afraid of the collapse of neoliberal social order and try to take precautions?
Notable quotes:
"... These factors would have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity, i.e., strength and stiffness. ..."
"... the superstructure above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. ..."
"... Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse. ..."
"... A reporter with rare access to the debris at ground zero "descended deep below street level to areas where underground fires still burned and steel flowed in molten streams." ..."
"... Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants. Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories : ..."
"... Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be? ..."
"... Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002, Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was only $386,000,000. ..."
"... Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way. ..."
"... All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies, and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never clarified). ..."
"... This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down. ..."
"... http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully flawed NIST report ..."
"... There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area. ..."
"... The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what happened at WTC. ..."
"... If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless. ..."
"... Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt. It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob. ..."
"... The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. ..."
Sep 15, 2012 | WashingtonsBlog

... ... ...

What Do the Experts Say?

What does the evidence show about the Solomon Brothers Building in Manhattan?

Numerous structural engineers – the people who know the most about office building vulnerabilities and accidents – say that the official explanation of why building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11 is "impossible", "defies common logic" and "violates the law of physics":

The collapse of WTC7 looks like it may have been the result of a controlled demolition. This should have been looked into as part of the original investigation

Photos of the steel, evidence about how the buildings collapsed, the unexplainable collapse of WTC 7, evidence of thermite in the debris as well as several other red flags, are quite troubling indications of well planned and controlled demolition

In my view, the chances of the three buildings collapsing symmetrically into their own footprint, at freefall speed, by any other means than by controlled demolition, are so remote that there is no other plausible explanation

Near-freefall collapse violates laws of physics. Fire induced collapse is not consistent with observed collapse mode . . . .

How did the structures collapse in near symmetrical fashion when the apparent precipitating causes were asymmetrical loading? The collapses defies common logic from an elementary structural engineering perspective.

***

Heat transmission (diffusion) through the steel members would have been irregular owing to differing sizes of the individual members; and, the temperature in the members would have dropped off precipitously the further away the steel was from the flames-just as the handle on a frying pan doesn't get hot at the same rate as the pan on the burner of the stove. These factors would have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity, i.e., strength and stiffness.

Structural steel is highly ductile, when subjected to compression and bending it buckles and bends long before reaching its tensile or shear capacity. Under the given assumptions, "if" the structure in the vicinity started to weaken, the superstructure above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. The opposite, intact, side of the building would resist toppling until the ultimate capacity of the structure was reached, at which point, a weak-link failure would undoubtedly occur. Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse.

For this reason alone, I rejected the official explanation for the collapse .

We design and analyze buildings for the overturning stability to resist the lateral loads with the combination of the gravity loads. Any tall structure failure mode would be a fall over to its side. It is impossible that heavy steel columns could collapse at the fraction of the second within each story and subsequently at each floor below.We do not know the phenomenon of the high rise building to disintegrate internally faster than the free fall of the debris coming down from the top.

The engineering science and the law of physics simply doesn't know such possibility. Only very sophisticated controlled demolition can achieve such result, eliminating the natural dampening effect of the structural framing huge mass that should normally stop the partial collapse. The pancake theory is a fallacy, telling us that more and more energy would be generated to accelerate the collapse. Where would such energy would be coming from?

Fire and impact were insignificant in all three buildings [Again, please ignore any reference to the Twin Towers this essay focuses solely on WTC7]. Impossible for the three to collapse at free-fall speed. Laws of physics were not suspended on 9/11, unless proven otherwise

The symmetrical "collapse" due to asymmetrical damage is at odds with the principles of structural mechanics

It is virtually impossible for WTC building 7 to collapse as it did with the influence of sporadic fires. This collapse HAD to be planned

It is very suspicious that fire brought down Building 7 yet the Madrid hotel fire was still standing after 24 hours of fire. This is very suspicious to me because I design buildings for a living

The above is just a sample. Many other structural engineers have questioned the collapse of Building 7, as have numerous top experts in other relevant disciplines, including:

The collapse was too symmetrical to have been eccentrically generated. The destruction was symmetrically initiated to cause the buildings to implode as they did

Watch this short video on Building 7 by Architects and Engineers (ignore any reference to the Twin Towers, deaths on 9/11, or any other topics other than WTC7):

Fish In a Barrel

Poking holes in the government's spin on Building 7 is so easy that it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

As just one example, the spokesman for the government agency which says that the building collapsed due to fire said there was no molten metal at ground zero:


The facts are a wee bit different:

Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants. Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories:

Approximately three million gallons of water were hosed on site in the fire-fighting efforts, and 1 million gallons fell as rainwater, between 9/11 and 9/21 .

