Your daily two minutes of hate

Flight 93 cockpit recording is a hoax

2006-04-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

I will stick my neck out and declare it a hoax: Jurors in the al-Moussaoui trial were shown alleged cockpit voice recordings of the final stages of the hijacking of United Airlines flight 93. It was played to the court accompanied by a video showing gruesome pictures of charred bodies, so it was intended to stir emotions rather than to provide hard evidence. The defence team's objections to the type of evidence were over-ruled.

It took the authorities a long time to come up with evidence from the flight recorders which they had earlier stated were not recoverable. It seems to me they still did a rather sloppy job when replacing the real recordings with this dramatic production. Here is why:

First of all, Cockpit voice recordings and recordings of air traffic communications are separated, yet in this case they appear together. I only have the transcript to go by since the actual recordings have not been released. I cannot establish from the transcript at what volume certain parts of it appear. It is possible that the crew instead of using headsets would have switched air traffic communications onto the cabin loud speakers so that they would also be audible in the cockpit. It does, however, not explain why we can hear communications from air traffic control and another plane on the frequency, but we cannot hear the communications by flight 93 crew to air traffic control, although those should have been a lot more audible.

According to the transcript air traffic control received a communication that there was a bomb on board, but we do not hear the pilots stating so. Air traffic control ask another plane on the frequency whether this is what they heard and they confirm. This means that the pilots must have stated so on the frequency. Air traffic control could not have gauged this information from the transponder code selected by the pilots as this would not be accessible to the crew of the third plane nor would it be specific. There is a transponder code for hijacking, but not for a bomb on board. Air traffic control could not have taken this information from what the hijackers said either, since to transmit a message to air traffic control the pilot has to press a push-to-talk button and the noise cancelling microphone will not pick up anything from the background.

However, let's assume, unlikely as this is, that they did pick up what the hijackers said according to the transcript, namely: "Ladies and Gentlemen. Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit." Here the script writers for the audio/video presentation made their biggest blunder. According to the script those remarks were made in Arabic. Air traffic could have got them translated, although not instantaneously, and they would have had to figure out what language they were dealing with first, but there is no chance that the crew of Executive Jet 956, the third plane on the frequency, could have understood those remarks.

The script writers made sure that there is plenty of Arabic in the recording to firmly establish the origin of the hijackers. They also add plenty of Bismillahs and Allahu akbars to show that these are Muslim fanatics. With the above quoted remark they have, however, gone over the top by making the translation sound foreign as well. Either they had a very incompetent translator or they weren't sure whether they should script this remark in Arabic or English - "keep remaining seating" sure does not sound like a good translation.

There is a problem with this opening sentence being in Arabic. From the content one would assume that it is addressed to the plane's passengers as it starts with "Ladies and Gentlemen." From the context it is said in the cabin upon first encounter with the captain. You can't talk from the flight deck to the passengers except over the intercom system, so it is unclear who the addressees of these sentences are meant to be. But neither crew nor passengers would have understood Arabic. If the remarks were made in conversation to fellow hijackers then they would hardly begin with "Ladies and Gentlemen" nor would they bother to inform them that they had a bomb on board.

Later in the tape we are treated with some more drama which would suit a Hollywood movie but not the real world of flying. It seems the hijackers discovered that there was a fight in the cabin. To control the situation one of them suggests to cut off the oxygen. What a folly! Breathing at high altitude in modern aircraft is achieved through cabin pressurisation not through the supply of oxygen. You can depressurise the aircraft, of course, but this would be gradual not sudden. And if you did it would affect both the passengers and the crew, so the hijackers would then need oxygen to cope with the thin depressurised air on the flight deck.

But we are made to believe that the hijackers were stupid. They tried to take control of the plane but didn't really know how to fly it. One of them is heard to instruct the other with short commands like "pull it down", "up, down, up, down", "down, push, push, push, push", "hey, give it to me". In the end, I suppose this explains why the flight crashed just like it happens on Microsoft flight simulator when you mess about with a 757. To emphasise the loss of control they suddenly all repeatedly say "Allahu akbar", but not the Shahadah.

Nice try, I say, but there is no doubt in my mind that, once more, we are being taken for a ride.

Postscript:

There is an unofficial transcript of Flight 93 available which was released by AirDisasters.com, not by the government. In that transcript the remarks about the bomb are made in English by the hijackers and a little later made again by the captain. A careful comparison of both texts reveals numerous discrepancies to the wording and the sequence of what is being said. There is no way both can be correct, ergo somebody is making things up. If Moussaoui's defence team don't tear this evidence to shreds, then they are working for the prosecution.

Important screening in NY

2006-04-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

New 9/11 Doc will premiere at Robt. DeNiro's Film Festival in NYC. 5/8

Please pass this info on to people who live in the area.

Subj: New 9/11 Documentary to Premiere at Tribeca Screening Room on May 8th
Date: 04/21/2006 5:48:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: kylehence@earthlink.net (Kyle F. Hence)

Please spread the word far and wide to your most valued and active
contacts. Support this new film from John Albanese to premiere on May
8th at the prestigious Tribeca Screening Room founded by Robert DeNiro.
I saw some of John's work on a film on another related subject and it
was sobering indeed and well done. Thank you.

Kyle F. Hence
9/11 CitizenWatch

==============

Crisis in America

9/11 Truth and The Tribeca Film Festival
A Call for Unity in the 9/11 Truth Community

By: John J. Albanese -- www.crisisinamerica.org

Stand with me. Today’s editorial is a shameless plea for unity and
support. Time is short. Today’s headlines relentlessly warn us of a
pending nuclear crisis, and the deafening drumbeats of war, and the
inevitable clash of civilizations that threatens to devour us whole.
Never mind that the rhetoric swirling around the Iran crisis mimics the
rhetoric that swirled around the debacle in Iraq. Never mind that the
facts are being skewed once again. American foreign policy appears to be
executing a full-court press to conflict and oblivion.

And at the bottom of this rubble-heap of American foreign policy lies
the all but forgotten truth and hidden history behind the worst
terrorist attacks in American history.

“We will never forget,” we all vowed after 9/11. And we meant it. But
sadly, 4 1?2 years after the fact, 9/11 has already become
commercialized, dramatized and fictionalized by such Hollywood
confections as Universal Studio’s “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World
Trade Center.” And while we can debate endlessly the degree of
historical accuracy of these films, Hollywood has, for all intents and
purposes, turned the tragedy of 9/11 into entertainment for the masses,
and has tread upon our sacred vows.

But there are those among us who know that something is seriously wrong.
From the start, there are those among us who were not satisfied to
simply put their trust in the ‘official story.’ There are those among us
who now feel vindicated in this position because we have seen the lies
and distortions and omissions. And there are those among us now who are
prepared to FIGHT to preserve our right to continue to ask the relevant
question.

We must never acquiesce to the perceived social stigma that comes with
asking questions. The victims of this crime demand it. We must never
allow the simple act of demanding accountability to be equated with
“conspiracy theory.” We must be relentless in demanding answers, without
falling into the snake pit of competing factions of 9/11 Truth
activists. Whether you believe 9/11 was in inside job, or was simply
allowed to happen (on purpose), or you believe the WTC was demolished
with explosives, or the Pentagon was not struck by a commercial jet, or
even if you simply believe that the 9/11 Commission Report is glaringly
inaccurate and incomplete – UNITE NOW! Put down your theories and UNITE!

And so, it is towards this end that I humbly request your support. As
the Tribeca Film Festival gears up next week in the virtual shadow of
the missing WTC complex, one sole independent film will attempt to
present the heavily censored facts and unanswered questions of 9/11.
Premiering at the prestigious Tribeca Screening Room, founded by Robert
DeNiro, Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime will at long last bring the
9/11 Truth movement into the spotlight, and provide an important
milestone in the public’s ever-evolving understanding of the events of
that infamous day.

This film is not being screened solely for the benefit of those in
attendance. This event transcends the very film itself in that it simply
EXISTS. It is a statement of defiance, and anger, and challenges the
mainstream media to pay attention to the growing number of Americans who
are now demanding that these issues be allowed to see the light of day.

I ask you all to join me in supporting this project. I ask all of you
with websites and user groups and email lists and regional Meetups to
brazenly utilize every resource available to you to help promote and
sponsor and petition the public to recognize this event. It is time to
declare victory, simply because this film exists, and demonstrates that
this issue will not be silenced. Please join me in declaring the premier
of this film at the prestigious Tribeca Screening Room as the most
important film premier of 2006.

Towards this end, little blurbs about a 'film' showing in NYC is just
not going to cut it. We must either choose to fight the 9/11 Truth fight
to win - or choose to continue to just nibble away at the edges,
perpetually marginalized and minimized and showing our secret films in
secret church basements at localized events, without ever achieving the
breakout media event that could forever alter the public's perceptions.

I believe the Tribeca Film Festival offers us that opportunity.

The media is primed for a breakthrough on this issue. We are now seeing
the beginnings of celebrity endorsements, as Charlie Sheen and Ed Asner
have lent their voices to the call. The public is also ready. The polls
do not lie. We have a date with destiny. Just imagine the reverberations
of headlines such as these:

“Tribeca Film Festival Rocked by Independent 9/11 Film”

“Controversy and Passions Rise at Tribeca Film Festival”

“New York Responds to Hollywood”

“The Hidden History of 9/11 Premiers in Tribeca”

“Independent Film on 9/11 Eclipses United 93”

The odds have always been stacked against us. We need to make our own
luck. United 93 has the backing of millions of dollars, represented by
professional PR firms and advertising agencies and powerful corporate
interests.

What do we have?

We have heavily censored facts, lingering unanswered questions and
ultimately we have ourselves. I’m betting on us. Our questions are much
more powerful than any fiction Hollywood could ever hope to dream up.
And our numbers are swelling like the rising tide.

Please join me in declaring victory at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.

For more information on this film, please visit: www.crisisinamerica.org

Lawyer: Rice Allegedly Leaked Defense Info

2006-04-22T04:06:00.000-07:00

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaked national defense information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in the same manner that landed a lower-level Pentagon official a 12-year prison sentence, the lobbyist's lawyer said Friday.

Prosecutors disputed the claim.

The allegations against Rice came as a federal judge granted a defense request to issue subpoenas sought by the defense for Rice and three other government officials in the trial of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. The two are former lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who are charged with receiving and disclosing national defense information.

Defense lawyers are asking a judge to dismiss the charges because, among other things, they believe it seeks to criminalize the type of backchannel exchanges between government officials, lobbyists and the press that are part and parcel of how Washington works.

During Friday's hearing, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said he is considering dismissing the government's entire case because the law used to prosecute Rosen and Weissman may be unconstitutionally vague and broad and infringe on freedom of speech.

Rosen's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the testimony of Rice and others is needed to show that some of the top officials in U.S. government approved of disclosing sensitive information to the defendants and that the leaks may have been authorized.

Prosecutors opposed the effort to depose Rice and the other officials. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin DiGregory also disputed Lowell's claim, saying, "She never gave national defense information to Mr. Rosen."

The issuance of subpoenas does not automatically require Rice or anybody else to testify or give a deposition. A recipient can seek to quash the subpoena.

Calls to the State Department seeking comment Friday evening were not immediately returned.

The judge also granted subpoenas for David Satterfield, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq; William Burns, U.S. ambassador to Russia and retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni.

"Each of these individuals have real-life dealings with the defendants in this case. They'll explain what they told Dr. Rosen in detail," Lowell said. "On day one, Secretary of State Rice tells him certain info and on day two one of the conspirators tells him the same thing or something less volatile."

The indictment against Rosen and Weissman alleges that three government officials leaked sensitive and sometimes classified national defense information to the two, who subsequently revealed what they learned to the press and to an Israeli government official.

One of the three government officials is former Pentagon official Lawrence A. Franklin, who pleaded guilty to providing classified defense information to Rosen and Weissman and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.

Franklin has said he was concerned that the United States was insufficiently concerned about the threat posed by Iran and hoped that leaking information might eventually provoke the National Security Council to take a different course of action.

The indictment against Rosen, of Silver Spring, Md., and Weissman, of Bethesda, Md., alleges that they conspired to obtain classified government reports on issues relevant to U.S. policy, including the al-Qaida terror network; the bombing of the Khobar Towers dormitory in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel; and U.S. policy in Iran.

Lowell said it is impossible for Rosen and Weissman to determine what is sensitive national defense information when they are receiving the information from government officials who presumably understand national security law and therefore would not improperly disclose national defense information.

The World War I-era law has never been used to prosecute lobbyists before.

What You Think You Know About Sept. 11 … but you don't

2006-04-20T02:43:00.000-07:00

Listen to a radio version of this piece on NPR's Day to Day.

The Saudi government paid off al-Qaida in exchange for immunity from terror attacks. Saudi princes knew in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of the Saudi officials who assisted al-Qaida all died mysteriously soon thereafter. The revelations in Gerald Posner's new book Why America Slept are an astonishing reminder of just how much we still don't know about Sept. 11 and its planning.

But there is also plenty that we think we know but don't. I'm not talking about shoddy conspiracy theories (that Jews were warned not to show up for work at the World Trade Center, for example) believed by the ignorant and the paranoid, but widespread misconceptions held by everyday Americans. Here are six of the most common:

1. The misconception: Zacarias Moussaoui was the "20^th hijacker." In the first months after the attacks, federal officials—including Vice President Cheney—hinted that Moussaoui, who was taken into federal custody before Sept. 11, might have been the missing man on the Flight 93 hijacking team. Moussaoui's indictment in Dec. 2001 also linked him to the Sept. 11 plot, trying to show parallels between Moussaoui and the Sept. 11 terrorists—flight training, joining a gym, mysterious funding from overseas, connection to ringleader Ramzi Binalshibh, etc.

What's wrong with the story: There is no actual evidence that Moussaoui was supposed to be on Flight 93 or the other planes. Moussaoui had no contact with any of the Sept. 11 hijackers and took his flight training long after they did. According to Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding's Masterminds of Terror, Binalshibh has said that while he contemplated Moussaoui as an understudy for 9/11, he was never part of the plot. Binalshibh said he was glad that he kept Moussaoui, who was not really trusted by al-Qaida, away from the other hijackers. (Incidentally, it is Binalshibh who was a failed hijacker: He couldn't get a U.S. visa.) This does not excuse Moussaoui, a truly bad guy who was apparently preparing for some act of airplane terrorism.

(Bonus Moussaoui misconception: that he only wanted to learn how to steer jumbo jets, not take off or land. In fact, as this Slate Explainer notes, the opposite is true: Moussaoui only wanted to learn takeoffs and landings.)

2. The misconception: We know how the hijackers seized the planes. Within days of Sept. 11, Americans believed they knew how the planes were grabbed: Terrorists had taken control by stabbing pilots, passengers, and flight attendants with box cutters and knives.

What's wrong with the story: It's incomplete and misleading. We don't really know what happened on the planes. The cockpit voice recorder survived neither New York crash and was damaged beyond salvage in the Pentagon crash. The Flight 93 voice recorder doesn't start until several minutes after the hijackers took the plane. What little we know about tactics and weapons comes from phones calls made by passengers and flight attendants. As Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, the evidence is incredibly paltry. No one on United Flight 175, which crashed into the World Trade Center, reported anything about weapons or tactics. One flight attendant on American Flight 11, which also crashed into the World Trade Center, said she was disabled by a chemical spray, while another flight attendant said a passenger was stabbed or shot. On the Pentagon plane, American Flight 77, Barbara Olson reported hijackers carrying knives and box cutters but did not describe how they took the cockpit. And on United Flight 93, passengers reported knives but also a hijacker threatening to explode a bomb. The box cutter-knives story isn't demonstrably false, but it serves to divert attention from the other weapons and to mask the fact that we don't have any idea how the hijackings happened.

3. The misconception: Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. According to an August Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe Iraq played a role.

What's wrong with the story: For starters, the two captured planners of the 9/11 attacks, Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have both reportedly denied Iraqi involvement during interrogations. Next, those who argue for Iraq's guilt rely on dubious claims. The first is an on-again, off-again Czech assertion that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. But American intelligence agencies now believe the meeting did not occur. (This Slate dialogue debated the Atta meeting and other Iraqi links to terrorism.) Several conservative analysts—notably Laurie Mylroie and former CIA Director James Woolsey—have pushed the idea that the first World Trade Center bombing was an Iraqi intelligence operation, and thus Sept. 11 might have been too. They believe that Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the first bombing, was acting for the Iraqis, and since Yousef's uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Iraq should be suspect again. But no one has managed to show that Iraq sponsored Ramzi Yousef or the 9/11 terrorists.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence against Iraqi involvement is that the Bush administration hasn't made a case for it. The president is desperate to link Iraq to al-Qaida. But so far, his team hasn't managed to find anything tangible that connects the Hussein regime to Osama Bin Laden (much less to 9/11). The administration wants the nefarious alliance so much that if it had any evidence, it surely would have leaked it. This does not prove, however, that Iraq and al-Qaida never cooperated. The polls, in fact, may reflect a kind of commonsense logic: Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida share a pathological hatred of the United States, so it's entirely possible that they collaborated, even if we don't know how.

4. The misconception: The Sept. 11 plotters planned to use crop-dusters for a biological or chemical attack.

What's wrong with the story: On the surface, the case for crop-dusters is powerful. The federal government twice grounded crop-dusters after 9/11 because of suspicion they might be used for attacks. The original indictment of Moussaoui suggested that he and the 9/11 plotters were investigating crop-dusters. Workers at a crop-dusting company in Florida reported that Mohamed Atta and other Arab men repeatedly inquired about crop-dusters. A Department of Agriculture official named Johnelle Bryant claimed that Atta visited her in early 2000 and asked for a government loan to buy a plane that he would modify for crop-dusting.

But as Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, the crop-dusting stories are squirrelly. A crop-dusting worker claimed Atta dropped by the weekend before 9/11, but Atta had already left Florida. Bryant pinpointed Atta's visit to late April or early-mid-May of 2000—but this was before Atta even arrived in the United States. When prosecutors revised the Moussaoui indictment in 2002, they also dropped all mention of crop-dusting. And in interviews with Al Jazeera's Yosri Fouda, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed didn't mention any interest in a crop-dusting attack. They indicated that the plan was always to fly airplanes into buildings.

Some al-Qaida operatives may have inquired about crop-dusting, and one may even have sought a loan from Johnelle Bryant. (Some terrorism analysts speculate that before al-Qaida decided to seize airliners, it planned to buy a small plane, fill it with explosives, and crash it.) The crop-dusting story can't be disproved, but no solid public evidence exists that the 9/11 plotters were interested in either crop-dusters or a biological or chemical attack.

5. The misconception: Terrorists or their supporters profited by speculating on airline stocks before 9/11.

What's wrong with the story: Terrorists may have profiteered, but the evidence is sketchy. As was widely reported after 9/11, the options market for United and American Airlines was unusually busy in the days before 9/11, with an extremely heavy volume of "put options"—bets that the airline shares would fall. By the end of September 2001, both the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched investigations into the unusual trading. Since then, they've been silent. Two years later, neither the exchange nor the SEC will comment on its investigation. Neither has announced any conclusion. The SEC has not filed any complaint alleging illegal activity, nor has the Justice Department announced any investigation or prosecution.

This does not mean terrorist wagering didn't occur: It might well have. The absence of any complaint suggests the SEC found nothing illegal, but that's not definite. The SEC and the Chicago board seal the records of their investigations and won't offer any explanation—even if there is an innocent one—for the strange trading. So, unless the SEC decides to file a complaint—unlikely at this late stage—we may never know what they learned about terror trading.

6. The misconception: No one could have predicted the Sept. 11 attacks. Since 9/11, President Bush and his team have repeatedly insisted that the attacks were inconceivable. David Corn chronicles these claims in his new book The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. In May 2002, for example, Condoleezza Rice said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Ari Fleischer echoed her, "Never did we imagine what would take place on Sept. 11 where people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."

What's wrong with the story: In fact, there were tons of warnings of exactly this kind of attack. The recent congressional report on the 9/11 intelligence failures lists a dozen pre-9/11 indications that terrorists were plotting a suicide hijacking. For example, in 1994 Algerians hijacked an Air France airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. (They were tricked by French officials into landing in Marseilles to refuel, where they were overpowered.) In 1995, police in the Philippines uncovered an al-Qaida plot to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. (One of the plotters: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) A year later, al-Qaida had the idea of flying a plane from outside the United States and crashing it into the White House. Two years later, al-Qaida planned to fly a plane from outside the United States and crash it into the World Trade Center. And so on.

Intelligence officials, who are endlessly juggling all kinds of different threats, didn't take the suicide-plane schemes seriously because they believed there were other, more imminent dangers. But no one can say they weren't warned.

David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at dplotz@slate.com.

Physicist says heat substance felled WTC

2006-04-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

EPHRAIM — A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse.

"It looks like thermite with sulfur added, which really is a very clever idea," Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters at Snow College Friday.

The government requires standard explosives to contain tag elements enabling them to be traced back to their manufacturers. But no tags are required in aluminum and iron oxide, the materials used to make thermite, he said. Nor, he said, are tags required in sulfur.

Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers.

The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed and non-reviewed academic papers, are posted on the site.

Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse.

At that time, he mentioned thermite as the possible explosive or incendiary agent. But Friday, he said he is increasingly convinced that thermite and sulfur were the root causes of the 9/11 disaster.

He told college professors and graduate students from throughout Utah gathered for the academy meeting that while almost no fire, even one ignited by jet fuel, can cause structural steel to fail, the combination of thermite and sulfur "slices through steel like a hot knife through butter."

He ticked off several pieces of evidence for his thermite fire theory:

First, he said, video showed a yellow, molten substance splashing off the side of the south Trade Tower about 50 minutes after an airplane hit it and a few minutes before it collapsed. Government investigators ruled out the possibility of melting steel being the source of the material because of the unlikelihood of steel melting. The investigators said the molten material must have been aluminum from the plane.

But, said Jones, molten aluminum is silvery. It never turns yellow. The substance observed in the videos "just isn't aluminum," he said. But, he said, thermite can cause steel to melt and become yellowish.

Second, he cited video pictures showing white ash rising from the south tower near the dripping, liquefied metal. When thermite burns, Jones said, it releases aluminum-oxide ash. The presence of both yellow-white molten iron and aluminum oxide ash "are signature characteristics of a thermite reaction," he said.

Another item of evidence, Jones said, is the fact that sulfur traces were found in structural steel recovered from the Trade Towers. Jones quoted the New York Times as saying sulfidization in the recovered steel was "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the (official) investigation." But, he said, sulfidization fits the theory that sulfur was combined with thermite to make the thermite burn even hotter than it ordinarily would.

Jones said a piece of building wreckage had a gray substance on the outside that at one point had obviously been a dripping molten metal or liquid. He said that after thermite turns steel or iron into a molten form, and the metal hardens, it is gray.

He added that pools of molten metal were found beneath both trade towers and the 47-story WTC 7. That fact, he said, was never discussed in official investigation reports.

And even though WTC 7 was not connected to the Trade Towers — in fact, there was another building between it and the towers —and even though it was never hit by a plane, it collapsed. That suggests, he said, that it came down because a thermite fire caused its structural steel to fail.

Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the collapses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the buildings and placed thermite and sulfur. But he said 10 to 20 people "in the know," plus other people who didn't know what they were doing but did what they were told, could have placed incendiary packages over several weeks.

Retired Air Force Col Robert Bowman: They lied to us about the war and about 9/11 itself

2006-04-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

As other speakers have said, they knew the American people wouldn’t stand for it, and they said so in their documents, and they said, unless there’s that new Pearl Harbor. Well 9/11 did supply that. And we’ve been lied to not only about the war, but about 9/11 itself.

The Bush administration was warned. They were warned by the Clinton Administration during the transition period, they were warned by the intelligence agencies of eleven other nations, they were specifically warned by one FBI agent that Moussawi was planning on flying a hijacked airliner, “into the World Trade Center.”

They ignored the warnings, more than that, we have mounting evidence that _at least_, they made it impossible for those planes to be intercepted.

If our government had merely done nothing - and I say that as an old interceptor pilot and I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were and I know what they changed them to - if our government had merely done nothing and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the twin towers would still be standing and thousands of Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!

As a combat veteran, I will not stand idly by watch our security destroyed by a President who went AWOL rather than serve in Vietnam. As one who has devoted his life to the security of this country. I will not stand by and watch an appointed President send our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs for the oil companies.

Patriotism demands that I speak out and call it by it’s name. It is treason.

I joined the Air Force a long time ago to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita-Banana, Exxon and Halliburton. We’ve had enough corporate wars. No more Iraqs, no more Kosovos, no more El Salvadors, No more Columbias.

These are not isolated incidents of stupidity, they’re part of a long bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. It is a new form of colonialism, all the benefits and none of the responsibilities. It violates our Constitution, it endangers our people and it is treason.

As a pilot who flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam, I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that includes a renegade President. It’s time for George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and the whole Oil Mafia to be removed from office and indicted for treason.

We owe it to the men and women serving in Iraq to end the occupation, restore our credibility and honor and bring them home, and it could be done if we had a President who would go to the UN and say we made a horrible mistake, it was wrong and we make you three committments:

1. We give up all rights to Iraqi oil

2. We give up all rights to the rebuilding contracts- if Halliburton wants a contract from you, they have to bid on it like anybody else, and they have to hire Iraqis to do the work for a change.

