Bush Officials Warned 9/11 Commission Against Probing Too Deeply
Some people ask, “Why do conspiracy theories get such traction in people’s minds?”
Perhaps because the arguments against them are not entirely dissuasive, but I have to say, if nothing else, it’s largely because of stories like this one, that actually lend credence to people’s suspicions by providing them with objective proof of the government’s attempt to obfuscate and withhold vital information.
Whether it is done in order to prevent embarrassment, or to protect themselves from prosecution, the fact remains, Bush officials in Washington were more concerned with covering their own butts, than publicly revealing an inconvenient truth. Even if it meant that national security might be improved and a similar event avoided.
As of today, it has been revealed via a FOIA request made by the ACLU, that Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet sent a letter dated January 16, 2004 to the members of the 9/11 Commission that there was an investigatory line it was “not allowed to cross.”
The line was in questioning the terrorist suspects that the Bush Administration was busy torturing, in violation of both U.S. and international law. In other words, the Commission was not allowed to question the accused.
Hardly a high point for American jurisprudence.
$650m Compensation Settlement for Heroes of September 11
Nico Hines writes on the Times:
Rescue and recovery workers who were exposed to a toxic brew of smoke and dust in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks have been awarded $650 million in a compensation deal struck in New York.
Thousands of 9/11 heroes, including firefighters, police officers, construction experts and emergency workers, have filed lawsuits since 2003 but last night’s agreement is expected to put an end to years of legal battles.
The settlement, worth up to $657.5 million (£434 million), was reached after negotiations between lawyers representing more than 10,000 people exposed to the debris from the World Trade Center and New York City’s federally financed insurer.
Some workers are likely to receive payments of only a few thousand dollars. Others could be in line to get more than…
The 9/11 Hijackers Are Alive
The chief of Japan’s Democratic Party says that the 9/11 hijackers are alive and that 9/11 was a complete hoax. Dr. David Ray Griffin is a professor and author of the book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé and he says that he agrees.
9/11 Truth Goes Mainstream: Chris Wallace’s ABC News Report
Nightline profiles the 9/11 Truth Movement, needless to say with the requisite amount of skepticism necessary for a story like this to air on network television:
Only Some Conspiracy Theories Welcome at Huffington Post
Have to agree, the Huffington Post loves to embrace all sort of crazy pseudoscientific theories about your health, but has a problem with this post from Jesse Ventura. (You can read the Ventura post on InfoWars.) Alex Pareene writes on Gawker:
The Huffington Post removed a 9/11 “Truther” post from former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. According to their editor’s note, “The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories….” Oh, really?
Because today, the very same Huffington Post published this wonderful post from dangerous nutcase Jenny McCarthy about how autism is caused by vaccines and can be cured with experimental treatments that the established medical community doesn’t want you to know about. We can only assume that as soon as the editors discover this conspiratorial nonsense, they will promptly remove it.
The fun thing about Jenny McCarthy’s conspiracy is that if it catches on enough, it will literally lead to the death of children. Trutherism just makes you really annoying!
It’s not only Huffington Post who gives the former Playboy playmate lip service, ABC News was willing to seek a medical opinion from her. Even if you disagree with Ventura’s claims on 9/11 (and I am in that camp), Ventura is not saying he is qualified to dispense an engineering analysis, or even claiming he is 100% right about his conclusions.
For more on Jenny McCarthy’s lunatic crusade, check out Jenny McCarthy Body Count.
9/11 Truthers Could Be Locked Up For Life Under Proposed U.S. Law
A new bill quietly introduced by Congress last week is causing quite a stir among civil liberties groups. The brainchild of senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, the bill would give the United States government the power to indefinitely detain terror suspects without charge or trial. It would also allow the government to interrogate them for the intelligence value and it doesn’t make a distinction between U.S. citizens and non-citizens.
ABC News Vs. Loose Change
Thanks to Signs of the Times for posting these two YouTube videos.
At the Treason in America Conference on 3/6/2010, ABC News decided to drop by and “cover” the event. The creators of the Loose Change documentaries were ready for them.
Ahmadinejad: 9/11 Was A ‘Big Lie’
From CNN:
Two days before his official trip to Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a “big lie” intended to pave the way for the invasion of a war-torn nation, according to Iranian state media.
Ahmadinejad, known for his harsh rhetoric toward the West and Israel, said the attack on U.S. soil was a “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure,” Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Saturday.
The assault was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan,” Press TV reported Ahmadinejad as saying.
It’s not the first time Ahmadinejad has denied a historical tragedy. In the past, he has denied the existence of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews…
With No Modification and Little Debate, Democrats Send Patriot Act Extension to Obama
Even though I didn’t expect any better, this story really breaks my heart. As long as this law is in effect, 9/11 never ends. Whether you believe it is the government or the terrorists who were behind the attack, it’s obvious that someone was trying to really screw you over nine years ago, and this story is a little reminder of that. Kudos to Dennis Kucinich for holding his ground on this and other civil liberties issues that other Democrats won’t touch for fear of being soft on terrorism. Personally, I’d rather be hard on human rights.
