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http://firefightersfor911truth.org/
Researcher compares 9/11 to Reichstag Fire in Nazi Germany and UFO secrecy
by Richard M. Dolan
An American Crusade Trading Card which shows link between 9/11 concerning the World Trade Center, and the Reichstag Fire. Reference: LINK
Back in 1933, Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. He never actually received a majority of the German vote, although his party had received the largest plurality in the most recent parliamentary elections. Thus, in January of 1933, the ancient, revered, and decrepit Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany, appointed Hitler as Chancellor. A little more than a month later, the German parliament building, known as the Reichstag, was in flames. Arson.
Hermann Goering, director of the national police and number two man in the Nazi Party, immediately proclaimed this to be "the work of the Communists." An easily confused and not-very-intelligent man, a foreigner (Dutch) and Communist, who was at the scene and had been goaded into the deed by the Nazis, confessed to everything and was executed. In fact, the best evidence indicates that Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich planned the whole thing. The result was the infamous Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial and extreme powers - supposedly temporary to meet the current crisis. The crisis happened to last for twelve years.
What I am saying is that 9/11 appears to be America's version of the Reichstag Fire. The Silent Watchdog and Invisible Fascism People who live in their little private Idaho read all this with such incredulity. "Well, why isn't any of this in the major media?" "Wouldn't the press just love such a scoop?"
The answer is no. Of course not. That people can still believe this about their media is something that I continue to marvel at, but -- in case, dear reader, you're still not getting it- it is time to wake up.
The U.S. Patriot Act context
Americans have lived with the Patriot Act for more than four years. A few people have voiced their concerns about the loss of their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. For those who want a refresher, this is the complete amendment, which went into effect:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The 400-page Patriot Act (HR 3162) completely overturns this amendment, which has been the cornerstone of the American right to privacy for more than 200 years. The Patriot Act was rushed through Congress within weeks of 9/11. It was certainly written before 9/11, waiting in the wings, so to speak. The members of Congress rivalled the wisdom of Homer Simpson who, when once faced with a waiver to sue for damages from the dreaded Mr. Burns and his team of lawyers, stated courageously, "I'm not signing anything until I read it or somebody gives me the gist of it!"
The Patriot Act is bad, very bad. The carefully worded Section 213, for example, provides for the infamous ability to "sneak and peak." It establishes the ability to issue secret warrants for any federal crime-not just terrorism-and indeed to extend the secrecy indefinitely. Police can break in, examine and remove or alter items, and can do this without ever presenting owners with a warrant detailing what they were entitled to do.
The U.S. Patriot Act also allows authorities to examine your medical, financial, educational, and even library records, whether or not they show any evidence of a crime. Credit reporting firms must also disclose to the FBI any information that agents request in connection with a terrorist investigation, without the need for a court order. In the past, this was only permitted in espionage cases. And just what constitutes terrorism, these days? Your guess is as good as mine.
It gets worse. For now we also live with the Intelligence Reform Act, passed in December 2004, an even more mammoth piece of legislation which continues the assault on the rights of American citizens.
For instance, it enables the President to select top Intelligence positions without Senate confirmation. As writer Mike Whitney put it, this is "an invitation to create his personal security apparatus without congressional interference." It also enables the new Intelligence Director to exempt his office from audits and investigations. It eliminates provisions to ensure that Congress receives timely access to intelligence. It allows the White House's Office of Management and Budget to screen testimony before the Intelligence Director presents it to the Congress. (Thus, a president-including the current one-can stonewall or selectively present information to Congress).
Whistle blower protections were removed from the bill so that federal employees cannot report on their superiors. Amazingly, it also hides the entire intelligence budget from Congressional scrutiny.
Finally, as Whitney points out, the Intelligence Director "shall have authority to direct or undertake electronic surveillance and physical search operations pursuant to FISA if authorized by statute or executive order." Yes, that's executive order.
Mass-media complicity and collusion with elites
The U.S. major media was silent on these issues. Indeed, our major media is a crucial part of the problem. It has become the watchdog that doesn't bark. I've written about this a number of times. Talk about this long enough and you begin to feel as though you're howling into a vacuum. Which is essentially the case. Just remember the words of long-time publisher of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, in 1988: "there are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy "flourishes" when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows." That's some interesting take on the idea of democratic rule. It is also a statement that our major media have taken to heart.
Fascist aspirations for "Empire" through "Privatization" and "Globalization". is destroying constitutional democratic ideals of America as a "Republic"
There is of course the obvious culprit, finally and widely acknowledged these days. This is the Spirit (and reality) of Empire, which has provided a none-too-subtle knife in the back. Since the days of Rome, people have understood the incompatibility of constitutional-oriented 'republican institutions' with the tools of Conquest and Empire. By the time of Caesar, for instance, Roman rule stretched throughout the Mediterranean, dominating peoples as diverse as those under American military hegemony today.
The problem back then was that the old Roman Senate, already with five centuries of history behind it, was designed for ruling Romans-in Rome. The Senate managed well enough during Rome's conquest of Italy in the third century BC, and even during the pivotal Punic Wars with Carthage. But ruling faraway (and valuable) lands like Gaul and Egypt were not so simple. Caesar knew this as well as anyone. Solution: end of the Republic, and the creation of such offices as Dictator for Life. Then, after his assassination, Emperor. Indeed, we may wish to remember that Caesar's successor, his nephew, the Emperor Augustus, stated that his own absolute rule was only temporary, and that he eventually intended to restore the republic.
Ultimately, Republics cannot wear the armour of Empire. That is because two central principles of republican philosophy-freedom and self-government-wither under its weight.
Empires (i.e. the "American Empire") mean war. Wars mean the stifling of dissent and constriction of free thought at home. This happens every time. Repeat: every time. It has happened in America today. Freedom of expression is a meaningless concept if everyone thinks the same. It is how dissenters are treated that enables us to measure how free a society is.
Empires also prevent people from governing themselves. That is because wars destroy truth. Without freedom of information from the elected and appointed leaders of our government-that is, without truth-how can 'the people' rule? This was a point heavily emphasized by America's Founding Fathers. "An enlightened citizenry," wrote Jefferson, "is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic." Madison agreed: "The diffusion of knowledge is the only true guardian of liberty." But as Phillip Knightly observed in his classic study of the subject, the first casualty in war is truth. This fact is once again in evidence regarding America's current fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The so-called "War on Terror" is simply the latest manifestation of the "new order of things", of what we may call the Permanent Warfare State. In such a situation, the old Constitutional-oriented republican virtues of freedom and self-government cannot survive.
One might argue that Empires don't have to result in reduction of rights at home. Look at Britain, not a republic of course, but at least a "liberal" monarchy. The British Empire spread around the world, and Brits enjoyed a higher degree of freedom than many other peoples, at least during the Empire's heyday during the 19th century. That's true, but the other side of it is that we don't know how free the British people would have been without Empire. And let us not forget that there was also a great deal of "unfreedom" in Britain, even during glory days of Britannia.
The American Empire Lest you doubt that America is indeed a bona fide empire that garrisons the world, consider that according to the Pentagon itself, the U.S. military has 860 bases in 41 foreign countries. That's twenty percent of all the nations on Earth.
But this figure is certainly too low. It leaves out bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan. Chalmers Johnson, in The Sorrows of Empire, argues that the true number is probably closer to 1,000 bases in perhaps more than 50 nations. Unlike during the cold war, when it was possible to learn the specifics about American bases in foreign lands, today much of the jurisdictional information is classified, and so we sometimes don't know matters as elementary as which nation 'owns' a particular base in a particular country.
Military bases are a big part of it, but not the whole story. American troops, once again according to the Pentagon, are currently being stationed in 135 nations of the world. This is seventy percent of the world's nations. Not all these places have large numbers of troops, it's true. But many do, and the point is, they're there. Today, we are told this is in order to defend and advance the noble cause of globalization. This is only part of the truth. In reality, empires are taken and defended in order to win great prizes for those few who are powerful enough to make money from them. This was true with Rome, it was true with Britain, it is true with America today.
"Globalization" is a game with winners and losers, and you can be sure that America's policy makers (as distinct from the American people) intend to be the winners. Since World War II, America has pursued a grand imperial strategy to stake out the globe. Today this strategy wears the scantiest of veils, and America's leaders now talk openly of "full spectrum dominance." That's bureaucratese for "we're taking over the world."
US Empire Circa 2003
Meanwhile, a profound but silent "national security revolution" has transformed America. It is silent because there is still no formal acknowledgment of any real change. As long as the external appearances are the same (e.g. President, Congress, Supreme Court, etc.) most people continue to live under the delusion that things are the same, when in fact they are entirely different.
More than three decades ago, Gil Scott-Heron sang The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. He was right. It wasn't. Criminal Globalization But, as I suggested at the beginning of this article, the demands of empire are only part of the problem.
The death of the American Republic is clearly a book-length subject, so I will content myself to mention some of the other culprits more briefly before moving on to my main theme.
