By Gold Star Father, March 9 at 6:31 am #
(Unregistered commenter) says,

“There are so many false statements in the previous comments. Many of you are just feeding on them.
A couple:
  The steel from the Trade Center Towers was taken to Staten Island before it was recycled. It was analyzed by many before it became “scrap”. It was looked over there repeatedly as it still contained human remains.I myself watched barges take the stuff there.”

And isn’t lucky that the steel girders all came down in 20 ft long pieces with ends cut at 60 degree angles.

This is a beautiful example of the perps, the “shadow government” trying to interject some doubt in a previously unquestioned series of events by lying.  The monker, Gold Star Father and the BS about being a military pilot tries to impose some level of credulity.

Well, I’ve got one for you.  All you unemployed in the US can now, thanks to NAFTA, go down to Mexico.  Plenty of “Doctorin’, Lawyerin’ jobs down there.  (Thanks John Candy.)

“Why[ asks Cyrena] are you so insistent that Obama, from a totally different generation and entirely different background is the same as these old white men that have been running our country from the beginning?”

Because, Cyrena, he has been put in power by the same people who put in Bush, with the same Wall Street money, and he is promoting the same policies as Bush, with better rhetoric for Progressives and marginal differences.  His political function is to get progressives to support Bushite policies. 

Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, Israeli ethnic cleansing, increased class inequality, and a disguised despotism in place of American democracy.  And torture, and arbitrary imprisonment, using the same legal and political arguemnts as Bush.

Americans are beginning to understand this, Cyrema, so you might consider where the future of Obama cheerleading is taking you.  Is that where you want to go?

Wadosy, I have always assumed that 9/11-anthrax was a crazy form of adventurism on the part of the Bushites but Ruppert in his book connected it to peak oil I’ve never understood the connection, that it was imminent enough to effect such a drastic political counter revolution.  I still can’t accept in emotionally, but it is a better explanation than adventurism plus Zionism.  Scott, a mentor of Ruppert, appears to head in that direction, and he is fantastically knowledgable.

Inherit:  Greenspan was an intimate of that dingbat Ayn Rand?  The one that had her Heroes wear dollar signs on their chests as a sign of their Manliness?  No wonder we are in such trouble.  And she was Jewish?  Good lord.

As Rex Tillerson said in, “ExxonMobil eyes starring role in Iraq 09 March”,

“I hope Iraq creates the conditions that will allow a company like ExxonMobil to be a participant in a significant way,” Tillerson told Reuters in an interview ahead of an energy conference in Qatar.

“That’s the dialogue we are having with them to make them understand what conditions will be necessary for us… to take risk with our capital and have the opportunity to be successful over the long term.”
——————————————————————————-
Reminds me of one of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s presentations where he outlined a global strategy for U.S. domination.  To paraphase Barnett, he said to keep an eye on how these invasions are going, watch the foreign direct investment (FDI).  These companies want some assurance of safety before they send money and management there to oversee the project.
In short, that tells me that the war will continue.

Thanks for the link, Wadosy.

cyrena - PART II - Re the idea that Americans have “dumbed down” and so accept whatever the government does including torture as OK or in the nation’s best interests, it goes beyond that: even when Americans were smarter, the idea of violence or whatever else it took to protect the country was tolerated. I think the real problem is that we’re continuing to act out our own history instead of analyzing it to see how we became what we are, and whether we can see ways we might make ourselves a better country in the first place. We rebelled against England—an excellent first step followed by less worthy enterprises; took the Southwest from Spain and Mexico who had earlier stolen it from the Indians; after the French and Indian war with the English (when we were colonials) and much later in our history, we displaced the French simply by establishing settlements and colonists instead of leaving only priests, missions and furhunters up the Mississippi; and like everyone—Europeans and American colonists alike—simply took or cheated away land from the Native Americans through trickery or force or both(who themselves were not innocents, having bloodily displaced a long-ago earlier people, and also many tribes would steal and enslave Indians from other tribes primarily to sell in Mexico or wherever there was a market, just like Europeans) and we forced both the South and the West to get with the program (meaning Manifest Destiny’s goal of a coast-to-coast setting of optimal conditions for Northern banks, industries, and a nation-spanning railroad). We always had excuses of course—untrammeled life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; knowing what was best for those unfortunate savages who didn’t agree that our ways and our god were the best; liberating slaves (but only after the industrial revolution inspired the north to sell its own slaves south and forbidding free blacks to live in many states) and switched to an industrial and manufacturing economy from the sustaining mercantile commerce of the rum and slave trade, then imposing ruinous tariffs on southern cotton being sold to England for milling, at the behest of covetous fine old Boston families such as the Lowells who needed that cotton cheap to be combed and woven by the virtually enslaved “mill girls” whose pitiful salaries kept them in company housing where they died young, lint in their lungs. For that, we launched a war claiming the lives of 500,000, so impoverishing and embittering southerners that for the next 100+ years vented their anger against the only people more vulnerable than they, the African Americans. The war also produced such polished killers as George Armstrong Custer and William Tecumseh Sherman to lead cavalries of unemployed but experienced young fighters against those Native Americans still left. (CONTINUED)

ExxonMobil is in talks with Baghdad to create the investment climate that would allow it to become a significant player in Iraq’s energy sector, the US supermajor’s chief executive Rex Tillerson said today.

ExxonMobil eyes starring role in Iraq 09 March, 2009

who’da thunk it?

By wadosy, March 9 at 11:29 am #

i post facts…

————————————-
Coincidence.  Those were exactly my thoughts about your posts.

I loved the GMAC-Goldmann Sachs connection.
Keep ‘em coming.

in the meantime, dont plan on a hideout on a beach in israel

unless you take your grease gun.

i post facts…

all you guys can do is whine.

i guess the readers will have to make up their minds who has more credibility.

Wadosy:

In your rant about Jewish conspiracies you forgot to mention that Alan Greenspan is Jewish as was the mother of the Libertarian Party and its Objectivism—Ayn Rand, born Alice Rosenbaum.  Oh, and to push it further, Greenspan was a close, personal friend of Rand, part of her innermost circle.

So not only did one of us (a German Jew) write the bible of the Left—Das Kapital, but another one of us (a Russian Jew) wrote the the bible of the Right—Atlas Shrugged.

Quick! Check under your bed and in your closets—some of us might be hiding there too!

Inherit, the 9/11 conspiracy fantasists are going to do the same thing on every thread re American politics until they get tired of it. The rest of us are just stuck with looking at it, but the “page down” button helps. I also agree with Gold Star Father, and your estimation of the lists of experts. All the smoke and mirrors and conspiracy theories and Folktruther’s fantasy of “Israelization of America”, disrupt discussion of the topic of why so many tolerate torture.

cyrena, PART I, only a few special ops people are my friends—most of those I interviewed I’d never met before. (I still do occasional indepth investigative reporting on commission basis. Researching and writing books that, even if published, doesn’t bring in much moncy.)

Why do Americans fail to fight torture OK’d by their government? An accurate and inclusive answer would be very long. Some factors: Many Americans are fans of violent gladitorial-style sports such as boxing and football where bodily violence is constat; many Americans in business or law or the equally cut-throat venue of academe transfer language of violence into the everyday—we made a killing, your client is dead meat, go for the jugular, swim with the sharks etc—and stories of WWI & WWII POW prison camp abuse as well as the steady stream of video games and tv or movies depicting violence all combine to make hurting other people OK, to be expected. Many Americans believe that if their government allows torture it’s for a complelling reason. Like other people everywhere, some Americans see their country shedding chershed old values (religious and social) at warp speed, the economic and social structure is up for grabs, and they’re scared. Fear makes people want the government to bend whatever rules necessary to bring their world back and don’t fear what they’ve never experienced—a true police state (hard to get rid of once in place).

I have theories as to how we’ve have reached this point in Part II because I first want to respond to a different part of your comment: Qut’b wasn’t crazy to begin with—just a pious mild-mannered professor who had his religious beliefs come boiling up at the University of Colorado, watching those decadent college kids dancing with one another to jungle music. Was jailed in the Moslem world and tortured for his radical writings, which convinced him that he was must have been right: there was a ready market, all the budding jihadis in the world. Zawahiri picked up on his ideas as did other radical Islamists, and the rest has been a historic catastrophe: Islamist Muslims expressing anger and action against all the wrong people for mostly wrong reasons, but all in the name of Allah. The Saudis accidentally discovered oil while looking for water, and until the world gets off oil or it runs out there will never be peace in the Near & Middle East and Central Asia.

Israel does have thousands of prisoners in its jails but are NOT routinely torturing men, women and childen as you say. (Marwan Bhargoudi, a militant, said it was like being in a university—prisoners get as many books as they want to read on non-religious topics. Bargoudi said he learned to speak Hebrew there, to understand Israelis better, which will make him a formidable enemy or knowledgeable ally.) The Israelis do interrogate, and there must be instances in which Israeli jailers have let themselves be provoked into beating up individuals who boast of the blood their hands. Human rights groups keep an eye on such things and I’ll check with sources I trust now that you’ve raised the quesion. I don’t know how many or why children might be jails but will find out. Israelis round up a lot of people who’ve participated in violence, and families are allowed visits.

...assuming i’m not tortured to death beforehand…

i’ve always had a suspicion that i’d come to a bad end, but until now, i hadnt considered the possibility of starving to death at the age of 75.

another suspicious piece of the puzzle: these financial whizzes are printing up trillions of dollars that are piped into bailouts and “undisclosed locations”, which should lead to a depreciation of the dollar…

but instead the value of the dollar against the standard euro/yen/etc/etc basket is appreciating, so all your loot goes farther when it comes time to buy that island hideout…

just make sure your land is at least 250 feet above sea level.

Bertil says…

“It simply adds to the suspicion that all this has been orchestrated.”

the biggest problem with the “orchestration” theory is this: you cant defeat the logic of it, especially when you have big wheeler dealers, professional money people, who most certainly had to have known better, pulling stunts like this.

and then the sudden change in the media, which is all of a sudden convinced that we’re falling into a depression… we know whose side the media is on, seeing as how they lied us into iraq and are attempting to lie us into iran.

the media is probably powerful enough to jawbone us into a depression by itself, without the smokescreen of a housing bubble.

and then, when it comes to peak oil and global warming, the most prominent deniers are exxon and their AEI/CERA allies.

the whole thing boils down to basic neocon/straussian philosophy, with tinges of aumann’s pychohistory: lie your goddamned ass off, always, and hope people are too dim to figure out what you know by watching how you act.

Wadosy,

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to reduce the federal funds rate from 3.5% to 3.0%.[50] Then, after the accounting scandals of 2002, the Fed dropped the federal funds rate from then current 1.25% to 1.00%.[51] Greenspan acknowledged that this drop in rates would have the effect of leading to a surge in home sales and refinancing.

alan greenspan wikipedia

so even wikipedia has to acknowledge the timeline.

it’s hard to say how many people are witting of the entire project, based as it is on gross human behavioral tendencies that only need a little encouragement to flourish…
————————————————————-
Donald Kohn, Federal Reserve, slipped in the scare tactic in his testimony before the Senate committee.  He said something to effect that we don’t want anoter Lehmann Brothers, do we?  It simply adds to the suspicion that all this has been orchestrated. 
On the McLaughlin Group, McLaughlin and Buchanan had a brief exchange when Paulson became Sec of Teasury that hinted that Bush brought Paulson on board for one thing.  After seeing Paulson’s control of the Treasury and his taking over some of the responsibilities of the Congress, it seems to hint to this unfolding as being part of a grand scheme.

AFriend,

You asked for a list of scientists, engineers and experts in demolition, I gave you that. If as you claim over half have denied the claims attributed to them, it falls to you to provide that evidence. Real evidence please, not suggested reports that prove nothing. In other words, PROVE IT!

As far as lists go, how many do you need? I can provide hundreds and hundreds of names, but I wont do that to the readers here!

However I will suggest you really don’t care about evidence or facts or names. Seems to be far more important to you to defend any way possible, the “official” albeit absurd story. Why is that? What’s in it for you?

Hmmm ... who benefits?

global oil production stagnated in 2005 despite a doubling of drills since 2002… the doubling of drills can be seen as an attempt to forestall global peak production… since peak oil production was the most pressing motive for staging the 9/11 attack, acknowledgement of peak oil must be delayed as long as possible in an attempt to disguise peak oil’s role as motive for 9/11.

unfortunately, the drilling program was unable to find enough oil to delay peak oil production, a probability already taken into account by PNAC, which no doubt was relying on exxon’s experience from american production peaking…

the peak oil problem, which became obvious as the price of oil approached $150 per barrel, was solved by crashing the global economy, which destroyed demand for oil, which obscured the fact that oil production had peaked, which obscured peak oil’s role as motive to stage 9/11.

how do you crash the global economy…? ...you lend trillions of dollars to people who cant pay it back, package the bad debt, and peddle the packages of bad debt to anyone stupid enough to buy them.

why was ditech hammering us 24/7 for years, trying to get us to borrow 125% of the value of the house we were using as collateral?

the crook that founded ditech in 1995 sold out to GMAC in 1999, which gave GMAC time enough to put together an ad campaign that convinced everyone that had a shred of equity in their shack that they should cash that equity in so they could charge more on their credit cards… the “convincing” to be accomplished by dint of non-stop 24/7 advertising on every commercial television outlet in america. 