3. We give up all rights to those 14 permanent military bases we’re building in Iraq at this time.

And the people in the Whitehouse are not going to make those committments and so they have to go and all the puppeteers with them.

You know we are the people and we are sovereign. We are the patriots and the whole world is with us. Everywhere in the country that they have a free press, all over the world people know the facts and they are with us. Not the people out there, not the deadheads, not the know-nothings, not the chickenhawks, they’re with us.

Don’t let anybody intimidate you into silence, it’s time for all of us to speak truth to power. Our sons and daughters are being killed, they’re being maimed by the tens of thousands, they’re being poisoned by Depleted Uranium by the hundreds of thousands. They’re children are being born with birth defects, horrible birth defects, at an alarming rate. We’re being lied to about all that as well.

Our sons and daughters in uniform are being dehumanized, emotionally damaged, psychologically destroyed, they’re being made not just to kill, but to hate. Those who return are prone to domestic violence, divorce and suicide. The lies, the killing and the destruction of our young sons and daughters must not continue. We must end it. Patriotism demands that we speak truth to power, and that we support what’s left of our troops by bringing them home now.

Together we can do it. We can get the truth out there to the American People, we’re on the verge. We’ve got half the people with us, we’ve got to go after the other half. And together we can take back our country and get the liars the heck out of there.

God Bless America, and God grant us regime change in Washington DC. Thank you very much.

Briefing: why Moussaoui confession doesn't add up

2006-04-09T03:04:00.000-07:00

Daniel McGrory,a Times expert on al-Qaeda, examines the inconsistencies behind Zacarias Moussaoui's confession that he was part of the 9/11 plot

"From the start of the hearing to decide whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in jail, Zacarias Moussaoui made it clear he regarded the proceedings as a joke. He mocked the judge, shouted obscenities at the jury and has repeatedly shown his contempt for the court, saying he only recognises Islamic law.

"His exasperated defence lawyer, Gerald Zerkin, admits he has no idea what his client is going to say or do next as he has no control over the former London university student.

"Asked why he signed a guilty plea as "the twentieth hijacker", Moussaoui smirked and said: 'Because everybody used to refer to me as the 20th hijacker and it was a bit of fun.'

"Prosecutors have no interest in demolishing Moussaoui’s extraordinary confession as the self- proclaimed al-Qaeda terrorist seems to have done their job for them. It does not appear to matter to them that Moussaoui’s testimony contradicts their own evidence.

"The CIA has in custody the man who orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center, and he has told his interrogators that Moussaoui was not part of any 9/11 cell. That handpicked team came from similar backgrounds and bore little resemblance to the Frenchman of Morrocan descent who was too indisciplined to be trusted on such a crucial mission.

"Al-Qaeda did pay for him to take flying lessons in America, as they did for dozens of others, but, unlike the pilots recruited for 9/11, Moussaoui proved incompetent. He not only raised suspicions by refusing to be taught the basics of how to take off or land a Boeing 747, but in the flight simulator he couldn’t even steer straight and instructors told the truculent Moussaoui that he was wasting his money.

"Defence lawyers argue he has repeatedly changed his story about his supposed role in a deliberate attempt to confuse US authorities.

"First he claimed he was to be used in a plot to free a blind Egyptian cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, jailed in the US in 1996 for an earlier attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre. Moussaoui told how he was to pilot a plane carrying the freed sheikh to Afghanistan.

"Then he changed his mind and said that he was to take part in a second wave of aerial attacks in the US. He did not give a date, but claimed he was to crash his aircraft into the White House.

"The question to be asked about his latest confession is, why would he implicate Richard Reid, his friend from their days at Finsbury Park mosque? Both men were at training camps in Afghanistan at the same time but, as evidence has shown, Reid, and another young Briton, Saajid Badat, were being groomed for an entirely different role.

"FBI agents are expected to question Reid, who is already serving an 80-year jail sentence for trying to detonate a shoe bomb on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

"Investigators know that Reid’s path never crossed that of the 9/11 cell. Before he was ordered to carry a bomb onto a plane, Reid had other uses for al-Qaeda. Using his British passport, he was sent on reconnaissance missions across Europe and the Middle East at the time the 9/11 hijackers were finalising their plans.

"In July 2001 he was in Amsterdam obtaining a new passport from the British Consulate, claiming that he had ruined his original document by leaving it in his trouser pocket which he stuffed into a washing machine.

"He then flew to Israel, Egypt and Turkey, scouting possible targets for attack.

"His travel diary was later discovered by FBI agents at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul after the US led invasion of Afghanistan. There is no mention of anything remotely connected to 9/11.

"On August 9, 2001 Reid returned to Amsterdam where he linked up with other al-Qaeda activists who have since been jailed for plotting bomb attacks in Europe. In November Reid was back in Pakistan with Badat to be shown how to detonate their shoe bomb.

"On December 5, Reid went to Paris to get yet another passport, using the same stunt as before. At his trial he freely admitted what his mission was to be, adding he was "a soldier for al-Qaeda".

"Those who remember Moussaoui from his loudmouth displays at London mosques, and who trained with him in Afghanistan, describe him as a man who enjoyed exaggerating his own importance. He claimed to be a particular favourite of Osama bin Laden, which none of the al-Qaeda captives verify.

"He liked the idea that London had provided al-Qaeda with a small army of would-be suicide bombers, and that he would be the first to die. He continually boasted about wanting to be a martyr for al-Qaeda.

"After his testimony yesterday he may yet get his wish."

9/11: The Myth and the Reality

2006-04-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

David Ray Griffin
(Authorized Version)

NOTE: This lecture was delivered March 30, 2006, at Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. Abbreviated versions of it were given in San Francisco for the Democratic World Federalists on April 2 and the Commonwealth Club on April 3.

Although I am a philosopher of religion and theologian, I have spent most of my time during the past three years on 9/11---studying it, writing about it, and speaking about it. In this lecture, I will try to make clear why I believe this issue worthy of so much time and energy. I will do this in terms of the distinction between myth and reality.

I am here using the term "myth" in two senses. In one sense, a myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false, failing to correspond with reality.

In a deeper sense, which is employed by students of religion, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for a people, a story that reminds them who they are and why they do what they do. When a story is called as a myth in this sense---which we can call Myth with a capital M---the focus is not on the story's relation to reality but on its function. This orienting and mobilizing function is possible, moreover, only because Myths with a capital M have religious overtones. Such a Myth is a Sacred Story.

However, although to note that a story functions as a Myth in the religious sense is not necessarily to deny its truth, a story cannot function as a Sacred Myth within a community or nation unless it is believed to be true. In most cases, moreover, the truth of the Myth is taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate. If some people have the bad taste to question the truth of the Sacred Story, the keepers of the faith do not enter into debate with them. Rather, they ignore them or denounce them as blasphemers.

According to the official story about 9/11, America, because of its goodness, was attacked by fanatical Arab Muslims who hate our freedoms. This story has functioned as a Sacred Myth for the United States since that fateful day. And this function appears to have been carefully orchestrated. The very next day, President Bush announced his intention to lead "a monumental struggle of Good versus Evil."¹ Then on September 13, he declared that the following day would be a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the Victims of the Terrorist Attacks. And on that next day, the president himself, surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi, and an imam, delivered a sermon in the national cathedral, saying:

Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of Evil. War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. . . . In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America, because we are freedom's home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time. . . . [W]e ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. . . . And may He always guide our country. God bless America.²

Through this unprecedented event, in which the president of the United States issued a declaration of war from a cathedral, French author Thierry Meyssan observed in 2002, "the American government consecrated . . . its version of events. From then on, any questioning of the official truth would be seen as sacrilege."³

That attitude has remained dominant in the public sphere until this day, as the official account has continued to serve as a Sacred Story. When people raise questions about this story, they are either ignored, ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, or---as Charlie Sheen has recently experienced---attacked personally. When anyone asks what right the administration has to invade and occupy other countries, to imprison people indefinitely without due process, or even to ignore various laws, the answer is always the same: "9/11." Those who believe that US law and international law should be respected are dismissed as having "a pre-9/11 mind-set."

Given the role the official account of 9/11 has played and continues to play, the most important question before our country today is whether this account, besides being a Myth in the religious sense, is also a myth in the pejorative sense---that is, whether it is simply false.

As a philosopher of religion, I would emphasize that the fact that a story has served as a Myth in the religious sense does not necessarily mean that it fails to correspond with reality. Many religious accounts contain at least a kernel of truth that can be defended in terms of a rational examination of the relevant evidence.

In many cases, however, stories that have served as religious Myths cannot stand up to rational scrutiny. When such a story is stripped of its halo and treated simply as a theory, rather than an unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to account for the relevant facts. The official account of 9/11 is such a theory. When challenges to it are not treated as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to be composed of a number of ideas that are myths in the sense of not corresponding with reality. Using the word "myth" from now on only in this pejorative sense, I will discuss nine of the major myths contained in the official story about 9/11. I will thereby show that the official account of 9/11 cannot be defended, in light of the relevant evidence, against the main alternative account, according to which 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by people within our own government. I will begin with a few myths that prevent many people from even looking at the evidence for this alternative account.

Myth Number 1: Our political and military leaders simply would not do such a thing.

This idea is widely believed. But it is undermined by much evidence. The United States, like many other countries, has often used deceit to begin wars---for example, the Mexican-American war, with its false claim that Mexico had "shed American blood on the American soil,"⁴ the Spanish-American war, with its "Remember the Maine" hoax,⁵ the war in the Philippines, with its false claim that the Filipinos fired first,⁶ and the Vietnam war, with its Tonkin Gulf hoax.⁷ The United States has also sometimes organized false flag terrorist attacks---killing innocent civilians, then blaming the attacks on an enemy country or group, often by planting evidence. We have even done this in allied countries. As Daniele Ganser has shown in his recent book NATO's Secret Armies, NATO, guided by the CIA and the Pentagon, arranged many such attacks in Western European countries during the Cold War. These attacks were successfully blamed on Communists and other leftists to discredit them in the eyes of the voting public.⁸

Finally, in case it be thought that US military leaders would not orchestrate such attacks against US citizens, one needs only to read the plan known as Operations Northwoods, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked up in 1962, shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista. This plan contained various "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba." American citizens would have been killed in some of them, such as a "Remember the Maine" incident, in which: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba."⁹

At this point, some people, having seen evidence that US leaders would be morally capable of orchestrating 9/11, might avoid looking at the evidence by appeal to

Myth Number 2: Our political and military leaders would have had no motive for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

This myth was reinforced by The 9/11 Commission Report. While explaining why al-Qaeda had ample motives for carrying out the attacks, this report mentions no motives that US leaders might have had. But the alleged motive of al-Qaeda---that it hated Americans and their freedoms---is dwarfed by a motive held by many members of the Bush-Cheney administration: the dream of establishing a global Pax Americana, the first all-inclusive empire in history.

This dream had been articulated by many neoconservatives, or neocons, throughout the 1990s, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union made it seem possible. It was first officially articulated in the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted by Paul Wolfowitz on behalf of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney---a document that has been called "a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony"¹⁰ and Cheney's "Plan . . . to rule the world."¹¹

Achieving this goal would require four things. One of these was getting control of the world's oil, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, and the Bush-Cheney administration came to power with plans already made to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. A second requirement was a technological transformation of the military, in which fighting from space would become central. A third requirement was an enormous increase in military spending, to pay for these new wars and for weaponizing space. A fourth need was to modify the doctrine of preemptive attack, so that America would be able to attack other countries even if they posed no imminent threat.

These four elements would, moreover, require a fifth: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. As Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, the American people, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the money and human sacrifices necessary for "imperial mobilization," and this refusal "limits . . . America's . . . capacity for military intimidation."¹² But this impediment could be overcome if there were "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat"¹³ ---just as the American people were willing to enter World War II only after "the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."¹⁵ This same idea was suggested in 2000 in a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, which was put out by a neocon think tank called the Project for the New American Century, many members of which---including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz---became central members of the Bush administration. This document, referring to the goal of transforming the military, said that this "process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor."15

When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. Several members of the Bush administration spoke of 9/11 as providing opportunities. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world."¹⁶ It created, in particular, the opportunity to attack Afghanistan and Iraq; to increase the military budget enormously; to go forward with military transformation; and to turn the new idea of preemptive warfare into official doctrine. This doctrinal change was announced in the 2002 version of the National Security Strategy, which said that America will "act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed."¹⁷

So, not only did the Bush administration reap huge benefits from 9/11. These were benefits that it had desired in advance. The idea that it would have had no motives for orchestrating 9/11 is a myth. But there is one more myth that keeps many people from looking at the evidence. This is

Myth Number 3: Such a big operation, involving so many people, could not have been kept a secret, because someone involved in it would have talked by now.

This claim is based on a more general myth, which is that is impossible for secret government operations to be kept secret very long, because someone always talks. But how could we know this? If some big operations have remained secret until now, we by definition do not know about them. Moreover, we do know of big some operations that were kept secret as long as necessary, such as the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb, and the war in Indonesia in 1957, which the United States government provoked, participated in, and was able to keep secret from its own people until a book about it appeared in 1995.¹⁸ Many more examples could be given.

We can understand, moreover, why those with inside knowledge of 9/11 would not talk. At least most of them would have been people with the proven ability to keep secrets. Those who were directly complicit would also be highly motivated to avoid public disgrace and the gas chamber. Those people who had knowledge without being complicit could be induced to keep quiet by means of more or less subtle threats---such as: "Joe, if you go forward with your plans to talk to the press about this, I don't know who is going to protect your wife and kids from some nutcase angered by your statement." Still another fact is that neither the government nor the mainstream press has, to say the least, shown any signs of wanting anyone to come forward.

I come now to

Myth Number 4: The 9/11 Commission, which has endorsed the official account, was an independent, impartial commission and hence can be believed.

One needs only to look at the reviews of The 9/11 Commission Report on Amazon.com to see that this assumption is widely accepted. Perhaps this is partly because in the Preface, the Commission's chairman and vice chairman tell us that the Commission sought "to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan." But these terms do not describe the reality. The Commission's lack of impartiality can be partly explained by the fact that Chairman Thomas Kean, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the members of the staff had conflicts of interest.¹⁹

The most serious problem, however, is that the executive director, Philip Zelikow, was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney administration. He had worked with Condoleezza Rice on the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush. When the Republicans were out of office during the Clinton administration, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together. Rice then, as National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, had Zelikow help make the transition to the new National Security Council. After that, Zelikow was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Zelikow was, therefore, the White House's man inside the 9/11 Commission.

And yet, as executive director, he guided the staff, which did virtually all the work of the Commission.²⁰ Zelikow was in position, therefore, to decide which topics would be investigated and which ones not. One disgruntled member reportedly said at the time, "Zelikow is calling the shots. He's skewing the investigation and running it his own way."²¹

Accordingly, insofar as the Commission was supposed to be investigating the failure of the Bush administration to prevent the attacks, the Commission was no more independent and impartial than if Dick Cheney had been running it. (The only difference is that no one got shot.)

Zelikow's ideological and personal closeness to the Bush administration is shown by one more fact that has until now not been widely known, even within the 9/11 truth movement. I mentioned earlier the Bush administration's National Security Strategy statement of 2002, in which the new doctrine of preemptive warfare was articulated. The primary author of this document, reports James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, was none other than Philip Zelikow. According to Mann, after Rice saw a first draft, which had been written by Richard Haass in the State Department, she, wanting "something bolder," brought in Zelikow to completely rewrite it.²² The result was a very bellicose document that used 9/11 to justify the administration's so-called war on terror. Max Boot described it as a "quintessentially neo-conservative document."²³

We can understand, therefore, why the Commission, under Zelikow's leadership, would have ignored all evidence that would point to the truth: that 9/11 was a false flag operation intended to authorize the doctrines and funds needed for a new level of imperial mobilization.

The suggestion that 9/11 was a false flag operation brings us to:

Myth Number 5: The Bush administration provided proof that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists under the direction of Osama bin Laden.

One of the main pieces of alleged proof involved the claim that the baggage of Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader of the hijackers, was discovered at the Boston airport, from which Flight 11 departed. This baggage, besides containing Atta's passport and driver's license, also contained various types of incriminating evidence, such as flight simulator manuals, videotapes about Boeing airliners, and a letter to other hijackers about preparing for the mission. But the bags also contained Atta's will. Why would Atta have intended to take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade Center? There are also many other problems in this story.²⁴ We appear to have planted evidence.

Another element of the official story about the alleged hijackers is that they were very devout Muslims. The 9/11 Commission Report said that Atta had become very religious, even "fanatically so."²⁵ The public was thereby led to believe that these men would have had no problem going on this suicide mission, because they were ready to meet their maker. Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, however, discovered that Atta loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances.²⁶ Several of the other alleged hijackers, the Wall Street Journal reported, had similar tastes.²⁷ The Commission pretends, however, that none of this information was available. While admitting that Atta met other members of al-Qaeda in Las Vegas shortly before 9/11, it says that it saw "no credible evidence explaining why, on this occasion and others, the operatives flew to or met in Las Vegas."²⁸

Another problem in the official account is that, although we are told that four or five of the alleged hijackers were on each of the four flights, no proof of this claim has been provided. The story, of course, is that they did not force their way onto the planes but were regular, ticketed passengers. If so, their names should be on the flight manifests. But the flight manifests that have been released contain neither the names of the alleged hijackers nor any other Arab names.²⁹ We have also been given no proof that the remains of any of these men were found at any of the crash sites.

One final little problem is that several of these 19 men, according to stories published by the BBC and British newspapers, are still alive. For example, The 9/11 Commission Report named Waleed al-Shehri as one of the hijackers and reproduced the FBI's photograph of him. It even suggested that al-Shehri stabbed one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the north tower.³⁰ But as BBC News had reported 11 days after 9/11, al-Shehri, having seen his photograph in newspapers and TV programs, notified authorities and journalists in Morocco, where he works as a pilot, that he is still alive.³¹

But if there are various problems with the government's story about the hijackers, surely it presented proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the operation? Insofar as this belief is widely held, it also is a myth. Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide a white paper providing proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, but this paper was never produced. British Prime Minister Tony Blair did provide such a paper, which was entitled "Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States." But it begins with the admission that it "does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law."³² (So, evidence good enough to go to war, but not good enough to go to court.) And although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, Bush refused.³³

This failure to provide proof was later said to be unnecessary because bin Laden, in a video allegedly found in Afghanistan, admitted responsibility for the attacks. This "confession" is now widely cited as proof. However, the man in this video has darker skin, fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the other videos.³⁴ We again seem to have planted evidence.

There are, moreover, other problems in the official account of Osama bin Laden. For one thing, in June of 2001, when he was already America's "most wanted" criminal, he reportedly spent two weeks in the American Hospital in Dubai, at which he was treated by an American doctor and visited by the local CIA agent.³⁵

Also, after 9/11, when America was reportedly trying to get bin Laden "dead or alive," the US military evidently allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being the "battle of Tora Bora," which the London Telegraph labeled "a grand charade."36 Shortly thereafter, Bush said: "I don't know where he [bin Laden] is. . . . I just don't spend that much time on him. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him."³⁷ (Sometimes the truth slips out.)

In any case, the idea that the Bush administration has provided proof for its claims about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hijackers is a myth. I turn now to:

Myth Number 6: The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise to the Bush administration.

Nothing is more essential to the official story than this idea. About 10 months after 9/11, for example, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."³⁸ There is much evidence, however, that counts against this claim.

The Put Options: One type of evidence involves an extraordinarily high volume of "put options" purchased in the three days prior to 9/11. To buy put options for a particular company is to bet that its stock price will go down. These extraordinary purchases included two, and only two, airlines--United and American--the two airlines used in the attacks. They also included Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, which occupied 22 stories of the World Trade Center. The price of these shares did, of course, plummet after 9/11, resulting in enormous profits for the purchasers. These unusual purchases, as the San Francisco Chronicle said, raise "suspicions that the investors . . . had advance knowledge of the strikes."³⁹ It would appear, in other words, that those who made the purchases knew that United and American airliners were going to be used in attacks on the World Trade Center.

The 9/11 Commission tried to show these suspicions to be unfounded. It claimed, for example, that the purchases for United Airlines do not show that anyone other than al-Qaeda had foreknowledge of the attacks, because 95 percent of these options were purchased by "[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda."⁴⁰ But the Commission thereby simply begged the question at issue, which is whether some organization other than al-Qaeda was involved in the planning.

Also, the Commission ignored the other crucial point, which is that US intelligence agencies closely monitor the stock market, looking for any anomalies that might provide clues about untoward events in the works.⁴¹ Therefore, regardless of who orchestrated the attacks, the US government would have had intelligence suggesting that United and American airliners were to be used for attacks on the World Trade Center.

Bush and the Secret Service: Further evidence of advance knowledge is shown by the behavior of President Bush and his secret service agents during the photo-op at the school in Florida that morning. According to the official story, when Bush was first told that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers, he dismissed the incident as merely a "horrible accident," which meant that they could go ahead with the photo-op.⁴² News of the second strike, however, would have indicated---assuming that the strikes were unexpected---that terrorists were using planes to attack high-value targets. And what could have been a higher-value target than the president of the United States?

His location at the school had been highly publicized. The Secret Service agents should have feared, therefore, that a hijacked airliner might have been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. It is standard procedure for the Secret Service to rush the president to a safe location when there is any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents allowed the president to remain another half hour, even permitting him to deliver an address on television, thereby announcing to the world that he was still at the school.

Would not this behavior be explainable only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president?

The 9/11 Commission, of course, did not ask this question. It was content to report that "[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president] to run out the door."⁴³ Maintaining decorum, in other words, was more important than protecting the president's life. Can anyone seriously believe that highly trained Secret Service agents would act this way in a situation of genuine danger?

Mineta's Report about Cheney: The attack on the Pentagon, as well as the attack on the World Trade Center, was said to be a surprise, even though it occurred over a half hour after the second strike on the Twin Towers. A Pentagon spokesperson, in explaining why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck, claimed that "[t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way."⁴⁴ The 9/11 Commission claimed that there was no warning about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington until 9:36 and hence only "one or two minutes" before the Pentagon was struck at 9:38.⁴⁵

But this claim is contradicted by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony about an episode that occurred in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House. In open testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Mineta gave this account:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President . . . said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"⁴⁶

Mineta said that that this final exchange occurred at about 9:25 or 9:26.⁴⁷ According to Mineta's account, therefore, Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more than 12 minutes before 9:38, when the Pentagon was struck. Assuming that Cheney would not have kept this information from his good friend Donald Rumsfeld, Mineta's testimony contradicts the claim of the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission that there was no advance knowledge, at least not sufficient advance knowledge to have evacuated the Pentagon, which would have saved 125 lives.

This example gives us one of the clearest examples of the fact that the Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission cannot be trusted. Having claimed that there was no knowledge that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon until the last minute or so, it simply omitted Mineta's testimony to the contrary, which had been given in open testimony to the Commission itself, from its final report. Then, to rule out even the possibility that the episode reported by Mineta could have occurred, it claimed that Cheney did not even arrive in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center until almost 10:00 o'clock, hence about 20 minutes after the Pentagon was struck.⁴⁸ But this claim, besides contradicting Mineta's eyewitness testimony that Cheney was already there when Mineta arrived at 9:20, also contradicts all other reports as to when Cheney had arrived there, including a report by Cheney himself.⁴⁹

In light of this information about the put options, the Secret Service, and Mineta's testimony, we can reject as a myth the idea that the attacks were unexpected. However, even if the attacks had been unexpected, should they not have been intercepted? This brings us to:

Myth Number 7: US officials have explained why the hijacked airliners were not intercepted.

Actually, there is a sense in which this statement is true. US officials have explained why the US military did not prevent the attacks. The problem, however, is that they have given three explanations, each of which is contradicted by the others and none of which is a satisfactory explanation. I will explain.

According to standard operating procedures, if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking, the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly (within about a minute), the superior is to ask NORAD---the North American Aerospace Defense Command---to send up, or "scramble," jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest air force base with fighters on alert.

The jet fighters at NORAD's disposal could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from "scramble order" to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can fly over 1800 miles per hour.⁵⁰ Therefore--according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD---after the FAA senses that something is wrong, "it takes about one minute" for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States."⁵¹ These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes."⁵²

If these procedures had been carried out on the morning of 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they could have reached Manhattan, and AA Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon.

Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year. A month after 9/11, the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Do these scrambles regularly result in interceptions? Just a few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that "[NORAD's] fighters routinely intercept aircraft."⁵³ Why did such interceptions not occur on 9/11?

During the first few days, the public was told that no fighter jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38. However, it was also reported that signs of Flight 11's hijacking had been observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within "10 or so" minutes after signs of trouble are observed, in this case 80 or so minutes had elapsed before fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a "stand-down" order had been issued.

Within a few days, however, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had sent up fighters but, because notification from the FAA had been very slow in coming, the fighters arrived too late. On September 18, NORAD made this second story official, embodying it in a timeline, which indicated when NORAD had been notified by the FAA about each airplane and when it had scrambled fighters in response.⁵⁴

Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA notifications had come as late as NORAD's timeline indicated, NORAD's jets would have had time to make the interceptions.55 This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given.