There is a creepy interconnection of most of these villains. There is, for instance, the unsettling confluence of the major financial institutions of the world, the major groups of organized crime, and numerous intelligence agencies from around the world, all carving up the globe in the name of privatization. Behind all this is the unsettling evidence that elite powerful interests and families do indeed exercise dominant power behind the scenes of our public institutions, and that this is being done on an international scale.
Most Americans live in a mindless "autopilot" of self-imposed ignorance
Americans have lived on a mental autopilot for long enough. Every day, millions of children mindlessly recite a pledge of allegiance to the flag "and to the republic for which it stands." Do they know what a republic is? Do the adults who teach them know? Do you? The word once had meaning for all Americans, but those days are long gone. Today, we hear nothing about such things as republican institutions, and even less discussion about what structures of real power have actually evolved in the United States, and indeed throughout the world. I am not sure what exactly we should be calling this new government, but it isn't a republic, nor is it particularly democratic.
Has Fascism taken over the effect governance of the United States?
One certainly hears a lot these days about "American fascism". Certain commentators like to point out that fascism was a distinct historical development that evolved from the European wreckage after World War I. Some maintain that to call what is happening in America "fascism" is a "disservice" to those who lived under Hitler, Mussolini, or other dictators.
It's true that there are major differences here today with certain features of those regimes. For one, the current regime is not as in-your-face about it as, say, Hitler was. There has been no openly acknowledged coup d'état to which one can refer. But the changes to America have yet been profound. What I believe is that the Jacobin-styled revolutionaries who run America these days have learned an important lesson from the past: that the best revolutions are silent. Manage the media, manage the other major institutions of power, and you can have your way about almost anything. You can change the structure of society at the most profound levels, as long as you keep the old appearances. I call this "silent fascism".
Americans must "wake up" in a timely manner, if they are to save America, from a destructive fascist greed-driven agenda that had also inspired Adolf Hiltler quest for "Global Empire".
The necessity of systematized UFO and other disclosure toward the renewal of American democracy
But my main quarry herein is not on 'Empire', not the covert influence of big money, not "Globalization", not the co-option of what was once an independent media, nor even fascism per se in America.
There is another disease eating away at America. It is something that receives nearly no attention, even from those people who think and care about such quaint issues as democratic-oriented 'republican' virtue and freedom.
But the UFO topic has important political implications. We cannot afford to ignore them. One of these is the damaging effect UFO secrecy has had on our society. It is an issue that intimately affects public policy, national security, and our very freedom.
UFOs are not fun and games, they are not delusions. They are real. The phenomenon has involved real technology, doing real things that are not supposed to be possible. We know this because, for a relatively brief period in America's history (primarily the late 1970's and into some of the 1980s'), the Freedom of Information Act enabled researchers to obtain official documents from government agencies, which clearly demonstrated this.
As far as efforts to currently try to obtain UFO-related information, FOIA's moment of glory was long ago, in the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam era.
It is furthermore notable that Dr. Edgar Mitchell, of Apollo 14 fame, and the sixth man to walk on the moon, on several occasions, has also spoken in public about his knowledge of UFOs.
Apparent secrecy on UFO's has been an integral part of a silent fascism which is effected seizing away control of America from the American people, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Freedom and Self-Governance
Americans elect a member of Congress, with the idea that he or she will represent your interests within the nation's primary instrument of political power: the Congress. Except that Congress has been made irrelevant by other centers of power, or been taken over by them.
You get your news from television or your newspaper with the idea that the journalist on the other end is a kind of watchdog, looking out for the public interest. Except that the journalist is working for a corporation which is itself antithetical to the public interest.
Unseen structures of power have evolved over the previous generations, advancing sometimes slowly, sometimes with a dramatic suddenness. But most people lack the conceptual means by which to understand what is happening.
As bad as things look today, I retain hope for a post-disclosure world. I retain a faith - yes, I guess it's faith -- in the value of truth over all things. A statement by my favourite writer, Leo Tolstoy, hangs before me every day: "the one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth." I cannot believe that a society based on a foundational lie can be better than one based on a foundational truth.
Article excerpted from 'UFO Secrecy and the Death of the American Republic' LINK.
Make comments about this article in The Canadian Blog.
What was 9/11?
9/11 was an extremely pivotal event in the establishment of a Neoconservative America. It started one morning when four (4) planes were hijacked..... And from all accounts, it was an open and shut case. Although there was no 'half-naked person cowering behind the wreckage,' like the Reichstag's Van der Lubbe, there was, within a few days following the hijackings, amazingly detailed dossiers on each of the hijackers. Luckily, each of the hijackers left copies of the Koran, box cutters, and aircraft piloting manuals in the trunk of their rental cars parked at the airport. But even more amazing, on September 12, Senator Orrin Hatch said "the US was monitoring bin Laden supporters and overheard them discussing the attack." [AP, 9/12/01] (Somehow, this little tidbit has always been lost in the shuffle. I wonder 'why'?).Prior to taking control of Washington, the Neocons were already planning on invading Iraq. But there was no public support for such a campaign prior to 9/11. Moreover, prior to 9/11, on three occasions, President George W. Bush publicized his envy of dictatorships:
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." - Bush describing life as the governor of Texas. (Governing Magazine 7/98)On October 2, 2001, The Patriot Act is introduced in Congress. The next day, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D) accuses the Bush administration of reneging on an agreement on this anti-terrorist bill. [Washington Post, 10/4/01] Anthrax letters are sent to Leahy and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D) on October 9. [CNN, 11/18/01]"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," Bush joked. (CNN 12/18/00)
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it," [Bush] said. (Business Week 7/30/01)
For the next few weeks, the country is freaked out (and rightfully so!) by a series of anthrax letters that reach not just the two Democratic Senators, but also various media companies who have been previously labeled as "liberal" by the right wing. During this scare, it is speculated that the letters are being sent from al-Qaeda or perhaps Iraq. During this scare, the Anthrax story is front page news, discussed almost 24 hours a day on the various news channels.
After an FBI investigation, it turns out that the Anthrax letters contain an anthrax strain which originates from a US Army base and that the likely source of the letter is a US government insider. But for some strange reason, this AMAZING FACT is hardly covered by the major media outlets. And after the revelation, the story becomes hardly discussed eventhough, to this day, the anthrax case has not been solved. (or has it?)
Nevertheless, 9/11 and the anthrax scare are used by the Neocons and President Bush to take the country to war against Iraq. It turns out that Iraq had absolutely no connection to the 9/11 attacks nor the anthrax attacks.
This seemingly neverending White House-sponsored orgy of 9/11 rhetoric, recrimination and revenge is treacherously similar to the Nazi orgy. (of course, it is not identical, but the similarities are certainly worthy of recognition.) A growing number of Americans believe the Bush Administration is culpable, either in whole or in part, for bringing down the World Trade Center (whether directly or via gross negligence). This conviction, however, is already widespread throughout Europe and the Muslim world, and perhaps for good reason.
Similar to Germany's Hitler, Bush also came to power with a minority of votes (remember, he didn't even win the popular vote in 2000) and has since exploited the terrible tragedies of September 11 in much the same way the Nazis exploited the Reichstag fire. Bush has used American fear and anger, which has resulted from the tragedies of 9/11 and anthrax, to push an extreme rightist (Neocon) agenda aimed at devouring civil liberties, muting dissent, fattening a war machine (see Halliburton and Bechtel), and arrogating the right to unilaterally attack other countries without tangible and/or legal provocation.
Concurrently, with all of this, the Neocons have shamelessly mounted assaults against the natural environment, social security, human rights, organized labor, and a wide range of international treaties, including the Geneva Convention. Combining fear with elements of patriotism and religion, the Bush regime has strong-armed its way into an overtly militaristic and imperialistic policy aimed at taking over the world's greatest oil assets, including the Iraqi oil fields and the Afghanistan pipeline.
Ironically, the conservatives profess themselves to be staunch opponents of Big Government. Yet so-called "Patriotic conservatives" and Neocons have trashed virtually every guarantee of individual freedom on which American greatness has been built. Under the guise of fighting terrorism and national security, the administration has become the ultimate anti-Constitutional terrorist-- going so far as detaining hundreds of people for years without charges ever being brought against them, without trials, hearings, or the right to counsel. And even more disgusting, these so-called patriots support the use of torture-- ultimate acts of barbarism and terrorism.
by Harvey Wasserman
When Hitler was rising to power in 1930s Germany, somebody did him the favor of burning the Reichstag, the German Parliament. It's widely believed the Nazis torched it themselves.
Hitler's cynical minions turned that fire into a horrific wave of terror. They blamed "the communists" and the Jews, the trade unionists and the homosexuals. With the support of a terrified populace, they suspended civil rights and civil liberties, fattened their war machine and rode the fascist tide into a full-blown dictatorship. The rest, as they say, is history.
The neverending White House-sponsored orgy of 9/11 rhetoric, recrimination and retaliation has become a treacherous parallel. Few Americans believe the Bush Administration itself brought down the World Trade Center last year. But the conviction is widespread throughout Europe and the Muslim world, and for good reason.