The spraying continued for months afterward (the 10 day period was simply the timeframe in which the DOE was sampling). Enormous amounts of water were hosed on Ground Zero continuously, day and night:

"Firetrucks [sprayed] a nearly constant jet of water on [ground zero]. You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was pumped in there," said Tom Manley of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the largest fire department union. "It was like you were creating a giant lake."

This photograph may capture a sense of how wet the ground became due to the constant spraying:

murphy Arguments Regarding the Collapse of the World Trade Center Evaporate Upon Inspection
In addition, the fires were sprayed with thousands of gallons of high tech fire-retardants.

The fact that there were raging fires and molten metal even after the application of massive quantities of water and fire retardants shows how silly the government spokesman's claim is.

Again, this has nothing to do with "inside job" no one was killed in the collapse of Building 7, no wars were launched based on a rallying cry of "remember the Solomon Brothers building", and no civil liberties were lost based on a claim that we have to prevent future WTC7 tragedies.

It is merely meant to show that government folks sometimes lie even about issues tangentially related to 9/11.

Pooua > Wolfen Batroach • 2 years ago

Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be?

JusticeFor911 > Pooua

Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002, Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was only $386,000,000.

I'd say nearly half of $1,000,000,000.00 was the primary cause to include this building with the towers. Keep in mind that President Bush's brother Marvin was a principal in the company Securacom that provided security for the WTC, United Airlines and Dulles International Airport. Are dots connecting yet?

Pooua > JusticeFor911

If you buy a new car, you take out full coverage insurance on it. Insuring billion-dollar buildings is standard procedure, especially when one had already suffered a terrorist attack. You insinuation is nothing but gossip and suggestion.

No, Securacom did not provide security for WTC; that's the job of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. Securacom had a contract to perform a limited service for PANYNJ, and Marvin Bush was only a bit player (he was on the board of directors) in the company. Your paranoid ramblings are lies.

IBSHILLIN > Pooua

Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way.

All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies, and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never clarified).

This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down.

Pooua > IBSHILLIN

I find it amazing that you consider yourself such an unquestionable expert that you not only feel qualified to insist that explosives brought down the WTC buildings, even in contradiction to scores of scientists, engineers and investigators of NIST, FEMA, FBI and MIT who say otherwise, and you do so without offering any evidence at all to support your bizarre claim.

No building the size of any of the WTC buildings has ever been brought down by controlled demolition, but of those that come closest, the planning took years, and the rigging took months of hard work by teams of experts working around the clock. This is not something that can be hidden.

Your suggestion is entirely preposterous and without merit.

ihaveabrain > Pooua

explain this? You are smarter than these experts? http://www.hulu.com/watch/4120...

NIST, FEMA, FBI and MIT are worthless entities! What about the experts in that documentary? Nanothermite brought them down smart guy!

Pooua > ihaveabrain • 25 days ago

You posted a 1.5-hour video. I am not here to watch a 1.5-hour video; I'm here to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC 7. If you have something to say, say it here.

NIST has been the premier standards body used by the US government for a century, covering virtually every aspect of engineering and public safety in this country. It employes thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians. For you to claim that it is a worthless entity is idiocy on your part.

linked1 > Pooua • 24 days ago

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully flawed NIST report

You claim to want to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC-7 but you can't be bothered to watch painstakingly researched documentaries that include thousands of witnesses, victims, scientists, and structural professionals.

You ought to educate yourself before calling other's claims 'worthless idiocy'. You are wrong, and history will prove you wrong.

Pooua > linked1

I've been reading arguments about 9/11 for two years. I've been arguing about other issues for the last 25 years, at least since I took a class in classical logic. What you need to understand is, you aren't arguing anything when you send me off to listen to someone else. The other guy might be arguing something, but you aren't doing anything. And, the fact that I've spent two years reading everything I could find on the subject makes me strongly suspect that this five-hour video would be just a waste of my time.