Hoping to overcome this problem, The 9/11 Commission Report provided a third account, according to which, contrary to NORAD's timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flight 175 until after it had struck the south tower or about Flight 77 until after it had struck the Pentagon. But there are serious problems with this third story.

One problem is the very fact that it is the third story. Normally, when a suspect in a criminal investigation keeps changing his story, we get suspicious. Let's say that the police ask Charlie Jones where he was Saturday night. He says he was at the movie theater, but they say, "No, the movie theater has been closed all week." Then Charlie says, "Oh, that's right, I was with my girl friend." But, the police say, "No, we checked with her and she was home with her husband." If at that point Charlie says, "Oh, now I remember, I was home reading my Bible," you are probably not going to believe him. And yet that's what we have here. The military told one story right after 9/11, another story a week later, and a third story through The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004.

A second problem with this third story is that it contradicts several features of the second story, which had served as the official story for almost three years.

For example, NORAD's timeline of September 18, 2001, had indicated that the FAA had notified it about Flight 175 exactly 20 minutes before it hit its target and about Flight 77 some 14 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission maintains that both of these statements were "incorrect"---that, really, there had been no notification about these flights until after they hit their targets. This, it claims, is why the military had failed to intercept them.⁵⁶ But if NORAD's timeline was false, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused. But it is hard to believe that it could have been confused one week after 9/11. So it must have been lying. But if the military's second story was a lie, why should we believe this third one?

Further scepticism about this third story arises from the fact that it is contradicted by considerable evidence. For example, the Commission's claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NORAD as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NORAD: "Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?"--to which NORAD said "yes."⁵⁷

The 9/11 Commission's claims about Flights 175 and 77 are also contradicted by a memo sent to the Commission by Laura Brown of the FAA. Her memo stated that at about 8:50 the FAA had set up a teleconference, in which it started sharing information with the military about all flights. She specifically mentioned Flight 77, indicating that the FAA had been sharing information about it even before the formal notification time of 9:24. Her memo, which is available on the Web,58 was discussed by the 9/11 Commission and read into its record on May 23, 2003.59 But Zelikow's 9/11 Commission Report fails to mention this memo.

Because of these and still more problems, which I have discussed in my book on the 9/11 Commission's report and also in a lecture called "Flights of Fancy",⁶⁰ this third story does not remove the grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued.

There is, moreover, ear-witness testimony for this suspicion. An upper management official at LAX, who needs to remain anonymous, has told me that he overheard members of LAX Security--including officers from the FBI and LAPD---interacting on their walkie-talkies shortly after the attacks. In some cases, he could hear both sides of the conversation. At first, the LAX officials were told that the airplanes that attacked World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been intercepted because the FAA had not notified NORAD about the hijackings. But later, he reports, they were told that NORAD had been notified but did not respond because it had been "ordered to stand down." When LAX security officials asked who had issued that order, they were told that it had come "from the highest level of the White House."⁶¹

Accordingly, the idea that the attacks could not have been prevented is a myth. I turn now to:

Myth Number 8: Official Reports have explained why the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed.

This claim suffers from the same problem as the previous one: We have had three explanations, each of which contradicts the others and none of which is anywhere close to adequate. The first explanation, widely disseminated through television specials, was that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the jet-fuel-fed fires. But this explanation contained many problems, the most obvious of which is that steel does not begin to melt until about 2800 degrees F, while open fires based on hydrocarbons such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel is---cannot under the most ideal circumstances rise above 1700 degrees.

A second explanation, endorsed by The 9/11 Commission Report, is a "pancake" theory, according to which the fires, while not melting the steel, heated it up sufficiently to cause the floors weakened by the airplane strikes to break loose from the steel columns---both those in the core of the building and those around the outside. All the floors above the strike zone hence fell down on the floor below the strike zone, causing it to break free, and this started a chain reaction, so the floors pancaked all the way down. But this explanation also suffered from many problems, the most obvious of which was that it could not explain why the buildings collapsed into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of 47 massive steel columns. If the floors had broken loose from them, these columns would have still been sticking up a thousand feet in the air. The 9/11 Commission Report tried to cover up this problem by claiming that the core of each tower consisted of "a hollow steel shaft."⁶² But those massive steel columns could not be wished away.

The definitive explanation was supposed to be the third one, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, often simply called NIST. The NIST Report claimed that when the floors collapsed, they, rather than breaking free from the columns, pulled on them, causing the perimeter columns to become unstable. This instability then increased the gravity load on the core columns, which had been weakened by tremendously hot fires in the core, which, NIST claims, reached 1832°F, and this combination of factors resulted in "global collapse."⁶³

But, as physicists Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have shown, this account is riddled with problems. One of these is that NIST's claim about tremendously hot fires in the core is completely unsupported by evidence. NIST's own studies found no evidence that any of the core columns had reached temperatures of even 482°F (250°C).⁶⁴ A second problem is that, even if this sequence of events had occurred, NIST provided no explanation as to why it would have produced global---that is, total---collapse. The NIST Report asserts that "column failure" occurred in the core as well as the perimeter columns. But this remains a bare assertion. There is no plausible explanation of why the core columns would have broken, or even buckled, so as to produce global collapse.⁶⁵

And this is only to begin to enumerate the problems in NIST's theory, all of which follow from the fact that it, like the previous two theories, is essentially a fire theory, according to which the buildings were brought down primarily by fire. In the case of the Twin Towers, of course, the impact of the airplanes is said to have played a role. But most experts who support the official theory attribute the collapses primarily to the fires. NIST, for example, says that the main contribution of the airplanes, aside from providing jet fuel, was to dislodge a lot of the fire-proofing from the steel, thereby making it vulnerable to the fires.⁶⁶ But these fire-theories face several formidable problems.

First, the fires in these three buildings were not very hot, very big, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A 1991 fire in Philadelphia burned 18 hours, and a 2004 fire in Caracas burned 17 hours, without causing even a partial collapse.⁶⁷ By contrast, the fires in the north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed, and neither fire, unlike the Philadelphia and Caracas fires, was hot enough to break windows.

Second, total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never---either before or after 9/11---been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with externally produced structural damage. The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized as especially difficult to explain. It was not hit by a plane, so the explanation has to rely on fire alone, and yet, because there was no jet fuel to get a big fire started, this building had fires on only two or three floors, according to several witnesses⁶⁸ and all the photographic evidence.⁶⁹ FEMA admitted that the best explanation it could come up with it had "only a low probability of occurrence."⁷⁰ The 9/11 Commission Report implicitly admitted that it could not explain the collapse of Building 7 by not even mentioning it. The NIST Report, which could not claim that the fire-proofing had gotten knocked off the steel of this building, has yet to offer an explanation as to why it collapsed.

And NIST, like the 9/11 Commission, evidently did not want citizens asking why Building 7 collapsed even though it was not hit by a plane. On its Website, it says that one of its objectives is to determine "why and how World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 collapsed after the initial impact of the aircraft"---thereby implying that building 7, like the Twin Towers, was hit by a plane.⁷¹

In any case, a third problem with the official account of the collapse of these three buildings is that all prior and subsequent total collapses of steel-frame high-rises have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as "controlled demolition." This problem is made even more severe by the fact that the collapses of these three buildings manifested many standard features of the most difficult type of controlled demolition, known as implosion. I will mention seven such features.

First, the collapses began suddenly. Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But as one can see from videos available on the Web,⁷² all three buildings are completely motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse.

Second, if these huge buildings had toppled over, they would have caused enormous death and destruction. But they came straight down. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type of controlled demolition called implosion, which only a few companies in the world can perform.⁷³

Third, these buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors.

Fourth, as mentioned earlier, the collapses were total collapses, resulting in piles of rubble only a few stories high. This means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had to be broken into rather short segments---which is what explosives do.

Fifth, great quantities of molten steel were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover, that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble, molten metal would be dripping from the end.⁷⁴

Sixth, according to many fire fighters, medical workers, journalists, and World Trade Center employees, many explosions went off before and after the collapses. For example, Fire Captain Dennis Tardio, speaking of the south tower, said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom."⁷⁵ Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions."⁷⁶ Thanks to the release in August of 2005 of the oral histories recorded by the Fire Department of New York shortly after 9/11, dozens of testimonies of this type are now available. I have published an essay on them, which will be included---along with an essay on "The Destruction of the World Trade Center," which I am here summarizing---in a forthcoming book on 9/11 and Christian faith.⁷⁷

A seventh feature of controlled implosions is the production of large quantities of dust. In the case of the Twin Towers, virtually everything except the steel---all the concrete, desks, computers---was pulverized into very tiny dust particles.⁷⁸

The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all seven, of these features---at least, as Jim Hoffman and Steven Jones have pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.⁷⁹ But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all these features.

These facts are inconsistent with the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. Foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for the hours needed to plant the explosives. Terrorists working for the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III---the president's brother and cousin, respectively---were principals of the company in charge of security for the World Trade Center.⁸⁰ Al-Qaeda terrorists would also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise.

Another relevant fact is that evidence was destroyed. An examination of the buildings' steel beams and columns could have shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all of the steel was removed before it could be properly examined,⁸¹ then put on ships to Asia to be melted down.82 It is usually a federal offense to remove anything from a crime scene. But here the removal of over 100 tons of steel, the biggest destruction of evidence in history, was carried out under the supervision of federal officials.⁸³

Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived the fire caused by the crash into the north tower and also whatever caused everything else in this building except the steel to be pulverized.⁸⁴ As a story in the Guardian said, "the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism."⁸⁵

To sum up: The idea that US officials have given a satisfactory, or even close to satisfactory, explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings is a myth. And they have implicitly admitted this by refusing to engage in rational debate about it. For example, Michael Newman, a spokesman for NIST, reportedly said during a recent interview that "none of the NIST scientists would participate in any public debate" with scientists who reject their report. When Newman was asked why NIST would avoid public debate if it had confidence in its report, Newman replied: "Because there is no winning in such debates."⁸⁵ In that same interview, Newman had compared people who reject the government's account of the collapses with people who believe in Bigfoot and a flat earth.⁸⁶ And yet he fears that his scientists would not be able to show up these fools in a public debate!

In any case, I come now to the final myth, which is:

Myth Number 9: There is no doubt that Flight 77, under the control of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour, struck the Pentagon.

There are, in fact, many reasons to doubt this claim.

We have, in the first place, reasons to doubt that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was under the control of Hani Hanjour. For one thing, the aircraft, before striking the Pentagon, reportedly executed a 270-degree downward spiral, and yet Hani Hanjour was known as a terrible pilot, who could not safely fly even a small plane.⁸⁷ Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says that it would have been "totally impossible for an amateur who couldn't even fly a Cessna to maneuver the jetliner in such a highly professional manner."⁸⁸

Moreover, as a result of that very difficult maneuver, the Pentagon's west wing was struck, but terrorists brilliant enough to get through the US military's defense system would have known that this was the worst place to strike, for several reasons: The west wing had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been. This wing was still being renovated, so relatively few people were there; a strike anywhere else would have killed thousands of people, rather than 125. And the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east wing. Why would an al-Qaeda pilot have executed a very difficult maneuver to hit the west wing when he could have simply crashed into the roof of the east wing?

A second major problem with the official story: There are reasons to believe that the Pentagon was struck only because officials at the Pentagon wanted it to be struck. For one thing, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes. And yet the US military, which by then clearly knew that hijacked airliners were being used as weapons, has the best radar systems in the world, one of which, it brags, "does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace."⁸⁹ The idea that a large airliner could have slipped through, especially during a time of heightened alert, is absurd.

Also, the Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet.⁹⁰ It is not only within the P-56-A restricted air space that extends 17 miles in all directions from the Washington Monument, but also within P-56-B, the three-mile ultra-restricted zone above the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. The Pentagon is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which has at least three squadrons with fighter jets on alert at all times. (The claim by The 9/11 Commission Report that no fighters were on alert the morning of 9/11 is wholly implausible, as I have explained in my critique of this report.⁹¹) The Pentagon, moreover, is reportedly protected by batteries of surface-to-air missiles, so if any aircraft without a US military transponder were to enter the Pentagon's airspace, it would be shot down.⁹² Even if the aircraft that hit the Pentagon had been Flight 77, therefore, it could have succeeded only because officials in the Pentagon turned off its missiles as well as ordering the fighters from Andrews to stand down.

A third major problem with the official story is that there is considerable evidence that it could not have been Flight 77 because it was not a Boeing 757. For one thing, the strike on the Pentagon, unlike the strikes on the Twin Towers, reportedly did not create a detectable seismic signal.⁹³

Also, according to several witnesses and many people who have studied the available photographs, both the damage and the debris were inconsistent with a strike by a large airliner. That issue, however, is too complex to discuss here, as is the issue of the what should be inferred from the conflicting eyewitness testimony.

Deferring those topics to another time, I will conclude by pointing out that the suspicion that the Pentagon was not struck by a 757, as the government claims, is supported by the fact that evidence was destroyed. Shortly after the strike, government agents picked up debris and carried it off.⁹⁴ Then the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining forensic evidence was literally covered up.⁹⁵

Also, the videos from security cameras on the nearby Citgo gas station and Sheraton Hotel, which would show what really hit the Pentagon, were immediately confiscated by agents of the FBI, and the Department of Justice has to this day refused to release them.⁹⁶ If these videos would prove that the Pentagon was really hit by a 757, most of us would assume, the government would release them.

Conclusion

It would seem, for many reasons, that the official story of 9/11, which has served as a religious Myth in the intervening years, is a myth in the pejorative sense of a story that does not correspond to reality. One sign of a story that is a myth in this sense, I have pointed out, is that it cannot be rationally defended, and the official story has never been publicly defended against informed criticism by any member of NIST, the 9/11 Commission, or the Bush administration. An illustration: After Charlie Sheen had made public his skepticism about the official story, CNN's "Showbiz Tonight" wanted to have a debate, about the points he had raised, between a representative of the government and a representative of 9/11Truth.org. But the producers reportedly could find no member of the government willing to appear on the show. In this unwillingness of the government to appear on an entertainment show to answer questions raised by an actor, we would seem to have the clearest possible sign that the government's story is myth, not reality.

If so, we must demand that the government immediately cease implementing the policies that have been justified by this myth.

When charges were brought against some members of Duke University's lacrosse team in March of 2006, the president of the university immediately cancelled all future games until the truth of the charges could be decided. But surely, as serious as the charges were in that case, the charges against the official story of 9/11 are far more serious, for this story, serving as a national religious Myth, has been used to justify two wars, which have caused many tens of thousands of deaths; to start a more general war on Islam, in which Muslims are considered guilty until proven innocent; to annul and violate civil rights; and to increase our military spending, which was already greater than that of the rest of the world combined, by hundreds of billions of dollars, partly so that weapons can be put into space.

Congress needs to put the implementation of these policies on hold until there is a truly independent investigation, carried out by qualified individuals who are not members of the very circles that, if 9/11 truly was a false flag operation, planned it, carried it out, and then covered it up.

NOTES

1. "Remarks by the President in Photo Opportunity with the National Security Team" (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010912-4.html), quoted in Thierry Meyssan, 9:11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002), 77.

2. "President's Remarks at National Day of Prayer and Remembrance" (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010914-2.html), quoted in Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 76-77.

3. Meyssan, 9/11: The Big Lie, 79.

4. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 150. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York, Norton, 1974), 143.

5. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 11.

6. Ibid., 57-62.

7. George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How American Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987), 220; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 119.

8. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005).

9. This memorandum can be found at the National Security Archive, April 30, 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430). It was revealed to US readers by James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (2001: New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 82-91.

10. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.

11. David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's Song of America," Harper's, October, 2002.

12. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.

13. Ibid., 212.

14. Ibid., 212, 24-25.

15. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), 51.

16. "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times," New York Times, October 12, 2001. Similar sentiments were expressed by Condoleezza Rice and President Bush. On Rice, see Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power," New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1), and Rice, "Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy," April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov); on Bush, see "Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,'" Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001, and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.

17. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), cover letter.

18. Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

19. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], xv. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005), 285-95.

20. Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, in their Preface, say: "The professional staff, headed by Philip Zelikow, . . . conducted the exacting investigative work upon which the Commission has built" (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], xvi-xvii).

21. These statements are quoted in Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding about the War on Terror (New York: Harper-Collins/ReganBooks, 2004), 139-40.

22. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 316, 331.

23. Max Boot, "Think Again: Neocons," Foreign Policy, January/February 2004, 18 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/7592/think_again.html).

24. See Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 180-83.

25. The 9/11 Commission Report, 116.

26. Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida (Eugene: MacCowPress, 2004). These details from Hopsicker's book are summarized in his "Top Ten things You Never Knew about Mohamed Atta," Mad Cow Morning News, June 7, 2004 (www.madcowprod.com/index60.html), and in an interview in the Guerrilla News Forum, June 17, 2004 (www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc4660.html), summarized in NPH, 2nd ed., 243n1.

27. "Terrorist Stag Parties," Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298).

28. The 9/11 Commission Report, 248.

29. The flight manifest for AA 11 that was published by CNN can be seen at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html. The manifests for the other flights can be located by simply changing that part of the URL. The manifest for UA 93, for example, is at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/ua93.victims.html.

30. The 9/11 Commission Report, 19-20.

31. David Bamford, "Hijack ‘Suspect' Alive in Morocco," BBC News, Sept. 22, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm). Several other alleged hijackers were reported to be alive in David Harrison, "Revealed: The Men with Stolen Identities," Telegraph, September 23, 2001 (www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml). At least one of these claims, that involving Ahmed al-Nami, was based on a confusion. The al-Nami contacted by Harrison was 33, whereas the man of that name who was supposedly on Flight 93, which supposedly crashed in Pennsylvania, was only 21. See Christine Lamb, "The Six Sons of Asir," Telegraph, September 15, 2002 (http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/15/wdoss215.xml). But no such explanation seems possible with Waleed al-Shehri, since the FBI photograph is clearly of a still-living man of that name.

32. Francis A. Boyle, "Bush, Jr., September 11th and the Rule of Law," which can be found in The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence: Could The US War On Terrorism Go Nuclear?http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/CrimNukDetSI.html. (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2002) or at

33. "White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You'" (CNN.com, Sept. 21, 2001). Four weeks after the attacks began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?" (Kathy Gannon, AP, "Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect" [http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html]).

34. See "The Fake bin Laden Video" (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html).

35. Richard Labeviere, "CIA Agent Allegedly Met Bin Laden in July," Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001. This story was also reported in Anthony Sampson, "CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July," Guardian, Nov. 1, and Adam Sage, "Ailing bin Laden ‘Treated for Kidney Disease,'" London Times, Nov. 1.

36. Telegraph, Feb. 23, 2002; Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 60.

37. President George W. Bush, Conference, March 13, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html).

38. Philip Shenon, "FBI Gave Secret Files to Terrorist Suspect," New York Times, Sept. 28, 2002, citing Mueller's testimony to Congress on June 18, 2002.

39. San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001.

40. The 9/11 Commission Report, 499 n. 130.

41. Investigative journalist Michael Ruppert, a former detective for the Los Angeles Police Department, has written: "It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades--in real time--as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests" ("Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA's Highest Ranks," From the Wilderness Publications (www.fromthewilderness.com or www.copvcia.com), Oct. 9, 2001. Nafeez Ahmed, besides quoting Ruppert's remark, points out that "UPI reported that the U.S.-sponsored ECHELON intelligence network closely monitors stock trading," citing United Press International, Feb. 13, 2001. See Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, Calif.: Tree of Life Publications, 2002), 120.

42. CNN, Dec. 4, 2001, The Daily Mail, Sept. 8, 2002, and ABC News, Sept. 11, 2002.

43. The 9/11 Commission Report, 39.

44. "Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses," Newsday, September 23, 2001.

45. The 9/11 Commission Report, 34.

46. "Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 23, 2003" (available at www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2003/commissiontestimony052303.htm).

47. Ibid.

48. The 9/11 Commission Report, 40.

49. See the summary of evidence in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 241-44, which includes discussion of the fact that the Commission cited no evidence for its revisionist timeline.

50. Cited in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 140.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 141.

53. See the Calgary Herald, Oct. 13, 2001, and Glen Johnson, "Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks," Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001 [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=print]). At an average of 100 scrambles a year, fighters would have been scrambled about 1000 times in the decade prior to 9/11. One of the many falsehoods in a essay entitled "9/11: Debunking Myths," which was published by Popular Mechanics (March 2005), is its claim that in the decade before 9/11, there had been only one interception, that of golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet. This essay's "senior researcher," 25-year old Benjamin Chertoff, has (on a radio show) tried to reconcile this claim with the fact that fighters are scrambled about 100 times per year by saying that these statements speak only of scrambles, not interceptions. But Chertoff's position would require the claim that only one of the 1000 scrambles in that period resulted in interceptions---that the other 999 fighters were called back before they actually made the interception. Besides being highly improbable, this interpretation contradicts Major Snyder's statement that interceptions are carried out routinely.

54. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 141-43.

55. Ibid., 139-48.

56. Ibid., 192.

57. Ibid., 176.

58. Laura Brown, "FAA Communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001," available at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2004081200421797.

59. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003 (http://www.911commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm). Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who read the memo into the record, reported that he had been told that it had been authored by two "high level individuals at FAA, Mr. Asmus and Ms. Schuessler." However, I was told by Laura Brown during a telephone conversation on August 15, 2004, that she had written the memo.

60. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 155-226; "Flights of Fancy: The 9/11 Commission's Incredible Tales of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93," Global Outlook, 12 (Fall-Winter 2006), and in Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

61. "My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11," by an Upper Management LAX Official. Although this official needs to remain anonymous, he has said that he would be willing to take a polygraph test if his anonymity could be protected.

62. The 9/11 Commission Report, 541 note 1.

63. Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (Draft), June, 2005, usually called the NIST Report, 28, 143.

64. And, as Jim Hoffman says, NIST's claim about these tremendously hot fires in the core is especially absurd given the fact that the core "had very little fuel; was far from any source of fresh air; had huge steel columns to wick away the heat; [and] does not show evidence of fires in any of the photographs or videos." All the evidence, in other words, suggests that none of the core columns would have reached the temperatures of some of the perimeter columns ("Building a Better Mirage: NIST's 3-Year $20,000,000 Cover-Up of the Crime of the Century," 911 Research, Dec. 8, 2005 (http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html).

65. See Hoffman, ibid., and Stephen E. Jones, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006); also available at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html.

66. The NIST Report (xliii and 171) says: "the towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation (fireproofing) and the subsequent multifloor fires."

67. "High-Rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," FEMA (http://usfa.fema.gov/fire-service/techreports/tr049.shtm); "Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela's Tallest Building" (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html).

68. Chief Thomas McCarthy of the FDNY said that while the firefighters "were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down," there was "fire on three separate floors" (Oral History of Thomas McCarthy, 10-11). Emergency medical technician Decosta Wright said: "I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out?" (Oral History of Decosta Wright, 11). These quotations are from the 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department at the end of 2001 but released to the public (after a court battle) only in August 2005, at which time they were made available on a New York Times website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html).

69. A photograph taken by Terry Schmidt can be seen on page 63 of Eric Hufschmid's Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002) or on Schmidt's website (http://www.nycwireless.net/Images/wtc2/). According to Schmidt, this photo was taken between 3:09 and 3:16 PM, hence only a little over two hours before Building 7 collapsed. It shows that on the north side of the building, fires were visible only on floors 7 and 12. Therefore, if there were more fires on the south side, which faced the Twin Towers, they were not big enough to be seen from the north side.

70. FEMA Report #403, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002 (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm), Ch. 5, Sect. 6.2, "Probable Collapse Sequence."

71. Reported in Ed Haas, "Government spokesman says, ‘I Don't Understand the Public's Fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven,'" Muckraker Report, March 21, 200 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id235.html), referring to NIST's "Investigation of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center Disaster" (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs.htm), as accessed on March 20, 2006.

72. See Jim Hoffman's website (http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html) and Jeff King's website (http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.king2/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html), especially "The World Trade Center Collapse: How Strong is the Evidence for a Controlled Demolition?"

73. Implosion World (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html).

74. Professor Allison Geyh of Johns Hopkins, who was part of a team of public health investigators who visited the site shortly after 9/11, wrote: "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel," Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, Late Fall, 2001. Dr. Keith Eaton, who somewhat later toured the site with an engineer, said that he was shown slides of "molten metal, which was still red hot weeks after the event" (The Structural Engineer, Sept. 3, 2002: 6). On the dripping steel, see Trudy Walsh, "Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks," Government Computer News, 21/27a, Sept 11, 2002 (http://www.gcn.com/21_27a/news/19930-1.html) and Jennifer Lin, "Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero," Knight Ridder, May 29, 2002 (http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/attacks/4522011.htm).

75. Quoted in Dennis Smith, Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center (New York: Penguin, 2002), 18.

76. Oral History of Richard Banaciski, 3-4. See next note.

"Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories," in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11. It is also available at 911Truth.org (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192). The oral histories of 9/11 recorded by the Fire Department of New York are available at a NYT website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html).