This unelected regime---Hitler also came to power with a minority of votes---has used the terrible tragedies of September 11 in much the way the Nazis jumped on the Reichstag fire. Bush has failed to capture or try 9/11's alleged perpetrators. But he's used the tragedy to push an extreme rightist agenda aimed at crushing civil liberties, silencing all opposition, fattening a war machine, and arrogating the right to unilaterally attack other countries without tangible provocation.
With this has come an assault on the natural environment, women's rights, gay rights, organized labor, a wide range of international treaties, and the need of the public to know about and prosecute corporate crime and fraudulent stock dealings, which seem to involve at least half the Bush cabinet, including its two ranking members.
Fittingly, just as the nation was mourning those who died in one of the most twisted acts of terrorism imaginable, Bush's brother Jeb made another mockery of the electoral process. In Florida, where the 2000 election was most blatantly stolen, faulty voting machines were again foisted on districts filled with primarily with blacks and Jews. While the nation's eyes were elsewhere, major---perhaps fatal---chaos was injected into the Democratic primary meant to choose Jeb's fall opponent. As the unusable ballots, dysfunctional voting machines and manipulated poll hours again shredded the democratic process, one could hear Republicans smirking from Tallahassee to DC.
Meanwhile John Ashcroft has shredded the American Bill of Rights as Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein could never imagine. Under the cloak of terror, the new Grand Inquisitor has virtually eliminated the first ten amendments to the Constitution---except the second, which guarantees that he and his gun lobby sponsors (and innumerable potential terrorists) can continue to carry guns.
Indeed, while professing staunch hatred of Big Government, so-called Patriotic conservatives have trashed virtually every guarantee of individual freedom on which American greatness has been built. In the name of fighting terror, the right has become the ultimate anti-Constitutional terrorist. Ashcroft has arrogated the power to arrest virtually anyone he deems unfit, "disappear" them without public notice, deny them access to a lawyer, and try them in secret, if at all. Under certain interpretations of military procedure, the Bush Administration clearly believes it has the right to execute people with no Constitutional guarantees.
In other words, this regime is behaving much like so many other third world dictatorships the US has installed throughout the third world. Pinochet. Somoza. The Taliban. Saddam Hussein. The Shah. Noriega. Mobutu. Marcos. Suharto. The Saudis.
Those flocks of US-sponsored thugs and klepto-dictators have finally come home to roost. For most Americans, any such comparison with any US regime seems like hysterical hype. After all, anti-war protestors threw the word "fascist" around in the later 1960s like a common epithet.
But Lyndon Johnson was not a fascist, and Richard Nixon was still forced to function with the Bill of Rights in tact and a Supreme Court that was willing to back it up. Though the US was deep in an actual shooting war, albeit an unjust one, the guarantees of free speech, habeas corpus and a fair and public trial were still in place.
Those guarantees are now gone. Freedoms were also curtailed during the Civil War and World Wars 1 & 2. But the new Bush war has no clear enemy, no clear goal, and most importantly, no clear end. It's a tangible Orwellian reality, a permanent pretext to shred freedom and dissent.
Because these absolute powers are now being used primarily against people of color, most Americans think these new power won't affect them. But as in Germany, it's only a matter of time before everyone and anyone is intimidated, and everyone and anyone is subject to official attack.
This Administration has been happy to fling the "terrorist" label against those environmentalists and other activists who might question its penchant for secrecy or oppose its corporate-dictated policies. History teaches us that it would be an illusion not to expect the worst.
For this Administration is not only unelected, it has a lot to hide. Witness the current media gang rape of Martha Stewart. While she endures public ridicule and official prosecution, the crimes of George Bush at Harken Energy and Dick Cheney at Halliburton were far worse. Stewart was not a director of the company whose stock she might have sold with insider knowledge. Bush and Cheney were at or near the helms of the companies from which they reaped millions while common stockholders were pillaged. As we know from so many third world dictatorships, where there is an addiction to secrecy there is always much to hide.
Meanwhile, Ashcroft has found time to escalate the attack on medicinal marijuana and other substances individual Americans may choose to use other than tobacco and alcohol. Not surprisingly, while reams of new research confirm marijuana's much-needed healing powers, particularly in chemotherapy and AIDS treatments, pot smokers are now being equated with terrorists. While state after state confirms marijuana's 5,000-year history as a medicinal herb, the Administration insists on enforcing penalties for its use that often exceed those for rape and murder. The drug war remains a blanket warrant to put tens of millions of Americans at risk of random, gratuitous arrest.
As a kicker, the right has further shed its historic rhetoric about states rights to override Nevada's 80% opposition to being turned into a radioactive waste dump. One must ultimately ask: is there any power this administration is not willing to take for itself?
The answer seems to be no. This may well be the most dangerous time in all of US history. While the war regimes of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had their excesses, there still remained an integral commitment to the historic guarantees of freedom and liberty that had made America great.
Permeated with economic failure, personal scandal and an obsession with secrecy, this has become the most oppressive of all US administrations. With a bought media, a compliant Congress and a spineless Democratic Party, it has turned the horror of September 11 into a tawdry excuse to bury the core freedoms that have made America great.
Resurrecting those freedoms will not be easy. But we have no choice.
http://www.911-strike.com/flight-training.htm
by Jerry Russell
According to some reports, the airliners that struck the WTC towers and the Pentagon were flown with exquisite skill, executing maneuvers that you might see at an aerobatic exhibition or flight show. These feats could well have been impossible for typical general aviation pilots with low flight hours. But there is reason to believe that the "terrorist" pilots could have received the very best of training, courtesy of the US government.
Various records and testimony show that two of the alleged hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehri, took flight training at Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida. Investigator Daniel Hopsicker, following the funding trail, found that Huffman Aviation is closely linked to Brittania Aviation and Caribe Air. Brittania had no visible assets or qualifications other than its association with Caribe Air, but was awarded a massive regional service center contract by the US government. Caribe Air, in turn, has a long history of association with CIA drug-running operations out of Mena, Arkansas, and is also allegedly linked to fraudulent Enron-funded offshore investment partnerships.
Hopsicker also notes that according to reports from Newsweek, three alleged terrorist pilots trained at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, while Knight Ridder stated that suspects Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari, and Saeed Alghamdi had attended various other prestigious military exchange officer's training programs. These reports were never categorically denied by US government sources.
Certain unnamed flight instructors told Washington Post reporters that the alleged hijackers had very poor flying skills. This is self-serving testimony, considering other stories that the "suicide pilots" also had a peculiar lack of interest in landings.
Why weren't these suspicious characters reported to the proper authorities? According to their flight instructors, the "terrorists" were such terrible pilots, they probably couldn't hit the side of a mountain, much less a New York skyscraper. That's why they weren't more concerned.
But with the understanding that these flight instructors could well have been funded through CIA channels, in order to pay for the training of these pilots, it becomes clear that the "terrorists" may have had very solid flying skills indeed.
UPDATE 9/28/2002:
I have become aware of additional, well-sourced accounts detailing the poor flying skills of some of the "terrorists", especially Hani Hanjour who allegedly piloted the flight which struck the Pentagon. Also, even in the reports from Hopsicker, there is no information indicating specifically that the terrorists had aerobatic training in jet aircraft.
http://www.911-strike.com/reichstag.htm
Based on a talk for Eugene Forum for Peace Education, given 11/9/03
by Jerry Russell
In the view of the notable historian William Shirer and many others, it has been established "beyond a reasonable doubt" that on Feb. 27, 1933, a team of Hitler's commandos fanned out through the Reichstag building (the German parliament), using incendiary fluids to quickly touch off a massive blaze. Before the fire had died down, Hitler proclaimed that the outrage must have been the responsibility of the Communists.
Apparently, by and large, the German public believed Hitler was telling the truth: the Enabling Act was passed giving Hitler a dictator's powers -- and in the general election a few days later, the National Socialists cemented their hold over the German government. Communist leaders stood trial, accused of participating in a vast conspiracy to destroy the Reichstag -- and, by extension, the German people themselves. Finally, a pogrom was commenced against the Communists -- which culminated years later, in WWII, with the German war against the Soviet Union which killed ten million people or more.
One item in the litany of evidence of Nazis' conspiratorial role in the Reichstag fire is the eyewitness testimony of an SA member named Adolf Rall, who levied his accusation in an interview in the magazine Pariser Tagiblatt, and was later murdered by the Nazis. Other testimony to this effect came at the Nuremberg trials. Also, technical analyses of the spread of the fire have led to the conclusion that it spread so rapidly that it must have been set by an organized team of arsonists. Unfortunately, one potential source of testimony is not available to us -- the entire team of SA commandos, fingered by Rall, were said to have been killed by the Nazis in 1934. The pattern of murders seems to indicate that a cover-up of the crime was underway.
