Another Newspaper Punches Hole in Official 911 Story

Justin Raimondo in AntiWar.com points today to an article in the Philadelphia Times Herald - News that details the Israeli spying operation in the United States just prior to 9/11, in other words the Art Students/Moving Company Israeli spies that are familiar to those in the 911 truth movement.

When you add this to the L.A. Times interview with David Ray Griffin , it makes you wonder if something is up.

Is there a falling out between two of the factions thought to have cooked up 9/11: Israel and U.S. Imperial War Hawks and Fascists?

Another clue: the person who is pushing this issue is Gerald Shea, a VERY well-connected eastern establishment type. Raimondo: "Shea – an alumnus of Phillips Academy (1960), Yale (1964), and Columbia Law School (1967) – was associated for many years with one of New York's most prominent law firms, in New York and Paris.."

Is the old Eastern Establishment the third force that could tip the balance on this thing?

David Ray Griffin Interview in the Los Angeles Times

Here is part of a very respectful interview with David Ray Griffin the the L.A. Times. The respect given the views of Griffin by one of the pillars of the Mainstream Media is new and significant, in my opinion:

Getting Agnostic About 9/11

A society of nonbelievers questions the official version
MARK EHRMAN

Anyone who types the words "9/11" and "conspiracy" into an online search engine soon learns that not everybody buys the official narrative of what took place on Sept. 11, 2001. As a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, 66-year-old David Ray Griffin would seem to have more affinity for leather elbow patches than tin hats, yet after friends and colleagues prodded him into sifting through the evidence, he experienced a conversion. Now he's spreading the bad news. Griffin compiled a summary of material arguing against the accepted story that 19 hijackers sent by Osama bin Laden took the aviation system and the U.S. military by surprise that awful day in his 2004 book "The New Pearl Harbor" (published by Interlink, a Massachusetts-based independent publisher covering areas including travel, cooking, world fiction, current events, politics, children's literature and other subjects). He recently followed up with the book "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" (Interlink), a critique of the Kean commission document in which he suggests that a chunk of the blame for the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil lies closer to home than the caves of Afghanistan. We contacted him at his Santa Barbara-area home for a report on his journey from mild-mannered scholar to doubting Thomas.

How did you join the ranks of those questioning the official account of the 9/11 events?

I was rather slow getting on board. For the first year and a half I just accepted the conventional view, really the blowback thesis, that this was blowback for our foreign policy. When a colleague suggested to me about a year after 9/11 that he was convinced our own government or forces within our own government had arranged it, I didn't accept that. Then several months later another colleague sent me [a link to] a website that had a timeline. Once I started reading that and saw all those stories drawn from mainstream sources that contradicted the official account, I decided I needed to look into it more carefully, and the more I looked, the worse it got. I considered it an obligation to kind of organize, compile the evidence and put it out there for the public.The Internet is full of 9/11 conspiracy theories. What have you contributed to the discussion?My main contribution has been the second book, [showing] that the 9/11 commission report is not worthy of belief, and the implication of that is that they were covering up the government's own guilt.

What would constitute a "smoking gun" against the official 9/11 account?

There are many. By just ignoring them, the 9/11 commission implicitly admitted they couldn't answer them. The towers coming down into a pile only a few stories high is a smoking gun. Many laws of physics had to be violated if the official story about the collapses is true. [The collapses] had all the earmarks of a controlled demolition by explosives. One of those is total collapse into a small pile of rubble. The fact that Building 7 [a skyscraper near the towers] collapsed when it had not been hit by an airplane, and collapsed in seven or eight seconds, that's a smoking gun. The fact that standard operating procedures were not followed that morning, and we've gotten three different stories now by the U.S. military as to why they did not intercept the planes, that's a smoking gun. The Secret Service leaving the president and themselves wide open to being attacked by [not responding immediately], that's a smoking gun. I can't say one is bigger than the other. You've got six or seven that are equally big.

Critics of the official 9/11 account seem to draw sinister inferences from instances where people, buildings or physical objects didn't react or behave as one might expect in theory. For example, if the hijackers were devout Muslims, why were some drinking, eating pork chops and cavorting with lap dancers? Doesn't real life unfold inconsistently, even bizarrely?

That's true, but the 9/11 commission simply ignored those questions. They're creating this image of fanatics who were so devout and convinced of the truth of their religion that they were ready to meet their maker, yet here's all this evidence that suggests they were not devout at all. [The commission] simply ignored evidence.

Dissenters also seem to find it suspect that in a dire emergency, individuals and agencies bumbled, fumbled, delayed, dropped the ball or choked. Won't that occur in any emergency?