78. Jim Hoffman, "The North Tower's Dust Cloud: Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center," Version 3, 9-11 Research.wtc7.net, Oct. 16, 2003 (http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volume.html). The available evidence, Hoffman says, suggests that the dust particles were very small indeed---on the order of 10 microns. Also Colonel John O'Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said: "At the World Trade Center sites, it seemed like everything was pulverized" ("The World Trade Center: Rise and Fall of an American Icon," The History Channel, September 8, 2002).

79. Jones, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" See also David Ray Griffin, "The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True," in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, March, 2006), and in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11. This essay is also available at 911Review.com, December 9, 2005 [http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html]). For Hoffman's analyses, see http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html. For videos of the WTC collapses, see in particular "9/11/01 WTC Videos" (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/index.html).

80. See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 31-32.

81. The official investigators found that they had less authority than the clean-up crews, a fact that led the Science Committee of the House of Representatives to report that "the lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for examination before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence" (see the report at http://www.house.gov/science/hot/wtc/charter.htm).

82. "Baosteel Will Recycle World Trade Center Debris," Eastday.com, January 24, 2002 (http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Jan/25776.htm).

83. This removal was, moreover, carried out with the utmost care. Each truck was equipped with a Vehicle Location Device, connected to GPS. "The software recorded every trip and location, sending out alerts if the vehicle traveled off course, arrived late at its destination, or deviated from expectations in any other way" (Jacqueline Emigh, "GPS on the Job in Massive World Trade Center Clean-Up," July 1, 2002 [http://securitysolutions.com/ar/security_gps_job_massive]).

84. Another problem with this story is that there were at least two versions of it. One said that the passport was found in the rubble the day after 9/11, the other that it was found minutes after the attack (see Morgan and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 68).

85. Anne Karpf, "Uncle Sam's Lucky Finds," Guardian, March 19, 2002 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html).

86. Haas, "Government spokesman says, ‘I Don't Understand the Public's Fascination with World Trade Center Building Seven.'"

87. New York Times, May 4, 2002, and CBS News, May 10, 2002, quoted under "Was Hani Hanjour Even on Flight 77 and Could He Have Really Flown It to Its Doom?" in Killtown's "Did Flight 77 Really Crash into the Pentagon?" (thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight77), Oct. 19, 2003. Even The 9/11 Report acknowledge that Hanjour was "a terrible pilot" in some passages (225-26, 242, 520n56).

88. Greg Szymanski, "Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job," Lewis News, Sunday, January 8, 2006 [http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=106623]).

89. "PAVE PAWS, Watching North America's Skies, 24 Hours a Day" (www.pavepaws.org).

90. Besides the fact that this is what we would expect, this is evidently what Pentagon officials tell their employees. April Gallop, who was working in the Pentagon on 9/11, has reportedly said that during her classified tour when she was first assigned to the Pentagon, she was told that it was the best-defended building in the world (John Judge, "Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11," Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html]).

91. See the evidence in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 159-64.

92. Thierry Meyssan, who has referred to these anti-missile batteries (Pentagate [London: Carnot, 2002], 112, 116), has said with regard to his source of information: "The presence of these anti-missile batteries was testified to me by French officers to whom they were shown during an official visit to the Pentagon. This was later confirmed to me by a Saudi officer."

John Judge, co-founder of 9-11 Citizens Watch, has reported that he learned about the missiles from his father, John Joseph Judge, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran who worked at the Pentagon after the war until his death in 1965. Young John Judge, whose mother also worked at the Pentagon, spent much time there. In the late 1950s, he says, his father pointed out the location of an air-to-surface missile.

Judge also reports that in 1998, he was given a tour of the Pentagon by Colonel Robinson, the long-time director of security. While they were outside talking about threats from terrorists, Robinson pointed to the roof and said, "we have cameras and radar up there to make sure they don't try to run a plane into the building." Since cameras and radars by themselves would not stop anything, Judge concluded, Robinson's statement implicitly referred to anti-aircraft missiles (John Judge, "Pentagon and P-56 Preparations and Defenses and the Stand-Down on 9/11," Ratville Times, Jan. 11, 2006 [www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html].

The Pentagon, to be sure, has denied that it had any anti-aircraft batteries at that time, saying that they had thought them "too costly and too dangerous to surrounding residential areas" (Paul Sperry, "Why the Pentagon Was So Vulnerable," WorldNetDaily, Sept. 11, 2001 [http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24426]). But can anyone believe that Pentagon officials would have let such considerations prevent them from protecting themselves?

93. Won-Young Kim and Gerald R. Baum, "Seismic Observations during September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack" (http://www.mgs.md.gov/esic/publications/download/911pentagon.pdf).

94. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was working at the Pentagon that morning, reports that "any physical remains of the aircraft that hit the Pentagon were quickly carted away to some unknown location, so we have no physical evidence that the aircraft really was Flight 77 or even a Boeing 757" ("Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory," in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006). Photographic evidence of this removal can be seen on Eric Hufschmid's video, "Painful Deceptions" (available at www.EricHufschmid.Net).

95. A photograph showing this literal cover-up can be seen in Ralph Omholt, "9-11 and the Impossible: Part One of an Online Journal of 9-11" (http://www.physics911.net/omholt.htm).

96. On the confiscation of the film from the Citgo gas station and the Sheraton Hotel, respectively, see Bill McKelway "Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon," Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec. 11, 2001 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html), and Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, "Inside the Ring," Washington Times, Sept. 21, 2001. Scott Bingham, who has tried to get videos of the Pentagon strike released under the Freedom of Information Act, has his lawsuit and the official response posted on his website (http://www.flight77.info). See also "Government Responds to Flight 77 FOAI Request," 911Truth.org, Aug. 2005 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050824131004151).

Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories

2006-03-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

March 28,2006

"Already there is near-consensus as to the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center."--Shankar Nair, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2001

Turn on C-Span, or "Meet The Press," or any other media program presenting federal officials. Whatever the issue, it always comes back to the same thing. Our government really has nothing else to offer us but protection from another 9/11. It uses this painful story to cut public services, eliminate our basic rights, and plunder the national coffers. But for many of us, it is not entirely clear from whom we most need protection.¹ As our debt explodes and our freedoms diminish, it would be wise to maintain focus on the origins of our War on Terror. No matter where this war leads us, we will need to keep the beginning in mind if we ever hope to see an end.

The Point of Origin: The Collapse of the WTC

Many have found that the 9/11 Commission not only failed to help us understand what happened; it also omitted or distorted most of the facts.² But if we really want to zero in on the exact turning point around which we plunged into chaos, we need to focus in particular on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. This is where our hearts were wrenched and our minds were made ready for never-ending war, torture, and apparently the end of everything that was American. If we are ever to emerge from this insanity, we need to know how three tall buildings collapsed due to fire, all on the same day, when no such thing has ever happened before.

The Twin Towers and Why They Fell
It would help to begin with an accurate description of the WTC towers in terms of quality of design and construction. In July of 1971, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) presented a national award judging the buildings to be "the engineering project that demonstrates the greatest engineering skills and represents the greatest contribution to engineering progress and mankind."³ Others noted that "the World Trade Center towers would have an inherent capacity to resist unforeseen calamities." This capacity stemmed from the use of special high-strength steels. In particular, the perimeter columns were designed with tremendous reserve strength whereby "live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs."⁴

One would expect that any explanation for the destruction of such buildings would need to be very solid as well. Four years after 9/11, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally did give us their version of "why and how" two of the buildings collapsed, but its explanation may be even less effective than the 9/11 Commission report.⁵ Now that the official story has been given, however, we can see just how weak and ill-defined our basis for this War on Terror has been all along. Additionally, we can track the evolution of official comments about collapse and see who was involved.

Selling the Official Story: Some Key Players

Shankar Nair, whose statement quoted above is quite telling, was one of those "experts" on whom the government depended to support what turned out to be an ever-changing, but always flimsy, story. Many of the scientists involved in the investigation were asked to examine ancillary issues, like escape routes and other emergency response factors. But those few who attempted to explain what really needed explaining, the unique events of fire-induced collapse, appear to have engaged in what can only be called anti-science. That is, they started with their conclusions and worked backward to some "leading hypotheses."
Not surprisingly, many of the contractors who contributed to the NIST investigation, like the company for which Nair works, just happen to depend on good relationships with the government in order to earn their living. What may be a surprise is just how lucrative these relationships can be. For example, Nair's company, Teng & Associates, boasts of Indefinite Quantity Contracts, long-term relationships with federal government agencies, and federal projects worth in excess of $40 million.⁶

Others who worked so hard to maintain the official story included Gene Corley, a concrete construction expert listed by the National Directory of Expert Witnesses as a source for litigation testimony.⁷ Corley was more than just a witness, however. He had led the Oklahoma City bombing investigation and then was asked to lead the initial ASCE investigation into the WTC disaster. Perhaps someone else, with less experience in bombings and more experience in fires, would have been a better choice. But without authority to save samples or even obtain blueprints, the ASCE investigation was ineffective anyway. Corley himself ended up being a very versatile resource, however, providing testimony supporting the pre-determined conclusions many times, and even posing as a reporter during an NIST media session.⁸

There was really no need for phony media coverage. As with The 9/11 Commission Report and the lead-up to the Iraq War, the major media simply parroted any explanations, or non-explanations, given in support of the official story. One example is from a television program called "The Anatomy of September 11th," which aired on the History Channel. Corley took the lead on this one as well, but James Glanz, a New York Times reporter, was also interviewed and helped to spread what is probably the worst excuse for collapse given. He told us that the fires heated the steel columns so much (the video suggested 2500 F) that they were turned into "licorice." Other self-proclaimed experts have been heard promoting similar theories.⁹ They will probably come to regret it.

This is because the results of physical tests performed by NIST's own Frank Gayle proved this theory to be a ridiculous exaggeration, as some people already knew. The temperatures seen by the few steel samples saved, only about 500 F, were far too low to soften, let alone melt, even un-fireproofed steel. Of course that result could have been calculated, knowing that 4,000 gallons of jet fuel¹⁰ ---not 24,000 gallons or 10,000 gallons, as some reports have claimed---were sprayed into an open-air environment over several floors, each comprised of more than 1,000 metric tons of concrete and steel.

Another expert who served on NIST's advisory committee was Charles Thornton, of the engineering firm Thornton and Tomasetti. Thornton's partner, Richard Tomasetti, was reported to be behind the unprecedented and widely criticized decision to destroy most of the steel evidence.¹¹ Early on Thornton said: "Karl, we all know what caused the collapse." He was talking to Karl Koch, whose company erected the WTC steel. Koch attempted to clarify as follows. "I could see it in my mind's eye: The fire burned until the steel was weakened and the floors above collapsed, starting a chain reaction of gravity, floor falling upon floor upon floor, clunk – clunk – clunk, the load gaining weight and momentum by the nanosecond, unstoppable. Once enough floors collapsed, the exterior walls and the core columns were no longer laterally supported and folded in."¹² This is a description of what was called the Pancake Theory, the most widely accepted version of what happened.

The Pancake Theory was promoted by an influential 2002 NOVA video called "Why the Towers Fell," in which Corley (yet again) and Thornton were the primary commentators. Both of them talked about the floors collapsing, and Thornton described how the perimeter columns buckled outward, not inward as Koch had described. The video made a number of false claims, including exaggeration of the temperatures (2000 F), remarks about melting steel, and the incredible statement that two-thirds of the columns in WTC1 (the North Tower) were completely severed. NIST's report now indicates that only about 14% of the columns in WTC1 were severed, and in some photos we can count most of these for ourselves.¹³

NIST and Underwriters Laboratories

In August 2004, Underwriters Laboratories evaluated the Pancake Theory by testing models of the floor assemblies used in the WTC buildings. Despite all the previous expert testimony, the floor models did not collapse. NIST reported this in its October 2004 update, in a table of results that clearly showed that the floors did not fail and that, therefore, pancaking was not possible.¹⁴¹⁵ NIST more succinctly stated this again in its June 2005 draft report, saying: "The results established that this type of assembly was capable of sustaining a large gravity load, without collapsing, for a substantial period of time relative to the duration of the fires in any given location on September 11th."

At the time of the floor tests, I worked for Underwriters Laboratories (UL). I was very interested in the progress of these tests, having already asked some sensitive questions. My interest began when UL's CEO, Loring Knoblauch, a very experienced executive with a law degree from Harvard, surprised us at the company's South Bend location, just a few weeks after 9/11, by saying that UL had certified the steel used in the WTC buildings. Knoblauch told us that we should all be proud that the buildings had stood for so long under such intense conditions. In retrospect it is clear that all of us, including Knoblauch, were ignorant of many important facts surrounding 9/11 and did not, therefore, see his statements as particularly important.

Over the next two years, however, I learned more about the issues, like the unprecedented destruction of the steel evidence and the fact that no tall steel-frame buildings have ever collapsed due to fire. And I saw video of the owner of the buildings, stating publicly that he and the fire department made the decision to "pull"---that is, to demolish---WTC7 that day,¹⁶ even though demolition requires many weeks of planning and preparation. Perhaps most compelling for me were the words of a genuine expert on the WTC. This was John Skilling, the structural engineer responsible for designing the towers.¹⁷ (The NOVA video, incidentally, gave this credit to Leslie Robertson. But Robertson, who never claimed to have originated the design, was only a junior member of the firm [Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson], and Skilling was known at the time to be the engineer in charge.) In 1993, five years before his death, Skilling said that he had performed an analysis on jet plane crashes and the ensuing fires and that "the building structure would still be there."¹⁸

By 2003, all of this information was available to anyone who cared. The details were, without a doubt, difficult to reconcile with testimony from officials, reporters, and scientists who were supporting the official story. But in November of that year, I felt that answers from UL were needed. If, as our CEO had suggested, our company had tested samples of steel components and listed the results in the UL Fire Resistance Directory almost forty years ago, Mr. Skilling would have depended on these results to ensure that the buildings were sufficiently fire resistant. So I sent a formal written message to our chief executive, outlining my thoughts and asking what he was doing to protect our reputation.

Knoblauch's written response contained several points. He wrote: "We test to the code requirements, and the steel clearly met those requirements and exceeded them." He pointed to the NYC code used at the time of the WTC construction, which required fire resistance times of 3 hours for building columns, and 2 hours for floors. From the start, his answers were not helping to explain fire-induced collapse in 56 minutes (the time it took WTC2, the South Tower, to come down). But he did give a better explanation of UL's involvement in testing the WTC steel, even talking about the quality of the sample and how well it did. "We tested the steel with all the required fireproofing on," he wrote, "and it did beautifully."¹⁹

This response was copied to several UL executives, including Tom Chapin, the manager of UL's Fire Protection division. Chapin reminded me that UL was the "leader in fire research testing," but he clearly did not want to make any commitments on the issue. He talked about the floor assemblies, how these had not been UL tested, and he made the misleading claim that UL does not certify structural steel. But even an introductory textbook lists UL as one of the few important organizations supporting codes and specifications because they "produce a Fire Resistance Index with hourly ratings for beams, columns, floors, roofs, walls and partitions tested in accordance with ASTM Standard E119."²⁰ He went on to clarify that UL tests assemblies of which steel is a component. This is a bit like saying "we don't crash test the car door, we crash test the whole car." In any case, Chapin suggested that we be patient and wait for the report from NIST, because the investigation into the "collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2, and 7" was an ongoing process and that "UL is right in the middle of these activities."²¹

For the most part, I did wait, although I shared my concerns with Chapin again at UL's Leadership Summit in January 2004. I encouraged him to ask for a company news release on our position, but this did not happen and I never heard from him again. By the time UL tested the floor assembly models in August of that year, I had been promoted to the top management job in my division, Environmental Health Laboratories, overseeing all company functions. Two months later, NIST released an official update that included the floor test results, as well as Frank Gayle's results, in which steel temperatures were predicted. These results clearly invalidated the major theories of collapse, because pancaking could not occur without floor collapse and steel does not turn to licorice at the temperatures discussed.

After reviewing this update, I sent a letter directly to Dr. Gayle at NIST. In this letter, I referred to my experiences at UL and asked for more information on the WTC investigation and NIST's soon-to-be-published conclusions. NIST had planned at the time to release its final report in December, with time allowed for public comment. After I allowed my letter to become public,²² this date was moved to January 2005, and then nothing was heard from NIST for several months.

Other than UL's involvement in testing the steel components, the facts I stated had all been reported publicly, but when I put them together plainly, they were considered outrageous. Five days after I sent my letter, I was fired by UL for doing so. The company made a few brief statements in an attempt to discredit me, then quickly began to make it clear that its relationship with the government, perhaps due to its tax-exempt status, was more important than its commitment to public safety.

For example, in spite of Tom Chapin's previous statements, UL suggested that it had played only a "limited" role in the investigation. Despite what our CEO, Loring Knoblauch, had written and copied to several executives, UL said there was "no evidence" that any firm had tested the steel used in the WTC buildings.²³ In doing so, UL implied that its CEO not only had fabricated this story about testing the WTC steel but had also spoken and written about it for several years without anyone in the company correcting him. As I see it, the only other option was that the company claiming to be our "Public Safety Guardian" was lying to us about the most important safety issue of our lives.

My experiences give a taste for the delicate nature of our critical turning point. But to keep our focus, we should examine what NIST did with the results of its physical tests, which had failed to support its conclusions. Did NIST perform more tests, at least to prove its key argument that much of the fireproofing on the steel in the Twin Towers popped off due to the impact of the airliners? No, it did not. Instead, NIST put together a black box computer model that would spit out the right answers. This black box model was driven by initial parameters that could be tweaked. When the parameters that had initially been considered "realistic" did not generate results that "compared to observed events," NIST scientists performed their final analysis using another set of parameters they called "more severe."²⁴ When they were finished, their model produced video graphics that would enable anyone to see the buildings collapse without having to follow a train of logic to get there.

Tom Chapin of UL was one of those doomed to make public comments in support of NIST's final report. His comments were innocuous enough but he did hint at something of value. "The effect of scale of test assemblies...," Chapin said, "requires more investigation."²⁵ This may be the closest thing to a straightforward statement that we will ever see from UL on the matter. But it seems clear enough that results showing zero floor collapse, when scaled-up from the floor panels to a few floors, would still result in zero floor collapse. Perhaps a more direct version of Chapin's comment might be that test results negating predetermined conclusions should not be used to prove them.

Other than the video, NIST left us with only some vague statements about a few sagging floors suddenly destroying two hundred super-strong perimeter columns and forty core columns. But since sagging floors do not weigh more than non-sagging floors, it is difficult to see how this might occur, especially so uniformly. NIST claimed the perimeter columns saw increased loads of between 0 and 25% due to the damage, but it never reconciled this with the original claim that these columns could resist 2000% increases in live load. And the outward-buckling theory, suggested by Thornton, was changed again to inward buckling---apparently the forces involved were never well defined. Additionally, NIST suggested that the documents that would support testing of the steel components, along with documents containing Skilling's jet-fuel-fire analysis, could not be found.²⁶

Ultimately, NIST failed to give any explanation for the dynamics of the towers as they fell, about how and why they dropped like rocks in free-fall. For both buildings, NIST simply stated that "once the upper building section began to move downwards . . ., global collapse ensued," as if just saying so was enough.²⁷ As for WTC7, NIST as of yet has not elaborated on its "working collapse hypothesis," which was vaguely presented in June 2004.²⁸ The bottom line is that, after more than four years, it is still impossible for the government even to begin to explain the primary events that drive this War on Terrorism.

So much has been sacrificed, and so much has been invested in this story, that we all have a need for supportive answers. But when we look for those answers, all our "mind's eye" can see is this smoky black box, where scientific results are reversed to support politically correct, pre-determined conclusions. That critical point of divergence, where our lives were turned upside down and all logic followed, has always been too painful to imagine. But now, without expert accounts of pancaking floors and licorice steel, it cannot be imagined at all.

Some of us remain hopeful that we can still achieve a critical mass awareness of the need for truth, and in doing so pull the support out from under what John McMurtry calls "the 9/11 Wars."29 But if we cannot, even as the hopes for peace fade and the number of 9/11 families continues to grow, we should remember how we got this story and how it was propped up despite all the evidence against it. Because whatever happens next, after the smoke clears, our children may have a need to know.

NOTES

[1] Richard Heinberg, "Götterdämmerung," Museletter, No.144, March 2004 (http://www.museletter.com/archive/144.html).

[2] David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005). Griffin summarizes the omissions and distortions in "The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie," 911 Visibility Project, May 22, 2005 (http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2005-05-22-571pglie.php).

[3] Angus K. Gillespie, Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1999), 117.

[4] "How Columns Will Be Designed for 110-Story Buildings," Engineering News-Record, April 2, 1964: 48-49.

[5] Jim Hoffman, "Building a Better Mirage: NIST's 3-Year $20,000,000 Cover-Up of the Crime of the Century," 911Research.wtc7.net, December 8, 2005 (http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html).

[6] Website for Teng & Associates (http://www.teng.com/teng2k3/mainframe.asp).

[7] Website for National Directory of Expert Witnesses (http://national-experts.com/members2/witness.asp?d_memnum=07572&d_lnum=2).

[8] Archived webcast video of NIST press briefing, NIST News Release website, June 23, 2005 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_briefing_june2305.htm), 01:15:10.

[9] Sheila Barter, "How the World Trade Center Fell," BBC News, September 13, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1540044.stm).

[10] Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), "World Trade Center Building Performance Study," May 2005, Chapter 2.

[11] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center (New York: Times Books, 2003), 330.

[12] Karl Koch III with Richard Firstman, Men of Steel: The Story of the Family that Built the World Trade Center (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), 365.

[13] Eric Hufschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002), 27.

[14] Table of results from Underwriters Laboratories August 2004 floor model tests, as presented by NIST in October 2004 (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/P6StandardFireTestsforWeb.pdf), 25.

[15] NIST, Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers(Draft) (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1draft.pdf), 195.

[16] Silverstein's statement is contained in "America Rebuilds," PBS documentary, 2002 (www.pbs.org/americarebuilds). It can be viewed (www.infowars.com/Video/911/wtc7_pbs.WMV) or heard on audio file (http://VestigialConscience.com/PullIt.mp3).

[17] "Structures Can Be Beautiful, World's Tallest Buildings Pose Esthetic and Structural Challenge to John Skilling," Engineering News-Record, April 2, 1964: 124.

[18] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, 138.

[19] Underwriters Laboratories email correspondence, December 1, 2003.

[20] Samuel H. Marcus, Basics of Structural Steel (Reston, Va.: Reston Publishing 1977), 20.

[21] Underwriters Laboratories email correspondence, December 1, 2003.

[22] Kevin Ryan, "The Collapse of the WTC," 911 Visibility Project, November 11, 2004 (http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-11-11-ryan.php).

[23] John Dobberstein, "Area Man Stirs Debate on WTC Collapse," South Bend Tribune, November 22, 2004 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041124095100856).

[24] NIST, Final Report, 196.

[25] Comments from Underwriters Laboratories on NIST WTC report, NIST website (http://wtc.nist.gov/comments/ULI_Ganesh_Rao_8-5-05.pdf).

[26] Archived webcast video of NIST press briefing, NIST News Release website, June 23, 2005 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_briefing_june2305.htm), 01:18:50.

[27] NIST, Final Report, 197.

[28] NIST presentation on WTC7 collapse investigation, NIST website (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/June2004WTC7StructuralFire&CollapseAnalysisPrint.pdf).

[29] John McMurtry, "9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes." In David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006). My present essay will also appear in this volume.

Sept. 11 left us with a host of questions

2006-03-29T23:55:00.000-08:00

Here is your must-read for the month. Here is your oh-my-God-I'm-sending-this-piece-to-
every-smart-person-I-know hunk of outstanding, distressing, disquieting media bliss.

Here it is: an absolutely exceptional inside scoop on the white-hot world of Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, writ large and smart by Mark Jacobson at New York magazine, and it's mandatory reading for anyone and everyone who's ever entertained the nagging thought that something -- or rather, far more than one something -- is deeply wrong with the official line on Sept. 11. (To find the article, go to nymag.com/news and scroll down to "most popular recent stories.")

See, it is very likely that you already know that Sept. 11 will go down in the conspiracy history books as a far more sinister affair than, say, the murky swirl of the Kennedy assassination. You probably already know that much of what exactly happened on Sept. 11 remains deeply unsettling and largely unsolved -- or, to put it another way, if you don't know all of this and if you fully and blithely accept the official Sept. 11 story, well, you haven't been paying close enough attention.

But on this, the third anniversary of the launch of Bush's invasion of Iraq, what you might not know, what gets so easily forgotten in the mists of time and via the endless repetition of the orthodox Sept. 11 tale, is the staggering array of unanswered questions about just about every single aspect of Sept. 11 -- the planes, the WTC towers, the Pentagon, the fires, the passengers and the cell phone calls and the firefighters and, well, just about everything. It is, when you look closely, all merely a matter of how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go.

Verily, Jacobson, in his piece, encounters crackpots and fringe nutballs and those who think Sept. 11 was connected to aliens and electromagnetic fields and the Illuminati. It can, unfortunately, get a little crazy. But there is also a very smart, grounded, intelligent and surprisingly large faction -- which includes eyewitnesses, Sept. 11 widows, former generals, pilots, professors, engineers, WTC maintenance workers and many, many more -- who point to a rather shocking pile of evidence that says there is simply no way 19 fanatics with box cutters sent by some bearded lunatic in a cave could have pulled off the most perfectly orchestrated air attack of the century. Not without serious help, anyway.