...and it comes as no surprise that goldman sachs becomes a partner with GM in the ditech operation in august of 2005.

...and as that fat little **** in the television commercials kept losing more and more refi jobs to ditech, greenspan was relentlessly lowering interest rates, which of course made the whole scam possible.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to reduce the federal funds rate from 3.5% to 3.0%.[50] Then, after the accounting scandals of 2002, the Fed dropped the federal funds rate from then current 1.25% to 1.00%.[51] Greenspan acknowledged that this drop in rates would have the effect of leading to a surge in home sales and refinancing.

alan greenspan wikipedia

so even wikipedia has to acknowledge the timeline.

it’s hard to say how many people are witting of the entire project, based as it is on gross human behavioral tendencies that only need a little encouragement to flourish… reagan’s “greed is good” philosophy seems to be a landmark in the corruption of honesty in america… and then there’s awareness of peak oil, which encourages looters to grab all they can before the thing falls apart… and then there’s always the immunity enjoyed by israelis and israeli americans, who trot out the holocaust and accusations of antisemitism at the drop of a hat… “hey! i’m entitled to (insert atrocity of choice) because hitler killed six million jews!”

so the situation is understandable if we look at it in a context of corruption, loss of faith in america’s future, and the dog-eat-dog philosophy that prevails.

but the basic pretext for the PNAC/9-11/“war on terror” operation hangs on torture because there’s no “evidence” other than that acquired by torture.

the PNAC/9-11/“war on terror” operation hangs on torture because there’s no “evidence” other than that acquired by torture, and it’s not as if the ringleaders of the operation have any qualms about terrorizing and torturing people.

david ben gurion, terrorist from poland, father of his country, leader of jewish terrorist organization haganah in palestine.

menachem begin terrorist from poland, leader of jewish terrorist organization irgun in palestine, later, prime minister of israel.

yitzhak shamir, terrorist from poland, leader of jewish terrorist organization stern gang in palestine, later prime minister of israel.

quote from yitzhak shamir jewish terrorist from poland who later became prime minister of israel:

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat”

how do jewish ethics and tradition and terrorism apply to netanyahu’s first words about september 11, 2001….?

“it’s very good…..”

since israel was founded in terrorism and has preserved itself by terrorism, including false flag attacks on its american protector, it’s no surprise to learn that the once and future king of israeli america, bibi netanyahu, thought 9/11 was such a good idea.

but why was 9/11 such a good idea?

judging from exxon’s timing in cranking up their Exxon Nuclear nuke power plant operation, exxon had a pretty good idea of when american oil production would peak… we have to assume that exxon was keeping pretty close track oil global oil production, too.

exxon gave up on nuke electricity for america in 1986—a few months after chernobyl—and overtly signed on with the israeli americans in 1998… at some point, exxon oil production data and estimates of future production, including global peak production, found its way to israel, probably via exxon’s allies in the israeli american AEI think tank.

it became apparent that israel’s protector, america, would probably not survive peak oil long enough to secure israel unless steps were taken to recruit america into israel’s “war on terror” before america was crippled by oil shortages.

...so the PNAC/9-11 plan was hatched… and it’s just beginning.  it’s likely that in order to squeeze every last nickel out of the american taxpayer, the US government will at some point resort to terrorizing and torturing its own citizens, and we’ve already felt the first gusts of that cold wind.

•  “Obama is still saying this while continuing Bush’s policies of rendition.”

Folktruther,
With all due respect, there is a huge difference between actually USING the procedure (rendition) which Obama has NOT, and transparently stating that if circumstances require it, (which he even named the circumstances) that it COULD BE considered an option.

So NO, FT, Obama is NOT saying this, and your determination to claim it doesn’t make it true.

Yes, the Dick Bush administration stated many times that the US does not torture, and I still have a cartoon of Condi Rice saying that as she lied out of all sides of her mouth. She meant only that the US does not torture HERE, which is why Guantanamo, Bagram AFB, and Abu Ghraib were created. And for the others, we just shipped them off to places that DO torture.

So the first thing Obama does on day one, is to give the order to close Guantanamo, (something that many of his campaign supporters demanded, but he’d already promised it two years ago) and to immediately suspend the kangaroo trials currently in progress, and to find a way to process the remaining detainees, many of whom are probably as innocent as all the rest of them that have been through that place in the past 7 years.

And then he makes it crystal clear that the US DOES NOT TORTURE. So Folktruther, it’s a flippin’ NO BRAINER that Barack Obama is NOT George Bush or Dick Cheney. This is a different guy, and you may hate him for whatever your reasons are, and some of them may seem perfectly legitimate in your mind. But stop saying that Obama is continuing the policies of that regime when it’s completely obvious – at least in the case of the MCA and the torture, that he clearly IS NOT.

In fact, have you ever even bothered to read the Military Commissions Act FT? Are you aware of how hard Obama fought that? Taking to the columns of the NYT from time to time to address this? Do you know how any of that all hooks together FT – in terms of civil liberties that have been so totally perverted under the former Cabal, bringing us as Ganderson said, within a gnats eyelash of a full-fledged fascist dictatorship?

Why are you so insistent that Obama, from a totally different generation and entirely different background is the same as these old white men that have been running our country from the beginning?
Or, is it really that ‘change’ that so terrifys you, that you have to do everything in your power to deny that it is happening?

Maybe that’s it.

MyronH’s comment (thank you) repeats the the comments of specialists who agree that the steel of the towers simply couldn’t melt at the tempitures that the fires attained by the plane fires. And the steel was disposed of immediately to prevent the examination of the evidence, in an unparrelled destruction of the evidence.

As increasing evidence is revealed and the disconnnected facts assembled, the only defense of the US power structure has is more lies and more covering up, and the need to distract attention to something else.  This need is especially acute for Zionists, since it is obvious that elements in Israel had advance knowledge of 9/11, which set off the War on Terrorism begun in a Jerusulem conference in 1979.

Once mass murder is committed by a false flag operation, a justification for torture is more easily disguised by the same kind of deceit.  Both Bush and Obama have stated repeated in public when Bush was in office that the USA does not torture.  Obama is still saying this while continuing Bush’s policies of rendition.

The US power structure, in alliance with Israel, is drawing itself into a tighter right wing ball, just as Israel’s power structure has taken a turn to the right. Only the public face on the US power structure is Obama, the leader of the ‘progressive’ party, just as Blair was the leader of the British ‘progressive’ party.  The Obama adminisstration just used Bush’s legal justification for the president’s power to imprison anyone he wishes for any length of time he wishes.

As it becomes obvious to the American people that the US is covering up the events of 9/11, as well as torture, the distrust of the US governement will grow, as it should. Just as the coverup of the Kennedy assassination became widely known.  Despotic methods increasingly will be used under the Obama regime, as well as delusive rhetoric and inspiring symbolism, since that is all they have to cover up political crimes.  And Obama and Zionist cheerleaders will increasingly cover their eyes. 

Faith for the Gops, Hope for the Dems, and fear for everyone.  As we enter a new depression while continuing the War on Terrorism.

Myronh, it’s my understanding (and it sounds as if you would know a lot more about it than I do) that the temperatures needed to melt or warp the steel in the Twin Towers could only have been achieved in a blast furnace or through the use of an incendiary such as thermite. In any case, the whole claim that the steel melted or failed is disproven by the way the fire engineers were treated. If the steel truly failed wouldn’t they want the fire engineers to examine it and find out why, to prevent such a thing happening again? But that’s not what happened. Engineers called in to investigate the collapse of the Twin Towers complained in a story run in the New York Times in 2001 that their investigations were impeded at every turn. They were prevented from interviewing witnesses, from examining the whole of what became known as ground zero and also had difficulty gaining access to recorded distress calls to the fire department and the police. Bill Manning, editor of ‘Fire Engineering Magazine’, wrote that: ‘The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately.’ One of the investigating engineers claimed, ‘Our hands are tied.’ Rudy Giuliani ignored all this and just shipped all the steel off to Asia to be melted down. That steel was never properly examined by fire engineers and in that kind of situation it’s simply unprecedented. I also understand that an open air fire only reaches a maximum temperature of 1,200 degrees fahrenheit. The example I saw is that you can use a gas stove all day and it doesn’t melt, neither do your pots and pans - because the fire can never reach the temperature needed to melt them. The whole story after 9/11 is one of obstruction and even threats being directed at professionals who were only trying to do their job.

There was virtually no concrete to recycle because it had been pulverized into fine, white powder by what experts in the field claim is known as a demolition wave, which travels down a high rise building in a precise sequence. This prevents the sides of the building from ‘bulging’ which would cause it to topple. If the Twin Towers had toppled, the loss of life and destruction of buildings surrounding them would have been horrific but if the steel had actually melted or buckled, experts argue, the buildings would have toppled. The fact that they didn’t tells a very different story to the one the Bush administration and the media have told.

Simple question to which there is simple answer:

Because ignorance is bliss (for awhile, maybe even over an entire lifetime, if a little lucky), because mainstream media serves otherwise to terrorize, and because addicted to shopping. Until just recently, when reality interrupted bliss and addiction, if not terrorizing by media, the last on behalf of government that serves special interests. Anything but discussion in big media of how government is bribed by same big biz, which when finally loosed on blissfully ignorant populace carried on (not at all unexpectedly) like rabid dogs would when let out of cages. Money well spent by biz for ads appealing to basest desire. 

As though Americans don’t measure worth by appearances and by size of individual bank accounts.

For as long as Americans thought they could get a whole lot for not much, they paid no attention. A fact Bush/Cheney rightly counted on. Which is why none should still regard either as idiot. Who’s laughing? The people or Bush/Cheney?

The day either is charged, then prosecuted, then sentenced, then photographed by big-deal, phony media behind bars for life is the day I’ll recant.

We were BUSY, man. Way too busy being bought off (via easy credit) to give a damn.

But for same old courageous protestors/dissenters, who went unnoticed, as usual.

NOW, big-mouths are wondering whether the President is socialist (very funny, I know) and instructing how to construct resume. So that enough might get back into the game while remainder remain homeless. Back to how it was, back to blissful ignorance, back to when terrorist threat was sole means of bludgeoning to point of submission.

Luck to power in desperate desire to return to bygone good ole days, only gone since a little over year or so ago.

I collected and am now cross-posting from another thread, (Sirota’s A word) because it seems so appropriate here…

By felicity, March 6 at 5:55 pm

•  “From my old college text book (published in 1950) the observation is made that “historically, prosperous nations seem to inevitably drift into materialism and anti-intellectualism with almost predictable disastrous results.”

WOW felicity!!

Obviously, this is a clue to the fact that we’ve ‘known’ this for a really long time, eh? Historically, prosperous nations DO seem to inevitably drift into materialism and anti-intellectualism, and of course the predictable results are always disastrous.

But, I’m still trying to find a way to explain how these two (materialism and anti-intellectualism) almost ALWAYS go together. I can’t even think of a time when they haven’t. Well, wait a minute, at least in the ‘roaring 20’s’ there were some intellectuals hanging about.

Anyway, your college textbook of the 50’s was on the money, and we’ve managed to reproduce the concept in a few of today’s college text books as well. So, what happened? Not enough of us got to read them, or those who did just blew it off.

I’m still recommending Lawrence Weschler’s A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (just because I think it’s good reading for our times, for the very reasons you’ve already suggested – we’ve gotta drift, (more like tear our asses) away from the edge of the cliff, and back to the center of community.)

Amazon.com Review
“When individuals are being tortured and everyone knows about it and no one seems able to do a thing to help,” Lawrence Weschler writes, “primordial mysteries at the root of human community come under assault as well.” Overthrowing oppressive regimes is not enough to resolve the crisis; the persecutors must also acknowledge what they have done. “True forgiveness is achieved in community…. It is history working itself out as grace, but it can only be accomplished in truth.”

A Miracle, A Universe brings together two long nonfiction pieces, originally published in the New Yorker, which examine how citizens of Brazil and Uruguay have worked to “settle accounts” with their former torturers. Weschler uses historical background to supplement his powerful eyewitness reportage and interviews, bearing witness to those who seek to break through official denials of government atrocity. The efforts to build a democratic society in which people can have faith have rarely been portrayed with as much immediacy and insight as Weschler brings to these articles.