Hitler's team also arranged to have a "patsy" on the scene at the Reichstag. A young Dutch communist, half blind, named Marinus van der Lubbe, had an encounter with the German police a few days earlier. According to some accounts, he had just recently attempted to set fire to an unemployment office; and he was overheard at a bar, threatening to burn the Reichstag itself. Now, given that van der Lubbe was a suspect in one crime, and known to be plotting another, one might imagine that the Nazis would have been prudent to keep him under custody. But they let him loose, and by some strange synchronicity, van der Lubbe was caught setting fire to the Reichstag just as Hitler's men were finishing their work. At trial, Hitler's experts provided conclusive evidence that van der Lubbe could not have started the fire alone, so a conspiracy must have been afoot. Yet all of the Communist leadership on trial were ultimately absolved of any responsibility, due to air-tight alibis. Van der Lubbe repeatedly testified that he alone was responsible for setting the fire, and so he alone was convicted and executed.
To this day, not everyone is convinced of the Nazi's conspiratorial role in setting the blaze. Some historians maintain that van der Lubbe truly did set the fire alone, and Hitler got a bad rap in this instance. Perhaps given the inflammatory nature of the accusation, it is best to concentrate on other aspects of the event: Hitler's illogical response in blaming an entire political movement, and ultimately an entire country, for the purported actions of just a few individuals; the rush to judgment and the eagerness to fix blame on the "vast Communist conspiracy" before the embers had a chance to cool; the coverup and the mysterious deaths of so many of those involved with the incident; and the moves to squash individual rights and freedoms in Germany, along with the death throes of German democracy, and the onset of world war. Even if Hitler's minions did not directly set the fire at the Reichstag, certainly Hitler's response was more than sufficient to earn the contempt of history.
Nevertheless, with all of the circumstantial evidence and all of the testimony pointing to Hitler's guilt for the Reichstag fire, it is also enlightening to look at those who confidently proclaim his innocence. One such figure is the journalist Sefton Delmer, who wrote in his 1961 book "Trail Sinister" that "the 'Hitler, Göring and Goebbels did it' legend has been thoroughly exploded". Delmer, who was a member of Hitler's inner circle in 1933, provided a great deal of colorful eyewitness detail which tended to support Hitler's innocence; evidence which is poorly corroborated elsewhere, to say the least. However, Delmer's own life story turns out to be most interesting: he was recruited in 1940 by the British Special Operations Executive to organize "black propaganda" broadcasts into Germany. In this intelligence capacity, he has recently been accused of fabricating a failed Nazi invasion of Great Britain out of whole cloth, according to reports by the BBC.
The lesson here is, that it is important to know when you have entered the hall of mirrors created by intelligence operatives. Why would a British journalist go out of his way to exonerate Hitler? It is hard to explain by any conventional analysis, yet I maintain that it can and does happen. Perhaps for the same sorts of reason that Americans like Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, the founders of the Bush dynasty, worked so hard to provide funding for Hitler's brownshirts -- and for the same reason that many German intelligence operatives were brought into the US intelligence fold after WWII, to create the embryonic CIA.
It has now been more than seventy years since the Reichstag fire, so we have the benefit of some historical perspective. It has only been a little more than two years since 9-11, so we're just starting to accumulate some of that same sense of perspective. Nevertheless, we can now see quite clearly that war has been launched, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, and the attacks of 911 have been given as the justification. Speaking about recent American casualties in Iraq, President Bush stated on Nov. 4, 2003: "We are at war, and it is essential that the people of America not forget the lessons of September 11, 2001." This in spite of the fact that no credible evidence has emerged linking 911 to Iraq. So here we have the first analogy to the Reichstag Fire: a campaign to scapegoat an entire population (in this case, Middle Eastern Islamics) for the purported actions of a few, and along with that, an aggressive campaign of warfare.
Another clear parallel is that there has been a cover-up, or at least a remarkable lack of interest by the authorities and the mainstream media in following-up the anomalies of 9-11. Consider, for example, the insider trading that has been researched by Mike Ruppert, Tom Flocco and Kyle Hence. Obviously, if we want to know who was really responsible for the 9-11 attacks, it would be helpful to know who had managed to learn about them in advance. Yet, as Ruppert notes at his web site:
To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market."
It is hard to believe that they missed
- A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBO.]
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, 'it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe."
How much money was involved? Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germanys intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion....
Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would "certainly be able to track down every trade."
As Ruppert also noted we know exactly where the trail was leading, when it suddenly went cold:
the trading in United Airlines stock -- one of the most glaring clues -- was placed through the firm Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed until 1998 by the man who is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.
But beyond the cover-up and the political use and mis-use of 911, what evidence do we have of real US government complicity? As the Internet columnist David McGowan wrote:
let's start with what is perhaps the only incontrovertible evidence in the case our own observations, as witnesses, of what played out that day on live television.
Tens of millions of people across the country witnessed what happened, and had the images of that day seared into their memory. But what we want to focus on here is what we didn't see happen that day, because some of the most compelling evidence lies, strangely enough, in what no one saw happen that day.
No one, for example, saw any defensive measures taken during the entire time that the lengthy spectacle played out. None whatsoever.
No one saw any jets scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked aircraft, though their locations and flight-paths were known and there was more than ample time for a military response. No one saw any jets scrambled to secure the airspace over Washington, though some of the hijacked flights were known to be headed that way, and interceptors were sitting on the tarmac just minutes away from likely targets.
And strangely enough, no one saw or heard any demands by television talking-heads for the military to respond in some capacity, or any questioning of why no response had yet materialized. Not after the first WTC tower was hit. Not after the second WTC tower was hit. Not during the agonizingly long interval before the Pentagon was hit. Not even after the Pentagon was hit.
We were all assigned the task of sitting back in fear and watching helplessly as the attack continued and the death toll mounted, encouraged to feel powerless not only as individuals, but as a nation -- as if we had no choice but to participate only as passive spectators, watching dumfounded as the carnage unfolded.
So the events of 911 were orchestrated to create feelings of fear and helplessness in the face of surprise attack -- fears which were later exploited by the Bush administration's imagery that the moribund Iraqi nuclear weapons program, could be restarted and then unveiled by a mushroom cloud over a US city.
Yet, in the strange lack of response of the US military on 9-11, we have our first evidence of the actual complicity of the US government. For how could the hijackers themselves have arranged for the failure to respond to the Pentagon attack? As Bykov & Israel noted in their groundbreaking article "Guilty for 9-11 Bush, Rumsfeld, Meyer":
Some of what happened on 9-11, such as planes flying into buildings, is unusual. But most of what happened, such as commercial jets flying off-course, transponder failures and possible hijackings, are everyday emergencies.... these emergencies are routinely handled with expert efficiency based on clear rules.
Bykov & Israel went on to argue quite persuasively that because of the hierarchical and distributed nature of the chain of command of the US military, it is impossible that these procedures would have failed so spectacularly unless there were explicit orders, right from the top, voiding standard response procedures.
The Reichstag fire gives us another clue as to how to understand the events of 9-11 look very carefully at the alleged perpetrator of the crime. What sort of patsy has been put forward as responsible for the disaster?
Just as in the case of the Reichstag Fire, there was a rush to judgment on the part of the US government and the media after the catastrophe: it was immediately announced that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida was the only organization with the capability and malice to do such a thing. Within days, names and photos of the alleged hijackers were released, and the evidence connecting them to Al Qaida was claimed to be beyond dispute. Yet details emerged painfully and slowly, in self-contradictory fits and starts. Only now, two years later, do we have a reasonably complete narrative from official sources, regarding the alleged mechanisms by which the hijackings were organized and carried out. According to this tale, mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (under the watchful eye of Osama Bin Laden) assembled a team of terrorists headed by Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh. The hijackers went to the United States for flight training, and funds were supplied by a paymaster named Mustafa Ahmad Al-Hiwasi.
The story was covered most recently in an article from Der Spiegel, translated and re-printed in the New York Times, entitled "Operation Holy Tuesday", appearing on Oct. 27, 2003. The article covers a "confession" by the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And it conveys at least one clear message this "confession" was obtained by torture. The article stated
US interrogators have never had any doubts about the purpose of their jobs. According to the CIA, it is in the national interest that everything that the two men know about Al Qaeda be extracted from them "If they are silent, it will cost our blood." Even American politicians are uncomfortable about this ultimatum-like approach. Without specifically mentioning the word "torture," members of the intelligence committees in the US Congress have asked whether force is being used. "All I can say to that is that there is a before and an after September 11th," responded Cofer Black, former director of counterintelligence at the CIA and currently charged with the same duties at the State Department. He added that "we have taken off our kid gloves."
Omar al-Faruk, a sort of Southeast Asia representative of Bin Laden until his arrest, discovered exactly what this means. In his isolation cell in Bagram, the light was left on day and night, and Faruk was forced to squat on the floor at night. His interrogators would suddenly raise the temperature in his cell to a tropical 100°F and then drop it to an icy 10°F, continuing this cycle until he became willing to cooperate.
Now, my position is that the value of confessions obtained under such conditions is less than zero. And, if the strongest evidence of the official story is a confession obtained in a secret torture chamber, I think that sends a clear enough message of the contempt these officials have for real justice and the truth. This another of the alarming parallels with the Reichstag Fire events: a massive deterioration in the respect for human rights.