Well, of course, that is the official theory. It's a coincidence theory that just happened to be that on those days, everybody became terribly incompetent. Take the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. They've got these standard procedures: If a plane goes off course, if you lose radio contact or lose the transponder, you call the military. On this day we're told these FAA officials hit the trifecta. They got all three of these things, and yet they would stand around debating, "Should we call the military? No, I don't think so." And when they finally call, the people at headquarters won't accept their calls because they were in conference or wouldn't pass the call on. They have roughly about 100 hijack warnings a year where planes have to be scrambled, but suddenly they become just all thumbs. The whole thing is just implausible. The other thing is, if you've got accidents, screw-ups, some ought to go one way and the others the other way. Here everything goes the same way. Everybody fails to do their jobs in relation to something to do with 9/11.

With others, you have alleged that inconsistencies, omissions or lies in the 9/11 record point to a cover-up, or even collusion or orchestration, by the American government. What would motivate such a scenario?

You've got liberal Democrats and Republicans and Independents who are appalled by what Andrew Bacevich [a professor of international relations at Boston University] called "the new American militarism" in the book "American Empire." New meaning, qualitatively different than before. This post-9/11 push to a new level has made the world an enormously more dangerous place. Many people apart from thinking about 9/11 as an inside job have decided that the United States is doing what [Princeton University emeritus international law professor] Richard Falk calls a "global domination project." Chalmers Johnson [Japan Policy Research Institute president], a previous conservative, now says that we have become a military juggernaut intent on world domination.

Have you followed polls on what the public believes about 9/11?

There was a Zogby poll in New York. The question asked was, do you believe the government had advance knowledge of the attacks and consciously let them happen? Forty-nine percent in New York City said yes. I believe it was 43% statewide. That is a pretty remarkable figure. In this country there has not been a poll that asked, do you believe the government actually planned and orchestrated the attacks? The question has been raised in Europe and Canada and has gotten to somewhere around 20%. It would be interesting to have such a poll in the United States.

Conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as marginal types. Where do your views on 9/11 place you in the eyes of your peers in academia?

One thing to point out is, the official account itself is a conspiracy theory. It says that 19 Arab Muslims under the influence of Osama bin Laden conspired to pull off this operation. The question is not whether one is a conspiracy theorist about 9/11. It's which conspiracy theory do you find most supported by the evidence?

Does your role as a 9/11 dissenter depart from your life's work as a scholar and theologian?

At first glance it may seem strange, but the task of a theologian is to look at the world from what we would imagine the divine perspective, [which] would care about the good of the whole and would love all the parts. [So] 9/11, if it was brought about by forces within our own government for imperial reasons, is antithetical to the general good.

Israeli and Palestinian Subjectivity

It has always been clear that in the U.S. media, only the Israelis are shown to have true human feelings, to be subjects, to be portrayed sympathetically. The Palestinians are always shown as Others, as objects, as animals.

Here is one of the few syndicated columnists to point this out, Charley Reese:

As I watched the extensive, plainly sympathetic coverage of Jewish settlers being evicted from their Gaza homes, I couldn't help but take note once again of the striking double standard applied by American news media as well as the U.S. government.

I cannot recall any sympathetic coverage of Palestinians being evicted from their homes. No interviews with weeping mothers or fathers. No discussions of whether the evictions were right or wrong. This is obviously a deliberate policy on the part of America's television networks, for after all, they had 4,170 opportunities to report on Palestinian evictions since September 2000. That's how many homes were destroyed, and, of course, doesn't count the orchards and olive trees bulldozed by the Israeli army or Israeli settlers.

Of course, Palestinians were not evicted by sympathetic soldiers or promised huge amounts of money to relocate. No, they were brutally told to get out of their houses, which were then blown up or bulldozed into rubble by decidedly unsympathetic Israeli soldiers. What little they had was destroyed, and they were offered nothing except verbal abuse by the Israelis and invisibility by the American media.

One idealistic American girl who tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian home was crushed to death by the bulldozer. Naturally, the United States government did nothing, and the American media obediently either ignored her death or accepted the Israeli excuse that the driver couldn't see her, which is bull. She was killed in broad, sunny daylight while wearing a blaze-orange jacket and standing atop a pile of dirt.

As an American consumer of commercial news, you should protest. You are being denied the balanced coverage of this conflict that would allow you to form an intelligent opinion. You are, in effect, being fed Israeli propaganda, and if all you know is what you read in most newspapers and see on television, then you would surely think the Palestinians are a faceless mob of howling savages. Actually, they are among the most highly educated and industrious people in the Middle East. A considerable number of them are Christians...