“The American special ops people I’ve talked with are repelled by torture as a stupid idea, though they don’t believe it has any relationship to what might happen to them if they are captured because so many other cultures and splinter-groups condone and use it—indeed, part of their training is withstanding torture.”
~*~*
Sepharad,

MOST military personal are repelled by torture, whether they are special ops or not. Most SANE military that is. I guess you could call it a ‘stupid idea’ though I see it as being a little bit more serious than that. But, I suppose most folks consider it as such. Maybe even MORE importantly however, is the fact that it DOES NOT ‘WORK’ for the intended purposes, and that was discovered long, long, long, ago Sepharad, but experts within this very same regime, who TOLD their higher ups that torture for the purposes of obtaining information was not only unreliable, (because the victims will say ANYTHING to make the torture stop, specifically whatever their captors seem to want to hear) but dangerous as well.

None of this has to do with whether or not other cultures supposedly ‘condone’ torture. But, since you mentioned it, that is one of the many things that ‘turned’ Sayyed Qutb even crazier than he already was…TORTURE.

Meantime, regardless of what you special ops friends may tell you, people like Alan Dershowitz, Richard Perle, and a few others of the neo-con set have agrued for the legalization of torture, and that’s what we’re talking about here….I think.

I’m familiar with the use of torture on an individual basis, having explained prior to now, that I usually find myself ‘at the beginning’ when I attempt to study anything to a full appreciation of it. So I know that torture exists (and has for centuries) and is still practiced in places that I can’t possibly be aware of. But now we ARE aware that the practice of torture continues in many places, INCLUDING ISRAEL – and I DO know that - there are still tens of thousands of men, women, and CHILDREN locked up in Israeli prisons and tortured routinely, so maybe we should try to find out why more Americans don’t seem to give a damn.

Guantanamo, Bagam, Abu Ghraib, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, all engage in this practice. Do ya reckon it’s a cultural thing for all of those victims, or that maybe that’s why the US is doing the torture in Guantanamo, Bagam, Abu Ghraib, and that Israel is doing the torturing there and in the Occupied Territories? I guess since Saddam tortured some of them, we must have decided that it’s what they were ‘used to’ eh? Must be the culture. Saddam did it to them.

But what of Bagam, and Guantanamo? And what of the rendentions to Syria, Egypte and Israel, which are KNOWN geopolical torture chambers?
And, why do so few Americans give a damn? Got any ideas besides the ‘cultural’ twist?

Yet again, a thread over REAL issues, REAL threats, and REAL documentation has devolved into “Was 9/11 a CIA/Mossad Conspiracy?”.

You all know where I fall on this: I think it is a crock and I agree with Gold Star Father.  Lists of “experts” mean nothing to me—I saw the touted “list of experts” who denied Global Warming—and found the name of an acquaintance whose sole credentials as a “scientist” was as a medical doctor—he went to Belgium to go to med school.

Still, the REAL issues are lost: The John Yu memos giving George W. Bush pure dictatorial and regal powers all on the slim excuse that we are “At War”—and that war? “The Global War on Terrorism”, whatever the hell that is…since Eric Rudolph is as much a terrorist as Osama Bin Laden.

Problems are solved by de-composing them into manageable boxes.  Put 9/11 into one box, those of you who insist it was a conspiracy.

Put these memos in another and LET US ADDRESS THEM!

Let’s gather evidence, bring charges, get convictions and throw these traitorous bastards in jail, all the way from the lowest Bush political op who took part up to Darth Cheney and, if the case is strong enough, the top traitor and coward himself.

Then let’s write the laws so there is NO wiggle room, NO room for “interpretation” and “signing statements”. Make it damn clear what John Yu proposed and the actions taken to implement them are CRIMES no matter WHAT the nation faces!

Otherwise this is just a vast masturbatory exercise that will NEVER do justice to Gold Star Father’s loss or his son’s sacrifice.

We thought we had fixed it after Viet Nam, but a whole slew of chicken hawks made all the same damn evil and stupid mistakes again.

Louise,

You should start over with the list of VIP’s you shared here. What you missed is that over half on the list have denied the claims attributed to them.

Take the time and put in the effort. Real effort. NOT Internet blogs!