If you want to discuss this matter, then discuss it. Don't send me off to spend hours of my time listening to someone else. You explain it. If you can't explain it, then you don't understand it, and you are wasting everyone's time.

mulegino1 . > Pooua

The levels of energy required to turn most of the Twin Towers and WTC7 into nanoparticles (thus the pyrocastic flow which only occurs in volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations) would be thousands of orders of magnitude greater than airliner impacts and hydrocarbon based office fires, which are claimed to have initiated a "gravity collapse".

How could a "gravity collapse" perfectly mimic the detonation of a small tactical nuclear device or devices-electromagnetic pulse, molten lava and a mushroom cloud?

Pooua > mulegino1

I want you to look at this image from the WTC on 9/11. It shows the debris after the Towers collapsed. Does this look like nanoparticles to you? Most of the debris was bigger than a man's fist.

Thumbnail

There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area.

The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what happened at WTC.

mulegino1 . > Pooua

If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless.

There was indeed a pyroclasticas flow as anyone with youtube can determine for themselves.

Pooua > WilliamBinney • a year ago

It is your job to do more than make idiotic, speculative assertions and pretend that constitutes a reason for disregarding the government's account of the event. Yet, you all have completely failed to do anything except expose your own inability to account for the events of that day.

Dizzer13 > Pooua • a year ago

Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt. It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob.

mulegino1 . > Pooua • 2 years ago

The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC.

The official narrative is so ludicrous from any standpoint that the "debunkers" resort to wildly implausible scenarios in order to convince the above cited demographic that the government and the major national media were reporting factual information when in fact they were reading from a script. And it was a very poorly written script. The Bin Laden bogeyman was already being invoked before the buildings exploded.

What you've got here is a pseudo-religious narrative designed to so enrage the dumbed down sheeple that they will lash out in their fury against virtually anyone designated by the powers that be as the enemy- a Sorelian myth.

Like any false narrative, the official story breaks down at the level of discrete facts and can only survive as a holistic mythologized, meta-historical events.

[Mar 19, 2015] '9-11 was an inside job' Full speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at UN

Sep 23, 2010 | youtube.com

[Mar 19, 2015] New 9-11 photos 'prove WTC exploded from inside'

Feb 11, 2010 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX_UKdqoa_o

New picture releases are shedding light on September 11th, some say they prove that the assault on America proves a homegrown attack. The new photos are provided by US national institute of standards and technology. There are over 2,000 new photos that have been made public. Manny Badillo says that you see an explosion from the inside, not what it has seemed to be, he says there has never been a building taken down by a plane.

[Mar 19, 2015] George W. Bush Confronted on 9-11 & war crimes in Florida!

[Mar 18, 2015] 9-11 Truth Judges shocked by first time seeing video of WTC 7 collapse in Denmark court

See also 10th Anniversary TV Ad - Remember Building 7 and Geraldo Rivera Does 911 Truth Segment About Building 7
Mar 18, 2015 | wtfrly.com

Three judges in Denmark watched in “astonishment” last week as they saw the collapse for the first time of World Trade Center Building 7, the third collapsed building in the September 11th attacks.

We got the opportunity, for once, to present a video of World Trade Centre 7 collapsing, in court, … at that time I recognised a state of astonishment among the three judges…. I understand, as usual, that none of them had heard or seen the collapse of Building 7 before.”

The exchange came as part of an appeal in the Eastern High Court in Copenhagen to a libel suit which was dismissed by a lower court. Niels Harrit sued over comments by Journalist Søren K. Villemoes calling him a “crackpot” over Harrit’s description of the building’s collapse.

The legal consideration at issue is whether the Weekendavisen journalist’s statement was libellous, comparing Niels Harrit with creationists and holocaust deniers, but the presentation of evidence against collapse from fire is a key point. The video of the collapse was looped and shown 3 times during the case.

Harrit also highlighted to the judges the fact that the Building 7 collapse was not part of the official 9/11 Commission report.