There is much more that we can learn from the official story, and the sequence in which it has been revealed. With massive and meticulous detail, Chaim Kupferberg of the Canadian internet site GlobalResearch.ca, builds his case that the story of the 9-11 hijackers is an improvised, legendary tale weaved around a small cadre of mysterious figures of uncertain identity -- whose lives were tied to New World Order intelligence agencies by a remarkable series of synchronicities.
According to Kupferberg, the archetypal outlines of the 9-11 legend were unveiled in 1995, when Ramzi Yousef, who was responsible for the 1993 bombing attempt against the WTC (along with FBI mole Emad Salem), was arrested in the Philippines. His computer disk was reported to have contained plans for a project called "Bojinka" which involved simultaneously hijacking multiple airliners, destroying them, or flying them into buildings such as the WTC, nuclear power plants, and so forth. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was identified at that time as an integral part of this embryonic Al Qaida conspiracy. As Kupferberg wrote:
Put bluntly, if September 11 was [...] being marketed as a failure to "connect the dots" by the intelligence apparatus, those dots were being lined up quite neatly by the mainstream media as early as April 1995.
In the days immediately following 911, at the same time as the Administration was maintaining that it was totally surprised by the attacks -- they also maintained with absolute confidence, that the attacks could only have been the work of Bin Laden and Al Qaida. The fact is, the attacks certainly could not have been a surprise, at least in the sense that US intelligence agencies were fully informed of the plot and the main characters, by 1995.
As the team of hijackers was assembled, we learn still more intriguing facts. The terrorists were largely recruited into the Al Qaida fold by two preachers, Abu Hamza in London and Mohammed Haydar Zammar in Hamburg. Kupferberg says
the reality is this with a population in excess of one billion adherents, and a geographic span that stretches from the West African Straits of Gibraltar to the far east of Asia, the Muslim World apparently was not up to the task of furnishing the most hardcore, sophisticated operative cells of al-Qaida. Contrary to popular wisdom, the inferno of 9/11 was not conceived in fetid slums like Gaza, where deprivation and bitterness has stoked inter-generational hatred of Westerners and Jews. Rather, the peculiarly sophisticated strain of Muslim terror that has been branded as al-Qaida was largely incubated among an insular network in the U.K. and the E.U., where a conveniently incriminating trail could be tracked and showcased as definitive proof of the authorship for 9/11.
Again we are reminded of the Reichstag fire, where a young Dutchman directly took the rap, while a much broader population of European and Russian Communists were scape-goated.
Once the hijackers were drawn into the Al Qaida fold, they showed a most fascinating habit of holding meetings in swank hotels, within a matter of days of counter-terror meetings in those same hotels attended by the likes of FBI officials Robert Mueller and John O'Neill. Then they came to the US for flight training. Now, these terrorists were not the sort of young men who normally would have been able to obtain visas to come to the US under any circumstances. Unemployed, with incomplete educations -- without some inside connections as well, these are the sorts of people (and there are millions if not billions like them) who simply cannot gain legal entry into the United States. Yet even with well-known connections to terrorist organizations in some cases, the hijackers sailed cleanly through the system.
Some of the hijackers took their flight training in Florida, where, according to investigative work by former NBC News Executive Producer Daniel Hopsicker:
...the evidence indicates the CIA was not only aware of the thousands of Arab student pilots who began pouring into the U.S. to attend flight training beginning in 1999, but was in truth running the operation.
Another cell was set up in San Diego, where terrorists Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar took up residence in the home of FBI informant Abdussattar Shaikh, and alleged flight 77 pilot Hani Hanjour was a frequent visitor.
Not only is it difficult to avoid the conclusion that US intelligence was coddling along the terrorists at every step, it is also evident that other major intelligence agencies all over the world were well aware of the plans for Sept. 11, and they notified the US government, sometimes in great detail, as Paul Thompson and Mike Ruppert have documented.
There are many unanswered questions remaining about the terrorists' actual role in 911. How the hijackers evaded airport security, how they managed to board the planes without being photographed by security cameras (or, why no such photos have ever been released), how they were able to successfully fly the planes to their destinations in spite of precious little flight training directly related to Boeing jet aircraft (including aerobatic maneuvers on the part of the least-trained pilot, Hani Hanjour) and indeed whether they were on the planes at all, remains open to question and debate.
Were the 911 terrorists the actual perpetrators of the crimes of 911 (regardless of how they might have been helped along in their destructive quest, by the US government) or were they in fact nothing but patsies, bit-part actors in a drama where the true perpetrators of the crime were hidden behind the scenes? This is another long story, and I won't be able to get into it very much today, but there is a growing body of forensic evidence suggesting that the terrorists could not possibly have caused all the damage which occurred on September 11. The analogy to the Reichstag fire may well be perfected in this way also: in my opinion, commandos of the New World Order were the real arsonists of 911, just as Hitler's minions were responsible for setting the fires back in 1933. There is more about this at my website, and at the new site physics911.org, which I highly recommend.
Thank you for your attention.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Reichstag fire analogy appeared on the Internet within hours after the attacks, according to an excellent survey article entitled "Making a Case for 911 skepticism" by John McCurdy. My introduction to this analogy came by way of the anonymous author of a piece called "The Rise of the Fourth Reich", which was posted at http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/reich.html.
America's first Muslim congressman has provoked outrage by apparently comparing President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler and hinting that he might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks.Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler's later seizure of emergency powers."It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," Mr Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."
To applause from his audience of 300 members of Atheists for Human Rights, Mr Ellison said he would not accuse the Bush administration of planning 9/11 because "you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you".
Vice-President Dick Cheney's stance of refusing to answer some questions from Congress was "the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship", he added.
Mr Ellison also raised eyebrows by telling his audience: "You'll always find this Muslim standing up for your right to be atheists all you want."
A convert to Islam who was previously linked to the extremist Nation of Islam, Mr Ellison, 42, has cultivated a moderate image since being elected last November, concentrating on issues such as health and education.
He is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. But he angered his own anti-war supporters by voting for a budget bill that aims to end the war over the next 18 months. His followers want an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
After his speech was reported, Mr Ellison said he accepted that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. But his demagogic comments threaten to plunge him in controversy.
Mark Drake, of the Republican party in Minnesota, said: "To compare the democratically elected leader of the United States of America to Hitler is an absolute moral outrage which trivialises the horrors of Nazi Germany."
http://agonist.org/mmeo/20071020/9_11_and_the_reichtag_fire
9/11 and the Reichstag Fire
History can have surprising relevance.
As my proof of that assertion, consider an old review article by the prolific British historian Geoffrey Barraclough, from a November, 1972 New York Review of Books.
The liberal historians who had held the field from the collapse of the Nazi state in 1945 until the 1960s had focussed an enormous degree of attention on the growth and development of Nazi Germany: Barraclough had over a dozen books in that tradition to review, and he took three articles to complete the task.
They had run the business to the ground, in Barraclough's opinion, in large measure without once examining their presupposition that liberal middle-class Germans had been the victims of events outside of Germany and of criminal politicians within Germany.
From this somewhat unpromising examination I was surprised to find ideas which directly help me to frame questions arising from recent American history.
Barraclough contrasts the tired old version of the liberal historians with that of the "younger generation," among whom he identifies Hans Mommsen, who recently (this is in 1972, mind you!) reassessed the Reichtag Fire.
In February 1933, less than a month after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of a minority government thanks to his status as leader of the largest party in the German legislature, the building in which the legislature met was burned in an act of arson.
The Nazis made immediate arrests in the case -- overwhelming evidence implicated a dim-witted Communist -- and charged that the leftist parties were conspiring against the state: in the March 1933 elections held in the course of this purge the Nazis won for the first time a parliamentary majority.
Barraclough cites the usual liberal historians' assertion that the Nazis deliberately set the Reichtag fire, and then, citing Mommsen's article "The Reichtag Fire and its Political Consequences," explains " . . . the facts tell a different story. Unscrupulous and evil Hitler and his lieutenants may have been, but the arrests that followed the fire and the manipulation of the elections six days later were 'not the outcome of clear and purposive decisions' but of 'spontaneous, unconsidered reactions.''
Barraclough draws the implications from Mommsen's study.
"This is not merely a conflict over the interpretation of facts; rather, it reveals two basically different attitudes toward National Socialism. Historians of the older generation approach the problem from a moral and ideological point of view. In asserting that the Nazis deliberately planned the Reichtag fire, they are proceeding not from an objective examination of the historical record but from a preconceived notion of the Nazis as evil terrorists who would stop at nothing to get their way.
"For the younger generation, on the other hand, what is significant is the speed and vigor with which the Nazis reacted to a crisis which took them totally unawares; for we have only to contrast these qualities with the hesitancy and flabbiness of the other German [political] parties -- with what Julius Leber [otherwise unidentified by Barraclough in a typical academic-style name-dropping -- mm] called 'the whole inner weakness and indecision of the Weimar front' -- to see how important a factor they were in carrying the Nazis ferom their original insecurity as expendable allies of the army and big business to a position of total domination."
The parallel to the Bush Administration's taking of political advantage from the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is striking.