“Air traffic controllers on duty on 9/11 were so concerned at what went on that day that they made a tape recording which covered the crisis as it had unfolded. Six air traffic controllers who processed two of the hijacked planes claim that this tape was destroyed by a supervisor. The supervisor, an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) official, crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and disposed of the remains in various rubbish bins around the building. No explanation was forthcoming for his behavior.”

~~~

WOW Diamond, I had NO IDEA about this from the FAA controllers, though I’m admittedly not surprised. (I would have done the same thing…made a tape recording of the whole thing). So, the FAA supervisor found out and destroyed them. Sounds like something my old supervisor would have done.

And you’re right. Who exactly is going to admit to such treasonous activity, even after the fact?

It has never ceased to amaze me that the FAA was ‘fingered’ as being responsible for ‘what went wrong’ despite the fact that the FAA doesn’t much bother with monitoring Military Air Traffic. They have their own controllers. So why haven’t we heard anything from anybody on why the vaulted NORAD FAILED TO RESPOND to these alleged highjackings, for a full 45 minutes after they allegedly disappeared from radar.

And the vaulted air defense couldn’t keep an airliner from allegedly hitting the most powerful symbol of military power (in the world) from being attacked in the most protected air space in the world.

Anyway, thanks for this information about the controllers who taped the events, and the supervisor who destroyed it.

cyrena—re relationship of cultural attitudes of others re torture to American attitudes: I don’t think that what any non-American thinks about torture should affect the American view or behavior. Unlike lunatic Jack Bauer, the American special ops people I’ve talked with are repelled by torture as a stupid idea, though they don’t believe it has any relationship to what might happen to them if they are captured because so many other cultures and splinter-groups condone and use it—indeed, part of their training is withstanding torture. One man said that he was not above threatening torture, which alone sometimes elicits information if the subject comes from a country where torture is widespread, but would not actually carry it out. (Israeli experts say torture does not work; that only a skilled interrogator who can develop a fairly accurate map of the landscape of the subject’s mind can say the right things at the right time, ask the right questions. It’s not something anyone walking in off the street, or undertrained, could or should try to do. (I imagine there are probably some American as well as Israeli agents who lose their tempers, but apart from being morally wrong, that doesn’t sit well with superiors and can end a career.)

I don’t think there is ever a good enough reason to torment or torture a living human being, whether through waterboarding or sensory deprivation or punching or kicking or whatever thuggery is in question. Soldiers or agents questioning someone who they know has himself done some torturing on their fellows in arms may be tempted, but they have to resist that impulse. The French are widely believed to a be a civilized culture, and yet many—not just the “pieds noirs” (nickname for French colonials who once lived in and dominated Algeria) still justify the extensive torture that was used to obtain information toward suppressing the Algerian uprising because they say it might prevent atrocities committed by Algerian nationalists and now, later, the Algerian government, or the Algerian rebels. Torture becomes a never-ending cycle of gradual moral degradation if you buy into it even once.

And no, I don’t think Americans should ever allow or condone after the fact torture of anyone for any reason, any more than you can excuse murder. In wartime, there is usually a clear difference between killing and murder, and according to several people I know well who have been in that venue—an old friend who served in Vietnam and now counsels veterans, my late nephew, and my son-in-law (Iraq)—soldiers know when they have crossed that line. An example: one night on guard, a nervous soldier hears a noise and looking across a small field on the other side of a canal sees an enemy, gun on the ground, squatting to relieve himself. Should he shoot him or not, in the latter case the same man might the next day kill one of the soldier on guard’s comrades? All three of these people said that if he shot the other guy it would be murder because it was not necessary, not in the heat of battle. Murder’s wrong, and so is torture. (Another motive for either torture or murder in wartime would be revenge, but that is also no excuse and also should be punished by a military court that includes jury of the offenders’ peers, just as civilian courts require.)

Targeted assassinations is a greyer issue when at war, symmetric or asymmetric. If killing an individual or individuals will stop persistent violence, it seems preferable to do that rather than launch a full-scale attack that causes the death of many people.

I, for one, agree with you Afriend: it was a huge conspiracy from the highest levels of the government, the Pentagon and CIA down to shitkickers at FAA.The official story was that none of the black box in-flight data recorders were recovered from the planes that hit the Twin Towers. However Nicholas di Masri, a fireman, has written a book (which he and other firemen self-published) in which he claimed that he and several other ground zero workers escorted federal agents in an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them recover 3 of the 4 black box recorders from the planes that struck the Twin Towers. Why has it taken nearly eight years for them to become ‘available’ and why did they lie and say they weren’t recovered in the first instance? This pattern of destruction or repression of evidence went on in other quarters too. Air traffic controllers on duty on 9/11 were so concerned at what went on that day that they made a tape recording which covered the crisis as it had unfolded. Six air traffic controllers who processed two of the hijacked planes claim that this tape was destroyed by a supervisor. The supervisor, an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) official, crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and disposed of the remains in various rubbish bins around the building. No explanation was forthcoming for his behavior. Do you honestly believe that anyone who could be indicted for their involvement will step forward and put their head in the noose? Treason is a capital offense and who wants to out themselves as a traitor?

If they had nothing to hide why did they treat the fire engineers trying to discover how the twin towers came down as if they were the criminals and bar them from the WTC site? Thomas H. Keans former New Jersey Republican governor who led the 9/11 Commission, got nowhere, it seems, in his questioning about NORAD and why it had failed to respond, but he still smelled a rat: ‘We don’t know to this day why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth. It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.’ One example of what he was up against is the testimony of General Larry Arnold and Colonel Alan Scott who told the Commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9.16am but the Commission later determined from tapes it had subpoenaed that the airliner wasn’t hijacked until 12 minutes later. And then there’s George W. Bush’s journal entry made just before he went to sleep at 11.30pm on 9/11:
‘The Pearl Harbour of the 21st century took place today…we think it’s Osama bin Laden’ (Washington Post, 27/1/02). It’s interesting to compare this with the mission statement (in 2000) of The Project for a New American Century, the now notorious neo-con think tank with members that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. They state that America needs a ‘new Pearl Harbour’ to unite the country and boost defence spending. Conspiracy, anyone?

With a majority of 55 Republicans to 45 Democrats, Bush was able to get everything he wanted through Congress except the privatization of Social Security, and the reason for that was the mobilization of outside voices such as Paul Krugman, Robert Kuttner, and even Al Franken.  Franken would hit on the subject daily on his radio program. 
Now the Republicans have 41 to 58 Democrats, give or take one or two, and the Democrats can’t seem to anything done without kowtowing to the Republican minority.  Reid is afraid of the threat of filibuster.
Rep. Conyers sounded like one of those rock musicians in, “This Is Spinal Tap,” with his whiny grousing and tepid letter writing.
Now, Mumbles O’Leary wants to form a Toothless Commission before he turns the page.  An informal group sort of like a book club to go over what happened during “Our Dictatorship” and then, probably whitewash it.
Barney Frank said to a questioner in the 2004 campaign who asked, “What can we do?”  In all of Barney’s vervor he said, not much just vote.
So that’s it, it’s Socialism and Get Out of Jail Free for the few at the top and shut up and vote every 2 or 4 years for the rest of us.
I don’t hear anything from the Obama administration denouncing and rejecting these newly acquired powers.  In fact it is just the opposite.  It’s hush hush.
Now, the buzz is that Congress gave away the power to declare war to the President.  Let me interrupt to say it wasn’t theirs to give.  It’s in the Constitution.  The Constitution assigns them and them only the power to declare war.  If they want to give it away, amend the Constitution for Chrissakes!
We’re not cowards for not dicussing race relations, we’re flat out cowards.  An alcoholic with a psyopathic mean streak gets elect President, covers up for the attack on the WTC, invades two countries, shreds the Constitution, and all these people can say, at long last is, “Let’s fuhgetaboutit.  Look ahead.”
Great article.  We need more disgust like Mr Pfaff’s.

Way to go, Louise! 

Jackpine, the question is, how plausable is ti that the 9/11 homicide could have occured without government pre-knowledge?  And what the hell is an ‘asertation.’

AFriend,

Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. Final Report. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center - National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

“The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today released its final report (Nov. 28, 2008) on the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City. The final report is strengthened by clarifications and supplemental text SUGGESTED by organizations and individuals worldwide in response to the draft WTC 7 report, released for public comment on Aug. 21, but the revisions did not alter the investigation team’s major findings and recommendations, which include identification of FIRE as the PRIMARY cause for the building’s failure.”

“The extensive, multi-million dollar, three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation found that the fires on multiple floors in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings, caused an extraordinary event. Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.”
NOTE: The fires never produced the required temperature to produce suffiscient melting of steel beams which would lead to critical girder and support column failure.

NOTE: WTC 5 was completely gutted by fire on 9/11, but never collapsed and eventually the still standing sleleton was torn down.

NOTE: According to eyewitness testimony from fire-fighters on the scene, the fire in WTC 7 never reached total building involvement.

The extraordinary event. Three buildings pancaking in collapse in almost exactly the same fashion, on the same day. When buildings all around them, fully engulfed in fire did not collapse! That is more than mere coincidence. In fact the fact that, that type of collapse has never happened before because of fire, and has never happened since because of fire, (or for that matter because of structural failure) proves the likely scenerio that the collapse was caused by outside, man-made forces, as in pre-planted explosives.

“In response to comments from the building community, NIST conducted an additional computer analysis. The goal was to see if the loss of WTC 7’s Column 79—the structural component identified as the one whose failure on 9/11 started the progressive collapse—would still have led to a complete loss of the building if fire or damage from the falling debris of the nearby WTC 1 tower were not factors. The investigation team concluded that the column’s failure under any circumstance would have initiated the destructive sequence of events.”

NOTE: In conducting their computer analysis, factors were built into a computer model based on assumption of fact not actually proven. In spite of that, the computer model FAILED in every instance, in all three Towers, to totally bring down the central core! An anomaly conviently left out of the final report.

Summing up, NIST concluded and included identification of FIRE as the primary cause for the building’s failure. While concluding and including that the column’s failure under any circumstance would have initiated the destructive sequence of events, REGARDLESS of fire. OK. Doublespeak for we don’t really know! Duh ...

AFriend,

Zacarias Moussaoui is a French citizen who was convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the USA as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As a result of his conviction, he is serving a life sentence at the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

However, prosecutors in Moussaoui’s drawn-out trial had difficulty directly connecting him to the 19 alleged 9/11 participants. Moussaoui admitted his involvement with al-Qaeda, but claimed he was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. Rather, he claimed that he was preparing for a separate attack. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had earlier told investigators that Moussaoui met with him prior to September 11, but that he, Mohammed, chose not to use him. No EVIDENCE directly linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 attacks has EVER been released.

According to the Associated Press, three jurors decided Moussaoui had only limited knowledge of the September 11 plot, and three described his role in the attacks as minor, if he had any role at all.

AFriend,

(AFRI) La Guerre contre le terrorisme - Le Piège des mots

A Collection of Reference to:

Lists of terrorist attacks, Court documents, investigations and charges. 
Lists of charges against bin-Laden dating back to 1989.
A list of findings for counter-terrorism justified as action against terrorism, dating back to 1989.
A repeat of defined but not yet proven 9/11 findings.

OK. I think we all agree there are bad guys out there. I think we all agree we need to know that. I think we all agree awareness and education goes a long way to keeping ourselves safe. I think we all agree 9/11 happened. That is not and never has been the issue!

The initial challenge was for you to provide difinitive PROOF that 9/11 happened the way we are told, ergo convieniently identified bad guys flying jets into two buildings that caused them (plus one) to all fall down. This information does not do that!

This information also does not provide the answer to why bin-Laden IS NOT identified as the guy responsible for 9/11 on the FBI’s most wanted list.

From the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list, http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/fugitives.htm

USAMA BIN LADEN wanted for MURDER OF U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; CONSPIRACY TO MURDER U.S. NATIONALS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES; ATTACK ON A FEDERAL FACILITY RESULTING IN DEATH

“Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.”

Now how come 9/11 is not specified on that list? Could be that absent definitive proof, the risk of not being able to make the case stand up in court is to great. On the other hand there appears to be ample proof to back up the other charges. As noted on (AFRI) La Guerre contre le terrorisme - Le Piège des mots (The war against terrorism - )

AFriend,
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) completed its performance study of the buildings in May 2002. Finding that the WTC design had been sound and attributed the collapses wholly to extraordinary factors beyond the control of the builders. While calling for further study, FEMA suggested that the collapses were probably initiated by weakening of the floor joists by the fires that resulted from the aircraft impacts. According to FEMA’s report – and subsequently contradicted by NIST’s findings – the floors detached from the main structure of the building and fell onto each other, initiating a progressive “pancake” collapse.

The light construction and hollow nature of the structures allowed the jet fuel to penetrate far inside the towers, igniting many large fires simultaneously over a wide area of the impacted floors. The fuel from the planes burned at most for a few minutes, but the contents of the buildings burned over the next hour or hour and a half. It has been SUGGESTED that the fires might not have been as centrally positioned, nor as intense, had traditionally heavy high-rise construction been standing in the way of the aircraft. Debris and fuel would likely have remained mostly outside the buildings or concentrated in more peripheral areas away from the building cores, which would then not have become unique failure points. In this SCENARIO, the towers might have stood far longer, perhaps indefinitely. The THEORY is that the fires were hot enough to weaken the columns and cause floors to sag, pulling perimeter columns inward and reducing their ability to support the mass of the building above.

In the North Tower, jet fuel ran down at least two elevator shafts to the basement, and two or more elevators plummeted to the lower levels. Fire continued to burn in the shafts, which MAY have helped WEAKEN the core.

The WTC complex comprised seven buildings, three of which completely collapsed on 9/11. Two were hit by jetliners, and one was not!

The investigation was criticized by engineers and lawmakers in the U.S. It had little funding, no authority to demand evidence, and limited access to the WTC site. One major point of contention was that the cleanup of the WTC site resulted in the destruction of the MAJORITY of the buildings’ steel components. When NIST published its final report, it noted “the SCARCITY of physical evidence” available to investigate the collapses. Only a fraction of a percent of the buildings remained for analysis after the cleanup was completed.

Had there been a preservation of evidence, which there wasn’t, and a thorough forensic investigation, which there wasn’t, FEMA and NIST would have come with very different results. Perhaps even with definitive PROOF of pre-planted explosives that brought the towers down. But there was no preservation of evidence! Why? And there was no thorough forensic investigation! Why?

Sorry, the excuses offered are not satisfactory. Never happened before and nobody knew they should? Bull Crap! NYPD is one of the best in the world at investigating! Why were they shut out? And, as I previously noted, models created of the Towers, (both physical and virtual) in an effort to understand the collapse, failed in every instance to completely bring down the core!

So we are right back where we started. I asked for links to PROOF the official story is provable.You provided me with a list of reference points we’re already familiar with. References that provide info regarding terrorism and two studies that at best make a case for what they want to believe but CAN NOT PROVE!

And that’s enough about your “links” which pretty much are just a repeat of a repeat of a repeat ad nuaseum!

AFriend,
The short list:

*Dr. David L. Griscom, prominent physicist with 33 years of service for the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC said the official theory for why the Twin Towers and world trade center building 7 collapsed “does not match the available facts” and supports the theory that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.

*Dr. Lynn Margulis, world-renowned scientist, recipient of the National Medal of Science, America’s highest honor for scientific achievement said: “I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new, thorough, and impartial investigation be undertaken.”

*Dr. James Quintiere, former head of the Fire Science Division of the government agency which claims that the World Trade Centers collapsed due to fire (NIST) is one of the world’s leading fire science researchers and safety engineers, has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering , and has called for an independent review of the World Trade Center Twin Tower collapse investigation. “I wish that there would be a peer review of this,” he said, referring to the NIST investigation. “I think all the records that NIST has assembled should be archived. I would really like to see someone else take a look at what they’ve done; both structurally and from a fire point of view. I think the official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable.”

*Dwain A. Deets, Former Director for Research, Director for Aeronautical Projects, and Flight Research Program Manager for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, who holds masters degrees in both physics and engineering says: “The many visual images (massive structural members being hurled horizontally, huge pyroclastic clouds, etc.) leave no doubt in my mind explosives were involved [in the destruction of the World Trade Centers on 9/11].’‘

*Dr. Steven E. Jones, prominent physicist, former U.S. professor of physics from a top university, and a former principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Energy, Division of Advanced Energy Projects stated that the world trade centers were brought down by controlled demolition.

*Dr. Crockett Grabbe, U.S. physics professor who teaches at several universities believes that the World Trade Centers were brought down by controlled demolition.

*Bent Lund, expert on demolition said that the trade centers were brought down with explosives.

*Danny Jowenko, Dutch demolition expert stated that WTC 7 was imploded.

*Dr. Heikki Kurttila, safety engineer and accident analyst for the Finnish National Safety Technology Authority stated, regarding WTC 7 that “The great speed of the collapse and the low value of the resistance factor strongly suggest controlled demolition.”

*Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, 13-year professor of metallurgical engineering at a U.S. university, with a PhD in materials engineering, a former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment Senior Staff Member , is calling for a new investigation of 9/11.

continued:

AFriend,
The short list continued:

*Dr. Niels Harrit, Danish professor of chemistry said, in a mainstream Danish newspaper, “WTC7 collapsed exactly like a house of cards. If the fires or damage in one corner had played a decisive role, the building would have fallen in that direction. You don’t have to be a woodcutter to grasp this”

*Dr. Bruce R. Henry, former guidance systems engineer for Polaris and Trident missiles and professor emeritus, mathematics and computer science at a university concluded that the Twin Towers “were brought down by planted explosives.”

*Edward S. Munyak, mechanical engineer with 20 years experience as a Fire Protection Engineer for the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, and Veterans Affairs, who is a contributing Subject Matter Expert to the U.S. Department of Energy Fire Protection Engineering Functional Area Qualification Standard for Nuclear Facilities, a board member of the Northern California - Nevada Chapter of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, currently serving as Fire Protection Engineer for the city of San Jose, California, believes the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition.

*Enver Masud, former Chief of the Strategic and Emergency Planning Branch, U.S. Department of Energy, and former Director of the Office of Engineering at the Public Service Commission in Washington, D.C., and a mechanical engineer, does not believe the official story, and believes that there is a prima facie case for controlled demolition of the World Trade Center.

*Gary Welz, professor of mathematics said: “The official explanation that I’ve heard doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t explain why I heard and felt an explosion before the South Tower fell and why the concrete was pulverized”

*Marx Ayres, prominent engineer with 55 years experience, in charge of the design of hundreds of major building projects including high rise offices, former member of the California Seismic Safety Commission and former member of the National Institute of Sciences Building Safety Council believes that the World Trade Centers were brought down by controlled demolition.

*Dr. Joerg Schneider and Dr. Hugo Bachmann, two professors of structural engineering at a prestigious Swiss university said that, on 9/11, World Trade Center 7 was brought down by controlled demolition.

*Charles Pegelow, structural engineer, of Houston, Texas.

*Dennis Kollar, structural engineer, of West Bend, Wisconsin.

*Doyle Winterton, structural engineer (retired).

*Haluk Akol, Structural Engineer and architect (ret.).

*Michael T. Donly, P.E., structural engineer.

*William Rice, P.E., structural engineer, former professor of Vermont Technical College.

And Willie Nielson all agree, and believe the towers came down because of explosives!

And so do I!

I think everybody is just trying to make in this crazy time......

For the umpteenth time.  9/11 is the realm of two, competing conspiracy theories.  Neither has been proven with any evidence.

No, AFriend, there is no evidence that the government’s story is the truth…that story being that a fiendish international terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden planned and executed the attack.  If there was evidence, bin Laden might have been charged or indicted by now.

The competing theory (ies) is all conjecture, and it falls under the weight of that conjecture when it leads to assertations.

The only thing we know is that we do not know the whole story.

you may be right, northamerican, that afriend is a plant of some kind since he accepts everything the American power structure tells him as gospel.  But I don’t think so.  The idea that the American power structure could deliberately massacre thousands of its own people in cold blood is such a fantastic notion to most Americans, conflicting with everything we have been taught from childhood about America, that people, including intelligent people, reject it emotionally out of hand, and then try to find intellectual reasons for this emotional rejection.

My wife, for example, who is more intelligent than I am, (which is common in married couples but unacknoledged) and who reasons logically from the evidence in supervising appelate lawyers in their briefs, rejects the possibility that 9/11 could be a false flag operation. She doesn’t know about false flag operations. And the reasons she gives are not logical or they defy the evidence. 

But she is not much interested in the question, it’s on the margin of her consciousness.  She hasn’t read the 9/11 truth or the recent books, and won’t; it just seems incredible to her.  She doesn’t realize the implications so she doesn’t care much one way or the other.

I suggesst to you that most Americans are like that.  The few here who try to argue the Bushite case simply haven’t read the stuff and, in any case,  are usually not the brightest bulbs in the chandilier.  Cyrena, who worked in the airline industry for many years, has been giving an accurate rundown on 9/11 over time, but it does not penetrate the emotional resistence of a number of commenters. Probably nothing can.

The essential problem is not really ignorance but emotional denial.  A denial that we live in that kind of world, and that kind of country, where this kind of thing is possible.  Americans don’t have a knowledge of history from a world historical perspective and don’t understand that violence happens to people just like themselves.  And it is perpetrated by power.

In addition, as Cyrena says, the American people have been corrupted and brutalized by corrupt and brutal American power, so they often identify with torture and murder, BUT HAPPENING TO SOMEONE NOT LIKE THEM, or like their families, or their neighbors. 

So if mass murder occurs, it follows it must be an Outsider who perpetrated it, usually with a dark skin.  They don’t understand, or waht to understand, that the major enemby of every class-based power structure is its own people.  Espeically when national or regional power systems reach the end of their life cycles.

This earmarking and porkfest is garbage, and the sad things is EVERYBODY is guilty of this.
Dr.Phillips

I am new to this site,but what amazes me is,that no one will comment on what really is motivating afriend and the very few who keep denying the obvious. i for one,have a very good idea who afriend really represents.    keep on keepin on, folktruther

Memoranda. The plural of memorandum is memoranda…

Folktruther,

You have shared your opinion on the 9/11 disaster several times now. Have you located that one engineer or demolition expert that will support your opinions?

We know that dozens of phone calls were placed by many of the victims on the airplanes. Those first hand eyewitness accounts are part of the body of evidence. Your suggesting that dozens of family members are also lying about their loved ones calls? Or are you suggesting that those victims were on some Hollywood movie set and no idea they were actually not on airplanes?

The recovered black boxes from the Pennsylvania and Pentagon crashes are available too. Now dozens of FAA investigators are part of the plot?

Thousands would have to be involved. Yet you seem unable to explain how that’s possible. You simply keep restating your opinions.

You will continue believing the fantastic and will not take the time to study the evidence. You will continue believing that I am the one with blinders on.

By altlic, March 8 at 3:37 am #

“My answer is that it’s because we’ve been dumbed-down, and ‘out of sight, out of mind’ seems to be the American public’s mindset.”

Cyrena,

On torture, I disagree (again).  The average American is, or at least was, okay with torture.  Same as most Americans are okay with execution.  There are many reasons for this.  The biggest reason, I think, is that average Americans are quite puritanical, believe in punishment (compared to humanists), and were filled with feelings of revenge after 9/11, which of course Bushco whipped up.  Sad but true.  Take a look at our bloody history.  Revenge and aggression are everywhere in the US Indian wars, for example.  It’s how the West was won.