He mentioned that the judges wanted to clearly understand his statements and he explained that the official investigation did not include analysis of the Building 7 collapse but part of a separate investigation years later.

9-11 & Iraq Revisited Remembering How We Were Lied Into War by Will Porter

September 19, 2014 | Antiwar.com

Since the cataclysmic events that took place on the morning of September 11th 2001, an extended series of consequences have unfolded with an alarming rapidity. Between vast escalations of military activity abroad, the passing of draconian laws, like the Patriot Act and the NDAA, the instituting of the Department of Homeland Security, and the ramping up of domestic spy programs through the NSA, 9/11 has served as a catalyst for a radical change in how America conducts itself both at home and around the world. In the weeks and months following the incident, the American people were bombarded with a veritable hurricane of bald-faced lies and assertions based on dubious "intelligence". Before they could begin to wrap their heads around the significance of the events taking place around them, their government had already set plans into motion to wage a decades-long military conflict in the Middle East, a conflict which rages at full force to this day. In fact, recent developments in Iraq regarding the Islamic State militant group, or ISIS, elevate the issue of the 2003 Iraq War to the highest importance.

Among the general populace, a widely-accepted narrative has developed which attempts to make sense of all that has happened since September 11th. Very broadly, the narrative contends that Islamic extremists have declared war on the United States, and this alone serves to explain and justify the long string of wars that have been waged in the name of the global "War on Terrorism" ever since. What’s most surprising about the public narrative is that it offers almost no explanation at all of how or why Iraq was, directly or indirectly, implicated in the 2001 terror attacks on New York and DC. At best, the public storyline suggests only a vague connection between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Any substantial explanation of this tie, however, has seemingly fallen away into the ethereal memory hole of American historical conscience.

Of the many oft-repeated talking points which comprise the terror war narrative, the question of the highest importance almost always goes unasked: why exactly did the United States wage war against Iraq in the first place? It is extremely peculiar that the largest-scale, most significant conflict to date in the war on terrorism has no widely-understood explanation. Those who have paid the highest price to initiate this war, the American people, seem to be the least informed on the matter. It is because of this lack of understanding regarding Iraq in particular that the terror war was ever able to get underway, and, indeed, build up a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

On this 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which initiated the drive for war, it is vital to return to these basic questions. How did this happen? Who was involved? What justifications were given to go into Iraq in the first place? After more than a decade, the American people still cannot provide firm answers to such questions. To understand the broader war on terror, and how it came to dominate American foreign policy, it is necessary to fill in the blanks of the official narrative, as well as overturn some of the prevailing falsehoods about Iraq, WMDs, and its connection to al-Qaeda.

In basic terms, the official US government justification for the Iraq War goes something like this: Saddam Hussein was a material supporter of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda – particularly the Islamic militant Abu Musab Zarqawi – offering safe harbor and/or training facilities for them in Iraq. On top of this is the related claim that Hussein was actively pursuing "weapons of mass destruction," using "mobile bio-weapons labs," as well as "aluminum tubes" for centrifuges in a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In his alleged link to militant Islam – and his ties to Palestine in the case of Zarqawi, a Jordan-born Palestinian – Saddam was said to have planned to provide Iraq’s weapons to terrorists, who would act as his proxies. For these reasons, Iraq was said to be a threat to its neighbors, and a threat to the United States. These claims are officially stated in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), but also informally circulated in TV and print news media in the run up to the war.

While the Bush Administration explicitly refrained from directly accusing Saddam of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, they were certainly happy to let the American people believe there was a direct connection between the two. After all, many thought, why would the US ever wage a war against Iraq, seemingly as a result of 9/11, if Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? Due to the disjointed and incoherent Administration narrative, and the mainstream media’s willingness to freely speculate on all matters pertaining to 9/11, Iraq, and terror, the American people were left to rationalize and put two-and-two together on their own, often concluding that Saddam and September 11th were related.