Of course, anyone who points this out will get accused of anti-semitism, but remember, the Palestinians are semites, too, and probably have more in common genetically with biblical Hebrews than the Jewish settlers do.

More Here it Comes

Asia Times published a reprint of Toni Straka's Prudent Investor blogpost from yesterday about the proposed Iranian Oil Bourse:

Could the proposed Iranian oil bourse (IOB) become the catalyst for a significant blow to the influential position the US dollar enjoys? Manifold supply fears have driven the price of crude oil to its recent high of US$67.10 - only a notch below its highest price in inflation-adjusted dollar terms.

...Non-US-dollar holders so far have been the victim of additional transaction costs in the oil trade. The necessary conversion of local currencies into oil-buying greenbacks can be considered a hidden tax, charged and enjoyed by the international banking sector. The IOB, by eliminating this transaction cost, will become a factor that could unsettle the dollar's dominant position.

The last time someone (Iraq) proposed such a thing, they were invaded by the United States and Great Britain.

Until now, oil has been solely priced, traded and paid for in the greenback on markets in both London and New York. But monthly worldwide oil revenues of over $110 billion (on a 20-trading-day basis) - a third of which ends up with OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) members - raise the question of what happens to these cash mountains. According to the most recent data from the US Treasury Department, OPEC members have parked only a skimpy $120 billion in direct dollar holdings, which are almost equally split between equities and American debt paper. This is a clear indication that oil producers are investing their windfalls elsewhere. The yield spread between US and EU debt papers in favor of the EU is another hint where the petrodollars might be heading.

...The proposal to set up a petroleum bourse was first voiced in Iran's development plan for 2000-2005. Last July, Heydar Mostakhdemin-Hosseini, who heads the board of directors of the Iranian Stock Exchange council, said authorities had agreed in principle to the establishment of the IOB, where petrochemicals, crude oil and oil and gas products will be traded. The oil exchange would strive to make Iran the main hub for oil deals in the region and most deals will be conducted via the Internet.

Experts from London's International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) and the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) have reportedly confirmed the feasibility of the project. The IOB can count on two sharp arrows in its holster. It can - and probably will - lure European buyers with oil prices quoted in euros, saving them dollar transaction costs. And it can strike barter deals with oil-hungry giants like China and India who have a lot of products and commodities to offer. One doubts whether American hamburgers and legal services will be considered adequate collateral for the world's most after-sought resource.

Worse than an Iranian nuclear attack?

Weaned off the almighty commodity, the US dollar can have a deeper impact on the US economy than a direct nuclear attack by Iran. The permanent demand for dollar-denominated paper stems substantially from the fact that until now almost all resources of the world are quoted in it. While this led to the eurodollar (US dollar-denominated deposits at foreign banks or foreign branches of American banks) market in the 1970s, the new terms of trade could ring in the demise of the dollar as the premier reserve currency.

It would be hard to overestimate the effects on the U.S. economy, already teetering on the brink of total collapse, of a move to price oil in currencies other than the dollar.

As this development poses a very real danger to the superior status of the greenback and the interests of the US, the "president of war" can be expected to take a strong line against the winds blowing from the Middle East. One may be reminded that Saddam Hussein had entered into discreet talks with the EU, proposing to sell his oil for euros. That was in the year before the first oil war of this century.

With the Bush gang and their allies in Israel and Great Britain determined to widen the war to Iran, the world stands at the edge of the abyss.

Here it Comes

Scary news today. Bush’s approval rating has dropped to the dangerously low point of 36%. Why is this scary? Take a look at the issue of Newsweek that came out on 9/11/01. It went to press before the attacks, so it had no news about 9/11. Most of the news was about what a pathetic president Bush was. There was also an investigative piece on how the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush, and how, basically, the election was stolen. Then a few days later Bush is hugely popular.

Could this happen again? September is only a week away. The best way for us average citizen types to prevent another false flag terrorist attack on a U.S. city is to tell everyone we can that Bush would do this to save his presidency and “The Plan” (see this from the planners themselves and this from the right and this from the left). The more the idea gets out that they would do such a thing the more likely it is that "they" will shift tactics.

911 LIHOP and MIHOP

Recent revelations about 911 where more information has come out showing that anti-terror intelligence agencies were tracking Mohammed Atta and company before 911 have all but proven the LIHOP (Letting It Happen On Purpose) thesis. See Joseph Kay and Barry Grey :

A spokesman for the September 11 commission acknowledged on Wednesday that members of its staff met with a uniformed military officer on July 12, 2004 and that the officer informed them that a military intelligence group had, as early as the summer of 2000, identified Mohammad Atta as part of an Al Qaeda cell operating in the US. Atta is thought to have been the lead hijacker in the September 11 attacks.