~~~

Altlic,

I will concede your argument in these limited terms, as I’ve certainly considered the overwhelming bloody and vindictive mentality of the American populace as a general rule. Why else would we be the ONLY so-called civilized and ‘first world’ nation still using capital punishment?

HOWEVER, there are many ‘reasons’ for that as well. Among those who ‘favor’ capital punishment in the us for ‘the most heinous’ of crimes often have come to that conclusion reluctantly, based on more practical logistics….the times when these criminals are eventually freed and end up killing again.

In other words, if we had a penal system that actually MEANT, ‘life in prison’ and only used such sentences for the most heinous of crimes, we might have actually adapted to less barbaric mentalities, like those of every other civilized first world country.

There’s also a big difference between the bloodshed of the earlier massacres that come with ethnic cleansings and other aggressive wars of expansion. The early settlers weren’t “torturing” the natives, they were just killing us off by the hundreds of thousands in various and sundry ways that don’t fall under torture.

So, while I will concede that a significant portion of the American population maintain this ignorant mindset of vindictiveness, (especially after 9/11) the primary reason MOST Americans didn’t give a damn, was because they are too dumbed down to even know that it has been taking place, or what it even means.

The Torture Debate has been raging for years now, at least in the legal communities. you should google it.

You might also want to check out the testimonies of the troops who participated in it. “Taxi to the Dark Side” is an excellent documentary film you might watch and/or reccommend to your friends that may be equally dumbed-down.

“My answer is that it’s because we’ve been dumbed-down, and ‘out of sight, out of mind’ seems to be the American public’s mindset.”

Cyrena,

On torture, I disagree (again).  The average American is, or at least was, okay with torture.  Same as most Americans are okay with execution.  There are many reasons for this.  The biggest reason, I think, is that average Americans are quite puritanical, believe in punishment (compared to humanists), and were filled with feelings of revenge after 9/11, which of course Bushco whipped up.  Sad but true.  Take a look at our bloody history.  Revenge and aggression are everywhere in the US Indian wars, for example.  It’s how the West was won.

Cyrena,

I know I get a bit incensed sometimes, and I am just learning who all the ‘regulars’ are and the nuances of their POVs.  I will try to behave myself, not throw tantrums, etc.

But, y’all are crazy.

It doesn’t take reams of ‘evidence’ to figure out whether 9/11 was contrived.  It just takes a modicum of common sense.  I know at the outset that nobody’s mind is likely to be changed but I guess I’m willing to hang for a while.  So here goes.

1.  You guys have done sooo much research, I know.  I’ve seen a bunch of it, myself, and have been taken in by it in the past.  But ya cain’t see th’ woods fer th’ trees.  Let’s make a comparison.  Climate change deniers have done sooo much research and have sooo much evidence that makes complete sense to them, to the point where they just cannot accept that there is overwhelming evidence that humans are contributing significantly to global warming.  Have you ever seen their stuff?  It’s very convincing!  Until you go back and look at the facts.  Other examples: there’s evolution deniers in the US Senate (for God’s sake!), there’s holocaust deniers (Jews, Armenians…), need I continue?

2. “no building has ever collapsed…” So what.  No plane had ever made a safe water landing until the miracle on the Hudson.  Bldg 7 was severely damaged when the north tower fell (there are pictures of an enormous gash in it, also schematics are available of the somewhat unusual load distribution in the building) and was observed to be bulging and deforming before it collapsed.

3.  Occam’s razor.  You cannot plant the demolition charges, you cannot keep it all hush-hush, you cannot have about 600 different versions of how 9/11 happened all be true!  I mean, doesn’t that tell you something?  That there are so many different scenarios?

4.  Humans.  I’m sorry, but people are just not that smart.  And if you think that there is an elite cadre of evil geniuses behind the scenes, then I’m guessing you also believe in UFOs and the Abominable Snowman.  The neocons are scary, but they are very, very human.  They are weak in the head.  They know power, they know sneaky, but they have very little self-awareness.  They act out of fear.  Out of their terror (9/11 freaked them out completely), they terrorized us.  Get it?  Same goes for corporate suits.  Corrupt?  Yes.  Sworn to protect the code of evil?  No.  They are themselves in thrall to money.  This is ultimately divisive and cannot stand.  Conclusion:  people like you, Cyrena, who glorify these people with superhuman powers, are tilting at windmills; worse, you are empowering them and enslaving yourself.

Enough for now.

Sepharad,

You’re right on the torture. I’ve spent the past several years studying that as well. The history of the thing back to medieval times. It’s quite fascinating, and there aren’t many of us ‘weirdos’ who have made an academic project out of study of torture and specifically Torture Law.

So yep, I know all about it. It’s one of the many topics that has come to the field of Law and Society, which includes the very CULTURAL aspects of what you were suggesting in your own previous posts. I’m aware of them.

On the other hand, what I think we’re addressing here is the very blase’ attitude of AMERICANS about torture, which is why Pfaff apparently wonders why so few Americans give a damn.

My answer is that it’s because we’ve been dumbed-down, and ‘out of sight, out of mind’ seems to be the American public’s mindset. In other words, if we don’t see it on TV, and it there is no entertainment or capital value to the ‘information’ then Americans don’t consider it. That would most obviously include an extensive history on the use of torture, (specifically by the CIA - but they could take it all the way back as many of us have)as well as what the US Constitution has to say about the practice.

How other cultures feel about the practice doesn’t really have anything to do with how Americans feel about it or don’t. At least not that I can tell.

Is there something in your own thoughts on the subject that lead you to believe that the cultural attitudes of the people being tortured somehow change the validity of the laws that clearly make it a highest prohibition in both US and International Law?

cyrena, re your March 7 4:41 post—Did not mean to imply that rendition is OK—just didn’t seem to make much sense for a government to approve torture such as waterboarding and then send people off to other countries anyway. We—allegedly civilized countries anyway—have imposed restrictions on torture partly to protect the treatment our soldiers receive as POWs. I think that’s a reasonable hope, but it doesn’t always work out that way: we know that soldiers and non-official combatants are tortured and killed by people who know the rules but for whatever benighted reason simply don’t give a damn. I also didn’t include the reference to one Iraqi man’s reaction to Abu Ghraib flippantly, but as a direct expression re torture coming from someone in a very different culture. Torture has been a reality throughout history, and different cultures today have widespread and varying attitudes toward when and on whom it can be imposed. Some Near and Middle Eastern countries as well as central asian nations do not deny the use of torture, and some Western countries while decrying it still use it.

I don’t understand what makes an individual capable of torturing another human being, although having read about some Native American customs in the pre-colonial times, in which warriors would bring back captive braves and give them to the women of the family whose relatives were killed in battle by these captives, I can understand why someone would want to hurt and kill the person who killed a loved one. There’s a rough justice there. But we’ve evolved legal systems where defense lawyers get to challenge jurors on the basis of their ability to be objective—it would be asking too much to demand objectivity from a father or mother re what should be done with the person who killed a child, or a wife re the fate of someone who killed her husband.

Re: By prole, March 6 at 3:59 pm:

Prole makes the point: this is all part of the “Israelization of America”.  For decades we’ve been praising torture-state Israel as a “light unto the nations”, so it’s only natural that we learn to accept it when our own government does it — especially in the name of ridding the world of Holy Israel’s enemies.