Whose help? This, of course, is the biggest question of all, and many well-researched theories go a surprisingly long way toward answering it.

You have to sift and sort. There are disturbing questions about collapse speeds and controlled demolitions and why the towers fell when the all-steel infrastructure was designed to easily withstand the temperatures of any sort of fire, even burning jet fuel. There are questions of the mysterious, media-documented blasts deep in the WTC towers that took place after the planes hit. There are questions of why there was such a short-selling spree on shares of American Airlines and United Air Lines the day before the attack, huge doubts about the failures of NORAD and the FAA, the bizarre case of the missing plane in the Pentagon crash, and also the downing of Flight 93 where, according to the coroner, no blood or major plane wreckage was actually found. There is, ultimately, the stunning failure of the entire multitrillion-dollar American air-defense system. Just for starters.

There is also the very big question of what happened to 7 WTC, the only building not hit by anything at all, but which collapsed anyway, in a perfect controlled-demolition sort of way, for no reason anyone can sufficiently explain. But which just so happened to contain vital offices for the IRS, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and more.

Perhaps Jacobson's article will be insufficient for you. Perhaps you have heard much of it before, or you're more of the visceral type and need to actually see the proofs in order to delve deeper, have them laid out like gruesome body parts in a mesmerizing autopsy. Fair enough.

For you, we have the surprisingly compelling indie documentary "9/11 Loose Change" (Google it), freely available on the Internet and produced by three young, astute and strong-willed dudes who managed to cobble together a truly astounding array of proofs and interviews and evidence, a full 1 hour and 20 minutes' worth of mesmerizing footage you will not be able to easily forget.

Or maybe you should peruse one of the countless Sept. 11 conspiracy sites, many of which link to relevant video and one of which -- scholarsfor911truth.org -- claims to be "a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11." Start there.

Now, it's true that some of the more specious conspiracy claims have been proved false. Some of the more radical "evidence" gathered by theorists is quite suspect and easily placed in the category of no-way-in-hell. This is valid. This is as it should be. You have to chew through a lot of skin and gristle to get to the real meat.

But oh the meat. The overwhelming quantity, the bloody, deadly stench of it. Fact is, it is quite impossible to watch the entire "Loose Change" documentary and not come away just a little shaken, a little awed by the sheer number of perversely interrelated facts and aberrant coincidences-that-aren't-coincidences, shaking your head at how it all seems to irrefutably prove there is far, far more to the Sept. 11 tragedy than just crazy Osama and his band of zealots, as you begin to sink into a sighing morass of rage and frustration and suspicion and mistrust. You almost can't help it.

Of course, there is another option. There is another way out. You may simply ignore it all, scoff and roll your eyes and shrug it all off because it's just too bleak and distasteful to entertain the idea that the dark Sept. 11 thread winds all the way through the NSA and the FBI and the White House and the Project for the New American Century and Dick Cheney's mangled soul and God only knows where else.

But then again, no. You have to look. You have to try. Knowledge is power, and while the truth may be spurious and slippery and messy and deep, the pursuit of it is just about the only thing we have left. Give that up, and all that's left is spiritual numbness, emotional stasis and death. So what are you waiting for?

Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.

Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on sfgate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.

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From the Sander Hicks' blog... CNN Cancelled

2006-03-28T15:10:00.000-08:00

My appearance on CNN tonight has been cancelled.

CNN claims they could not find anyone else to argue “the other side.”

Also, the producer said words to the effect of “people are asking me ‘why are you bringing this up’.”

The show is cancelled, or maybe post-poned….Does anyone know someone in the US Gov still willing to defend the official story? CNN desperately wants to talk to you.

Why do I have a feeling that that is not the real issue?

I feel like a heavy curtain just dropped, and I’m on the other side.

80 Cameras Watch Tiny Alaska Town

2006-03-28T14:35:00.000-08:00

(CBS/AP) Dillingham is a quiet fishing village in southwest Alaska that's home to 2,400 people and not a single streetlight.

What it does have, however, is 80 surveillance cameras focused on the port and the town, courtesy of a $202,000 Homeland Security federal grant.

Dillingham Police Chief Richard Thompson said the cameras could stop terrorism in Southwest Alaska someday. More to the point, they may also put an end to the drinking, deaths and drug deals that go down at the port every summer when the town fills up with commercial fishermen.

If the system prevents even one death, Thompson said, “I don’t care what’s said about me.”

But some people are outraged. The only thing being captured by the cameras, they said, are their civil liberties.

“I think it’s an invasion of privacy,” said Freeman Roberts, a barge captain. “The government shouldn’t be in the business of looking at people.”

A quiet city like Dillingham doesn’t need one camera for every 30 people, said Tim Smeekins.

“There are no jihadist sockeyes swimming into our bay, no militant moose, no bomb-bearing belugas,” he said.

Thompson said the public opposition in Dillingham comes from a misunderstanding. The cameras, all of which won’t be fully operational until summer, take still pictures every 15 minutes. They have no audio. The images will be stored only if there is a crime, he said.

The chief said that if weapons are ever transported through Dillingham on large freighters traveling to Anchorage or Seattle, “it might someday be useful to know which ship dropped that cargo off or picked it up.”

The cameras are mostly aimed at the port, the chief said. About three dozen cameras watch from poles there. Another seven gaze at the harbor from City Hall. Some with dual lenses, critics say, resemble storm trooper helmets from Star Wars.

Donna Shade, owner of the Cafe Hillside in Dillingham, said she’s sure Thompson has good intentions, but argues the surveillance cuts into the freedom that defines rural Alaska.

“What happens is all of a sudden a community becomes untrustworthy, and that I find troubling,” she said.

Smeekins and other critics are circulating a petition demanding the cameras come down. More than 200 area residents have signed, he said. Critics hope to put the question on the local ballot this fall.

Globalism and the New World Order: The Emerging Global Village

2006-03-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

Former President George Herbert Walker Bush was the first national figure to publicly use the term "New World Order." Since those days in the late 1980's, numerous notable personalities have advanced the concept of global hegemony.

As a student of the Scriptures, I am well aware that ever since the events surrounding the Tower of Babel (recorded in Genesis chapter 11), the desire for world conquest has repeatedly arisen in the hearts of power-hungry men. I also believe a vast number of America's political, commercial, media, and entertainment elite today knowingly assist and facilitate this emerging global village.

I further propound that since the end of World War II, the great majority of America's foreign policies have more to do with building Bush's "New World Order" than with protecting the people or interests of the United States. Yes, Margaret, that includes our current actions in the Middle East.

Both President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair speak boldly and often of their intentions to globalize the political and commercial affairs of the world's nations. One has only to listen to Bush's latest State of the Union address (http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/cwarchive_020306.html ) to get a glimpse of how immersed our political leaders are in the philosophy of globalism.

Just this week, Tony Blair gave a major speech on internationalism and the reason for Britain's (and America's) involvement in Iraq. In his speech Blair said, "This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization. 'We' is not the West. 'We' are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. 'We' are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy."

Blair's speech, given at a Reuters newsmaker event, also said, "The only way to win is to recognize this phenomenon is a global ideology." Blair also boldly stated that the events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, as well as climate change and poverty in Africa are all "linked."

Blair went on to say that there are about "40 to 50" countries that might require "interventionist" action in order to obtain global "prosperity and stability."

But George Bush and Tony Blair are not the only ones to espouse global government. Back in 2001, a U.N. official by the name of Edward Widmer made the following declaration: "Within 10 years time, you're going to see the beginning of an embryonic world order." I believe we are already seeing it.

Expressing the same thoughts as Bush, Blair, and Widmer, former newsman Walter Cronkite wrote in his book, A Reporter's Life, "A system of world government is mandatory. The proud nations someday will see the light and yield up their precious sovereignty."

Cronkite also told BBC newsman, Tim Sebastian, "I think we are realizing that we are going to have to have an international rule of law." He added, "We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law."

Cronkite went on to say, "American people are going to begin to realize that perhaps they are going to have to yield some sovereignty to an international body to enforce the law."

Remember also that President George W. Bush signed the Declaration of Quebec back on April 22, 2001 in which he gave a "commitment to hemispheric integration and national and collective responsibility for improving the economic well-being and security of our people."

Obviously, "our people" means the people of the Western Hemisphere, not the people of the United States. Phyllis Schlafly also recently reminded us that "Bush pledged that the United States will 'build a hemispheric family on the basis of a more just and democratic international order.'"

George Bush, Sr. calls it a "New World Order." Tony Blair calls it "Globalization." Walter Cronkite calls it "World Government." G.W. Bush calls it "International Order." Call it what you will, it means the end of U.S. sovereignty and independence. And a sizeable percentage of America's political, commercial, media, and entertainment elite are doing their best to bring it to fruition.

What will it take for the American people to wake up? Foreign troops on American soil? Already happening. Outsourcing every American asset, including our own security? Already happening. Putting American troops under foreign commanders? Already happening. Using American troops as U.N. "peacekeepers" and nation-builders? Already happening. Forcing "free trade" agreements upon the American people that steal their jobs and livelihoods? Already happening. Allowing and facilitating overwhelming and ruinous illegal immigration that sacrifices our culture and way of life? Already happening. Forcing Americans to adopt and accept foreign languages into the fabric of everyday life? Already happening. Ignoring or even ridiculing American history in our classrooms and entertainment? Already happening. What in the world has to happen to awaken and energize the American people? When will they determine to put a stop to this nonsense?

Americans (and perhaps Christians are the most blind and naïve regarding this reality) need to understand that there are not two parties in Washington, D.C., but only one: the Globalist Party. If you don't believe it, just check out the list of people from both parties who belong to the cabal of wealthy elitists whose goal is global government known as the Council on Foreign Relations. (See http://www.geocities.com/benribqqq/cfr2005roster.html and http://www.jbs.org/artman/publish/article_32.shtml ) Isn't it amazing that no matter who is elected President and from which party he hails, the list of CFR members in appointed government positions never decreases!

Folks, let's face it: the terms "conservative" and "liberal," "Republican" and "Democrat" mean very little these days. Instead of thinking in traditional terms, we need to start thinking in terms of "American" and "Globalist." Once we come to realize that the vast majority of the national candidates from both parties are Globalists at heart, it would be a simple matter to repudiate them, fire the ones that are already there, and start electing some real Americans to high public office once again. I don't know about anyone else, but that's the way I'm voting from now on.

Moussaoui had no 9/11 role, says al-Qaeda man

2006-03-28T14:27:00.000-08:00

Alexandria, Virginia - Zacarias Moussaoui refused to follow instructions from al-Qaeda superiors, pestered them with cell phone calls and otherwise breached the terrorist outfit's way of operating, according to testimony Tuesday in his death penalty trial.

A captured al-Qaeda official, considered the mastermind of the suicide attack on the warship USS Cole and an early planner of the September 11, 2001, plot, said in a statement that he did not know of any role for Moussaoui in the attacks.

The assertion was from Waleed bin Attash, often known simply as Khallad. Moussaoui's lawyers are presenting statements from a series of al-Qaeda operatives in custody, including the chief organiser of the September 11 attacks, to show Moussaoui was not part of that plot.

Moussaoui himself stunned the courtroom Monday by claiming he was to supposed to have been the fifth pilot of a hijacked plane in the September 11 attacks and that his target would have been the White House. He testified against his lawyers' wishes.

Khallad portrayed Moussaoui, a French citizen, as something of a loose cannon during a trip to Malaysia in 2000, where he met members of a radical group affiliated with al-Qaeda. Khallad said Moussaoui breached security measures and al-Qaeda protocol.

For example, he called Khallad daily, despite instructions to call only in an emergency, to the point where Khallad turned his cell phone off.

Moussaoui's testimony that he was part of the September 11 plot along with shoe-bomber Richard Reid flew in the face of his previous denials that he had any role in the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3 000 people.

As soon as Moussaoui finished testifying, the jury was read statements from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who said Moussaoui was to have been used in a second wave of attacks completely disconnected from September 11 when hijackers crashed passenger jetliners into New York's World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Mohammed is in custody abroad in undisclosed circumstances, having been interrogated but not yet charged.

Because Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, the jury must only determine his sentence: death or life in prison. To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions resulted in at least one death on September 11.

Even prosecutors are not alleging a direct role for Moussaoui in the September 11 plot. Instead, they argue that Moussaoui allowed the September 11 plot to go forward by lying about his al-Qaeda membership and his true plans when federal agents arrested him in August 2001.

Moussaoui repeatedly had denied involvement in September 11, and when he admitted guilt in April 2005 to conspiring with al-Qaeda to hijack aircraft and commit other crimes, he pointedly made a distinction between his conspiracy and September 11.

On Monday, though, Moussaoui put himself at the centre of the plot. He was asked by defence attorney Gerald Zerkin: "Before your arrest, were you scheduled to pilot a plane as part of the 9/11
operation?"

Moussaoui: "Yes. I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House."

He said he knew few other details, except that planes also were to be flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.

He had met Reid, his purported partner, in the 1990s at London's Finsbury Park mosque, a haven for Islamic fundamentalists.

On December 22, 2001, Reid was subdued by passengers on a flight from Paris to Miami when he tried to detonate a bomb in his shoe. That plane landed safely in Boston. Reid later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

Moussaoui's defence attorneys, in their opening arguments, suggested Moussaoui may prefer execution, which he would see as martyrdom, to life in prison. He isn't cooperating with his court-appointed attorneys and testified against their wishes.

Mohammed's testimony came in the form of a 58-page statement culled from government interrogations. He said repeatedly that Moussaoui was to be part of a second wave of attacks, distinct from September 11.

He was said to have wanted to use only Middle Easterners for Sept. 11 so that Europeans like Moussaoui would stand a better chance of mounting a subsequent attack after security was increased.

Two Nut Jobs and a Boeing 747

2006-03-28T05:21:00.000-08:00

One of the most obvious lies in the show trial of Zacarias Moussaoui came when a court-appointed physician, Dr. Raymond Patterson, declared Moussaoui was not suffering from mental illness. Patterson made the assertion after Moussaoui said he wanted to fire his lawyers and represent himself. Moussaoui’s lawyers “became convinced that their client’s mental condition, already precarious, was deteriorating under the stress of solitary confinement, and that he was becoming increasingly paranoid,” writes Seymour Hersh for the New Yorker. In response to Patterson’s assertion that Moussaoui was sane enough to present his own defense, two “mental-health experts retained by the defense, Dr. Xavier Amador, of Columbia University, and Dr. William Stejskal, of the University of Virginia, argued that Patterson’s conclusions were unfounded and that Moussaoui needed further evaluation.” Judge Brinkema did not agree and ruled from the bench on June 13th, 2002, without hearing testimony, “that the defendant met the legal standard of competency.”

In fact, Zacarias Moussaoui is a stark raving lunatic, given to paranoid outbursts in the courtroom, and he was deemed sane for the simple reason that the government needs a conviction to prop up its ludicrous whitewash commission fairy tale about “al-Qaeda” cave dwellers attacking America on September 11, 2001.

Zacarias Moussaoui “is the only person charged in relation to the events of Sept. 11,” writes Stephanie Mencimer, a Washington Monthly contributing editor. “He was arrested after a flight-school instructor tipped off the FBI that he had asked to learn only how to fly, but not to take off or land. The government is working very hard to persuade people that this is a serious prosecution of a man who was supposed to join 19 other terrorists in hijacking four passenger planes on Sept. 11. They would like the world to believe that Moussaoui is a dangerous threat to national security and a calculating operative of al Qaeda who should be executed. But Moussaoui’s behavior has made that an uphill battle. His filings in federal court led lawyers interviewed by Legal Times to dub him ‘crazy as a loon.’”

For some reason we are expected to believe this loon was capable of crashing a 747 into the White House.

“Zacarias Moussaoui testified that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid planned to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the White House on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks,” reports Bloomberg. “Moussaoui said al-Qaeda leaders asked him in 1999 if he wanted to be a suicide pilot and he declined. He said that later, when he was in al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan, he told bin Laden he had dreamed of making plans to fly a plane into the White House. After that he decided to become a suicide pilot, Moussaoui said.”

If you believe any of this there is a proverbial bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

Moussaoui “couldn’t maintain basic aircraft control,” his flight instructor at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, Shohaib Nazir Kassam, told the Los Angeles Times. “He was a not a very good student. Just below average.” Average flight students solo after 15 hours of practice with an instructor, but Moussaoui wasn’t up to the task after nearly 60 hours of training. As an example of how out of touch he was with reality, Moussaoui told another flight school “My dream is to fly one of these big birds” and “After all we are in America and everything is possible.” Clarence “Clancy” Prevost, a flight instructor at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, told the court there was something “odd” about Moussaoui. “For instance, he asked absurd questions: Could the cabin doors be opened after they were pressurized and the plane was aloft?”

But the paramount absurdity is Moussaoui’s claim he plotted to hijack an airplane with Richard Reid (aka Abdul Raheem or Abu Ibrahim), a certifiable mental case and not the sharpest knife in the drawer now serving three life sentences in the ADX Florence, a Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Reid of course attempted to blow up his shoes (containing plastic explosive with a triacetone triperoxide detonator) on American Airlines Flight 63 going from Paris’ Charles De Gaulle International Airport to Miami International Airport.

It is said Reid reported directly to alleged nine eleven “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the “al-Qaeda” operative who had no problem obtaining a visa to enter the United States a mere six weeks before nine eleven, even though the CIA and FBI knew Mohammed was involved in Oplan Bojinka, also known as Operation Bojinka, a foiled attempt to assassinate the Pope and crash a plane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and other buildings. It is well known that Mohammed also worked with the ISI, Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency and partner with the CIA in creating the dire threat we now call “al-Qaeda.”

Reid was a follower of Syed Mubarik Ali Gilani, the Pakistani clerical leader of Tanzeem ul Fuqra or al-Faqra, an “Islamic sect that seeks to purify Islam through violence,” according to the U.S. State Department. Syed Mubarik Ali Gilani’s inner circle was penetrated by Ghulam Mustafa, an ISI operative who worked in the ISI-CIA camps in Afghanistan, according to Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times. In other words, in classic fashion, al-Faqra became an intelligence asset and Ali Gilani was possibly compromised. Of course, it should come as no surprise Richard Reid was so close to intelligence operations, both through his spiritual leader and his “al-Qaeda” handler.

Simply put, both Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are patsies, two doltish fall guys provided to put a sinister (if pathetic) face on the beast our government and corporate media call “al-Qaeda.” It was never intended that Moussaoui see the cockpit of a commercial airliner and if indeed “al-Qaeda” had wanted to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 over the Atlantic Ocean, they would not have selected a bumbling petty criminal such as Richard Reid to accomplish the task.

Moussaoui Says He Was to Hijack 5th Plane

2006-03-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - Laying out a stunning new version of his terrorist mission, al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he was supposed to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001, with would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and fly it into the White House.

Testifying against the advice of his court-appointed lawyers, Moussaoui shocked the courtroom. Jurors who will decide whether he is executed or imprisoned for life were almost motionless during his nearly three hours on the stand. They didn't look down to take notes; all eyes locked on the bearded 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent - the only person charged in this country in connection with 9/11.

His testimony started in familiar territory. He denied that he was supposed to be the so-called missing 20th hijacker of Sept. 11. He testified he was not intended to be a fifth terrorist on United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed into a Pennsylvania field - the only plane hijacked by four instead of five terrorists.

Then came the shock.

Defense attorney Gerald Zerkin: ``Before your arrest, were you scheduled to pilot a plane as part of the 9/11 operation?''

Moussaoui: ``Yes. I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House.''

He said he didn't know details of the other hijackings set for that day except that planes were to be flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Zerkin asked if he knew who else would be on his plane.

``Richard Reid. The other crew members were not definite,'' Moussaoui replied, referring to a man he had met in the 1990s at London's Finsbury Park mosque where Islamic fundamentalists recruited followers.

On Dec. 22, 2001, Reid was subdued by passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami when he attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe. That plane landed safely in Boston. Reid later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

This account by Moussaoui diverged sharply from his previous statements including his confession when pleading guilty last April. For three years, he has said he had no involvement in the 9/11 plot. Instead, he has said he was taking pilot lessons in Minnesota to fly a 747 jetliner into the White House at a later date if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned for separate terrorist convictions.

Former federal prosecutor Preston Burton said in an interview that Moussaoui was admitting ``far more individual involvement than he had made before.'' Now in private practice in Washington, Burton called it ``a stunning revelation that would help prosecutors rather than him.''

On cross-examination, prosecutor Rob Spencer underlined that Moussaoui was now saying his attack was to be part of the Sept. 11 plot.

Spencer: ``Osama bin Laden put you back in as the pilot of the fifth plane?''

Moussaoui: ``That's correct.''

Moussaoui had explained earlier Monday that at one point he was excluded from pre-hijacking operations because he had gotten in trouble with his al-Qaida superiors on a 2000 trip to Malaysia. He had rejected flight training they tried to arrange for him there and had been floating ill-conceived bombing and robbery plots to the local al-Qaida affiliate that was putting him up.

Moussaoui said he was summoned back to Afghanistan by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 plot. ``My position was, like you say, under review,'' Moussaoui testified. It was only after he acknowledged to Osama bin Laden that he had gone wrong in Malaysia that bin Laden restored him to the plot, he added.

Moussaoui told the court he knew the World Trade Center attack was coming and had lied to investigators when arrested in August 2001 because he wanted the operation to continue.

Prosecutor Spencer asked: ``You knew on Aug. 16 that other al-Qaida members were in the United States?''

``That's correct,'' Moussaoui replied.

Spencer: ``You knew there was a pending plot?''

``That's correct.''

Spencer: ``You lied because you wanted to conceal that you were a member of al-Qaida?''

``That's correct.''

``You lied so the plan could go forward?''

``That's correct.''

To get a death penalty, the government must show that an action of Moussaoui's led directly to at least one of the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11. Prosecutors have said the act was his lying to the FBI after his Aug. 16, 2001, arrest, lies that they contend prevented the FBI and Federal Aviation Administration from detecting the plot and saving at least one life.

Before Moussaoui testified, his attorneys made one last stab to keep him off the stand. Zerkin argued that his client would not be a competent witness because he recognizes only Islamic law, not American law, and believes it's permissible to lie to further holy war.

But when Moussaoui balked at the witness oath, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema asked him directly if he would tell the truth and he said he would.

Spencer tried but failed to counter one of the defense's opening day arguments. Defense attorney Edward MacMahon had told the jury Moussaoui wanted martyrdom and the only way he could achieve that would be if the jury gave him the death penalty. ``Don't make him a hero,'' MacMahon pleaded.

Three times, Spencer asked Moussaoui a version of: ``If you get the death penalty, you are not a martyr?''

``It's more complex,'' Moussaoui protested. ``It depends.''

Spencer: ``Depends on what?''

``If you have fought to the best of your ability,'' Moussaoui said.

Former federal prosecutor Lee Rubin, now in private practice in Palo Alto, Calif., said prosecutors need to be careful how they play up Moussaoui's testimony with the jury. ``The first question is, Is it truthful? Or is he committing suicide, effectively?''

``Rather than rotting in a jail, he might consider the ultimate martyrdom to be being put to death by the American infidels,'' Rubin said.

Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat and Toni Locy contributed to this report.

'Herald' Says Justice Scalia Gives the Press the Finger, He Denies It

2006-03-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK Emerging from mass in Boston on Sunday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia flipped a middle finger to the press, according to Monday's Boston Herald. He later disputed the account.

A Herald reporter outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross had asked Scalia, 70, if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state. "You know what I say to those people?" Scalia replied, making the obscene gesture, the Herald reported. He explained, "That's Sicilian."

A photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper, caught the moment. "Don't publish that," Scalia told the photographer, the Herald said.

The Herald today called it "conduct unbecoming a 20-year veteran of the country’s highest court - and just feet from the Mother Church’s altar."

Later Monday, however, the Associated Press reported that Scalia had actually used an Italian hand gesture. "It was a hand off the chin gesture that was meant to be dismissive," Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

According to AP: "The sign he used in Boston is frequently used by Italians to express displeasure with someone - from mild to deep irritation. It is done by cupping the hand under the chin and flicking the fingers like a backward wave."

The controversy came on the same day that Newsweek reported on a tape recording of a March 8 lecture by Justice Scalia in which he ridiculed legal claims by detainees of Guantanamo Bay as "crazy." The Supreme Court is now hearing a challenge to the legality of special military tribunals for suspects held at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba.

"War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," Judge Scalia said, during the talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, according to Newsweek. "Foreigners, in foreign countries, have no rights under the American Constitution... Nobody has ever thought otherwise."

RFID tags are subject to viruses, study claims

2006-03-27T14:48:00.000-08:00

If viruses get into the emerging world of RFID, the result would be chaos, says one Dutch professor. Jeremy Kirk reportsThree computer science researchers are warning that viruses embedded in RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are right around the corner.

No RFID viruses have been released “into the wild” so far, according to the researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. But RFID tags have several characteristics that could be engineered to exploit vulnerabilities in middleware and back-end databases, they say.

“RFID malware is a Pandora’s box that has been gathering dust in the corner of our ‘smart’ warehouses and homes,” the researchers say in a paper they co-authored.
Potential attacks could come in the form of a SQL injection or a buffer overflow attack even though the tags themselves may only store a small bit of information, they say. For demonstration purposes, the researchers created a proof-of-concept, self-replicating RFID virus.