This admission flatly contradicts statements made earlier this week by 9/11 Chairman Thomas Kean and Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton that the commission staff was never told of the military intelligence on Atta.

...The fact that military intelligence had identified Atta and three other future hijackers as part of an Al Qaeda cell in the US more than a year before the 9/11 attacks, and the four were still able to come and go as they pleased, in some cases leaving and reentering the US, and plan and carry out the biggest terrorist attack in US history without any hindrance or interference from the FBI, the CIA or any other government agency, is a revelation of the most explosive character with the most far-reaching implications.

It fatally undermines the central contention of the 9/11 commission and every other official whitewash of the events surrounding the terror attacks on New York and Washington: that the “intelligence failure” that allowed the attacks to occur was the result, at worst, of incompetence and institutional roadblocks that prevented the agencies from “connecting the dots.”

Instead, this latest revelation supports a whole series of previous revelations suggesting that one or more intelligence or security agencies and high government and/or military officials acted to shield the hijackers and allow them to carry out a terrorist attack on US soil. For what purpose? Precisely to create the conditions for shifting and manipulating public opinion to accept a massive escalation of US militarism and unprecedented attacks on democratic rights.

It is the immense importance of the Able Danger information, and its highly dangerous political implications for the Bush administration and the entire American political establishment, that explain the commission’s decision to exclude any mention of it.

The rationale given by the commission for omitting the information on Atta and Able Danger in its final report is just as absurd as the previous claims that the staff was never given Atta’s name. Referring to the military officer who met with the commission staff in July 2004, Felzenberg told the New York Times, “He wasn’t brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing.”

...The American media continues to bury the revelations. After its front-page article breaking the story on Tuesday, the New York Times has placed its follow-up articles on its inside pages. Wednesday’s article was on page 13 and Thursday’s on page 14. Other newspapers have hardly mentioned it. The only article to appear so far in the Washington Post has been a five paragraph Associated Press story on Wednesday. The broadcast network evening news programs continue to ignore the story.

See also Kurt Nimmo http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=897:

How much more evidence do we need that false flag terrorist operations are being run out of the Pentagon, more than likely by rogue DIA operatives plugged into a larger network (CIA, MI6, and Mossad)? Not much. Consider the following, posted the GSN (Government Security News) site: “In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as ‘Able Danger,’ identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to ‘take out that cell,’ according to Rep. Curt Weldon… The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell—in which two other Al Qaeda terrorists were also active—was not pursued during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. That’s because Mohammed Atta possessed a ‘green card’ at the time and Defense Department lawyers did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card.” In other words, it appears a legitimate anti-terrorism program, dubbed Able Danger, had collided with the nine eleven plot and would have derailed it if not for the absurd green card ruse and what we are expected to believe passes for political correctness.

You can add to that the Sibel Edmonds testimony and the story of the FBI counter-terrorism chief, John O'Neill who was hot on the trail of the suspects before 9/11 and who was pulled off the investigation by higher-ups and who quit in frustration. He was then offered a job as head of security at the World Trade Center and died there on 9/11.

At some point, the accumulation of evidence for LIHOP ends up being evidence for MIHOP (Making It Happen On Purpose), even without the evidence piling up for that. See, for example, a reprint of an article that appeared last weekend in The Daily Mail (but not on their website for some reason) as well as the commentary on that article by the Signs of the Times editors.

Let's not forget Ohio

So many events are piling on top of each other lately, but we need to keep talking about the big ones, including the stolen elections under the Bush II regime. Luckily, Harper's, is publishing a piece by Mark Crispin Miller on the Ohio vote theft and supression by Bush in the 2004 election called "None Dare Call it Stolen." They posted an excerpt on their website.

There's also a website called Madog Music created by Gary Polvinale with free music downloads commemorating the theft.

We need to keep the election thefts in mind and conversation, so that no one thinks that Bush ever won an election or ever got any kind of mandate for what he has done. Even when his popularity reaches historic lows, the media tends to treat him as a "popular president." We have to keep hammering that 911 was a false-flag operation and that the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections were stolen, pure and simple.

Thirty-Three Years of Fear and Loathing

I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 recently. I haven’t read it in years, but I always liked it better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his most well-known work. Unlike the latter, you kind of have to be a political junkie to appreciate it.

The parallels to where we find ourselves today stand out: A disastrous imperial war supported by both major parties. An arrest that MIGHT turn into a scandal for one of the most corrupt administrations in American history (the arrest of the Watergate burglars took place the summer of the conventions, but the scandal did not really take off until after the election). An economy about to run off the rails but being maintained on life support long enough to reelect the incumbent.