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•  “I will repeat myself here. Reams of “hard” evidence,  HUNDREDS of hours of testimony, THOUSANDS of case files and YEARS of solid investigative MAN HOURS can be seen by anyone who puts forth the effort and time.”
~~~

Well Friend,
You can repeat yourself as often as you want. Unfortunately, all of the stuff that you claim is available is simply NOT ‘hard’ evidence. It is CREATED evidence. That’s the problem.

You see, I HAVE put forth the effort and the time, Friend, as have many, many, many other concerned citizens from across the civil spectrum, and they include experts from across the same. Most of these people have come together, (from the very beginning) to question what was obviously ‘not right’ about the official explanation, based on their OWN personal and professional experience.

I’ll use myself as an example. I watched the explosion of the WTC on my television in Northern California on Sept 11, 2001. At the time, I was a long term employee of one of the airlines involved, and I am a FAA licensed airman, except that in this case, I’m an airwoman. Over the years, I have worked in MULTIPLE operations within the commercial airline industry, specifically SYSTEM operations that keep the airplanes in the air, and from colliding with each other, not to mention buildings, mountains, you get my point. I KNOW how the air traffic system works Friend, if only because there are obviously people within our population who DO –KNOW THESE THINGS! If there were not professionals in these functions, you wouldn’t be flying around the planet, something that many would suspect only Bird’s were ever intended to do.

ALL of that said, even I ‘accepted’ the basic ‘jist’ of the story in the immediate aftermath, DESPITE all of the immediate questions that came to my mind, in terms of how impossible it had to be, for those airplanes not only to have been ‘highjacked’ (because I didn’t really consider the impossibility of that at the time) but how they could have allegedly been piloted by some terrorists with boxcutters. That is because, my Friend, NO PILOT WOULD GIVE UP HIS/HER COCKPIT THAT EASILY!!! I know this Friend, just as also ‘knew’ then, (at least intellectually) that the 757 aircraft plowing into those buildings is not what caused them to explode! I know this NOT because I’m a demolitions expert, (although I’ve certainly witnessed demolitions to know what they look like) but because I am a professional aviator, and I know that those airplanes didn’t cause that damage.

HOWEVER, I was willing to wait Friend, until the STANDARD and ROUTINE investigations were done; the SAME investigations that the FAA and the NTSB ALWAYS do after ANY air disaster. (I have been part of a first responder team on 4 occasions, and maintained follow-ups through the end of each investigation, so I KNOW how the ‘bureaucracy’ works these things).

So I was anxiously waiting (yet allowing the necessary ‘time’) for the various investigative teams from the various bureaucratic agencies to tell us not WHAT happened, (since we saw that) but HOW. AND, THEY NEVER FLIPPIN’ DID!!!

In fact, if you will remember, the Bush-Cheney Admin did absolutely EVERYTHING to AVOID a formal investigation of the events. It wasn’t until the families of some of the US victims FORCED it – though Congressional pleas, that the “Official Commission” was ever even done, and that served only to white wash the entire series of events.

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So for many of us, Friend, the OFFICIAL Report IS the Conspiracy. It was the OFFICIAL COMMISSION REPORT, assembled some three plus years after the event, that confirmed for me, (and should have for anyone else who actually read the thing)!! Because despite what you call reams and reams of hard evidence, there is NO hard evidence in the report that holds up. NONE. HARD evidence is physical evidence that can and generally should be considered in terms of the existing circumstantial evidence.

But in the case of the Official 9/11 Report, there is NO PHYSICAL evidence, to connect the perpetration of those events to those who were ‘named’ as the perpetrators. (which is exactly what Louise told you).  We don’t even have the physical evidence left over from the airplanes themselves. NOTHING that proves to the general public that AA flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. NOTHING that identifies the remains of UA flt 93 that allegedly crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. (just an empty shallow crater with a few twigs). And obviously nothing left to find in the rubble of the WTC, since it was PULVERIZED.

So don’t suggest that we have been unwilling to research this information, because I have done little else in the past several years, and it’s been a full time effort under the guidance of our institutions of higher learning. (and yes, I went so far as to return to the academy to try and understand the radical Islamic connection, and it has since become clearer – as documents will continue to confirm.)

And don’t expect us to simply ignore the NON-reality of all these -FIRSTS-

FIRST time ANY skyscrapers have been destroy by fire from an airplane hit or anything else.

FIRST time in over 40 years that a so-called ‘highjacking’ has initiated in the US. There is a reason for that Friend, and the multi-layer air transportation security system didn’t just stop working that day. Neither did the FAA, though that’s where the blame was ultimately placed.

FIRST time ever that ANY building (WTC bldg 7) just imploded and fell in on itself, without being STRUCK by a single thing! The OWNER of said bldg, (Larry Silverstein) has ADMITTED that he gave the order to ‘pull’ building 7 after the hits on the North and South Towers. Pull as in, DEMOLISH!! Are you denying Friend, that bldg was 7 was DEMOLISHED on the order of the owner, Larry Silverstein? If not, and you accept that is the case, (he said something to the effect that it was decided based on the fact that so much destruction and loss of life had already taken place ???) then how do you suppose they were able to ‘pull’ it so fast? Have you actually WATCHED the ‘fall of building 7’? Oh, that’s right, you don’t wanna see anything from a website or other source.
Well, it was pretty remarkable Friend, just like how remarkable it was that the North and South Towers exploded, but at least those explosions were timed to happen in conjunction with the airplane strikes. In the case of bldg 7, it just exploded (as in PLANNED demolition) without the hits. So there goes yet ‘another’ first.

FIRST time in the history of anyplace outside the Bermuda Triangle where air or other craft simply disappear, without leaving a trace.

Have YOU seen any physical evidence of any of those 4 aircraft Friend, that can be positively identified as the aircraft that supposedly were involved in this events of 9/11? If you have, I would respectfully ask that you provide it. You won’t be able to, because if such existed, we would have already known it, and this discussion wouldn’t even be taking place.

You are quite right, AFreind, I do have a low opinion of American intellectual courage, as does the rest of the world.  Americans have always been extemely conforming historically, for reasons I am not entirely sure of.  Toqueville, when he came to the US to help make democracy safe for aristocracy, stated nearly two centuries ago in his famous DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA;

“I know of no country where there is so little real independance of mind and real freedom of discussion as America.  [there are] formidable barriors around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may say what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”

You are a good example, Freind,  of this know nothing mindlessness.  You accept the drivel that the US power structure gives you as “the most comprehensive investigation” when even the co-chairman of the investigating commission rejects it.  And high intelligence officals in Germany, Egypt and other countires all maintain that the operation reguited intense state planning and that someone in a cave in Afghanistan planned it is absurd.  Louise and Cyrena are by no means radical and they reject the offical explanation, and they are quite right to do so.

But you obviously identify with American authority and will believe whatever they tell you.  A large but decreasing number of Americans still do.

Thousands, Folktruther. It would take thousand of people to pull something like that off. Literately thousands before, during and after the attacks.

You have convinced yourself that multiples of thousands of people are so terrified of the dark and evil U.S. government that all would be silent after the fact? I wonder if you and others have fully thought this through.

You’re talking about over 900 FBI agents each reporting numerous bits and pieces of that they gathered for several years all over the country and the world. Over 300 analysts and several hundred CIA field agents piecing together events leading up to and after that single day. Your talking about hundreds of Congressional investigators and their staff. You’re talking about British, French, German, Russian, Saudi, Egyptian, Israeli and United Nations investigations. All of them have either been fooled or are lying? All of them scared to death to speak out?

Putting the entire world aside, putting aside the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted, you have an extremely low opinion of American bravery!
—-

My partial description of the needed demolition is absolutely correct. Please feel free to name one demolition expert or structural engineer that has come forward and given any credence to what you’re selling. Give me one. Blogs and Web posting are disqualified. I will not look at any of that. Give me something we can ALL verify as real.

I will repeat myself here. Reams of “hard” evidence,  HUNDREDS of hours of testimony, THOUSANDS of case files and YEARS of solid investigative MAN HOURS can be seen by anyone who puts forth the effort and time.

What a shame.  What a sham.  What a commentary on how febrile this whole overblown circus called America has become.  Robert Scheer’s well-respected site is now the breeding ground for the unhinged ‘left’ that doesn’t even realize, as Verne says, that it is the unsuspecting product of a fascistic culture.

Yes, I’m talking to you Louise, Folktruther, Cyrena.

~~~~

Guess we’re not much listening here altlic. You’re new here, and we aren’t. At least not me or Louise, and don’t include us in the same cynical ideology as Folktruther, who DOES walk a fragile tightrope between reality and fanaticism, based on his pure hatred for the ‘establishment’ upon which he insists on including Obama, despite the fact that Obama is from another generation entirely.

Don’t confuse him with those of us who have simply taken the time to address the realities of the 9/11 operation, and what it means to all of us who are concerned for the future of America.

We cannot force the rest of you out of your denial, but that doesn’t mean we’re going down with you in your learned ignorance and stupidity.

Reality is always the best and last option.

You should try it.

And my point, Folktruther, is simply that we have plenty of ammunition without 9/11 with which to bury the American ruling class. If you’re out there trying to organize and mobilize your family, friends and neighbors, better not to bring it up unless they do first. The American MSM is the most potent propaganda machine the world has ever seen. Why try to make headway into the teeth of its gale force winds, when you can turn and ride them to your desired port of destination? There are millions of people out there who are never going to buy the 9/11 “conspiracy theory” for a variety of reasons, valid (in their minds) or not, but who are plenty fed up with the status quo and can nonetheless be motivated to stand up and resist the destruction of their country, their communities and their lives. Why climb Kilimanjaro when you can just hop a pebble instead?