It only took Patrick Simpson, a master’s student at the university, four hours to write a virus small enough to fit on a RFID tag, something previously thought unworkable, says Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor at the university. RFID tags can contain as little as 114 bytes of memory, he says.

Tanenbaum expects vendors to be angry about the publishing of the code, as they have dismissed the possibility of RFID viruses, saying that the amount of memory in the tags is too small, he claims.

“You publish all of the code on the website, and all of [a] sudden, [vendors] are going to start panicking,” Tanenbaum says. “This hopefully will make them take it seriously. This is a wake-up shot before this stuff is deployed in a large scale.”

The purpose of the exercise, the authors say, is to encourage RFID middleware designers to be more careful when writing code. Back-end middleware can contain millions of lines of source code, and if software faults number between six to 16 per 1,000 lines of code, the programs are likely to have many vulnerabilities, the paper says.

RFID tags are increasingly being used in a variety of industries to track items and give a real-time view of inventories. The tags contain data on a particular object or, in some cases, embedded in animals, and that data is typically stored in a database.

Companies can save money by using the tags to keep closer tabs on their property. However, this “pervasive computing utopia” has its dark side, the authors say.

RFID systems may be attractive to criminals because the data contained on them may have a financial or personal nature, such as information stored on digital passports. In addition to causing damage to computer systems, RFID malware may have an effect on real-world objects, the paper says.

Airports are looking to RFID tags to better track baggage. But Tanenbaum says this application could pose a large problem if an RFID tag is read and delivers a much larger set of data in return.

A false tag on a piece of baggage could exploit a buffer overflow, delivering a virus to the RFID middleware, he says. Once the virus code is on the server, it can infect the databases and corrupt subsequent tags or install “backdoors” — small programs that allow for the extrication of data over the internet, he says. “You can hide baggage, [or] reroute baggage to the wrong place — all kinds of mischief. That’s I think a very, very serious thing that even has national security implications.”

Terminator Seed Rejected In UN Meeting In Brazil!

2006-03-27T14:41:00.000-08:00

Just an hour ago here in Brazil, the Chair of the UN meeting announced that governments have agreed to reject language that would have undermined the moratorium on Terminator.
Groups, communities and individuals across the world have joined together in this fight to ban Terminator and your action has been effective in this important first step.
The Ban Terminator Campaign will continued to monitor the meetings today and next week.
Terminator rejection - a victory for the people
A broad coalition of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and civil society today celebrate the firm rejection of efforts to undermine the global moratorium on Terminator technologies - genetically engineered sterile seeds - at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Curitiba, Brazil.
"This is a momentous day for the 1,4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds," said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, "Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty. Terminator directly threatens our life, our culture and our identity as indigenous peoples", said Viviana Figueroa of the Ocumazo indigenous community in Argentina on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

Kandahar hijacking, 9/11 ‘linked’

2006-03-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

New Delhi, March 26
Fresh evidence has surfaced suggesting that the December 24, 1999, hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was a progenitor of unprecedented terrorist attack on the American mainland (9/11). Two terrorist incidents — one in India and the other in the USA — are closely interconnected as without the hijacking of IC 814 in 1999, 9/11 possibly could not have taken place.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of the three terrorists who were taken to Kandahar for release by the then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, was one of the key planners and perpetrators of the most daring terrorist attempt on the US soil, said a former military intelligence analyst John Newman during his testimony before the 9/11 inquiry commission.

Newman went on to say that “Saeed Sheikh was probably a triple agent” who operated for Pakistani, American and British intelligence while being an Al-Qaida’s top functionary. After his release in 1999, Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was appointed member of the Majlis Al-Shura by Osama Bin Laden, said the testimony, which did not find mention in the final report on 9/11.

Despite startling revelations about Islamabad’s involvement in the 9/11 by Newman, the military government of General Pervez Musharraf succeeded in getting vital information removed from the final report.

Bin Laden referred to Sheikh as his son. No attempt was made to arrest when he returned to Pakistan from Kandahar where he was set free in exchange of Indian hostages in IC 814 episode.

The ISI gave him a house and protection from the police. He lived openly and frequented swanky parties attended by senior government officials, observed Newman adding that the US government sources told Newsweek that he was a “protected asset” of the ISI.

Sheikh, who carried many names, including Mustafa Ahmed, Mustafa Shmed al-Hasawi, Mustafa Mahmoud Saeed Ahmed, Mustafa Mohammed Ahmed, is a hijacking, kidnapping and financial expert. He was tasked with killing Daniel Pearl and is understood to have funded 9/11 by wiring $100,000 to Mohammed Atta.

Sheikh, the man about whom the Commission of Inquiry report utters no word, overhauled Al-Qaida’s logistics, communications and financial networks and was given responsibilities in international liaisons such as relations with the Hezbollah or the Sudanese National Islamic Front.

To facilitate financial and communications needs, he designed a new secure, encrypted, web-based communications system for Al-Qaida. There was talk that he would someday succeed Bin Laden. Over and above all these responsibilities, Sheikh had another extremely sensitive job for Al-Qaida.

He was the group’s principal liaison with the ISI. He worked closely with various current and former officers of Pakistani intelligence, including Lieut-General Mohammed Aziz Khan, who along with President Pervez Musharraf himself, was the most powerful commander in Pakistan.

A product of the London School of Economics, he went on to play a vital role in 9/11 by financing the hijackers. For his trouble, he received the same impersonal budget as the two other key coordinators, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Shibh.

As the 9/11 attacks neared, ISI chief General Ahmed became more deeply mired in the plot, apparently to secure new sources of funds for the airline tickets needed for the reconnaissance flights on the date of the attack.

In early August, Sheikh’s former prison mates kidnapped a wealthy shoe tycoon in India and held him for 15 days. Chief gangster Ansari ran the operation from Dubai in the Arab Emirates. Sheikh was carrying out his 9/11 paymaster duties. The kidnappers freed their hostage for $ 830,000 and gave $ 100,000 to Sheikh.

In an email discovered afterwards, Ansari said: “I’ve paid $ 100,000 to Sheikh,” said Newman in his testimony.

On the orders of the ISI chief, Sheikh wired the money to hijack leader Mohammad Atta. Flush with money, Atta Hamzi and Hanzour flew first class on the type of aircraft they would use on September 11, 2001.

All this does not find mention in the commission report because both the USA and the British governments were keen to enlist Pakistan as a key ally in their attack on Afghanistan.

Recent revelations in the Pakistani media have confirmed that Islamabad had paid tens of thousand dollars to lobbyists in the USA to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 report.

In 1993, he got hooked up with Pakistani terrorist in Bosnia to take up “jehad” and got training in terror camps in Afghanistan. In 1994, he tried to get a terrorist leader freed from an Indian jail by luring an American and three Britons to locations where they were kidnapped but the plot failed and he ended up in jail instead. The hostages were rescued.

The ISI paid for his lawyer, but he was never tried during his 5 years of incarceration. Despite his kidnapping of British citizens, he was allowed to immediately travel to London. There were no indictments either in India, the UK or the USA.

On January 2, 2000, the British Foreign Office spokesman would only say that this was so because he was a British citizen and had not been convicted of any offences overseas.

The 9/11 Truth Revolution - by Kevin Barrett

2006-03-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

"It feels like you and I have started the revolution, and God bless America." — Charlie Sheen

As 9/11 truth spreads, we are facing a revolution.

A revolution happens when the many at the bottom get together and overthrow the few at the top. At least that's the theory. In practice, it isn't quite that simple. The American Revolution was led by wealthy, well-educated deists, many of them slaveholders. The French Revolution involved the hungry masses, but the instigators were businesspeople, not street people. The Russian Revolution was led by a self-proclaimed vanguard. The anti-imperial revolutions that ended European colonization 50 years ago were led by the colonies' Euro-educated elites.

Today, thanks to the rapidly-spreading brushfire of 9/11 truth, we are on the cusp of a new kind of revolution — a real one this time, a revolution from below. As conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts writes, "the real story is what the people are saying about 9/11." What Roberts means is that the powerful few and the institutions they control — the government, the corporations, the armed forces, the major political parties, the foundation-funded pseudo-left, the universities, the mass media, Hollywood — have imposed near-total silence on the issue of what really happened on September 11th, 2001. Worse, most of them have cranked out endless tape-loops of mind-numbing propaganda aimed at reinforcing the official Big Lie. And yet the people are speaking out loud and clear: 9/11 was an inside job — an act of high treason and mass murder by our own leaders.

In the latest CNN poll, over 80% of respondents agreed with Charlie Sheen that the official story of 9/11 is a cover-up. Earlier polls showed that half the citizens of New York, the city that was so brutally attacked, and Atlanta, the biggest city in the nation's most conservative region, believe their leaders guilty of high treason and conspiracy to mass-murder.

Despite the best efforts of the treasonous billionaires who control all of our major institutions, the popular groundswell for 9/11 truth is unstoppable. The people have refused to be cowed into silence by inane fear-mongering and cowardly name-calling. All across the nation people are rising up and talking truth. "Have you seen Loose Change yet?" "That Charlie Sheen is amazing — how could CNN let him say that?" "You've got to read The New Pearl Harbor — here's a copy, pass it on." People are burning hundreds of DVDs and passing them to their friends, who are burning hundreds more. If the video-makers were getting full royalties on every copy, they'd be richer than self-confessed WTC demolisher and billionaire insurance-fraudster Larry Silverstein.

The source of this revolution is the courage and intelligence of the people. The neoconservatives, who underestimate the intelligence of other people almost as much as they overestimate their own, apparently thought that their monopoly media could coerce the poor dumb masses into lapping up outrageous lies indefinitely. What they didn't realize was that new communications technologies, in the hands of smart, brave people, can spread the truth with absolutely no help from traditional top-down, one-to-many media systems.

The truth is that people in power are no smarter than the rest of us. They are just greedier. As the French saying goes, "plus haut qu'il mont, plus que se voit son cul" — the higher up he climbs, the more you can see his ass.

This is a moral revolution by ordinary decent folks against the greed-heads who will stop at nothing — not even the mass murder of their own countrymen in the service of a genocidal Big Lie — to gain even more wealth and power.

It is a revolution from below at every level, even in government itself. Dozens of honest agents and bureaucrats, stymied by their treasonous superiors, have spoken out. Colleen Rowley and the other Minneapolis FBI agents have made it abundantly clear that Dave Frasca, the mole and former head of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalism Unit, intentionally blocked their most intensive efforts to call attention to the "hijacking plot" before it happened. Yet the traitor and mass-murderer Frasca, who stymied not only the Minneapolis agents, but also the Phoenix FBI agents and others, was promoted after 9/11! The many thousands of honest agents in the FBI, disgusted with their superiors' complicity in high treason and mass murder, are a key part of our revolution from below, and will surely be dealing with the likes of Frasca one way or another.

It is a revolution from below in journalism as well as government. First it was the complete outsiders, the devil-may-care small-time bloggers, the folks at the very bottom of the journalistic food chain. (Note that some of these ultra-outsider bloggers, such as From the Wilderness and Global Research, have been outperforming the "real journalists" on key issues for years.) The outsider bloggers' incessant agitation put 9/11 truth on the radar screen of the more respectable bloggers and the occasional honest academic. When the highly respected David Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor came out, compiling and validating the bloggers' research, low-level people at C-Span began urging their company to report "the other side of the 9/11 story." The result was the nationwide broadcast of Griffin's landmark University of Wisconsin talk 9/11 and American Empire last year. Now it appears that the actual working journalists at CNN have followed their C-Span colleagues away from their billionaire bosses' fantasy land and back toward reality-based journalism, by giving Charlie Sheen a national platform for truth-speaking.

It is a revolution from below in religious communities too. More than a few independent-minded Jews have made major contributions to the 9/11 truth movement, while increasing numbers of evangelical Christians are waking up to 9/11 truth, as the many e-mails we get from them at MUJCA-NET attest. While the self-appointed leaders and Sunday morning money-leeches spew their hatemongering rhetoric at the alleged-WTC-destroying Muslim hordes, whispers are spreading among their flocks: "Wait a minute — look at WTC-7 collapsing, and Silverstein confessing. How the hell did Osama do that?" And in the American Muslim community, the silent majority has always known it was an inside job — but the academics, self-appointed leaders and spokespeople, perfect examples of the Qur'an-derided munafiqeen (hypocrites) who say whatever makes their lives easier, have managed to obscure that fact with their ongoing nicey-nice drivel that implicitly or explicitly accepts the 9/11 Big Lie. After the 9/11 truth revolution, I hope every one of these "leaders" will resign from their cushy positions and look for real work. Indeed, they might be better advised to crawl into a hole somewhere, for the silent contempt in which they are now held by most of their co-religionists will surely grow less silent.

The 9/11 truth revolution from below will overthrow a good part of the American power structure. Billionaires will have their fortunes confiscated and spend the rest of their lives in prison. Most, perhaps all of the current administration will be tried and, presumably, either hanged or given some kind of truth-for-mercy deal. Its supporters throughout the judicial and legislative branches will be forced to resign. The CIA and other covert-op apparatuses will be broken into a million pieces and scattered to the four winds, finishing the job that JFK was unable to start. The media monopoly that enabled the 9/11 cover-up will be shattered into hundreds of fragments as the mother of all trust-busting eras commences. The uniformed military, and especially the Pentagon, will be purged of neocon moles, as the venerable institution of the firing squad is revived. Every last member of Skull and Bones, starting with the whole Bush crime family, will be hunted down, jailed, and forced to recite his entire sexual history to his cellmates while lying on the floor of the prison shower. And after the troops have pulled out, Rumsfeld, Perle and Feith will be air-dropped into Fallujah as a demonstration of how an undermanned invasion-of-three can be welcomed by adoring crowds strewing flowers at their feet.

Ultimately, though, the 9/11 truth revolution is not about vengeance — it's about hope. The story of the triumph of the 9/11 truth movement, against such apparently insurmountable odds, is a story of ordinary people's heroism, a veritable Frank Capra movie for the information age.

And though this revolution is an American movie, with a cast of thousands of heroes and Charlie Sheen doing an Oscar-worthy job in Best Supporting Role, it's going to be a worldwide hit. You thought they liked Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 at Cannes? Wait till you see the world's reaction to 9/11 Truth: The Reality. Other nations used to admire certain things about America — like our relative freedom, integrity, and imperviousness to corruption — and this movie will bring it all back, and then some. Better yet, this is the one American film that could really rock the Casbah in the Arab world. Want to lead the region toward freedom and democracy? Try setting an example. Overthrow your own corrupt leaders, and maybe the Arabs will overthrow theirs. And if you're tired of being hated by Muslims, what better way to re-establish friendship than by exploding the 9/11 blood libel and calling off the Big-Lie-triggered war on Islam?

The global ramifications of the 9/11 truth revolution go way beyond ending the ersatz "clash of civilizations" manufactured by the fake-terror-mongers. Our American revolution from below will lead a cascading revolution around the world, as the globalist elites are jailed, trust-busted, and discredited, and corrupt leaders are overthrown like rows of rotten dominoes. In the place of the current top-heavy structure of world finance and governance, this worldwide bottom-up revolution will create a truly democratic, populist order to match the many-to-many communications revolution of the information age. This is the "Planetization Revolution" that was foreseen by de Chardin — a sort of "people's globalization" that will unite the planet freely and democratically, rather than under murderous globalist tyranny. For details, see the revolutionary manifesto "Declaration of Union" at: http://www.planetization.org/declarationofunion.htm

The checks and balances on abusive power developed in the USA and elsewhere will be re-instituted and fine-tuned, as the power structure devolves toward a bottom-up rather than top-down decision-making model. People will seize control over their own lives, with individuals, families and local communities — not nation states, banks or corporations — making the decisions. This model of governance, as proposed by theologian and 9/11 truth supporter John Cobb, is one of "communities of communities of communities." It will be realized after the 9/11-truth-triggered annihilation of the top-heavy institutions, and wealth-and-power-heavy individuals and families, that currently run the world.

9/11 truth offers the ordinary person of good will an unprecedented opportunity to change the world for the better. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and spread the word. When the time is ripe — and it is ripening fast — we will have the people, and the soul-power, to take to the streets.

Pentagon plans cyber-insect army

2006-03-27T02:26:00.000-08:00

The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.

The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.

Experts told the BBC some ideas were feasible but others seemed "ludicrous".

A similar scheme aimed at manipulating wasps failed when they flew off to feed and mate.

The new scheme is a brainwave of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is tasked with maintaining the technological superiority of the US military.

It has asked for "innovative" bids on the insect project from interested parties.

'Assembly-line'

Darpa believes scientists can take advantage of the evolution of insects, such as dragonflies and moths, in the pupa stage.

"Through each metamorphic stage, the insect body goes through a renewal process that can heal wounds and reposition internal organs around foreign objects," its proposal document reads.

The foreign objects it suggests to be implanted are specific micro-systems - Mems - which, when the insect is fully developed, could allow it to be remotely controlled or sense certain chemicals, including those in explosives.

The invasive surgery could "enable assembly-line like fabrication of hybrid insect-Mems interfaces", Darpa says.

A winning bidder would have to deliver "an insect within five metres of a specific target located 100 metres away".

The "insect-cyborg" must also "be able to transmit data from relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc."

NY Times: US Wanted to "Paint" Planes for Dual Purpose Intel Op/Shootdown

2006-03-27T02:21:00.000-08:00

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

Consistent Remarks

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process."

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

Discussing Provocation

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

Mr. Sands first reported the proposals in his book, although he did not use any direct quotations from the memo. He is a professor of international law at University College of London and the founding member of the Matrix law office in London, where the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, is a partner.

Mr. Jones, the National Security Council spokesman, declined to discuss the proposals, saying, "We are not going to get into discussing private discussions of the two leaders."

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."

Anti-conspiracy nuts

2006-03-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

"Government Conspiracy Theory Believers" keep replying "Sheen isn't credible" due to their absolute lack of arguments to point out, so this flyer may be useful.
Did any mainstream media interview these guys about 911, or just inform americans about their doubts? Hmm, let me think...
Anyway the list is bigger, and growing everyday..........

Delta Force founder: Bush may have started World War III

2006-03-26T05:53:00.000-08:00

A founding member of the elite counter-terrorist unit, Delta Force, suggested that President Bush's invasion of Iraq may have started World War III, according to the Los Angeles Daily News, RAW STORY has learned. The article, acquired by RAW STORY Friday night, is expected in Sunday editions of the paper.

Retired Command Sergeant Major Eric Haney's book "Inside Delta Force" became the basis for the CBS drama "The Unit," where he now assumes technical adviser and executive producer duties.

Excerpts from the forthcoming article written by David Kronke:

#

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward.

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.

....

Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...

A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does

#

Developing...

Correction: The first edition of this article said Kronke's article would appear in Saturday's editions of the Los Angeles Daily News. It did not, and is instead expected Sunday.

Conspiracy and Closed Minds on 9/11

2006-03-26T02:57:00.000-08:00

Morgan Reynolds
March 2006

While more Americans doubt the 9/11 story every week, evidence abounds that many have a mental block against rational examination of the evidence about 9/11. The possibility that it was an inside job is a non-starter for them. Programmed “cut outs” insure that 9/11 doubts are consigned to the “conspiracy” closet.

Last June I was explaining the fuss over my 9/11 article to a family member who shall remain anonymous and he interrupted and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Millions join him in that sentiment. By implication they might as well say: “I’d rather cling to the official 9/11 myth” = “If mass murderers run free, I’m fine with that” = “If 9/11 was an inside job, then I’m ruled by monsters and I might have to do something about it, I’d rather watch Paris Hilton.”

Where does this passive attitude come from? Causes are many but American indoctrination has two sides that figure prominently in the explanation:

• Belief in “American Exceptionalism”

• Disbelief in conspiracy

The first belief massages the American ego that we are heroes, always the good guys in history, and we can trust our government to be the same. The second steers us clear of subversive theories and thwarts connecting the dots. American exceptionalism is Civics 101, the Disneyfication of U.S. history, the “we’re so good” formula, “those stupid romances commonly called history.” Like no other nation in history, we are an unparalleled success, goes the story. With American self-esteem unrivalled, denial about 9/11 is hardly surprising. Conventional wisdom, in effect, says Yes, criminal gangs have ruled in other nations from time to time, perhaps always, but it has never happened here and cannot happen here. Evidence to the contrary is bogus, I do not have to even look at it. For one thing, I vote. We are the world’s greatest duh-mocracy. In fact, I voted for Bush-Cheney (or that other skull-and-bones candidate from Yale, I forget). I am fully invested with the regime and I’m not a criminal or traitor, so Bush-Cheney must not be either. After all, we the people are the government. Criminals and traitors do not look like us either, they look like Arabs, Germans, Japanese, Chinese.

Besides, conspiracy theories are little more than a symptom of a mental disease. Such asinine theories stem from delusion and paranoia, not objective reality. On its face, it is preposterous to believe that the U.S. government would attack its own people. History is about accidents, bungling, lone nuts, chaos and coincidence, not planning, cause-and-effect, execution and cover-ups.

False Flag Terrorism

Americans know a great deal that just is not so. The hidden history of false-flag terrorism is key, followed by trained aversion to conspiracy. When bad things happen on a large scale, chances are that an important group of people wanted them to happen and made them happen.

Governments throughout history have provoked or staged attacks on their own people to serve the powers behind the throne (“the money power”), glorify themselves, engage in vast government spending, reward friends, exert domestic control, stimulate the juices of war, annex neighbors and pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements (the “global domination project”). A few examples:

• Nero burned Rome to blame the Christans A.D. 64

• US provoked Mexican-American war 1846

• USS Maine sinking 1898

• Lusitania sinking 1915

• Reichstag fire 1933

• Hitler’s staged attack on the Gleiwitz radio station 1939

• The “surprise attack” at Pearl Harbor 1941

• Bay of Pigs conspiracy 1961

• Operation Northwoods 1962

• LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin conspiracy 1964

• Kuwaiti baby incubator hoax 1991

• Bush Jr.’s 9/11, yellow cake and WMD scams

Ruthless though plotters be, the basic principle “is as mundane as insurance fraud,” as Webster G. Tarpley writes (9/11 Synthetic Terror, 2005, p. 104), and nicely illustrated by the obscure hoax that started World War II. Hitler wanted to invade Poland but knew the German majority did not support war, so a group of hapless German convicts was dressed up in Polish army uniforms (by Tarpley’s account, also see these variations), marched to the Gleiwitz radio station, machine gunned to death, arranged as if storming the building, and Nazi agents read an anti-German statement in Polish declaring Polish forces had invaded Gleiwitz and taken over the radio station. With this farce and related border stunts, Hitler invaded Poland the next day, September 1, 1939. “Wag the dog” anyone?

Errors about Conspiracy

Many Americans know that the JFK, RFK, MLK and other assassinations were inside jobs, and Nixon’s Watergate and Reagan’s Iran-Contra are proven conspiracies with criminal convictions. Blatant government murder of U.S. citizens occurred at Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing. Yet fools and liars argue that the scale of 9/11 was too big to be an inside job because it would involve so many people. A conspirator would surely squeal and we would hear about it, goes the argument, and that has not happened.

JFK’s triangulation murder involved hundreds and nobody “ratted” that out in any substantial way, although Jack Ruby was close before he was found dead in his cell and dozens of deaths surrounded the case. Here’s how large, inside conspiracies work:

• Conspiracies—partnerships in crime—are common: a corner drug deal is a conspiracy and one in four federal prosecutions include a conspiracy charge.

• Hundreds rather than thousands probably were necessary to pull off the 9/11 psychological operation.

• Many conspirators are ideologues committed to the idea that the 9/11 hoax would serve the interests of the nation. Worthy ends justify murderous means to this crowd. The human cost of 9/11 turned out to be “only” a month’s highway fatality toll and served the magnificent ends of starting a global war on terror, two invasions and more to come, billions more in defense spending, torture, new agencies, “Patriot” controls, domestic spying, enormous new contracts, more debt and many other attractive consequences.

• Many participants are cunning sociopaths (amoral) with the mindset of stone cold killers. They wear a suit or military uniform but have no respect for the lives of the “little people.” They are ruthless, witness the fool in the White House: “But all in all, it’s been a fabulous year for Laura and me,” a tone-deaf president declared in a December, 2001 interview.

• Only the trustworthy are at the center of the hub-spoke-and-wheel compartmentalization necessary in a complex conspiracy. Only the arrogant few at the hub know the big picture before hand.

• The most secretive regime in U.S. history puts a huge premium on personal loyalty and gets it.

• Most participants did not know in advance how “over-the-top” the twin tower demolitions were going to be. That job probably was contracted out to ruthless foreigners. Once done, it’s too late to get out.

• Any participant would hesitate to squeal after the event because disbelief, disgrace and grief would follow, at a minimum, anyway. The major media, inside 9/11 from the start, would discredit squealers, as necessary.

• Risk-taking behavior is always greater in groups than for lone individuals (psychology 101).

• Once involved in the plot, everyone is “in for good.’

• Conspirators face no threat of arrest, prosecution and punishment by the government’s justice system, a proven fact since government and media obstructed and trashed New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK investigation and prosecution.