The only explicit attempt to tie 9/11 to Iraq was in the claim that lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammad Atta, made contact with Iraqi intelligence at a meeting in Prague. Later, additional allegations derived from "Israeli security sources" assert that an Iraqi agent furnished Atta with an "anthrax flask" at the same meeting. Some suggested also that Iraq was involved in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks that took place shortly after 9/11, targeting media outlets as well as Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle (who both, coincidentally, happened to oppose the invasion of Iraq). All the talk of anthrax, no matter how baseless, ultimately helped to terrorize the American people and warm them up to the idea of war with Iraq. Finally, but no less important, we have the documents, curiously supplied by an Italian intelligence agency (SISMI), which were claimed to prove Saddam’s attempt to procure 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger. Sprinkle in a little Wilsonian talk of "spreading democracy," and you’ve got yourself a war.

As we shall see, absolutely none of the casus belli presented to the American people had any resemblance to reality. Through a complex network of government officials – primarily connected to the Pentagon and the office of the Vice President – media pundits and journalists – such as Judith Miller, others at the New York Times, and the PNAC crowd at the Weekly Standard – as well as foreign sources – Iraqi ex-pats as well as Italian and Israeli intelligence – the Iraq War was set off without a hitch; built upon, in the words of Colin Powell, a "web of lies."

An essential link in the chain was the Pentagon-created Office of Special Plans (OSP). Established in 2002, this agency lies at the very heart of the War Party push to invade Iraq. Through this Office, headed by Abram Shulsky under the authority of Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, "intelligence" was funneled into important or influential places, such as the office of Vice President Cheney via his Chief of Staff, Louis "Scooter" Libby. In one case, information was even directly leaked by Douglas Feith to Bill Kristol’s neocon rag, the Weekly Standard, demonstrating, in part, the state-media complicity in misleading the American people. Additional players linked to the OSP, to name only a few, include NESA bureau head William Luti, Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, as well as neocon Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, whose prior informal intelligence activity with Feith was officially codified in the creation of the OSP. Its primary task was to dig through raw intelligence agency information, unaccompanied by the judgment of a professional analyst, in order to ham-fistedly piece together official justifications for war.

According to retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and former Pentagon desk officer Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked closely with senior Pentagon staff such as William Luti, higher-up officials in the OSP were "willing to exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the agenda." To that end, information disseminated from this office was carefully cherry-picked and highly exaggerated, with much of it gleaned from the Iraqi expat group the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Presiding over the INC was Ahmed Chalabi, essentially a double agent for the Ayatollah, who temporarily served a vital purpose for his neo-conservative dupes.

Chalabi dazzled neocons with talk of a future "Hashemite Kingdom" in Iraq (referring to Jordan; diplomatically and economically friendly with Israel). He was selected by administration war hawks as early as the Gulf War to lead the Iraqi political march to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Exiled from Iraq, and a convicted bank fraudster, Chalabi weaseled his way into high position in the post-Saddam Iraqi state after helping the Bush Administration successfully bamboozle their way in. Later on, to the horror of his former US colleagues, his trueloyalties were discovered, revealing an epic betrayal of the War Party in favor of his long-held Iranian connections. As an influential figure among pro-war ideologues, Chalabi was able to carefully sway events to Iran’s benefit in ways which his neocon handlers were oblivious of. Despite this double-cross, it was Chalabi and his INC "heroes in error" who provided many of the intelligence sources that were vital in the push for invasion. For example, in a New York Times piece by Judith Miller, she cites a meeting, arranged by the INC, with an "Iraqi defector," claiming there to be "renovations at sites for chemical and nuclear arms" in Saddam’s Iraq. With the popular news media parroting the government’s claims, it helped to quickly move along the pro-war policy.

In the end, nothing regarding the claims of "aluminum tubes," initially insisted on by the CIA’s WINPACcenter, was true. The same goes for the "arms sites" and "mobile weapons labs," both of which were sourced from Iraqi defectors. All of these talking points were, as well, used in Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February of 2003, a speech which was crucial in the green-lighting of the American-led coalition to invade Iraq. The lies in that speech, as well as the ones told in the 2002 NIE cited above, are officially debunked by a 2004 Senate Report (download PDF in link) which cites intelligence community conclusions on the various fraudulent claims. None of the information used to bolster the WMD story held any weight, and a large portion of the US intelligence community had said so all along. This was not just a big mistake, it was intelligence deliberately concocted, or presented wildly out of context, in order to send the nation (back) to war, to finish the job started in the 1991 Iraq conflict.