By wadosy, March 7 at 7:40 pm #
“the 9-11/anthrax operation accomplished everything it was meant to accomplish… it vilified the people who own most of the remaining oil in the world, it gave us an excuse to start bombing them, it intimidated dissenters, and it silenced critics of israel.”

~~~

Wadosy…

THANKS for the info and the links. I never knew this about the 2001 World Conference on Racism, although I knew that Chertoff has already been ‘assigned’ to run the show.

In fact, there had been a ‘change in the order’ of who reported to whom, and where the authority would fall in terms of an emergency…about maybe 6 months prior to the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after, it ‘changed back’. It’s an ‘open secret’ of sorts, and I’ll see if I can track down a reference to it.

Anyway, the rest of this is news to me, because while I’ve always known that 9/11 was a false flag attack that could ONLY have been perpetrated from the inside, I’ve had a difficult time connecting it to an Israeli-motivated operation, aside from the PNAC, which of course shared all of the same ‘actors’ as the Zionist leadership of Israel.

I’m especially delighted that you have helped me pinpoint (far more clearly than I have managed to do before now) the time frame for the start of the ‘war on terror’ propaganda. IOW, the lead-up to the characterization of “Islamic Terrorists” so that everyone would just ‘accept’ that it was ‘them that done it’ when the WTC exploded/imploded, and when, for the first time in the history of air travel, an Islamic Terrorist Pilot – OR ANY OTHER -  was able to breach the most protected air space in the world.

Only the dumbing-down of the US public and the prolific content of the propaganda set in place well in advance, could allow so many people to accept such a preposterous explanation for what occurred on 9/11 and the accompanying anthrax attacks.

nothing much counts for anything, except…

The New York Times reported Thursday that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards.

the problem is this: it all makes sense if you’re a psychopath.

the 9-11/anthrax operation accomplished everything it was meant to accomplish… it vilified the people who own most of the remaining oil in the world, it gave us an excuse to start bombing them, it intimidated dissenters, and it silenced critics of israel.

last time the world condemned israel was the durban human rights conference in september of 2001.

israel and its american puppet walked out of the conference, and a week later, the WTC was attacked.

as wikipedia puts it…

“many of the potential political aftereffects of the Conference were annulled by the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The attacks took place just three days after the Conference ended, entirely eclipsing the Conference in the news, and significantly affecting international relations and politics.”

World Conference against Racism 2001

pretty convenient, which probably explains why netanyahu thought 9/11 was so good for israel…

…but doesnt explain why sharon, a year earlier —at about the time PNAC published its need for “a new pearl harbor”— visited the al aqsa mosque accompanied by 1000 cops/soldiers, a move that was most likely a deliberate attempt to stir up palestinian resentment… sharon’s visit was most likely a preliminary step in the overall PNAC plan… another “cockup” that did exactly what it was intended to do.

the resulting intifada was documented by the zionist media in the normal fashion, which is to say, every time an israeli was killed, it was a national tragedy for israeli america.

palestinian casualties were ignored.

and this stuff was beamed 24/7 into american homes, showing that palestinians and arabs in general were capable of any atrocity… a perfect setup for the 9/11 operation.

this situation dragged on for a year, palestinians (and muslims) vilified constantly on israeli american media, which set the stage for the 9/11 operation, arabs pre-designated as fall guys.

what kind of event will rescue israel’s status as “the light unto nations” this time?

anyhow, once 9/11 was accomplished, according to USAtoday…

“In the minutes after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was rushing back from Milwaukee, Michael Chertoff was calling the shots.

“Chertoff played key role on 9/11” USA today

so chertoff protects the dancing israelis until he and the israeli consul general, alon pinkas, can be sure the official 9/11 conspiracy theory would hold —and until they can browbeat the fbi into releasing the dancing mossad agents, a process that took over two months.

meanwhile, the anthrax attacks are happening, with accompanying hysterical coverage in the israeli american press —coverage which reinforced the official conspiracy theory, intimidated congress, and made sure any maverick media or law enforcement people got the message, that message being: you will be risking your neck if you dont fall into line with the official theory.

…then the dancing israelis are shipped back to israel, where one of them confesses that he and his mossad friends were filming “to document the event”, implying that he and his mossad friends had prior knowledge of 9/11, and were sent, before the event, to film the unfolding of a operation that their mossad bosses very likely planned and/or participated in.

no wonder they were so happy as they witnessed the success of 9/11 operation.

Whyzowl-Pfaff has reported that the new papers revealed that it was legal for Bush to unconstitutionally use military action against the American people.  The importance of 9/11-anthrax false flag operation was that his administration did, killing over two thousand Americans.  And this is still being covered up by the American power system and most probably always will be.  It is vital because the American people have to understand what they are dealing with, and face it even though we are afraid.

The American power system committed mass murder against the American people, and keeping this secret is one of the essential forces of the political counter revolution that it initiated.  Which Obama is continuing.

Friend, your comments are the usual mainstream bullshit.  It is quite true that anyone involved in the 9/11 homicide would know it after the fact, after he was complicit in it.  And know as well that a power structure that would kill thousands wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.

There are many,many architects, engineers, demolition experts, etc that have reported on the 9/11 truth blog, all convinced it was a false flag operations.  Scores of people heard explosions coming from the lower levels of the towers; the media simply don’t report it.

your demolition scenario is bullshit.  In the 1993 attack on the tower, the FBI gave their informant and operative, an ex-Eyptian officer, sufficent chemicals to make explosives to collapse a tower. He gave them to the conspirators.  But the explosives were placed wrongly and only 6 people were killed. 

this is documented in the trials of the defendants, but for God’s sake don’t read it, it will disrupt your critique of our conspiracy fantasies and you prefer the offical conspiracy theory.

Look, Afriend, horrifying as it is to contemplate that your own government, your own military hierarchy, your own intelligence services attacked you on 9/11 and later on with anthrax, facts are facts.

Leave the towers to one side and simply consider building number 7. The floors in this building where fires mysteriously started and caused the building to mysteriously collapse,had three to four thousand files stored on them. They included documents that dealt with cases of fraud on Wall Street and, specifically, documents relating to ENRON. Because this building also housed offices of the CIA, on another floor were documents dealing with the $325,000 that was sent by the head of the Pakistani secret service (the ISI) from Washington DC in the week leading up to the 9/11 attacks. This money was allegedly sent to Mohammed Atta who the Bush administration have claimed was one of the ‘ring leaders’ in the 9/11 plot. The money was allegedly passed on to Atta through the ISI asset Omar Saeed Sheikh, later arrested for the murder of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl who was investigating links between the ISI and Al Qaeda. The ISI are the creators of the Taliban and a close ally of the CIA. Al Qaeda itself originated in the CIA-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.  It has also been established that two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers had a support network in the U.S. that included agents of the Saudi government and that the Bush administration and the FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship. In his book ‘Intelligence Matters’ Senator Bob Graham revealed that details of financial support from Saudi Arabia for those agents were in 27 pages of a Congressional inquiry’s report. This report was blocked from release by the Bush administration even though leaders of both the Republican and the Democrat parties pleaded for its release.

Back to the towers: huge steel girders were thrown 400 feet outwards from the towers with such force that they were speared into the sides of other buildings. Human bones were found on the roof of the Deutsche Bank a considerable distance from the towers. None of the bones was bigger than a fragment.
Added to this are the statements of scientific experts and insurance assessors who claim that the steel used in the Twin Towers was especially formulated not to melt or buckle unless it experienced temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or over. The highest estimate of the temperature of the fires in the Twin Towers is around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Expert consensus is that it’s not possible for the steel to have melted or buckled from the heat. Experts also legitimately point to the fact that no other building anywhere in the world of this type has ever collapsed because of fire. The fact that massive pillars of steel held these buildings up was so threatening to the 9/11 Commission that they falsely claimed these pillars didn’t exist in their report. The 9/11 Commission Report claims there are no columns and that the ‘interior core of (the Twin Towers) was a hollow steel shaft in which elevators and stairwells were grouped’. Ask yourself why they said that. These are not conspiracy theories, they are conspiracy facts and the 9/11 commission was set up to obscure, not reveal them. It’s not good enough to say ‘prove they did it’ and then reject anything that proves it on the grounds that the government wouldn’t do something like that. Yes, they would and did.

some of have become brutes, and we watch 24.

some of us are waiting.

some of us have an interest in defending the official conspiracy theory, which may hold up for a few more years.

...but once peak oil and global warming become to obvious to deny, everyone will understand what happened.

that’s when the shit hits the fan.

in the meantime, i have to confess that i’ve never owned a toyota.

where’s the evidence?

oh.

i forgot.

the evidence was shipped to japan to become toyotas.

Folktruther,

Think again about what you’re trying to pull off in your writing. And then ask your friend, specifically, about the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Ask your friend if he himself would have known after the fact what he had been a part of. The answer will be YES.

And YES (you can ask your friend) it would take a cast of thousands to pull such a plot off. The logistics before, during and after are enormous.

False Flag Ops. is not the subject here. I believe you don’t understand what a False Flag Op. actually is. Go back and ask your friend.

—-

Also ask your friend if he knows anything of demolition. How it would take many months of punching walls for precision demolition placement. Hundreds of support structures would need to be purposefully degraded in advance. All the while tens of thousands of people worked daily in the New York buildings.

After all these years not a single demolition expert has come forward to explain how it could be pulled off? Not one person working in the buildings has come forward to say they witnessed entire walls missing, hundreds of metal support beams cut, and well over a thousand holes in the walls every two to ten feet apart? Not a single person saw the several miles of primer cord throughout the buildings? Not a single security guard? Not one maintenance worker? Not one of the tens of thousands of office personnel?

Conspiracy theories is one thing. What you’re suggesting is pure fantasy.

Whether 9/11 was a false flag operation or not is not the or even a central political question of our time. I believe that’s Mr. Pfaff’s point, more or less.

You see, there’s no need to demonstrate that 9/11 was an inside job in order to prove that American political and foreign policy elites are serial liars, financial racketeers, traitors to the Constitution and all of the other good things America is supposed to stand for, and international war criminals (mis)leading a captive, vicious, rogue imperial state. Everything they have done subsequent to the attacks, using them as justification, proves all of the above to be true beyond question or doubt.

What is required now is to mobilize a mass social movement to resist the depredations of the anti-American, American imperialist kleptocrats who are destroying our country, and—if we let them get away with it—our world. Insisting on arguing 9/11 Truth will only undermine our credibility with the overwhelming majority of the population who don’t buy it, for whatever reasons. So it is wise to just put it on the back burner for now. A successful people’s resistance movement against the corporate occupation of our planet will demand a free and independant investigaion of the events of 9/11 in good time. We can wait.

Of course, if you really just want to hang around on the web and play intellectual badminton while America burns… well, don’t let me try to stop you. But it seems to me that the necessity of our time is the same as what is required for success in badminton—keep your eye on the birdie.

The war on terror was a witch hunt and the ‘laws’ put in place by the likes of John Yoo for Bush and Cheney are a perfect match for the laws of the witch hunts and the inquisition. The witch trials of the 1600’s only ended in Germany when the German states were invaded by the King of Sweden because this genuine threat had to be dealt with and the illusory threat of the witch hunts was put aside and all the funds spent on this mass hallucination had to be spent defending themselves from real invaders instead of demons and witches. Since the global economic catastrophe unfolded (itself a product of a mass hallucination) the war on terror has become a cliche, an advertising slogan and in that way history has repeated itself.

The war on terror was an attempt to replace the Soviet Union as a global threat so that the CIA’s and MI5’s of this world could have business as usual and justify their existence. This is the only good side of the global shitstorm: there’s no money left to play terror games and war games and so this global ‘emergency’ has been put away like a set of toy soldiers until the next time. If people don’t go to jail, and the whole truth is not exposed, there will be a next time. You all know that, don’t you? And it could be sooner rather than later. The corruption and criminality of the intelligence services has to be dealt with or they will destroy the west. There also has to be a peace agreement and a Palestinian state in the Middle East because no progress on world peace is possible with a nuclear armed state like Israel terrorising its neighbours with the tacit support and agreement of the USA.

I agree entirely with the (4) comments of Verne Arnold, who by now has probably high-tailed it out of the lurid world of truthdig commenters, just as he has high-tailed it out of this nutty country.

What a shame.  What a sham.  What a commentary on how febrile this whole overblown circus called America has become.  Robert Scheer’s well-respected site is now the breeding ground for the unhinged ‘left’ that doesn’t even realize, as Verne says, that it is the unsuspecting product of a fascistic culture.

Yes, I’m talking to you Louise, Folktruther, Cyrena.

Why Did So Few Americans Give a Damn?

when you stop and think about all the cowboys and indians that were shot off their horses in those endless shoot ’em up chase scenes we watched as kids…

when you think about what’s happened since… millions killed in vietnam for no apparent reason…

when brutality becomes best-selling entertainment…

you gots to conclude some of us have become brutes.

when it’s become obvious that the american way is nothing much more than mindless pursuit of money enough to buy things we dont have time enough to enjoy… on the dubious assumption that those thing would be enjoyable anyhow…

when the government has proven itself, time after time, to be the agent of people who see you as a consumer, a number, your humanity be damned…

when things havent quite got bad enough yet to take things into your own hands…

you wait.

It is interesting to see a post such as this garner so much comment but it is all hash and rehash, which is at least still keeping the subject matter in memory. And there are a growing number of people that want some accountability for those responsible for the current disaster that now the world is experiencing. I am one of those people. But all talk and no action is the barrier that needs getting over. For what intelligence I have it does not take any more than 1 viewing of the ‘attack’ of 9/11 to understand that the 3 buildings that went to the ground were set for demolition and with the use of highly advanced ordnance used only by our military or the cia. There is only one answer to this and that is it was done by people of the american government with help from some other ‘allies’. All of it can be wrapped under the name of ‘criminal corporate enterprise’. After all it was all about control and theft. And there is nothing good about far too many people in this country that still don’t see the attact of 9/11 as anything other than a terrorist attack by a few fundamentalist muslims.
What is very exasperating to have a new administration come in and not do anything to investigate such an obviously traitorous act against this country. This has very high indications that whatever the reason, the attack of 9/11 is over and those responsible ‘earned’ their money.
Now how can anyone expect this country to keep going knowing that a bunch of people responsible for this attack are still walking around among us, less those renditioned to prevent ‘leaks’. Oh, yeah, we are quick to classify someone as a sex offender and make all kinds of efforts to publicly expose them(except of course any elected person) or just plain lock them away. But a bunch of people that did what was done on 9/11 still able to mingle with us? We have no priorities, those are all attended to at the people behind the curtains meetings for their benefit, not the people’s.

It is completely untrue that thousands of people were needed as knoweldgeable agents in the false flag 9/11-anthrax homicide.  An ex-intelligence agent once described to me some false flag operations, and only a few people are neeeded to nuderstood the whole operation.  The operations are done on a need-to-know basis, which each operative given only that information necessary for his specialized part.  The operation itself is compartmentalized, so no agent has an overall view.

Wadosy makes a good point that torture, in addition to terrorizing the active population against imperialism, can obtain “evidence” of whatever is needed to corraberate the deceit of power.  The political counter revolution led by the Bushites need such evidence to frighten the American people into believing that Terrorists are so powerful and dangerous that a whole war is necessary against them, with a military bigger than that used against the Communist Bloc.