• Controllers discipline participants through $billions in black budgets and drug money, death threats, assassination and black mail.

• Blatant and repeated resistance against truthful investigations, aided by obstruction of justice and abetted by media silencio, prove there is a lot to hide.

Consider one control technique among many: a very high CIA official died a few years ago and on good authority I know that he had a 7/24 CIA presence to protect against a deathbed confession in front of Hospice personnel. “I’m not into conspiracy theories,” says filmmaker Michael Moore, “only those that are true.”

The fundamental difficulty is not really disbelief about the ability to keep conspiracy secrets but disbelief that U.S. government officials could really collaborate in attacking America and take all those innocent lives at the World Trade Center. This is naïve. First, government is the instrument of social compulsion. Organized force is what government does. The belief that soft-hearted people rise to the top in government is akin to the belief that softies were whipping masters on slave plantations. Second, setting WTC bombs could easily have been contracted out to Mossad, otherwise known as “executioner to the world.” Killing? It’s what we do (because this is “life or death for Israel,” blah, blah). Third, people are taught that they control their government and live in a duh-mocracy but all governments are run by insiders, usually permanent and dominated by the paymasters. When policy or personnel really matter, international bankers call the tune for modern governments daily dependent on them for new loans and refinance of the old. These financiers look out for themselves and believe in a New World Order, a one-government world, and have no allegiance to America or its founding principles. Fourth, the U.S. military oath requires an oath-taker to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The enemy within the gate is key today, whether called conspiracy or not, not the enemy outside.

Skepticism about conspiracy, small or large, is somewhat beside the point in the case of 9/11 because the official Osama-and-Nineteen-Young-Arabs (ONYA) conspiracy tale is so farcical and impossible. Nearly everyone in America has easy access to the internet and hundreds of websites expose the 9/11 fraud. The analysis is out there and in a few dozen books, although the mainstream media ignores it all. Only government could have pulled off a psy-op this big, not a rag-tag band of Arab incompetents with no visible means of support repeatedly running afoul of law enforcement in the field. All the other intelligence services and governments know the real story about who did 9/11. It is like an elephant in the living room, studiously ignored by insiders who keep quiet about it. After thorough exposure via the Downing Street memo and other irrefutable evidence about the Bush-Cheney lies to justify invading Iraq, it takes a lot to remain ignorant about 9/11. It is not about a conspiracy too large to work. Ignorance increasingly has to be willful.

The Case for Controlled Demolition, by Judy Wood, Ph.D

2006-03-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

Analysis of Collapse Time

Free-fall from roof	"collapse" every 10 floors	"collapse" every floor	"collapse" initiated ahead of collapse wave	Seismic Evidence

How long should it take the WTC towers to collapse?

Page 305 of the 9/11 Commission Report states, "At 9:58:59, the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds, .... The building collapsed into itself, causing a ferocious windstorm and creating a massive debris cloud." (Chapter 9. html, pdf)

The height of the South Tower (WTC2) is 1362 feet, and the height of the North Tower (WTC1) is 1368 feet, which are nearly the same.

Columbia University's Seismology Group recorded seismic events of 10 seconds and 8 seconds in duration, which correspond to the collapses of WTC2 and WTC1, respectively.

Information Based on Seismic Waves recorded at Palisades New York

Seismology Group, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

Event

origin time (EDT)
(hours:minutes:seconds)

Magnitude
(equivalent seismic)

Duration

Impact 1 at North Tower

08:46:26±1

0.9

12 seconds

Impact 2 at South Tower

09:02:54±2

0.7

6 seconds

Collapse 1, South Tower

09:59:04±1

2.1

10 seconds

Collapse 2, North Tower

10:28:31±1

2.3

8 seconds

Collapse 3, Building 7

17:20:33±1

0.6

18 seconds

Do these values seem reasonable? Let's calculate a few values we can use as a reference.

For the following, I used the height of WTC1 as 1368 feet and considered each floor to be a height of 12.44 feet. (1368/110 =12.44 ft/floor).
I assumed gravity = 32.2 ft/sec² or 9.81 m/sec².

Case 1: Free-fall time of a billiard ball dropped from the roof of WTC1, in a vacuum

Let's consider the minimum time it would take the blue billiard ball to hit the pavement (see below). Start the timer when the ball is dropped from the roof of WTC1. We'll assume this is in a vacuum, with no air resistance.

From the rooftop of WTC1, drop one (dark-blue) billiard ball over the edge. As it falls, it accelerates. If it were in a vacuum, it would hit the pavement, 1368 feet below, in 9.22 seconds, shown by the blue curve in the figure, below. (It will take longer if air resistance is considered, but for simplicity, we'll neglect air resistance.)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Notice that the billiard ball begins to drop very slowly, then accelerates with the pull of gravity. If in a vacuum, the blue ball will hit the pavement, 1368 ft. below, 9.22 seconds after it is dropped. That is, unless it is propelled by explosives, it will take at least 9.22 seconds to reach the ground (assuming no air resistance).

Let's consider the "Pancake Theory"

According to the pancake theory, one floor fails and falls onto the floor below, causing it to fail and fall on the floor below that one. The "pancake theory" implies that this continues all the way to the ground floor. In the case of both WTC towers, we don't see the floors piled up when the event is all over, but rather a pulverization of the floors throughout the event. So, clearly we cannot assume that the floors stack up like pancakes. Looking at the data, we take the conservative approach that a falling floor initiates the fall of the one below, while itself becoming pulverized.

To illustrate the timing for this domino effect, we will use a sequence of falling billiard balls, where each billiard ball triggers the release of the next billiard ball in the sequence. This assumes pulverization is instantaneous and does not slow down the process. In reality, this pulverization would slow down the "pancake" progression, so longer times would be expected.

Case 2: ‘Progressive Collapse’ in ten-floor intervals

Let’s simulate the floor beams collapsing every 10th floor. This assumes there is no resistance within each 10-floor interval. Refer to the figure below.

The clock starts when the blue ball is dropped from the roof (110th floor). Just as the blue ball passes the 100th floor, the red ball drops from the 100th floor.
When the red ball passes the 90th floor, the orange ball drops from the 90th floor, ... etc. Notice that the red ball (at floor 100) cannot begin moving until the blue ball reaches that level, which is 2.8 seconds after the blue ball begins to drop.

This approximates the "pancaking" theory, assuming that each floor within the "pancaking" (collapsing) interval provides no resistance at all. With this theory, no floor below the "pancake" can begin to move until the progressive collapse has reached that level. For example, there is no reason for the 20th floor to suddenly collapse before it is damaged.

With this model, a minimum of 30.6 seconds is required for the roof to hit the ground. Of course it would take longer if accounting for air resistance. It would take longer if accounting for the structures resistance that allows pulverization.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Case 3: ‘Progressive Collapse’ in one-floor intervals

Similar to Case 2, above, let's consider a floor-by-floor progressive collapse.
Refer to the figure below:

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Now, let's consider momentum.

Assume that the top 10 floors stay intact as a solid block weight, Block-A. Start the collapse timer when the 100th floor fails. At that instant, assume floors 90-100 miraculously turn to dust and disappear. So, Block-A can drop at free-fall speed until it reaches the 90th floor. After Block-A travels 10 floors, it now has momentum. If all of the momentum is transferred from Block-A to Block-B, the next 10-floor block, Block-A will stop moving, even if there is no resistance for the next block to start moving. If Block-A stops moving, after triggering the next sequence, the mass of Block-A will not arrive in time to transfer momentum to the next "pancaking" between Block-B and Block-C. In other words, the momentum will not be increased as the "collapse" progresses.

Recall the physics demonstration shown below. (I believe everyone who has finished high school has seen one of these momentum demonstrations at some point in their life.)

Note, if some part must stop and then restart its descent every 10 floors, the total collapse time must be more than 10 seconds. Given that the building disintegrated from the top down, it is difficult to believe there could be much momentum to transfer, anyway. Also, consider the energy required to pulverize the 10 floors between each "pancake." After being pulverized, the surface-area/mass is greatly increased and the air resistance becomes significant. I don't believe the pulverized material can contribute any momentum as it "hangs" in the air and floats down at a much-much slower rate than the "collapsing" floors.

Now, let's consider reality.

QUESTIONS:
(1) How likely is it that all supporting structures on a given floor will fail at exactly the same time?
(2) If all supporting structures on a given floor did not fail at the same time, would that portion of the building tip over or fall straight down into its own footprint?
(3) What is the likelihood that supporting structures on every floor would fail at exactly the same time, and that these failures would progress through every floor with perfect symmetry?

Case 4: ‘Progressive Collapse’ at near free-fall speed

Now, consider the chart below.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Let's say that we want to bring down the entire building in the time it takes for free-fall of the top floor of WTC1. (Use 9.22 seconds as the time it would take the blue ball to drop from the roof to the street below, in a vacuum.) So, If the entire building is to be on the ground in 9.22 seconds, the floors below the "pancaking" must start moving before the "progressive collapse” reaches that floor, below. To illustrate this, use the concept of the billiard balls. If the red ball (dropped from the 100th floor) is to reach the ground at the same time as the blue ball (dropped from the 110th floor), the red ball must be dropped 0.429 seconds after the blue ball is dropped. But, the blue ball will take 2.8 seconds after it is dropped, just to reach the 100th floor in free fall. So, the red ball needs to begin moving 2.4 seconds before the blue ball arrives to "trigger" the red ball's motion. I.e., each of these floors will need a 2.4 second head start. But this creates yet another problem. How can the upper floor be destroyed by slamming into a lower floor if the lower floor has already moved out of the way?

Case 2, above, shows the red ball being dropped just as the blue ball passes that point.

Remember, I'm assuming the building was turning to dust as the collapse progressed, which is essentially what happened.

So, for the building to be collapsed in about 10 seconds, the lower floors would have to start moving before the upper floors could reach them by gravity alone.

Did we see this? I believe it's pretty clear in some of the videos. The "wave" of collapse, progressing down the building, is moving faster than free-fall speed. This would require something like a detonation sequence.

Realizing that, for example, the 40th floor needs to start moving before any of the upper floors have "free-fallen" to that point, why would it start moving? There was no fire there. And, if anything, there is less load on that floor as the upper floors turn to dust.

In the picture (at right), notice that WTC2 is less than half of its original height, yet has no debris that has fallen ahead of the demolition wave.

So, how could the ground rumble for only 8 seconds while WTC1 "disappeared?"

I don't think this part of the building made a thud when it hit the ground.

Perhaps here, the only use of gravity was to get the dust out of the air.

The Case for Controlled Demolition (continued) - Seismographic Evidence

Analysis of Collapse Time

Free-fall from roof	"collapse" every 10 floors	"collapse" every floor	"collapse" initiated ahead of collapse wave	Seismic Evidence

Seismic Information

SEISMOLOGICAL OBSERVATION OF IMPACTS AND COLLAPSES AT WORLD TRADE CENTER

Seismology Group
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Palisades NY 10964
Version of 9/14/01

Seismograph stations in southern New York, northern New Jersey, western Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, operated by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, recorded the collapse of each of the towers of the World Trade Center on Tuesday morning September 11 and the subsequent collapse of 7 World Trade Center later that afternoon. The closest station, at Palisades, New York, is located 21 miles (34 km) north of lower Manhattan in Rockland County. This station also registered the impacts of the two airliners that crashed into the towers.
The signals generated by the collapsing North and South towers were much larger than those from the two airliner impacts. The signals generated by the collapse of Building 7, however, were smaller than those of the impacts. In addition, many smaller signals were registered at Palisades throughout the rest of the day that may have originated from the further collapse of the Twin Towers and the fall of walls and other debris in the surrounding area.
The Palisades recordings of the Twin Tower collapses were comparable in size to the signals from a small earthquake of seismic magnitude 2.4 that was felt in the east side of Manhattan and in the western parts of Queens earlier this year, on January 17.
The seismic signals from the five events on 11 September differed from a small earthquake in that they were richer in low-frequency energy and poorer in high-frequency energy. These differences can be attributed to the short time duration of the fault rupture responsible for the earthquake as compared to the long and complex collapse of the buildings. The seismic waves from the five World Trade Center events resemble those produced by the collapse of a salt mine south of Rochester, in 1994.
The catastrophic events at the World Trade Center, as might be expected, producedmuch larger seismic effects than the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on January 7, 1983, which were detected up to 130 miles away.
The seismographic stations are part of the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network, which is operated in conjunction with several other institutions and is supported by the U.S. Geological Survey under the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program. As part of its agreement with the USGS, Lamont-Doherty makes this data available upon request without restriction.
Preliminary measurements made by Lamont-Doherty analysts are summarized in the Table below:

Data from Columbia University Seismology Group

Date	Origin Time (UTC)	Magnitude (Richter scale)	Time (EDT)	Dominant Period	Signal Duration	Remark
09/11/2001	12:46:26±1	0.9	08:46:26	0.8 sec	12 seconds	first impact
09/11/2001	13:02:54±2	0.7	09:02:54	0.6 sec	6 seconds	second impact
09/11/2001	13:59:04±1	2.1	09:59:04	0.8 sec	10 seconds	first collapse
09/11/2001	14:28:31±1	2.3	10:28:31	0.9 sec	8 seconds	second collapse
09/11/2001	21:20:33±2	0.6	17:20:33	0.7 sec	18 seconds	Building 7 collapse

Location of the World Trade Center is 40.71°N and 74.01°W.

Other seismic information:

Seismograms recorded by LCSN Station PAL (Palisades, NY)
New York Earthquake, 10/27/2001
Seismograms recorded by LCSN Station PAL, 10/27/2001

How long did the ground rumble?

Vibration of the ground following the plane impact of WTC1.

Vibration of the ground at the time of the WTC1 "collapse."

So, if it takes at least 9.22 seconds for the roof to hit the ground, how could the ground quit rumbling after 8 seconds?

==>> Consider the picture below. I don't think this part of the building made a thud when it hit the ground.

Perhaps here, the only use of gravity was to get the dust out of the air.

There should be pulverizing or pancaking; not both.

The Alex Jones Show - 24/3/06, with Charlie Sheen

2006-03-25T00:30:00.000-08:00

Wanna hear the Charlie Sheen's reply ?
Listen him, again, on the Alex Jones Show of 24/3/06: here.

Able danger..... was nicknamed "the little terrorist"

2006-03-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

The office manager of a flight school was so unnerved by September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta that she nicknamed him "the little terrorist" months before the deadly attacks.

Susan Hall, the former office manager of Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, disclosed her nickname for Atta during testimony on Tuesday at the sentencing trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

Atta was the presumed ringleader of the airliner hijackings that killed almost 3,000 people.

He piloted the first airplane that was smashed into the World Trade Centre.

"I found Atta to be very cold and steely in his demeanour. Not friendly and pretty hateful," Hall said.

"I called him 'the little terrorist'," she said.

Asked why she had that nickname for Atta, Hall said: "He had that aura about him. I just didn't like the aura he gave off."

Hall said she used the nickname for Atta only with her co-workers but said she never expressed her reservations to the FBI or the Federal Aviation Administration.

Atta and another September 11 hijacker, Marwan al Shehhi, took flying lessons at Huffman beginning in the summer of 2000.

Student Member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth Shot Dead

2006-03-24T06:23:00.000-08:00

(WCCO) Minneapolis Minneapolis Police are reviewing videotape from security cameras after a shooting in the Uptown neighborhood over the weekend.

Michael Zebuhr, 25, was shot in the head in the 3100 block of Girard Avenue around 10 p.m. Saturday.

Zebuhr died late Sunday night at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Zebuhr was a graduate student at Clemson University in South Carolina. He dreamed of working at NASA.

Zebuhr also loved mountain biking, math and science.

Police said on Saturday night, Zebuhr was walking to a parked car with family members, when robbers approached them and demanded his mother's purse. She gave it to the gunmen without any resistance.

One gunman shot Zebuhr twice in the head. Police said the shooting appeared to be cold-blooded and unprovoked.

Police are hoping for a break in the case. Several security cameras were pointed in the direction where the shooting happened and police are now reviewing those tapes.

Uptown's usual upbeat atmosphere remains on edge with no suspects in the case.

"It's a definite shock," said Erik Pehrson, an Uptown shop employee. "I'll be walking ladies to their cars at night when they get off late."

A manager of another store said she'll be paying for employees to park at a parking ramp because at a ramp, at least there are a few extra sets of eyes keeping watch.

Which is the same reason one community leader wants parking on the street to be restricted to residents. He reasoned it would force late-night visitors to play it safe.

"People patronizing the Hennepin-Lake bars and restaurants (should) park in the ramps where security could be a little more controlled," Jeff Farnam said.

For an area filled with around-the-clock visitors and residents, Saturday's violence is shattering. Residents and businesses said police presence isn't an issue in Uptown.

"We have pushed all the possible officers out on the street," said Minneapolis Police Deputy Chief Sharon Lubinski. "We have 76 percent of officers in department on the street."

She said that although the shooting is a tragedy, it was very unusual and similar crimes rarely happen in that area.

Neighborhood residents have already taken steps to do what they can to make it safer.

Christine Devens is with the Calhoun Area Residents Action Group.

"Because of increasing concern for these types of crimes, our neighborhood, the CARAG neighborhood, has gotten together to form what we call the CARAG stroll patrol or a neighborhood walking group," Devens said.

Devens and other neighbors said the rising rate in burglaries and robberies in the area has given them concern.

"They did everything right so it is really concerning," Devens said.

According to officials, burglary is up 14 percent and robbery is up 43 percent compared to one year ago.

"It's surprising and it's tragic, but my response isn't one of fear," resident David Johnson said.

Most residents said they feel safe, despite the recent problem, but that doesn't mean they're not taking extra precautions now.

"The more people out on the streets, making it a lively place ... hanging out, meeting each other, getting to know each other," Johnson said. "I think it's great. It's got a great benefit of making it safer too, but I think it's just part of what makes life great here."

Local businesses are now paying for additional security to patrol the area.

Video shows British soldiers beating young Iraqis - DOWNLOAD

2006-02-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

Here. (download, then click here to download)

Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter

2006-02-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was "alert and doing fine" in a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday after he was shot by Cheney on a ranch in south Texas, said Katharine Armstrong, the property's owner.

He was described as in stable condition by Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System in Corpus Christi.

RFID Injection Required for Datacenter Access

2006-02-12T13:24:00.000-08:00

user24 writes "Security focus reports that RFID injections are now required for access to the datacenter of a Cincinnati company. From the article 'In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access ... although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment.'"

Al Qaeda establish 'Islamic state' in Pak province

2006-02-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

It's like.... bomb them!
Whoops, no, it's impossible. Pakistan is a valuable ally in the war on terror.

NEW DELHI: After taking "virtual control" of the entire North Waziristan province of Pakistan, Taliban and Al Qaeda have recently "declared" the establishment of an 'Islamic State' in the area and gained a major base for their operations against the US-led forces in Afghanistan, media reports said.

"The Taliban recently declared the establishment of an 'Islamic State' in North Waziristan, and they now, through the brutal elimination of criminal elements who previously held sway, in effect rule in the rugged territory," a latest report in 'Asia Times' magazine said.

It said that by "taking control of virtually all of Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, the Taliban have gained a significant base from which to wage their resistance against US-led forces in Afghanistan.

9/11 Revisited: Scientific and Ethical Questions - VIDEO

2006-02-11T16:42:00.000-08:00

Download from:

- 911 Truthseekers
- 911 Blogger

- Internet Archive (reprehensor version)

SPREAD IT !

Big brother in India...

2006-02-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

Srinagar, February 10: THE J-K police has turned to the intelligent digital monitoring system in its fight against the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. And in its first phase, the police is setting up close-circuit surveillance cameras at all the strategic points of Srinagar and Jammu cities.

‘We are setting up these cameras throughout Jammu and Kashmir,’’ said a senior J-K police officer. ‘‘Initially, we will cover Srinagar and Jammu cities. In the next phase, these cameras would be installed in all the major towns of the state.’’ The police, in its first experimental stage, has set up 25 special fish-eye close-watch cameras on the tactical sites of Civil Lines city. And if the results are encouraging, the police plans to instal these hidden cameras in the congested downtown locality of Srinagar city as well. ‘‘These (surveillance cameras) are very good,’’ a senior police officer said. ‘‘We will soon set up another 30 cameras in downtown (in Srinagar). The installation is in progress in Jammu city also.’’

The special hidden cameras set up at a height of 40-50 feet are connected to the recording unit set up at a secret location in Srinagar. A separate control room has been set up for the purpose. The footage is being monitored round-the-clock by senior police officials and can be automatically recorded and saved on a storage card for a period of six months, which police could use to identify a suspect.

‘‘These cameras are specially designed for surveillance,’’ said a police officer. ‘‘These (cameras) can zoom in on a person, hundreds of metres away from the camera in all the directions.’’ The secret surveillance cameras keep 24-hour vigil and are functional during the night as well.

‘‘These cameras can monitor movements in the dark also,’’ the police officer said. Though some of the cameras have been installed in the open along the busy Residency and Maulana Azad road of Srinagar, the police says there are also large number of hidden cameras installed in the city. ‘‘A good number of such cameras are not visible. These would help the police keep a check on the movement of suspected militants’’. The setting up of surveillance cameras in winter capital Jammu is already in progress and the police plan to instal more such hidden cameras in other major towns and vital installations of the state.

U.S. Wraps Up Mock Internet Attack Drill

2006-02-11T14:59:00.000-08:00

A war exercise of a different kind, "Cyber Storm" was staged by the Department of Homeland Security and involved more than 115 government agencies.

The drill wrapped up Friday.

It tested how the government would respond to a devastating attack over the Internet.

It included such imaginary, but real-life enemies as anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and even bloggers.

The results? The Internet survived. Not even the bloggers or hackers could break through or pose a serious threat to energy, transportation or health care industries.

“Cyber security is critical to protecting our nation's infrastructure because information systems connect so many aspects of our economy and society," said George W. Foresman, DHS Under Secretary for Preparedness.

"Preparedness against a cyber attack requires partnership and coordination between all levels of government and the private sector. Cyber Storm provides an excellent opportunity to enhance our nation's cyber preparedness and better manage risk.”

Homeland Security officials promise a full report by summer.

Moussaoui Defense Reveals Details of Pre-9/11 Knowledge

2006-02-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

McLEAN, Va. Lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui (zak-uh-REE'-uhs moo-SOW'-ee) say that U-S government agents knew Moussaoui was an agent of Osama bin Laden but still failed to aggressively investigate their client.

Those remarks came during a closed hearing last month in which Moussaoui's lawyers disclosed several details that go beyond and sometimes contradict what was disclosed in the September 11th commission report.The government's knowledge of Moussaoui and his terrorist connections will be a key issue at his March 6th death-penalty trial in federal court in Alexandria.Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly aircraft into U-S targets. But Moussaoui claims he had nothing to do with Nine-Eleven and instead was training for part of an aborted second wave of attacks.To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui was directly involved in the attacks.Transcripts of the January 5th pretrial hearing were released late yesterday.Prosecutors did NOT respond to the defense statements during the hearing.

New nuclear weapons an unnecessary evil

2006-02-11T14:53:00.000-08:00

SCIENTISTS are cooking up an old favorite — the H-bomb — for the first time in 20 years, and we can't help but to wonder why.

This isn't just theoretical work — the plan, if it is approved by the president and Congress, is to completely revamp the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The bombmakers say the new weapons will be easier to maintain and can be remotely defused if they should fall into the wrong hands. Or at least that's what they're supposed to do. Because the weapons are only in the design stage and are untested, there's no telling how they would perform.

According to officials, the plans, being worked on at national laboratories in Livermore and Los Alamos, New Mexico, include a factory that could produce more nuclear weapons as needed.

But what does that mean — "as needed"? The United States has thousands of warheads, and it's hard to understand why we need more. Building the bombs would mean diverting resources from other areas at a time when the United States already is facing a huge deficit.

During the Cold War, our nation's officially stated policy was that nuclear weapons were to act as a deterrent. If that is true, the thousands of warheads we now possess should be more than enough to satisfy that need.

We're not suggesting abandoning research, but nuclear weapons are part of the Cold War paradigm. The United States finds itself in a new century, fighting a new kind of war; one in which nuclear warheads aren't effective weapons against the enemies we face.

Producing more nukes makes no sense. Our country already has 5,700 nuclear warheads — isn't that enough to get the job done? We fail to see how more nuclear weapons will make America safer.

Zawahiri relative killed in US raid, al Qaeda deputy escaped

2006-02-11T14:51:00.000-08:00

Islamabad, Feb 11: A close relative of al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was among five militants killed in a US air strike last month, but Zawahiri himself escaped, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said.

Security officials said military ruler Musharraf was referring to Abdur Rehman al-Maghribi, Zawahiri's son-in-law and the head of al-Qaeda's media operations.

The January 13 attack on Damadola, a remote village in the Bajur tribal agency bordering Afghanistan, sparked protests in Pakistan after residents and officials said up to 18 civilians were also killed.

"Among the people who were killed in Bajur, one of them was a close relative of Zawahiri," Musharraf was quoted as saying by his spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan.

"Zawahiri's son-in-law was killed in the Bajur strike," one security official told media persons on condition of anonymity.

Musharraf added that one of the dead was an "important person" with a five million dollar bounty on his head, however sultan said it was not clear if the president was talking about Zawahiri's relative or another person.