There too is clear evidence of the surprise of the principals, as well as the quick decision to use the event to best advantage, in contrast to the inadequate, not to say nonexistent, resistance to the audacious grasp of unconstitutional power and authority.
Even more interesting as a frame from which to view recent United States political history is Barraclough's sktech of a critical, not-blinded-by-liberal-political-presuppositions view of twentieth-century German history.
The Second Reich, established in 1870 and destroyed by the failure of the Central Powers -- Germany and Austria, joined belatedly by Turkey and Bulgaria -- in the First World War -- was based on an alliance cemented by Bismarck in 1879 between the landowning Prussian Junker elite and the large industrial corporations of the Rhineland.
"The reason 1879 is a significant date," writes Barraclough, "and 1870 is not is that 1879 saw a radical redistribution of social and economic power, and 1870 did not. Until 1879 it was possible that Germany might make a peaceful transition to modern industrial capitalism; after 1879 that was no longer the case."
The choice of an alliance with the reactionary Prussian landowners cemented in position a whole series of oppositions to the changes required by liberal democratic capitalism. Militarism, monarchism, worship of the national destiny, all became inseparable from the support of the present regime in Germany.
Then the World War swept away that effort to retain a narrow elite in power; during the Weimar Republic which attempted to consolidate a new conception of German political power during the 1920s, large numbers of new voters consistently supported socialist political parties. A political conterrevolution gathered strength with the disruptions consequent upon the Great Depression, from 1930 onwards.
This counterrevoltuion, much more than the machinations of the National Socialist Party, wanted primarily to turn things back to the Old Days, when there was no more threat of widepread political power among the lower social classes.
"The destruction of poarliamentary democracy," Barraclough concludes, "was the sork of the conservatives, not of the Nazis, who were only called in at the last moment when it looked as though without them the conterrevolution woudl not succeed."
We are in the midst, if I may develop that idea, of a counterrevolution begun by Nixon.
Nixon and Kissinger took the idea of the U.S. as a benevolent protector of the democratic West against the subversive Communist threat from the Soviet Union and subtracted any element of benevolence from it.
The United States no longer, in their conception of the world, could afford to rely upon the moral authority of liberty and justice. It had to adopt to a much larger degree than the small-scale efforts of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles the hard calculations of brute force. To sit down with Mao Tse-tung and to assist at the assassinations of the head of the army and of the state of Chile were two sides of the same coin: reasons of state.
To a greater or lesser degree Nixon's success (calling Peking in to redress the balance with Moscow) has influenced all subsequent United States governments.
Even more interesting, Nixon's so-called "Southern strategy," the naked -- no, that is unfair, the code-worded -- appeal to racism and to the threat that genuine human rights would pose to the ruling elite in this country, has been generally adopted as well.
Both Republican and the Democratic administrations -- with the partial exception of Jimmy Carter's -- since Nixon have under the rubric of "national security" abandoned the idea that the best hope of United States influence in the world came from our example of liberal democratic polity at peace with everyone. We have instead committed the country to an imperial role in the world. Bill Clinton at least as much as George Bush Senior, whom he replaced, or as Ronald Reagan, who explicitly articulated a reactionary myth of a non-existent past.
The elite circles in U.S. political discourse have constantly denied the force of equitable distribution of the fruits of labor and sneered at the promptings of justice among the nation's social and economic classes.
The Bush, Junior, Administration when it came to power in 2000 spoke quite eloquently of the value of resolution and decisiveness: remember the famous dismissal of the "reality-based community" ? They have merely learned the lesson of the Reichtag Fire.
To update the fictional world of Sinclair Lewis, It Has Happened Here.
Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this", and, "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the slave-labor camps to WW2 was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.The German people of the late 1930s imagined themselves to be brave. They saw themselves as the heroic Germans depicted by the Wagnerian Operas, the descendants of the fierce Germanic warriors who had hunted wild boar with nothing but spears and who had defeated three of Rome's mightiest legions in the Tuetenberg Forest.
But in truth, by the 1930s, the German people had become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery was both salve and slavery. Germans were required to behave as if they were brave, even when they were not.
It's easy to look back and realize what a jerk Hitler was. But at the time, Hitler looked pretty good to the German people, with the help of the media. He was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. The German people assumed they were safe from a tyrant. They lived in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government could and more importantly could not do. Their leader was a devoutly religious man, and had even sung with the boy's choir of a monastery in his youth.
The reality was that the German people, as individuals, had lost their courage. The German government preferred it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But the German people didn't wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding individual courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the German people simply pretended that the situation did not exist. And in that simple self-deception lay the ruin of an entire nation and the coming of the second World War.
When the Reichstag burned down, most Germans simply refused to believe suggestions that the fire had been staged by Hitler himself. They were afraid to. But so trapped were the Germans by their belief in their own bravery that they willed themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they could nod in agreement with Der Fuhrer while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoided the one situation which most required real courage; to stand up to Hitler's lies and deceptions.
When Hitler requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under German law, but powers Hitler claimed he needed to have to deal with the "terrorists", the German people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, agreed. The temporary powers were conferred, and once conferred lasted until Germany itself was destroyed.
When Hitler staged a phony invasion from Poland, the vast majority of the German people, their own self-image dependant on continuing blindness to Hitler's deceptions, did not question why Poland would have done something so stupid, and found themselves in a war.
But Hitler knew he ruled a nation of cowards, and knew he had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards could fight and win. He decorated his troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Hitler copied the parade regalia of ancient Rome, to remind the Germans of the defeat of the legions at the Tuetenberg Forest. Talismans were added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fell in battle. Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, Hitler spent vast sums of money on his wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, the world's first cruise missile and the world's first guided missile, weapons that could be used to kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they were doing.
The German people were lured into WW2 not because they were brave, but because they were cowards who wanted to be seen as brave, and found that shooting long range weapons at people they could not see took less courage than standing up to Hitler. Sent into battle by that false image of courage, the Germans were dependent on their wonder-weapons. When the wonder-weapons stopped working, the Germans lost the war.
I remember as a child listening to the stories of WW2 from my grandfather and my uncles who had served in Europe. I wondered how the German people could have been so stupid as to have ever elected Hitler dog catcher, let alone leader of the nation. Such is the clarity of historical hindsight. And with that clarity, I see the exact same mechanism that Hitler used at work here in this nation.
The American people imagine themselves to be brave. They see themselves as the heroic Americans depicted by Western Movies, the descendants of the fierce patriot warriors who had tamed the frontier and defeated the might of the British Empire.
But in truth, by the dawn of the third millennium, the American people have become civilized and tamed, culturally obsessed with fine details in both science and society. Their self-image of bravery is both salve and slavery. Americans are required to behave as if they are brave, even when they are not.
The American people assume they are safe. They live in a Republic, after all, with strict laws regarding what the government can and more importantly cannot do. Their leader is a devoutly religious man.
The reality is that the American people, as individuals, have lost their courage. The government prefers it that way as a fearful people are easier to rule than a courageous one. But Americans don't wish to lose their self-image of courage. So, when confronted with a situation demanding courage, in the form of a government gone wrong, the American people simply pretend that the situation does not exist.
When the World Trade Towers collapsed, most Americans simply refused to believe suggestions that the attacks had been staged by parties working for the US Government itself. Americans were afraid to, even as news reports surfaced proving that the US Government had announced plans for the invasion of Afghanistan early in the year, plans into which the attacks on the World Trade Towers which angered the American people into support of the already-planned war fit entirely too conveniently.
But so trapped are Americans by their belief in their own bravery that they will themselves to be blind to the evidence before their eyes, so that they can nod in agreement with the government while still imagining themselves to have courage, even as they avoid the one situation which most requires real courage; to stand up to the government's lies and deceptions. The vast majority of the American people, their own self-image dependant on continuing blindness to the government's deceptions, never question why Afghanistan would have done something so stupid as to attack the United States, and as a result, Americans find themselves in a war.
Now the US Government has requested temporary extraordinary powers, powers specifically banned under Constitutional law, but powers the government is claiming they need to have to deal with the "terrorists". The American people, having already sold their souls to their self-delusions, are agreeing. The temporary powers recently conferred will be no more temporary in America than they were in Germany.
The US Government knows they rule a nation of cowards. The government has had to spend the money to make the new war something cowards can fight. The government has decorated the troops with regalia to make them proud of themselves, further trapping them in their self-image. Talismans are added from orthodox religions and the occult to fill the soldiers with delusions of mystical strengths and an afterlife if they fall in battle.
Finally, knowing that it takes courage to kill the enemy face to face, the United States government has spent vast sums of money on wonder weapons, airplanes, submarines, ultra-long range artillery, cruise missiles, and guided missiles, weapons that kill at a distance, so that those doing the killing need not have to face the reality of what they are doing.
As I mentioned above, Hitler was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942. Both of these men, and many others also celibrated by the media, were unimaginable monsters. The lesson from these facts is that it isn't easy to spot a genocidal tyrant when you live with one, especially one whom the press supports and promotes.