From The Raw Story:
Kucinich jeers: Congress is ‘complicit’ in violating Americans’ constitutional rights. In the wake of congressional Democrats’ reauthorization and extension of the USA Patriot Act, few elected Democrats have been as vocal about the post-9/11 security measures as they were during the Bush administration.
Leave it to stalwart House progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to raise a rallying cry against what he called America’s love of its fears.
“This legislation extends three problematic provisions of the PATRIOT Act and, at the same time, leaves some of the most egregious provisions in place, absent any meaningful reform and debate,” he declared in a media advisory.
Washington Times Reports 9/11 Inconsistencies
Jennifer Harper for the Washington Times:
A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.
“In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards,” says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to…
Illuminati Symbolism and 9/11 In Hollywood Movies
Nice little montage of Illuminati/Masonic/911/Conspiracy symbolism culled from popular films. Quite a bit of a stretch in places, but still rather amusing. Possibly even….”illuminating”!
1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation
From Yahoo News:
Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.
These prominent…
Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory
Here’s a lecture from my old buddy Damien at Blather.net. It is a good addition to the stories/discussions that are currently going around about the sub-culture of conspiracy theories.
From Blather:
This is the video of the talk I did at the Dublin Paracon 2009 on the subject of 9/11 and conspiracy theories. This talk resulted from a course called Digital Cultures, part of the MsC. in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh, where we were encouraged to carry out a ‘virtual ethnography’ on a community of our choice. I chose, for reasons passing understanding, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, choosing some of the recent 9/11 films as a field site.
[Read more at Blather]
It’s a Conspiracy! No, It’s Not: A Debunking of the Classic Theories
Image by quarkscrew via Creative Commons
The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, so often the purveyor of eviscerating book reviews, for once truly loves something: an all-out mockery of a myriad of conspiracy theories, from 9/11 to Princess Diana, by David Aaronovich, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History:
The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were…
TSA Detains Student for Arabic Study Cards; Asked By Agent ‘Do You Know Who Did 9/11?’
RAW Story is reporting today the ACLU is filing a lawsuit on behalf of the student. Here’s the original report from Dave Davies in the Philadelphia Daily News:
EIGHT YEARS after 9/11, we’re used to changes in our routines. We show ID to get into office buildings, and take off our shoes at airports. But should a college student flying back to school be handcuffed and held for five hours because he has Arabic flash cards in his backpack?
That’s the way Nick George, a senior at Pomona College, in California, sees what happened to him at the Philadelphia airport two Saturdays ago. George, of Wyncote, Montgomery County, was about to catch a Southwest flight back to school when stereo speakers in his backpack caught the eye of screeners at the metal detector.
Controlled Opposition: Hard Questions About Alex Jones
[The views in this essay are those of the author alone. Publication here does not constitute endorsement by disinformation®: Full Disclosure: disinformation® has distributed two of Mr. Jones' films.]
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
Special thanks to Bulldogger for showing me the way to the rabbit hole.
Many readers of Black Sun Gazette are doubtless familiar with Alex Jones, the Austin, TX-based radio show host and film maker. I have long struggled with what to make of Alex Jones. On the one hand, he provides people with difficult to find information about the frightening truth of the American government’s lurch toward police state and global empire. On the other, he is a frothing at the mouth crypto-fascist who seems to do little more than lead people down blind alleys and arguably does more…
Pentagon Hired ‘Crackpot’ Conspiracy Theorist As Al Qaeda Specialist
Justin Elliott writes on TPM Muckraker:
When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda.
Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month.
It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie’s career — that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.
Those who know Mylroie’s work are shocked that the Pentagon would hire her.
Steven Spielberg Producing WTC Ground Zero Documentary
No prizes for guessing why they didn’t ask Dylan Avery (Loose Change or Ray Nowosielski (9/11: Press For Truth) to produce this film. From Variety:
Steven Spielberg is teaming with Science Channel on a documentary about the reconstruction of the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.
“Rebuilding Ground Zero” will air as a six-part doc to air on the Discovery net in 2011. Spielberg will act as exec producer and advisor for the project that was originated by architect Danny Foster and director Jonathan Hock.
Doc, shot in 3D and high def, will examine the partnership of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, politicians and various construction crews and engineers in putting the pieces together for a project of such a large magnitude.
In addition to the new 1,776-foot tower,…
Obama Staffer Wants ‘Cognitive Infiltration’ of 9/11 Conspiracy Groups
I don’t usually write commentary on stories, but this one seems fitting. I’ve been making podcasts about conspiracy theories for years, and what this article says about “crippled epistemology” is absolutely true.
From The Raw Story:
In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.
As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing…