Obama is Continuing the delusive War on Terrorism, along with the keptocapitalism of Bush, and turning the US into a disguised Despotism to enforce it. He looks and sounds so good on TV that he diverts attention from the implications of what he is saying, and that his polcies are similar to Bush’s.
This allows the Obama cheerleaders to obscure them for a while until they become obvious to the American population.

how many million zionists of different persuasions, how many oily corporate fascists and deathwish christians, have figured out that 9/11 was exactly what they needed?

how many of them will be scrupulous in defending the official conspiracy theory that justifies actions they support?

how much of the main media is run by corporate zionists, who not only regurgitated the official conspiracy as needed, but has since lied us into expanding the wars?

would all that amount to a conspiracy, or what?

how do you explain the fact that netanyahu thought 9/11 was such a good deal?

how do you explain neocon calls for a new 9/11?

how do you explain the fact that the FBI doesnt have any 9/11 evidence against bin laden?

why do you defend the use of torture, unless torture is the only way you can acquire “evidence” that justifies your project?

wadosy,

You’re writing about a conspiracy that would literally involve multiples of thousands of people.

And your sources are foolish, media driven, blog heavy nonsense.

I’m sorry but I must be frank.

so now we’re seeing another function of torture:

“confessions” obtained by torture give the true believers something to cling to in the absence of evidence.

nevermind that the israelis, israeli americans, deathwish christians, and oily corporate fascists had tons of motive to stage 9/11, and once they were installed into office, they had even more tons of means, opportunity and character to do 9/11.

...but the true believers will never explain why the FBI has been able to come up with evidence linking bin laden to 9/11.

Louise,

Terrorism 2000-2001
Source : Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)
Date : 2002

Africa and the War on Terrorism
Source : Congressional Research Service (CRS)
Date: Jan. 2002

DoD Testimony by Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, DIA Director
Source : Department of Defense
Date: Jan. 2002

World Trade Center Building Performance Study
Source : Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Date May 2002

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Contacts with Two September 11 Terrorists
Source : Department of Justice
Date: May 2002

Review of Studies of the Economic Impact of the September 11,

2001, Terrorist Attacks on the World Trade Center
Source : Government Accountability Office (GAO)
Date: May 2002

United States of American v. Zacarias Moussaoui
Source : Department of Justice

The FBI’s Handling of the Phoenix Electronic Communication and Investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui Prior to September 11, 2001 - September 24, 2002
Source : Congress
Date : 24 Sept. 2002

“9/11” And After : A British View
Source : Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS)
Date : Oct. 2002

The Bali Bombing : What it Means for Indonesia
Source : Australie
Date : 22 Oct. 2002

Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001
Source : Congress
Date : Dec. 2002

(AFRI) La Guerre contre le terrorisme - Le Piège des mots
Source : France
Date : 2003

Resolution 1465
Source : United Nations - Terrorisme
Date; Feb. 2003

Arlington County Conference Report : Local response to Terrorism, lessons learned from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon
Source : Arlington County
Date: July 2003

Resolution 1516
Source : United Nations - Terrorisme
Date : 20 Nov. 2003

Terrorist Attacks by Al Qaeda
Source : Congressional Research Service (CRS)
Date : 31 Mar. 2004

The 9/11 Commission Report
Source : White House
Date: July 2004

A Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004
Source : National Counter terrorism Center
Date: July 2004

Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups : Theory, Research and Prevention
Source : Department of Justice
Date : Sept. 2005

Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers. Final Report. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center
Disaster.
Source : National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Date : Sept. 2005

Louise,

One must start pre-Sept. 2001 in order to maintain historical context.

Legitimate Use of Military Force Against State-Sponsored International Terrorism -1989

The World Trade Center Bombing : Report and Analysis
Source : Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 1993

Terrorism in United States : Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) 1996

Significant Incidents of Political Violence Against Americans 1995: Department of State 1996

Statement of Chairman Floyd D. Spence on the Report on the Bombing of Khobar Towers. Source : Congress

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - September 1998
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

Terrorism : US Response to Bombing in Kenya and Tanzania : A New Policy Direction.
Source : Congressional Research Service (CRS)

Significant Incidents of Political Violence Against Americans 1997
Source : Department of State. Nov 1998

Wanted Usama Bin Laden
Source : Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) : May 1999

Investigation to inquire into the actions of USS Cole - November 17, 1999
Source : Department of the Navy

The Network of Terrorism
Source : Department of State
Date : 2001

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - February 5, 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - February 20, 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - March 7, 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

Patterns of Global Terrorism
Source : Department of State
Date : April 2001

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - May 3, 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - June 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

USA v. Usama Bin Laden - July 3, 2001
Source : Court Case : USA v. Usama Bin Laden

Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks.
Source : White House
Date : 17 septembre 2001

The Post 11 September Investigations
Source : Amnesty International
Date : Nov. 2001

Zacarias Moussaoui Indictment
Source : Department of Justice
Date: Dec. 2001

DoD Transcript of Usama Bin Laden Video Tape
Source : Department of Defense
Date : 13 Dec. 2001

corrected url:

taliban repeatedly offer to surrender bin laden

Louise,

Links? You think the world spins on the Internet? You honestly believe you can prove or disprove a criminal case or conspiracy on the Web?

Sometimes one has to pick up a book. Sometimes one has to use the Freedom of Information Act and purchase stamps. Sometimes one needs to watch or listen to Congressional testimony. Read actual investigative reports. Court transcripts are “open source” public domain.

The point is this: Reams of evidence, hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of case files and years of solid investigative man hours can be (studied) by anyone who puts forth the effort and time.

You originally wrote. “We don’t have hard proof that 9/11 happened as we are told! Never have had! Never will have! “

Firstly: You don’t need to be told anything. I assume you’re not a child.

Put in the time and effort. Don’t go on believing in things that are provably untrue.

I can point out a small fraction of what’s available. You must do the rest yourself.

Please don’t again ask me to do your research for you. I did my homework. It took me years but, I did it. You can too.

now then, had i been running things, and in planning the 9/11 caper, i decided that Verne Arnold would be the designated patsy, i would have grabbed as many of verne’s friends and associates as i could lay my hands on, and i would ship them to gitmo or abu ghraib or some other expert torturers, and i would “interrogate” verne’s friends until they “confessed” that Verne Arnold was the mastermind of 9/11.

it’s real simple to see why torture is a vital part of this project, because you need to fabricate pretexts for justifying the project, even if you have to obtain those pretexts through methods as unreliable as torture.

and you have to fabricate those pretexts because the evidence you need does not exist.

Bin laden repeatedly denied involvement in 9/11.

The taliban repeatedly offer to surrender bin laden if bunnypants will supply evidence of bin laden’s participation in 9/11.

hijackers started popping up after 9/11, alive, well, and pissed off.

October 7, 2001, Bunnypants starts bombing afghanistan without any proof of bin laden’s involvement

November 11, 2001, Rove goes to hollywood, after the invasion of afghanistan

December 14, 2001, the phony tape of bin laden’s confession surfaces

fbi director mueller cant prove IDs of hijackers…

...which is bad enough, but he also had to admit he could find no evidence of bin laden’s connection to 9/11…

…and bin laden is not wanted for participation in 9/11, according to the FBI’s wanted poster…

Things to think about: for those of you who believe in the official conspiracy theory of 9/11

you can start by providing proof of bin laden’s involvement in 9/11, other than one inept video of a poor double confessing on such a garbled sound track that nobody can understand it.

then you can discuss karl rove’s visit to hollywood—-a month before the video surfaced and a month after bunnypants started the war—- for the express purpose of recruiting hollywood into the war on terror.

then you can explain how the low quality of the tape was a necessity, even coming from hollywood, since bin laden’s double was so unconvincing.

and finally, you can explain how bunnypants is justified in attacking afghanistan even before the manufactured evidence was so conveniently found.

You are making the taliban, who refused to surrender bin laden without having proof of his involvement in 9/11, look positively noble in comparison to bunnypants, who apparently bombed afghanistan without any proof at all.

remember back to the week just before the video surfaced, and the main media’s hysterical promotion of the video—-“delayed one more day to process”, “delayed one more day to confirm”, “delayed one more day to whatever”—- and the “whatever” being the building of expectations to a feverish pitch so the shit quality of the video would be overlooked, drowned in a week of nonstop 24/7 hype .... a textbook case of manufactured consensus.

the simple fact is, there was no evidence, bunnypants was taking all kinds of heat for refusing to provide evidence to the taliban, he was taking heat for attacking without showing proof, and so he needed to cook up evidence.

it’s a very short hop from manufacturing evidence to frame someone—-in this case, bin laden——to covering up evidence that will incriminate the people who are actually running things—-AIPAC, israel, and oily corporate fascist fellow travelers…...

.....in fact the frameup and the coverup are one and the same

Last word; Truthdig has been a safe home for many posters who feed off of each others delusions. posters like TAO Walker speak to reality and rarely garner a comment. Interesting; it appears we project and fail to listen or comprehend. Interesting; but not for long.

By Louise, March 7 at 1:31 am;

Until this post of yours, I have always considered you to be one of the few level headed posters here. You have obviously bought into the complete fantasy that the towers were an inside job. I hate the U.S. government; but they didn’t do 911. This utter delusion will forever poison your mind and you will never see the truth. That is the reason I have totally given up on any form of government ever telling me what reality is. And that is also why I have given up all hope Americans will ever get back their freedoms; the ones stolen using 911 as an excuse. This was a gift handed to Bush by radical fanatics, and his (Bushes) criminals so they could go to the dark places they inhabit. As long as you and others cling to the fantasy of a false flag operation to explain 911, you’ll continue to be the pawns of fascism, American style. I’m so sorry for you and your ilk; but this is for me the last straw so to speak. I’m outa here; you people are truly sick and lost in your own delusions. With few exceptions, the posters here are in gross denile and I’ll have no more of it.

AFriend,

LINKS?

I mean if you have access to information that actually proves the “official” story, I think we’d all like to see it!

I’m talking PROOF here. Not speculation. Not theory. Not assumption. Certainly not brain-numbing, doubletalking, gobbledegook.

Honest to goodness fact backed proof!

LINKS?

Louise,

I repeat….. Reams of evidence, hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of case files and years of solid investigative man hours can be (studied) by anyone who puts forth the effort and time.

—-

Take the time and put in the effort.

War is uncivilized.  We have no money and no business sending troops into Middle East countries nor Big Ugly Dishonorable WEAPONS of inhumane proportions and interference also dishonorable. 

This country doesn’t give a damn because the media hypes corruption as if we want it, and the dissociation between what the “right wing establishnment media” says we want, and the truth of we is growing ever wider.

The media has no interest in the U.S. duty to maintain peace not war as the proper view.

The media has no interest in NO RED INK IN THE TRILLIONS military.

The media has no interest in the TRUTH of what Americans value.

Give a damn?  Try the right stuff ON, and insist on that, and we just might find the right stuff happening.

INTERNATIONAL LAW is NO NUKES.

Do you see the media saying the U.S. owes the UPHOLDING of the ABM Treaty?  Why not!!!

Do you see the U.S. media editorializing on how bad Hillary Clinton’s unconscionable comment about “obliterate Iran” as a U.S. capability instead of peace is a “given” from the U.S.—why not, because it isn’t, not with Bush and Rice, and now, the worst of the worst, Hillary Clinton and her horrific intent to dictate and dominate those who should turn their backs on her “upfront” and let her know she deserves BACKS not FACES when she attempts her ugly Condelezza Rice diplomacy as the media would have it.

And, now we see Obama touting one more one upmanship of BUSH…stem cell research, as if we have oh so much MORE red ink for UNWANTED when the basics for LIFE LIBERTY and HAPPINESS are due.

International Law upheld, basics in place as EXPECTATIONS, but…well, indeed, THOSE WERE NOT OFFERED BY THE TWO NOT SIX candidates, and the people allowed media rule.  The media does not represent us, and they represent corruption of everything, and the apathy of not giving a damn, has to start with refusal to war Obama’s red ink and bloody international offensives, and refusal to allow the media such constant lack of honest politics on track.  What we will very soon have is no money and no military and a country with nothing.  then what will the majority do?  I voted for Nader for bringing the troops home, not redeployment, and humanitarian aid to troubled spots, not weapons, I voted for the BEST which I believe is the DUTY of honest voters.  Honest agenda might net the majority giving a damn, and so, the media owes, and the people owe, to force the change to end the apathy and disgust, before it is horror, which is looming large in my eyes.

jewcy, Folktruther and wadosy… cleaning windows.

Let me amplify the implications of wadosy’s astonishing find. The founding president of the Jewish People’s Policy Institute wrote an article in the Jewish Forward arguing that morality has no place in Israeli foreign policy.  The chairman of that institute was Dennis Ross.

Obama appointed Dennis Ross as Special Adviser on the Middle East.

Ideology has policy implicaions.  Over half the 5000 people killed or maimed by Israel in Gaza were women and children. Homes, businesses and public buildings were deliberately blown up.  With Obama’s support.  The US under Obama is providing a billion dollars to the US-Israeli puppet Abbas, but not one cent is going to rehabilitate Gaza.

Israel now has a right wing government which does not even make a pretense of a two state solution, whosse first act is to bulldoze the homes of hundreds of Palestinians.  It is estimated that Israel has between 200 to 400 thermonuclear weapons.

Natanyahoo has publically stated as one of his first pronouncements that Iran is the chief danger to Israel.  And Dennis Ross is Obama’s Mideast Advisor.

Who holds bascially a fascist ideology, that power trumps any morality.  And Israel has largely hijacked US foreign policy.  The American people do not understand that the Israeli lobby has largely hijacked an important part of the American power system.  policy is not being made in the interests of the American people, or even the interests of American power, but in the interests of Israeli power, which is not restricted by morality.

And American Zionists will defend Israel no matter what it does.

By Sepharad, March 6 at 9:51 pm #
•  “cyrena, you might be amused to know that “24” is so popular in San Francisco, bastion of all that is politically correct, that one of the SF Chronicle’s regular columnists has a blog that weekly discusses the ongoing adventures of Jack Bauer and gets dozens of comments every time.”

Sepharad,

I believe you, though I’m admittedly NOT ‘amused’. My sister and part of her family happen to be avid Jack Bauer fans, although they are situated in the Southern (LA section) of all that is supposedly the same. (politically correct). I chastise her routinely, but she rationalizes it. She has enough sense not to allow my niece to watch it, (she’s only 16) but that doesn’t excuse the fact that the rest of them do.

But, (at least in my opinion) this isn’t a ‘political’ issue; (torture) at least it never was before. It was simply (or maybe not so simply) a matter of law; US Law and International Law. It’s the top of the list crime in terms of the International Humanitarian Law, but it’s also the same with the Geneva Conventions in terms of War Law, as well as the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). In other words there are no conditions, (legally) that allow for the abrogation of the Universal Conventions against Torture, despite the trickery and criminality of John Yoo, Bybee, Dick Cheney, and his legal brain, David Addington, to call it something else – ‘enhanced interrogation’ among other things.

So, it’s not ‘political’ in that respect, because it’s just the law. It is what it is. I would like to believe that if American’s weren’t so dumbed down, they would be aware of these laws, both US Federal Law as well as International Law and our commitment to uphold it. It would also be very helpful if they understood WHY we have these treaties, conventions, agreements, etc. International Law is largely based on the concept of reciprocation. We agree not to torture your soldiers when we capture them in a legitimate conflict, and you agree not to torture ours. It’s really quite simple.

So maybe, because there is really such a minute portion of the American population who actually put themselves or allow their families to be put in the front line of fire on all of these optional and aggressive wars, they may not know or care what happens to our troops at the hands of any given enemy. Again, in the past 40 years –since Vietnam, there has remained only a tiny portion of the population who actually have to fight, and whose families are also required to devote their lives to the military.

Speaking of which, (And I meant to say earlier), I am sorry for your nephew’s loss as well. I know that all Israeli citizens are required to do military service in the IDF, though mjt01 did provide me/us with the information that there are some excusals for the ultra-orthodox. That seems (despite the pain of any loss) to be a fairer way to maintain an army, but needless to say, we don’t do that here, and that may be why more Americans’ are unaware of these things.

It rings close to home for me as well, since losing an extended member of my own family in Iraq.

Of course we still miss her desperately:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Perez