Official skepticism toward Bush Administration claims of Saddam’s weapons, as well as his ties to terror is illustrated the leaked UK intelligence documents, known as the "Downing Street Memos". These memos depict high-ranking UK officials expressing concern over whether the Administration was "fixing" intelligence around a pro-war policy, rather than a policy around intelligence. Before, during, and after the war, there were a multitude of intelligence sources, as well as a fairly large body of journalism, which conveyed deep skepticism toward the dubious pro-war talking points. There certainly were dissenting voices in the lead up to the war; these voices simply went unheeded and unheard, at least until after the invasion. The mainstream media chose, instead, to create an echo chamber for the flurry of false claims emanating from the Bush Administration and the tightly-knit group of neo-conservatives in high office or positions of public influence.

Also proven false in the 2004 Senate Report are the allegations of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from the Nigerian government in 1999-2000. The documents passed along from Italian intelligence, in fact, turned out to be the crudest of forgeries! From October of 2002 to March of 2003, the CIA, as well as the IAEA, expressed doubts about the information contained in the documents, yet this didn’t stop President Bush from invoking it in his State of the Union address of January 2003. Indeed, the CIA’s skepticism was either discounted or completely circumnavigated in order to push this particular piece of intelligence.

Of much interest here is the 2005 La Republica exposé (translation) which explores the antics of one Rocco Martino, an Italian peddler of information who worked with Italian, and at times French, intelligence. Martino and a number of associates, looking for a quick way to make money, were able to use various intelligence assets to attain access to outdated Nigerian documents. Using official stamps and letterhead stolen from the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, this group of rapacious rogues crudely pieced together the stale documents to create the forgery, which they hoped to sell. They were initially handed off to SISMI and to the French, who quickly saw them for what they were. But much changed after 9/11 and the Bush Administration’s mad scramble for Saddam-WMD intelligence. At this point, SISMI finds new willingness to share the documents with the CIA station in Rome, while Martino gives them over to British MI6. The information makes its way to the Bush Administration, where it is eventually used in the 2003 SOTU address in the form of sixteen ambiguous words. Following the rest of this story, with its possible ties to a police sting, Iran, Israel, and Michael Ledeen, will lead us down quite a deep rabbit-hole, which due to space limitations simply cannot be elaborated on here.

Finally it should also be briefly noted that the more recent scandal involving the outing of undercover agent Valerie Plame is heavily related to her husband’s investigation of the forged Niger documents. The Wilson-Plame Niger investigation clearly probed too close to the truth, leading to an attempted career assassination at the behest of powerful people.

Another key example of botched intelligence is the claim of the meeting in Prague between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence, as well as the later attempt to link this meeting with anthrax. The Prague meeting was initially reported by Czech officials, although there were various conflicting accounts, where different Czech officials deny the meeting ever happened. An interesting parenthetical note, when Dick Cheney cited these reports in a TV interview to confirm the 9/11-Iraq tie, he refers to "Czechoslovakia," a country which had not existed since Czech-Slovak split in 1993. This certainly could have been a simple slip of the tongue, but it seems that, assuming Cheney himself had seen the Czech report, it’d be fresh enough in his mind to at least get the country’s name right!

Mark Rossini, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent given the task of analyzing the Czech report on the Prague meeting, recalls his reaction to the Cheney interview: "I remember looking at the TV screen and saying, ‘What did I just hear?’ And I–first time in my life, I actually threw something at the television because I couldn’t believe what I just heard." A 2006 Select Committee on Intelligence report repeats this conclusion, held among US intelligence circles, that the Prague meeting was dubious at best, definitely not solid enough base a military invasion on. Since this meeting likely never occurred, there is no need to provide further evidence to disprove the claim, sourced from "Israeli security," that a flask full of anthrax was given to Atta during the meeting.

Aside from the Prague-anthrax connection, further attempts were made to link the anthrax-letter attacks to both the 9/11 hijackers and, again, to Iraq. The letters themselves contained messages that were so deliberately suggestive of hijacker involvement that it strikes one as suspicious, proclaiming "09-11-01, this is next," and "Death to America, death to Israel." Bryan Ross at ABC repeatedly said, with increasing degrees of certainty, that it was very likely from Saddam Hussein’s anthrax program. He sourced three or four unnamed "well placed people," which if true might suggest that Ross was purposely mislead by government agents who wished to anonymously disseminate false information.