Egyptian Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's lieutentant and chief ideologue of the al-Qaeda terror network, was due at a house in the village on the day of the air strike but he failed to show, Musharraf added.

"Zawahiri was also supposed to be there but he did not come," spokesman sultan quoted Musharraf as telling media in northwest Pakistan.

Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified

2006-02-11T14:44:00.000-08:00

By Norman G. Finkelstein

01/15/06 "Aftenposten" -- -- The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions: 1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and 2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel's real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad. This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel's defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include:

Illegal Killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians have garnered much media attention, Israel's quantitatively worse record of killing non-combatants is less well known. According to the most recent figures of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified as combatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom 309 were combatants. This means that three times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and up to three times more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians. Israel's defenders maintain that there's a difference between targeting civilians and inadvertently killing them. B'Tselem disputes this: "[W]hen so many civilians have been killed and wounded, the lack of intent makes no difference. Israel remains responsible." Furthermore, Amnesty International reports that "many" Palestinians have not been accidentally killed but "deliberately targeted," while the award-winning New York Times journalist Chris Hedges reports that Israeli soldiers "entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

Torture. "From 1967," Amnesty reports, "the Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects in the Occupied Territories." B'Tselem found that eighty-five percent of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security services were subjected to "methods constituting torture," while already a decade ago Human Rights Watch estimated that "the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated" was "in the tens of thousands - a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is under three-quarters of one million." In 1987 Israel became "the only country in the world to have effectively legalized torture" (Amnesty). Although the Israeli Supreme Court seemed to ban torture in a 1999 decision, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reported in 2003 that Israeli security forces continued to apply torture in a "methodical and routine" fashion. A 2001 B'Tselem study documented that Israeli security forces often applied "severe torture" to "Palestinian minors."?

House demolitions. "Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories," B'Tselem reports, and since September 2000 "has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes." Until just recently Israel routinely resorted to house demolitions as a form of collective punishment. According to Middle East Watch, apart from Israel, the only other country in the world that used such a draconian punishment was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In addition, Israel has demolished thousands of "illegal" homes that Palestinians built because of Israel's refusal to provide building permits. The motive behind destroying these homes, according to Amnesty, has been to maximize the area available for Jewish settlers: "Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than they are Palestinians." Finally, Israel has destroyed hundred of homes on security pretexts, yet a Human Rights Watch report on Gaza found that "the pattern of destruction?strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat." Amnesty likewise found that "Israel's extensive destruction of homes and properties throughout the West Bank and Gaza?is not justified by military necessity," and that "Some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes."

Apart from the sheer magnitude of its human rights violations, the uniqueness of Israeli policies merits notice. "Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality," B'Tselem has concluded. "This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa." If singling out South Africa for an international economic boycott was defensible, it would seem equally defensible to single out Israel's occupation, which uniquely resembles the apartheid regime.

Although an economic boycott can be justified on moral grounds, the question remains whether diplomacy might be more effectively employed instead. The documentary record in this regard, however, is not encouraging. The basic terms for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict are embodied in U.N. resolution 242 and subsequent U.N. resolutions, which call for a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian state in these areas in exchange for recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. Each year the overwhelming majority of member States of the United Nations vote in favor of this two-state settlement, and each year Israel and the United States (and a few South Pacific islands) oppose it. Similarly, in March 2002 all twenty-two member States of the Arab League proposed this two-state settlement as well as "normal relations with Israel." Israel ignored the proposal.?

Not only has Israel stubbornly rejected this two-state settlement, but the policies it is currently pursuing will abort any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. While world attention has been riveted by Israel's redeployment from Gaza, Sara Roy of Harvard University observes that the "Gaza Disengagement Plan is, at heart, an instrument for Israel's continued annexation of West Bank land and the physical integration of that land into Israel." In particular Israel has been constructing a wall deep inside the West Bank that will annex the most productive land and water resources as well as East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life. It will also effectively sever the West Bank in two. Although Israel initially claimed that it was building the wall to fight terrorism, the consensus among human rights organizations is that it is really a land grab to annex illegal Jewish settlements into Israel. Recently Israel's Justice Minister frankly acknowledged that the wall will serve as "the future border of the state of Israel."

The current policies of the Israeli government will lead either to endless bloodshed or the dismemberment of Palestine. "It remains virtually impossible to conceive of a Palestinian state without its capital in Jerusalem," the respected Crisis Group recently concluded, and accordingly Israeli policies in the West Bank "are at war with any viable two-state solution and will not bolster Israel's security; in fact, they will undermine it, weakening Palestinian pragmatists?and sowing the seeds of growing radicalization."?

Recalling the U.N. Charter principle that it is inadmissible to acquire territory by war, the International Court of Justice declared in a landmark 2004 opinion that Israel's settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the wall being built to annex them to Israel were illegal under international law. It called on Israel to cease construction of the wall, dismantle those parts already completed and compensate Palestinians for damages. Crucially, it also stressed the legal responsibilities of the international community:

all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction. It is also for all States, while respecting the United Nations Charter and international law, to see to it that any impediment, resulting from the construction of the wall, to the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end.

A subsequent U.N. General Assembly resolution supporting the World Court opinion passed overwhelmingly. However, the Israeli government ignored the Court's opinion, continuing construction at a rapid pace, while Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the wall was legal.

Due to the obstructionist tactics of the United States, the United Nations has not been able to effectively confront Israel's illegal practices. Indeed, although it is true that the U.N. keeps Israel to a double standard, it's exactly the reverse of the one Israel's defenders allege: Israel is held not to a higher but lower standard than other member States. A study by Marc Weller of Cambridge University comparing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory with comparable situations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor, occupied Kuwait and Iraq, and Rwanda found that Israel has enjoyed "virtual immunity" from enforcement measures such as an arms embargo and economic sanctions typically adopted by the U.N. against member States condemned for identical violations of international law. Due in part to an aggressive campaign accusing Europe of a "new anti-Semitism," the European Union has also failed in its legal obligation to enforce international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Although the claim of a "new anti-Semitism" has no basis in fact (all the evidence points to a lessening of anti-Semitism in Europe), the EU has reacted by appeasing Israel. It has even suppressed publication of one of its own reports, because the authors -- like the Crisis Group and many others -- concluded that due to Israeli policies the "prospects for a two-state solution with east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine are receding."

The moral burden to avert the impending catastrophe must now be borne by individual states that are prepared to respect their obligations under international law and by individual men and women of conscience. In a courageous initiative American-based Human Rights Watch recently called on the U.S. government to reduce significantly its financial aid to Israel until Israel terminates its illegal policies in the West Bank. An economic boycott would seem to be an equally judicious undertaking. A nonviolent tactic the purpose of which is to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Indeed, the real enemies of Jews are those who cheapen the memory of Jewish suffering by equating principled opposition to Israel's illegal and immoral policies with anti-Semitism.?

Twenty-Three Intel Experts Say LA Terror Plot a Sham

2006-02-10T15:39:00.000-08:00

Twenty-Three Intel Experts Say LA Terror Plot a Sham

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | February 10 2006

Following yesterday's highly suspiciously timed announcement that the US government had foiled a 2002 terror plot against the Los Angeles Library Tower, intelligence experts and White House reporters have uniformly debunked the story.

As we reported yesterday, in an orchestrated set-up, George W. Bush announced that a plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002 and within minutes news networks were showing footage of the same building being destroyed in the movie Independence Day.

After the mayor of LA, Antonio Villaraigosa, immediately went public with comments of his absolute bewilderment concerning the alleged plot, no fewer than twenty three intelligence experts told Capitol Hill Blue that President Bush was "cheapening and politicizing their work" by creating a "fantasy world" of discredited terror alerts and using them for political points scoring.

Both current and former NSA and FBI officials vented their fury with George Bush, one telling Capitol Hill Blue that he was "full of shit."

The LA attack plot arose from the same discredited informant who said that Washington and New York financial institutions were being targeted, which led the White House to raise the terror alert right as the 2004 election campaign was beginning.

In June 2004 John Pistole, the FBI's counterterrorism director, said he was "not sure what [the CIA] was referring to," after a CIA counterterrorism official who testified under the alias "Ted Davis" said that the US had prevented aviation attacks against the east and west coast.

Even former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, before he was replaced by Michael Chertoff, stated that the White House would raise the terror alert with zeal based on the flimsiest evidence.

White House press reporters questioned the timing of the bogus attack claim Thursday evening in light of the NSA spying hearings, after Bush claimed NSA surveillance was key in preventing the alleged attack.

"But is it just a coincidence? You had February 6th circled on the calendar for the hearings, the NSA hearings. Is it just a pure coincidence that this comes out today?" asked one journalist.

McClellan was clearly ruffled and all he could do was repeat the same line about how the President likes to share information with the American people, a claim that would be funny if it were not so disturbingly tragic in light of today's report highlighting White House knowledge of levee breaks in New Orleans hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore.

"Scott, I wanted to just ask a follow-up about the LA plot. Is there something missing from this story, a practical application, a few facts? Because if you want to commandeer a plane and fly it into a tower, if you used shoe bombs, wouldn't you blow off the cockpit? Or is there something missing from this story?" asked another.

File this with the dozens of fake terror alerts, staged 'Al-Qaeda' arrests and hoax bin Laden tapes as another brazen attempt to frighten the American people into jettisoning their own liberty for the sake of a mythical security offered by an illegitimate occupational government.

Russia confirms missile defence contract with Iran

2006-02-10T15:38:00.000-08:00

Moscow: Amid the escalating crisis around Iran's nuclear programme, Russia said Thursday that it will still arm Tehran with missiles that can secure nuclear facilities from attacks.

"We concluded a contract for the supply of air-defence systems to Iran and there is no reason not to fulfil it," Mikhail Dmitriyev, the head of Russia's military-technical cooperation agency, told journalists here.

Worth an estimated $700 million, the deal for up to 30 Tor M-1 surface-to-air missiles is the largest since Russia in 2000 withdrew from an agreement with the US restricting the supply of military hardware to Iran.

Dmitriyev rejected media reports that talks were underway for the additional supply of heavier S-300 air-defence missiles.

Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov has stressed that the Tor is a defensive system and that the sale does not violate Russia's international obligations.

The weapon is effective against aircraft, cruise missiles and guided bombs.

There was no indication when the systems would be shipped to Iran.

The missiles are expected to be deployed at the nuclear research centre at Isfahan and the reactor that Russia is completing for Iran at the southern port of Bushehr.

According to Dmitriyev, Russia's overall exports of arms in 2005 were worth a record $6.1 billion. The sales target for 2006 is $7 billion, he added.

The main customers for Russian military hardware are China and India.

Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy

2006-02-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

· 15-year limit set for switch to renewable energy
· Biofuels favoured over further nuclear power

John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday February 8, 2006
The Guardian

Evergreen... Sweden will develop biofuels from its forests. Photograph: Mattias Klum/Getty Images

Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development. "There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline."

According to the energy committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, there is growing concern that global oil supplies are peaking and will shortly dwindle, and that a global economic recession could result from high oil prices.

Ms Sahlin has described oil dependency as one of the greatest problems facing the world. "A Sweden free of fossil fuels would give us enormous advantages, not least by reducing the impact from fluctuations in oil prices," she said. "The price of oil has tripled since 1996."

A government official said: "We want to be both mentally and technically prepared for a world without oil. The plan is a response to global climate change, rising petroleum prices and warnings by some experts that the world may soon be running out of oil."

Sweden, which was badly hit by the oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets almost all its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power, and relies on fossil fuels mainly for transport. Almost all its heating has been converted in the past decade to schemes which distribute steam or hot water generated by geothermal energy or waste heat. A 1980 referendum decided that nuclear power should be phased out, but this has still not been finalised.

The decision to abandon oil puts Sweden at the top of the world green league table. Iceland hopes by 2050 to power all its cars and boats with hydrogen made from electricity drawn from renewable resources, and Brazil intends to power 80% of its transport fleet with ethanol derived mainly from sugar cane within five years.

Last week George Bush surprised analysts by saying that the US was addicted to oil and should greatly reduce imports from the Middle East. The US now plans a large increase in nuclear power.

The British government, which is committed to generating 10% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2012, last month launched an energy review which has a specific remit to consider a large increase in nuclear power. But a report by accountants Ernst & Young yesterday said that the UK was falling behind in its attempt to meet its renewables target.

"The UK has Europe's best wind, wave and tidal resources yet it continues to miss out on its economic potential," said Jonathan Johns, head of renewable energy at Ernst & Young.

Energy ministry officials in Sweden said they expected the oil committee to recommend further development of biofuels derived from its massive forests, and by expanding other renewable energies such as wind and wave power.

Sweden has a head start over most countries. In 2003, 26% of all the energy consumed came from renewable sources - the EU average is 6%. Only 32% of the energy came from oil - down from 77% in 1970.

The Swedish government is working with carmakers Saab and Volvo to develop cars and lorries that burn ethanol and other biofuels. Last year the Swedish energy agency said it planned to get the public sector to move out of oil. Its health and library services are being given grants to convert from oil use and homeowners are being encouraged with green taxes. The paper and pulp industries use bark to produce energy, and sawmills burn wood chips and sawdust to generate power.

Intel pros say Bush is lying about foiling 2002 terror attack

2006-02-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

Outraged intelligence professionals say President George W. Bush is "cheapening" and "politicizing" their work with claims the United States foiled a planned terrorist attack against Los Angeles in 2002.

"The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world," says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington."

Within hours of the President’s speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President’s remarks.

“He’s full of shit,” said one sharply-worded email.

Although none were willing to allow use of their names, saying doing so would place them in legal jeopardy, we were able to confirm that at least four of the 23 who contacted us currently work, or had worked, within the U.S. intelligence community.

But Los Angeles Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is willing to go on the record, claiming Bush blind-sided his city with the claims.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor says. "I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody." Villaraigosa also said he has twice requested meetings with Bush to discuss security issues for Los Angeles and was turned down both times.

Intelligence pros say much of the information used by Bush in an attempt to justify his increased spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, trampling of civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, and massive buildup of the Department of Homeland Security, now the nation’s largest federal bureaucracy, was “worthless intel that was discarded long ago.”

“A lot of buzz circulated in the months following the September 11, 2001, attacks,” says an NSA operative. “Snippets here and there were true but most were just random information that could never be confirmed. One thing we do know about al Qaeda is that they seldom use the same technique twice. They tried a car bomb to bring down the World Trade Center and it failed. Then they went to planes. The next time will be something different because we’ve geared up to prevent hijacking planes and using them as flying bombs.”

In August 2004, just as the Presidential campaign was about to heat up, the Bush White House raised the terror alert, claiming attacks were imminent on major financial institutions. The alert, apparently timed to steal thunder from Democrat John Kerry’s nomination for President, was withdrawn after administration officials admitted it was based on old information from a discredited informant.

The discredited information dated back to the same period when intelligence agencies began receiving reports of a planned attack against Los Angeles.

Counterterrorism officials say they are surprised that Bush claimed the plot was "set in motion."

"There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage," says a senior counterterrorism official, who has worked at the CIA and the FBI, who talked to Capitol Hill Blue and the New York Daily News.

FBI Deputy Director John Pistole refused to characterize it as an advanced plot when discussing it in June 2004.

Former DHS secretary Tom Ridge admits the U.S. raised terror alerts for the wrong reasons and now says he often disagreed with the timing of such alerts but was overruled by the White House.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge says. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on alert, There were times when the White House was really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' We often lost the argument."

Ridge left DHS in February 2005 and Bush replaced him with Michael Chertoff who agrees with the “cry wolf” strategy of the White House.

“Chertoff is a lackey,” says Kevin Riley, a retired New York City Detective who knew Chertoff during his days as a U.S. Attorney in New York. “He’ll do whatever Bush tells him to do.”

Intelligence pros at established Washington agencies laugh at DHS operatives, calling them “Keystone Kops” and “overpaid rent-a-cops,” saying they lack any real expertise in dealing with terrorism.

“DHS is a political police force,” says a retired CIA agent. “They exist to enforce the political propaganda program of George W. Bush. That’s all they’re good for and they’re not very good at that.”

Prof. Strauss and the neocon takeover

2006-02-07T01:25:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the latest blockbuster? Like Star Wars, it's classic good verses evil - a power hungry dictator plotting to seize control of a goodly Republic. The twist is it's for adults. Ones who know reality is stranger than fiction. You guessed it! This epic thriller is actually your life, and it's called “The Fall of the Republic - Sleeping Through the Revolution.” Here's a behind the scenes look:

Bush Jr. came to power surrounding himself with far right “neo-conservatives” that his daddy called “crazies in the basement.”

Who are the crazies? A militant, anti-communist group of mainly Jewish intellectuals who studied the Trotskyite, Machiavellian political philosophy of Prof. Strauss at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Perle, Abrams, Chalabi, Bennett, Ho, Shulsky, Khalilzad, Schmitt, Kristol, are a few of the invasion architects, intelligence crafters, torture lawyers, Iraq ambassadors and U.S. puppets who studied under Strauss.

Together with Straussian devotees at neocon and pro-Israeli think tanks, they now control all powerful positions in our government.

What do neocons believe and want? They are anti-democratic, authoritarian, and they want power. Straussianism provides the intellectual framework and personal justification for their actions.

Strauss taught that an elite, wise ruling class must rule the unsophisticated masses by telling them noble lies for their own good.

Strauss loved Plato, interpreting his teachings to mean, “... true democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs.”

He wrote leaders must use religion to control the masses.

“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people.” Leaders must always provide an enemy.

Straussian teachings spark delusions of grandeur in neocon intellectuals, who imagine themselves as the wise ruling elite, set free of the bonds of honesty and equality.

The Project for a New American Century think tank springs directly from this authoritarian power cult. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Abrams, Libby, Perle, and others signed PNAC documents in 1997 advocating aggressive, militaristic world domination, domination of space, control of cyberspace (they don't want much), permanent bases in the Middle East, and employing troops in constabulatory (police) duties to enforce U.S. world empire, Pax Americana.

Neocon papers are thick with delusional paranoia like the following from Richard Perle, National Security Council: “No stages, this is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute Fellow, former NSC, State, and Defense Department consultant and influential White House advisor writes, “We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater. Š We are a warlike people and we love war.”

Perle, Wolfowitz, Bolton and others have a long history of calling for “winnable nuclear war.”

Henry Kissinger described the baffled response of established powers in the face of revolutionary challenge. “Lulled by a period of stability which seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists: those who counsel adaptation Š are considered balanced and sane.”

This movie will soon be over. Better wake up your congressman.

Muslim Riots Aid Neo-Con Global Agenda

2006-02-07T01:23:00.000-08:00

"Clash of Civilizations" Advanced by Naive and Controlled Groups

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | February 7 2006

The riots that are currently sweeping across Europe and the Middle East in response to caricatures of Mohammed that were originally printed in Danish newspapers are staged managed and are helping the Neo-Cons advance the "clash of civilizations" that they need to impose world order and imperial hegemony.

Images of Muslims with signs that read "freedom go to hell" and "Europe, take some lessons from from 9/11" are playing right into the hands of the Globalists by enabling them to hold up examples of how the Muslims are dangerous barbarians who wish to take away our liberties and need to be dealt with.

The elite is encouraging and fostering the spread of Islamofascism throughout Europe by allowing mass immigration in increasing levels year after year. It is in their interests to create a balkanized melting pot so they can use divide and conquer tactics to enslave all races under a centralized new world order.

The elite want us to be at each others throats while they dominate over the downtrodden and befuddled warring tribes. Race is the ultimate touchstone hot button issue and the Globalists have enacted policies of rampant uncontrolled immigration in order to force hostile cultures to intermingle. The outcome is always tribal warfare, as we saw in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The right of newspapers to publish these caricatures is unwavering and freedom of speech takes precedence over everything else. Violent Muslim demonstrators should be aware that they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction by allowing the media to portray them as freedom hating, brutal and out of control. This ensures increased support for future wars that primarily target Muslim and Persian majority countries.

During collection of material that is posted on this website, we regularly scan political cartoon and artwork archives such as Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index. This is an archive for cartoons that appear in US newspapers nationwide on a daily basis. On numerous occasions over the past five years we have seen cartoons and caricatures that depict Mohammed. Why the sudden outrage now?

As Kurt Nimmo points out, the three most offensive cartoons that caused the outrage were not even printed in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper but were added in and handed out by Danish imams who “circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries,” according to the London Telegraph.

It also appears highly suspicious that Muslims in Gaza City and other places had gained access to a plentiful supply of Danish flags to burn in front of the waiting world media as soon as the controversy broke out.

We have tirelessly documented previous cases where Muslim clerics and leaders were proven to be acting on behalf of Western intelligence agencies. Early indications strongly suggest that the original riots that led to worldwide demonstrations were staged managed.

Last November's French riots were used to advance a similar agenda that we see unraveling today.

The melting pot of multiculturalism does not work, it has never worked and it was never intended to work. The Algerians in France do not want to be part of the Western fabric because they fundamentally hate it to its very core. This is not helped by promotion of decadent and hedonistic lifestyles pumped out from every cultural and media orifice.

A sizeable proportion of the secular humanist Westerners who like to think of themselves as part of the establishment, when in reality they are unwitting tools of the true elite, have bought into the cuddly utopian philosophy that the West is a global village which welcomes all comers and has the enlightened innate ability to homogenize millions of different people of all different colors and creeds into one giant melting pot.

The reality couldn't be further from the truth and images of flaming buses, schools, nurseries, terror and panic betrayed that fact in France last November.

Establishment controlled Mexican groups such as Aztlan and Mecha advocate killing all whites and blacks and driving them out of the southern states by means of brutal ethnic cleansing. Flags and placards carried at marches depict white people having their heads cut off, as seen in the picture below.

Those that protest such groups are then attacked by the establishment media and labeled as racists, despite the fact that the Plan of San Diego, a rallying cry for the Hispanic Klan groups, advocates total eradication of any race but Hispanics.

Mecha's own slogan reads, "For the race everything. For those outside the race, nothing."

Again, this racial warfare only benefits a smug elite who are content to sit back and watch all the chaos unfold, leaving a terrified middle class to beg for a choking police state to be instituted as the only solution to the problem, a problem manufactured by elite control of so-called minority groups in the first place.

Violent Muslim demonstrators need to take a step back and consider what is important in the long term. The ability of western media to exercise freedom of speech and print cartoons, or unwittingly greasing the skids for a giant engineered backlash against the Muslim world that will see all Muslim nations subjugated and dominated under a tyrannical world government, along with every other race, color and creed.

Call For A Red Synthetic Terror Alert

2006-02-07T01:21:00.000-08:00

The intense international intelligence warfare pattern mandates a move to red alert -- the highest vigilance -- for the upcoming superbowl Sunday in the USA and the Turin winter Olympics, and perhaps all the way to the March 20 opening of the Iranian oil bourse, which spells the beginning of the end for six decades of world dollar hegemony.

The Iranian oil bourse opens March 20 -- this is the strategic key. The Cheneyacs want war to stop the bourse from deflating the sick US dollar. The crumbling of European resistance has given new strength to Condi's nuclear lynch mob against Iran, with that country about to be hauled before the UN Security Council. At that point, a wider Middle East war will be immediately in sight.

The Mohammed cartoons are a transparent provocation by NATO intelligence through a Danish right wing newspaper of limited circulation. This classic US-UK provocation has had an enormous effect. Islamic circles need to realize that this is a cynical ploy designed to lead to an attack on Iran and thence to general war, and treat it that way.

We had the latest British terror bombing in Achwaz, Iran last week (Jan. 24), killing several people. The trial of British-backed terrorists in Iran starts in about 2 weeks. The situation of the British invaders in southern Iraq is becoming critical. Afghanistan is about to boil over. The US and North Korea are trading nuclear war threats across the 38th parallel. Russia has accused the British of flagrant spying, and there is every reason to believe this charge. Venezuela has expelled a US military attache as an obvious agent provocateur; now the US expels top Venezuelan diplomat. Now the fake provocation of an alleged IED bomb near a school in Gaiithersburg, Maryland in the Washington DC suburbs, impacting the personnel of the Bush administration and the federal government in general; many top officials live within a few miles of this school.

There was real hysteria in the corridors of the US government this afternoon. A new Sudden Response terror drill is taking place at Charleston. South Carolina. Will this drill go live in the way other drills went live in London last July 7? The latest leaked Downing Street memorandum reveals Bush as proposing to send US U-2 spy planes disguised in UN colors to be shot down over Iraq to secure a pretext for the illegal aggression there. This reveals Bush in the Operation Northwoods tradition, ready to commit acts of war in the form of impeachable offenses.

Detroit is a burned-out auto city, expendable in the eyes of the finance oligarchs. Turin, Italy, home of FIAT, is another expendable burned out ex-industrial city. An action in Turin would push the Europeans to join the US in the attack on Iran. The sinking of the Egptian ferry in the Red Sea may well fit into this pattern, but this is not clear. The Patriot Act has not been renewed. Top neocons face indictment and jail sentences.This is the classic moment when the neocons and their rogue network backers go back to Leo Strauss's nihilist revolution, capable of throwing humanity back into the Stone Age.

Webster Griffin Tarpley Washington DC
February 4, 2006