Tyrants become obvious only when looking back, after what they have done becomes known. The German people did not stand up to Hitler because their media betrayed them, just as the American media is betraying the American people by willingly, voluntarily, even proudly, abandoning its traditional role as watchdog against government abuse.
It is the very nature of power that it attracts the sort of people who should not have it. The United States, as the world's last superpower, is a prize that attracts men and women willing to do absolutely anything to win that power, and hence are also willing to do absolutely anything with that power once they have it. If one thinks about it long enough, one will realize that all tyrants, past and most especially present, MUST use deception on their population to initiate a war.
No citizen of a modern industrialized nation will send their children off to die in a war to grab another nation's resources and assets, yet resources and assets are what all wars are fought over. The nation that wishes to initiate a war of conquest must create the illusion of an attack or a threat to start a war, and must always give their population of cowards an excuse never to question that carefully crafted illusion.
It is naive, not to mention racist to assume that tyrants appear only in other nations and that somehow America is immune simply because we're Americans. America has escaped the clutches of a dictatorship thus far only through the efforts of those citizens who, unlike the Germans of the 1930s, have the moral courage to stand up and point out where the government is lying to the people.
Unless more Americans are willing to have that kind of individual courage, then future generations may well look back on the American people with the same harshness of judgement with which we look back on the 1930s Germans.
New Questions about remote control and 9-11
By Jerry Russell
British aeronautical engineer Joe Vialls claims that all 757 and 767 aircraft are equipped with computerized remote flight control systems for the purposes of rescuing the planes from attempted hijackings. If this were true, it would raise some very interesting questions. On the one hand, if the systems were used to control the aircraft and pilot them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then who was at the controls? How did they get access to the secret codes?
But on the other hand: if these systems were on the aircraft, and they were not compromised by some enemy trick of espionage, then why weren't they used on September 11 to save the four ill-fated flights?
Let me quote from Vialls, who posted in October 2001:
In the mid-seventies America faced a new and escalating crisis, with US commercial jets being hijacked for geopolitical purposes. Determined to gain the upper hand in this new form of aerial warfare, two American multinationals collaborated with the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) on a project designed to facilitate the remote recovery of hijacked American aircraft. Brilliant both in concept and operation, "Home Run" [not its real code name] allowed specialist ground controllers to listen in to cockpit conversations on the target aircraft, then take absolute control of its computerized flight control system by remote means.
From that point onwards, regardless of the wishes of the hijackers or flight deck crew, the hijacked aircraft could be recovered and landed automatically at an airport of choice, with no more difficulty than flying a radio-controlled model plane. The engineers had no idea that almost thirty years after its initial design, Home Run's top secret computer codes would be broken, and the system used to facilitate direct ground control of the four aircraft used in the high-profile attacks on New York and Washington on 11th September 2001.The following information was added to the Vialls web site, January 20, 2002:
Former German Minister Von Buelow Already Knew About Remote Control
In his interview with the German daily "Tagesspiegel" on January 13th, former German Secretary of Defence Andreas Von Buelow made the following statement:-
"There is also the theory of one British flight engineer: according to this, the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots' hands, from outside. The Americans had developed a method in the 1970s, whereby they could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting [automatic pilot system]. This theory says, this technique was abused in this case..."
Not quite so much a theory as might first appear. When I released the above report about "Home Run" remote control in October 2001, I mentioned that one European flag carrier was aware of the technology, though at that precise point in time I thought it prudent not to name the actual airline:-
"As long ago as the early nineties, a major European flag carrier acquired the information and was seriously alarmed that one of its own aircraft might be "rescued" by the Americans without its authority. Accordingly, this flag carrier completely stripped the American flight control computers out of its entire fleet, and replaced them with a home grown version. These aircraft are now effectively impregnable to penetration by Home Run, but that is more than can be said for the American aircraft fleet..."
The European flag carrier which completely stripped the American flight computers out of its aircraft was Lufthansa, the German national airline. Bearing in mind his former posts as Secretary of Defence and Minister of Science and Technology, Herr Von Buelow would have known all about this mammoth but secretive task.
How very clever (and discreet) of Von Buelow to sort of "drop the information" into the middle of an interview about the 9/11 attacks!Finally, in February 2002, Vialls provided the following:
There have also been claims that I have refused to reveal "sources" or "proof" of the classified Home Run system, which is not true. In my first report I carefully stated that "two American multinationals collaborated with the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) on a project designed to facilitate the remote recovery of hijacked American aircraft." This should have acted like a homing beacon for any serious researcher. DARPA has a web site that can be accessed by anyone on the Internet, and within that web site is a search engine. A judicious advanced search of the DARPA web site should yield, as they say, "something of interest".
Finally, there is former German Defense Minister Andreas Von Buelow, who is frequently available for questions at meetings around Germany. Because of national security Von Buelow is most unlikely to comment directly, but he might respond to the following question: "Can you deny that during the mid-nineties, Lufthansa removed and replaced the flight control computers on certain American aircraft in its fleet for security reasons?"Now, I have no inside knowledge, but as an engineer, Vialls' story rings true. I believe that "hijack recovery" would have been a very obvious feature to incorporate into a computerized aircraft control system, and also that European customers of Boeing aircraft would find this a very troublesome and controversial feature.
On the other hand, Joe Vialls goes on to make some very absurd claims about this "Home Run" system. For example, that the system would require the Cockpit Voice Recorder to go blank. What kind of idiotic engineering team would design a system that would require the voice recorder go silent during the critical moments following a hijack attempt?
Furthermore, the idea that it would be necessary to "remove and replace the flight computers" doesn't make sense. Why not just change the software? One could imagine that the Americans could encrypt and encapsulate the computer so thoroughly that it could not be reverse engineered and the offending codes removed; but in that case, it would not be a matter of just replacing the computers, but also redesigning the entire flight control system from the ground up and completely testing it. This would be such a huge expense that it would be impossible to hide in the German budget. Anybody who takes Vialls' advice and asks this silly question to Von Buelow, is revealed as a fool.
A more thorough debunking of Vialls' writing is found at Eric Hufschmid's website, linked below.
The "no suicide pilots" theory was taken up by antiwar activist Carol Valentine, but she couldn't buy into Vialls' theory that the controls were hijacked by a ragtag crew of Islamic fundamentalists. She argued that the system must have been operated by someone with deep connections within the US government. Meanwhile, stories started to circulate that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile or a bomb, not by an airliner. This argument was generically known as "Hunt the Boeing" because of a French website by that title, but the thesis was decisively discredited by Mike Rivero of whatreallyhappened.com. For some reason, Carol Valentine adopted a variant of the "Hunt the Boeing" thesis, and wandered off into her strange "Bumble Planes" snake pit, which I have analyzed in detail elsewhere on this website.
Vialls and Valentine both seem to be insane. But perhaps there is a method to their madness. If by some chance they are government propagandists, then perhaps we can discover the truth by looking at what it is they are trying to hide, and how, and why. (If you think that I have just demonstrated conclusively that I myself am insane to even suggest that they might be government agents, you might want to try a Google search on the keyword "Cointelpro", or check the links at my media page. But stay with me for a moment...)
In this case, Vialls has told us himself that he is an insider, a British aeronautical engineer with links to DARPA as well as the German airline Lufthansa. This means he would have signed non-disclosure agreements, and could not release classified information without approval, or face ruinous legal consequences. Thus, if his information is true, the leak must be officially approved. Former German Defense Minister Von Buelow picked up the leak and confirmed it, thereby adding German support to the British allegation.
So the only question is whether both Vialls and Von Buelow are both courageous whistle blowers who have torn apart all ties with their former employers, or whether they are still insiders.
Carol Valentine has recently charged that both Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com and Michael Rivero of whatreallyhappened.com are "members of the fake opposition", so it seems only fair to test her] by the same standards which she applies to others. See my media page for further information.
Suppose that there was a remote control system available on the aircraft. The engineers and operations people who knew about it, would immediately start to raise questions. According to Vialls, now the system has been compromised and all flights everywhere would be at risk. This would represent a powerful incentive for those good-hearted engineers and scientists to keep quiet. Otherwise there would be obvious security risks in terms of the possibility that still more hijackers could figure out how to operate the controls; as well as the risk of a panic as passengers everywhere refused to ride these airplanes.
If Joe Vialls is a propagandist, then his job is to do damage control among those engineers who designed the "Home Run" system, and among anyone else who knows about it. It's very important to keep them quiet.
He also works hard to discredit the arguments posed by Jared Israel as to why the Air Force did not scramble to meet the challenge of the hijackers. He writes:
This is peacetime, when most home-based western combat aircraft normally carry only "drill" (dummy) missiles on their wing pylons, and have no live cannon shells in the ammo trays. Damn, we just bumped into our first irritating time delay! Though unarmed interceptors can quickly be used to check out the status of off-course aircraft like Payne Stewart's Lear Jet, they are effectively useless against hostile targets. We keep them unarmed for a very good reason. On a scale of one to ten, listing the types of accidents all air forces try to avoid, jettisoning live Sidewinder missiles down the chimney of City Hall probably rates as number one or two.