Despite the massive FBI probe into the case, no definitive answers were ever provided as to who was responsible. The total incompetency of the FBI, however, didn’t stop independent journalists from delving into the case themselves. From these investigations came a series of very strange discoveries, not the least of which was the likelihood that the specific anthrax strains used in the letter-attacks originated in US Army labs! Although two different people were selected as "fall-men," the baseless accusations against neither of them stuck. The second of the two, one Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian-American scientist, worked at the Fort Detrick facility from which samples of anthrax, among other dangerous biological compounds, went missing years before the letter-attacks. In later, seemingly unrelated, events at Fort Detrick, Dr. Assaad’s colleagues, primarily a group led by a man named Phillip Zack, engaged in bizarre and juvenile harassments against him. This same Phillip Zack was a suspect in a 1992 internal Army inquiry, thought to be making unauthorized access, by cover of night, to a biological compounds lab, where pathogens like anthrax, Ebola, and the Hanta virus had gone missing.

Moreover, in late September 2001, an anonymous letter sent to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia alleging that Dr. Assaad was behind a terrorist plot to use biological agents in the United States. This accusatory letter was sent after the anthrax-letters were mailed, but before they were discovered to contain anthrax. This suggests that some third-party, somebody other than Dr. Assaad, had foreknowledge of the attacks. Tying things together, in the missive accusing Assaad it is also stated that the author had formerly worked with him, demonstrating fairly extensive knowledge of Assaad’s career at USAMRIID.

Although the true culprits of the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks remain a mystery, this highly peculiar series of events seems to suggest there is much more to the story than simply another act of terrorism perpetrated by the same group responsible for the 9/11 attacks (or Iraq, as Bryan Ross asserted). One might speculate that this Phillip Zack, or somebody closely related, had a hand in the anthrax-letters, based on his suspected past unauthorized access to pathogens labs, his proven hatred for Dr. Assaad, and the strange letter sent by an alleged former colleague of Assaad’s, ascribing the guilt to him. There is more to be said about this long story, however what matters here is not the identity of the culprit, but the fact that despite almost zero solid evidence pointing to Iraq, nor to the 9/11 hijackers, influential people in the government and media were more than willing to accept such an event as a pretext for war; behind closed doors with the former, out in the open with the latter.

In the end, most of the high-ranking US officials involved in kicking off the Iraq invasion have subsequently come out to admit there were no WMDs, and no ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda. While they admit they made mistakes, most of them, unbelievably, deny they ever made claims about nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. They also deny ever asserting there were ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Needless to say, there are mountains of direct evidence proving without a shadow of a doubt that these people are complete liars, guilty of the highest crimes against humanity imaginable.

The Iraq War has often been blamed on faulty intelligence alone, and for some of the people involved this may well be true. However, what’s clear is that within the intelligence community itself, there was all along a basic consensus of the doubts regarding Bush Administration claims. The intelligence is not to be blamed, but those who wielded it in dishonest and outright corrupt ways.

What’s more are the absolutely damning ties between the neocon cabal largely responsible for the war, and the Israeli foreign policy apparatus. There is a long and extensive history of neo-conservative groups’ – especially the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) – involvement in the crafting of both Israeli and Americanpolicy, as well as garnering immense tax-dollar support for the Israeli state. Perhaps this is best illustrated in a 1996 Israeli policy paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," authored by neocon figurehead David Wurmser, with signers-on Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, among others.

Here they outline a plan regarding how Israel should deal with its neighboring Arab states. Working with allies Jordan and Turkey, they hope to "contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of [Israel’s] most dangerous threats." This includes countries like Syria, Lebanon, and Iran – most of whom the US has taken an increasingly aggressive posture toward. Iraq also is said to a valuable prize, with the removal of Saddam Hussein from power a priority. Indeed, for many years, long before 9/11, this very same group of hardline Israel-firsters sought to influence American policy toward war with Iraq as well, in large part to serve Israeli interests, alongside military-industrial ones. The 9/11 attacks were obviously used as justification to execute this plan, to get a regime change in Iraq. To these neocons, American and Israeli state-security interests are one in the same, certainly regarding Iraq, as well as the aggressive Zionism (illustrated in the "Yinon Plan") which characterizes Israeli policy, both domestic and foreign.