Given the timing of that campaign, thirty-three years ago, many junior people involved in the various campaigns are now senior people in American politics. Bill and Hillary Clinton worked on the McGovern campaign. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other vile Neocons were working for the Henry Jackson campaign, a Democratic incubator of neocon careers. Bush senior was with Nixon as was Donald Rumsfeld. 1972 was the year that George W. Bush began to drift away from his National Guard service by applying for a transfer in May of that year to Alabama so he could work on the Senate campaign of Winton Blount .

Thompson followed the McGovern campaign, which was an insurgent, anti-war campaign derided by the mainstream media and establishment politicians as naïve and radical. McGovern, however, built an excellent organization and beat the crap out of the old-guard dinosaurs of the Democratic party like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, many of whom supported the Vietnam war for years and didn’t like the counterculture at all. These types have never forgiven McGovern to this day and blame him for “ruining” the Democratic party. Reading Thompson’s book provides a corrective to that by showing just how ruined the party was by the beginning of the campaign.

There was another insurgent, popular campaign that year which also drove a stake into the old Democratic coalition: the George Wallace campaign. Wallace, the governor of Alabama was an unabashed segregationist running a right-populist campaign with clear racist overtones. So in the 1972 Democratic primary campaigns you can see the elements that Reagan was able to put together: Take one part George Wallace (racist white southerners and religious fundamentalists), one part Henry Jackson (neocon Likudniks and war-mongering cold war nationalists) and one part Richard Daley/George Meany (the so-called Reagan Democrats: socially conservative, blue-collar northern Catholics) and you have Reagan’s coalition.

Interestingly, George Wallace fell victim that year to another “Lone Nut,” Arthur Bremer, who shot and crippled Wallace, thereby eliminating him as a serious factor although that wasn’t apparent at the time. It is clear many years later that many signs point to the involvement of Nixon’s people in the assassination. Nixon was very anxious about what the investigators found in Bremer’s apartment and was VERY anxious about the reporting after the shooting as can be seen in the Nixon Tapes. There was even a cover set up, since they had Bremer shadow the Nixon campaign before shooting Wallace so it would look like he might have shot Nixon intead. As for the Who Benefits, think about how difficult it would have been for Nixon to win in 1972 if Wallace had split off as a third party candidate after the Democratic convention. That would completely take away Nixon’s Southern Strategy of appealing to racist whites disaffected with Liberalism and the counterculture (a Northern Strategy as well given the popularity of Wallace in northern white working class areas like South Boston). That would have been McGovern’s best chance to win. As it turned out, though, McGovern lost by a landslide.

The amazing thing about the Wallace shooting story in Thompson’s book, is that, as much of a crazed Nixon-hater as Thompson was, it never entered his mind that Nixon would actually do such a thing.

Vectors of Disinformation

Sometimes the best disinformation is buried deeply enough to pass through sceptical filters. In the July 25th issue of The New Yorker, William Finnegan has an article about anti-terrorist efforts by the New York City Police Department. Lots of interesting information there along with the disinfo, including the clear CIA/Mossad connections of NYPD “terrorism” experts. One of these experts, David Cohen, the department’s Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence who is a thirty-five year veteran of the CIA and was Director of Operations (I guess it’s no longer a club for Yale-educated Anglo-Saxons and Notre Dame-educated Catholics), relates a “typical” incident deep in the article (p. 63):

“Transit cops on the 7 train caught two guys camcording infrastructure,” Cohen said. “Most of the video was tourist stuff. Two minutes was train track. Two minutes of train track? Turns out those guys worked for Iranian state intelligence. We turned them over to the FBI. They were deported two days later.”

Lots of questions here. First, why in the world would Iran attack the United States and give an excuse for Bush to blow them to pieces? Especially by sending some guys to videotape train tracks. Second, why would anyone ever take anything a “thrity-five year veteran of the CIA” at face value? They are the best liars in the world. You don’t get in the door there otherwise. But the seed has been planted so that if anything happens in NYC, “Iranian State Intelligence” can be blamed.

The New Yorker with its dense, fact-based reporting, and its fake “hard hitting” exposes by people like Seymour Hirsh, is a great place to plant such obvious disinfo. Now, Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch is getting into the act:

Iran may have the weapons-grade uranium out of three nuclear warheads dumped out of a B-52 back in 1991. Or so at least the US government might have some reason to believe, according to a seemingly well-informed person talking to CounterPunch last week.

You can just picture the trenchcoats and foggy streets. Jeez.