Each western country keeps a handful of interceptors armed in case of a surprise attack, and bases them at the outer extremities of its national sovereign territory, from where the attack will come. Though the Official Secrets Act prohibits me from stating exactly how many armed aircraft are available in Britain or America in peacetime, rest assured the figure is exceedingly small. Any reasonable and intelligent person can deduce from this, that aircraft based close to major cities like London and Washington, DC, will not be armed at all in peacetime.Again, I have no inside knowledge but I sure hope this isn't true, otherwise the US is pretty much defenseless.
Valentine's job, similarly, could be to do damage control among antiwar activists, by advocating an obviously wrong, virtually impossible remote control theory. Valentine's readers are sent along to Vialls' site where they can readily see that he makes strange and inexplicable arguments. Now it seems clear that everybody who is advocating the remote control theory is either crazy or a liar. The whole theory is discredited as a hopeless mess. Meanwhile, the key concept that the necessary remote controls were built right into every 757 and 767 is lost in the shuffle.
Furthermore, Valentine's followers also see Vialls' attacks on Jared Israel and his argument that jets should have scrambled on 9/11, so he is discredited as well, even if only subliminally. And worst of all, any ordinary citizens of this United States Republic, who happen to encounter the wreckage of "Hunt the Boeing" and the "Bumble Planes", will quickly turn aside.
"Those aren't the droids you're looking for. Keep moving along..."
Here are links:
Eric Hufschmid http://geocities.com/erichufschmid/PentagonPlaneCrash2.html
Bumble Planes http://www.regena.com/strange_theory_of_the_bumble_pla.htm
Joe Vialls http://geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html
Hunt the Boeing http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ppfinal.html
Von Buelow interview http://www.regena.com/VonBuelow.htm
posted March 24, 2002 by Jerry Russell; updated March 25, 2002
NEW March 28, 2002:
Joe Vialls is reported to be a SAS (British intelligence agency) operative!!
http://www.shootersnews.addr.com/snpajoevialls.html
Joe states he is a former British SAS Officer but fails to tell us the SAS is integrally linked to intelligence and law enforcement organizations like MI6 and the Special Branch - of whom have been caught out fabricating evidence and other forms of unacceptable behaviour in the past.
*NEW* April 14, 2002:
Regarding combat readiness of American forces, compare Vialls' argument to this statement in the Boston Globe:
Marine Corps Major Mike Snyder, a spokesman for NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.... said its fighters routinely intercept aircraft. When planes are intercepted, they typically are handled with a graduated response. The approaching fighter may rock its wingtips to attract the pilot's attention, or make a pass in front of the aircraft. Eventually, it can fire tracer rounds in the airplane's path, or, under certain circumstances, down it with a missile.
*NEW* May 26, 2002:
Reader Doug Herrick took exception to my statement that it would be "idiotic" to disable the cockpit flight voice recorder during a hijacking. As Herrick points out, in an article titled "When is an autopilot not an autopilot", Guy Dunphy argued exactly the opposite, that this would be a desirable security feature:
http://webpages.shepherd.edu/DHERRI01/When%20Is%20An%20Autopilot.htm
There is one other channel via which the secret might leak out - the cockpit voice recorder. Supposing the plane crashed, and accident investigators played it back. Or even if it was just played back after the landing. Much better if the record was just an unexplained blank.
So, another design feature of our anti-hijack system would be that it must shut off all cockpit voice signals to the recorder. Let it continue recording silence, overwiting its entire loop with nothing. Maybe also shut off or spoof data to the blackboxes as well.
I suppose that this goes to show that when it comes to speculation, there is always room for more than one opinion.
http://www.911-strike.com/remote_skills.htm
Alleged flight 77 (Pentagon) pilot Hani Hanjour had a history of great difficulties in his efforts to learn to fly. As late as Aug. 2001, he was unable to demonstrate enough piloting skills to rent a Cessna 172.
See for example this article from Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/ny-usflight232380680sep23.story
At Freeway Airport in Bowie, Md., 20 miles west of Washington, flight instructor Sheri Baxter instantly recognized the name of alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour when the FBI released a list of 19 suspects in the four hijackings. Hanjour, the only suspect on Flight 77 the FBI listed as a pilot, had come to the airport one month earlier seeking to rent a small plane.
However, when Baxter and fellow instructor Ben Conner took the slender, soft-spoken Hanjour on three test runs during the second week of August, they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot's license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.
Certainly there is no evidence that Hanjour ever had any sort of practice flying commercial jetliners or any jet-propelled aircraft.
However, air traffic controller Danielle O'Brien, who tracked the radar signal from Flight 77, stated that it was flown like a fighter jet.
http://september11.natca.org/NewsArticles/DaniellOBrien.htm
"The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe."
The plane was between 12 and 14 miles away, says O'Brien, "and it was just a countdown. Ten miles west. Nine miles west … Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information, [that] we have an unidentified very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, 8 miles west."
Vice President Cheney was rushed to a special basement bunker. White House staff members were told to run away from the building.
"And it went six, five, four. And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane turned away. In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital, and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second," says O'Brien.
But the plane continued to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver.
"We lost radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited. And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest waiting to hear what's happened," says O'Brien. "And then the Washington National [Airport] controllers came over our speakers in our room and said, 'Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic. The Pentagon's been hit.'"
When I wrote my earlier articles on remote control, I was inclined to discount the issues surrounding pilot capabilities. I was concerned that readers would give the benefit of the doubt to the "terrorists" and believe that they somehow managed to carry off the mission in spite of their lack of training. However, I received the following mail from a reader, who convinced me that this is a serious problem indeed for those who believe the official story.
While in the Air Force I worked on heat-seeking, video, electro-optical, and laser-guided air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles and bombs. As a profession today I work in computer network engineering. As a hobby I am an avid fisherman very familiar with the concepts of GPS. From my perspective it would be a piece of cake to build a back door access into an aircraft's avionics and sieze control of the vessel.
We do it all the time with computers. It uses the Telnet protocol and programs such as LanDesk, which are widely available. With it we take control of a remote computer (remote control) and fix it while the end-user sits there and watches their mouse cursor move all over the screen, windows opening and closing, and their computer will not respond to any input they give it. And now we can do it in a wireless setting using hubs and switches that work with IR light to transmit digital signals. This is really ancient technology in the computer industry. The need to control computers half way around the world started as soon as Al Gore invented the internet. lol GPS technology is nothing more that electro-optical technology taken to a much higher degree. E/O and laser guided weapons rely on an energy source to "paint" the target. The weapon uses the reflection as a homing beacon which guides it directly, and with the nth degree of precision, to the target. Using GPS fish locating equipment I can return to a spot in the middle of a 10,000 acre lake exactly. Not close, exactly. To guide a plane to a target the size of the WTC would be no sweat.
All that said, as unbelievable as people would like that scenario to seem, it violates me much less than the one that is being peddled. Imagine a 25-30 year old man that has never driven anything bigger than a family sedan, and never driven over 55 MPH. Then take this man and put him in an 18 wheeler in a city he does not know. Tell him he must drive that truck across town at 80 MPH to an address he does not have a map to find. Just tell him it is southwest from where you are. Make him do this at the rush hour. Then if he does arrive at the correct address, he must back that truck up to the loading dock and do it perfectly the first time. And he must do all this without incident of any sort. Then realize the pilots were flying an aircraft 2000 times larger than anything they had ever flown before. And they were not flying 50% faster than they had ever flown, but 400% faster. Then factor in that these young men knew they would be going to meet Allah. Imagine how their hearts would be racing and their hands shaking. And we get three direct, dead-center hits. That is what stretches my imagination, not the remote control part.
Visual Aids
One is the cockpit of a Cessna single engine aircraft, the other is a 767. The guy that says it is no sweat to jump from one to the other is the same guy that played a little high school ball then watches the pros and figures with some workouts he could do that. A complete lack of respect for what the other guy can do.
I played a little football in juco, we took 2nd in the nation. Four guys on my team ended up in the NFL. I was not one of them. I found out the difference between 6', 220#, and a 4.9 forty and 6'6", 265#, and a 4.7 forty. If it was that easy we would all be doing it and it would pay six bucks an hour.
Posted 9/28/2002, Jerry Russell
[Update 2/14/2003:
An alternative explanation of the events at the Pentagon is the "missile theory", which is probably the Number One Most Contentious issue amongst 911-skeptics. The arguments have been very heated.
Early news releases included three photographs that seemed to show aircraft debris at the Pentagon, but missile theory advocates disagree that the fragments came from a jetliner. Very recently more photos have been located, but some of them have no context to prove they were from the Pentagon. (See http://www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm)
Everyone agrees that if the plane didn't crash at the Pentagon, it must have gone somewhere else -- but no trace has been found. David McGowan mentioned that a reader wrote him to say that there were media reports of a plane crash in Colorado that day, which were quickly squelched and never heard from again.
Personally I am inclined to accept the photographs showing that an airliner struck the Pentagon, even though there are many troubling inconsistencies in this version of events. However, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity or the sanity of anyone who has taken the other side in this issue.]
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