This incestuous neocon-Israeli involvement in the crafting of state-policy should, of course, come as no surprise. This is a well-known phenomenon, not any sort of speculative conspiracy fringe. Israel not only has long-standing ties with influential conservative movers-and-shakers in the foreign policy field, but also a history of deceptive and outright murderous behavior all around. From the decades of military occupation of the Palestinian people, the Israeli spying on American institutions, the multiple cases of Israeli (or Israel-related, through AIPAC) theft of sensitive US intelligence-related secrets, the theft of uranium in the 1950s to build nuclear bombs with, to their deliberate attempt to sink the USS Liberty in June of 1967, Israel has quite a deranged history indeed.

As with most matters of policy, the Iraq War was certainly not pushed by only one single set of interests. Things aren’t so simple. The Israel-first neocon crowd had a very important role to play, but in the end this was a confluence of many inter-locking interest groups. Political campaigning, military-industrial interests, oil, and, especially in the case of Bush Jr., personal ambition; these also were part of the incentive-structure for a pro-war policy. All of the people responsible for this war did not necessarily have to be unified in a grand conspiracy in order to push for the same policy-objective. Indeed, it just goes to show the way in which disparate and varying interest groups can come together in agreement where their individual motivations and values meet. It is sometimes easy to ascribe a collective agency to government actors, but these are still human beings we’re speaking of here. Each individual, in reality, acts according to the values placed on his own given ends in the situation he finds himself in.

I have hardly even begun to broach the voluminous content of the Iraq War chronicles, but this short review should alone serve to prove the case. The United States government, or rather a militant clique within its most powerful and influential agencies, sent this nation to war, based on fraudulent pretexts, with a largely disarmed and impoverished adversary. Between the 1990s sanctions, which lead to the deaths of 500,000 children, the one million people killed in the war of 2003, and many more millions displaced – their homes in ruin and their lives destroyed – the toll taken on the Iraqi people has been devastating. From 1990-2012, it is estimated 2-3 million Iraqis were killed or died, due to the economic sanctions, the two wars waged by the US government, and the Civil War which broke out during the second occupation.

Let us never forget how easily this happened, as we are faced with yet anotherattempt to send troops to Iraq. For almost a half-century now, the United States has constantly intervened in Iraq, and to what avail? Of all the trillions of dollars, the millions of lives, the rivers of blood poured into the country, it has only given rise to the most brutal, out of control problem to date: the Islamic State. ISIS is currently rampaging across Iraq and Syria, taking entire swaths of territory and proclaiming the establishment of a long-sought Islamic Caliphate.

As the United States, with its Mid-East allies the Turks and Saudis, continues to funnel material support to the "moderate" anti-Assad rebels in Syria, they fund and back precisely the same people they claim to oppose in Iraq. The anti-Assad rebels and the pro-caliphate jihadists are, in many cases, the very same militant groups. Considering these issues, it is long, long, overdue that the American people and, less likely, the politicians who make US policy, reexamine the issue of the Middle East, and the long-standing practice of US foreign intervention in general. If 50 years of failed policy, the colossal waste of money and resources, as well as the resulting blowback can’t teach us this lesson, I do not know what ever would.

At least encouraging was the strong majority stance of the American people to absolutely reject the notion of US military involvement in Syria around September of last year. But for any hope to avoid future bloodshed and destruction, it is vital that we internalize the lessons of the past. We must abandon the idea that history began last week, and always return to the past in order to inform our knowledge of the present and the future. For that reason, after the anniversary of the most horrific example of blowback this country has ever seen, let us never forget Iraq.

A special thank you is reserved for independent researcher, author, and filmmaker RyanDawson. Both his film "War by Deception" and his personal correspondence were invaluable. Another big thanks to radio show host Scott Horton, who took the time to go over this essay and offer many needed resources and corrections.

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Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: February, 21, 2017