"The Simpsons" Predicted 9/11

Though the Sheeple predictably wave it away as "just a coincidence"!

The clip from X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunman, on the other hand really is amazingly similar to the conspiracy theorists' idea of what happened on 9/11.

Battle of the Crazies

The Truthers and the Bigots go to war.

When a bunch of deranged and bigotted idiots become outraged at the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" such as harridan Pam Geller, Alan Partridge-like Pat Condell and the Koran-Burner-General, "Terry Jones"(!) the 9/11 Truthers have got to feel a little upstaged. Someone is clearly on "their patch" and putting their own brand of crazy in the shade.

This man is not happy!

Barry Jennings and Michael Hess

A lot of 9/11 Truthers claim that the testimony of Barry Jennings proves that bombs were planted in the World Trade Center Building 7 because according to him the building shook with explosions before the Twin Towers collapsed.

Alien Entity has already produced an excellent video which instead shows it is far more likely that Barry Jennings was confused about the timeline of the building collapses.



Now, a new video of Michael Hess calling from the 8th floor of Building 7 seems to demonstrate beyond all doubt that Hess and Jennings were still in the building after at least one, probably both, of the Towers had come down.

Oil!

Oil picture

According to this Huffington Post article:

The catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline early Friday morning. The leak is currently releasing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, and efforts to manage the spill with controlled burning, dispersal and plugging the leak were unsuccessful Thursday. This oil spill is on track to become the worst oil spill in history, surpassing the damage done by the Exxon Valdez tanker that spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the ecologically sensitive Prince William Sound in 1989. Unlike the Exxon Valdez tragedy, in which a tanker held a finite capacity of oil, BP's rig is tapped into an underwater oil well and could pump more oil into the ocean indefinitely until the leak is plugged.


However, some people say that as bad as that sounds the reality is far worse. According to Glenn, in a comment on a blogpost about an election that's going on in some Western European backwater:

This is gusher - a traditional, straight up gusher - of unprecedented force and it's sitting on the sea bed, three miles down. It cannot be stopped, it will deliver 60,000 barrels (nearly 1/4 million gallons) of crude into the ocean each day soon.

The force of this, after we'd drilled 13,000 feet into the Earth's mantle, was something we could not stop - it blew every valve from the bottom all the way to the top of the rig.

If we do not stop it, all the world's oceans will be destroyed, they will stop producing oxygen, and we will die gasping very soon afterwards.


Expecting some sort of knee-jerk, pseudo-skeptic response from myself, ("Towel-whipping and high-fiving between AngryLarry aside, isn't anyone else seriously concerned about this unfolding environmental catastrophe, possibly the worst ever") he offers two links, one of which makes the case for an Apocalyptic scenario.

The first describes a situation worse than that reported to the public:

"The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

Asked Friday to comment on the document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said, "I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."


But the second suggests that all life on Earth is finished!

Here are some extracts with my own snarky comments:

Glenn, I honestly don't know what to say. The guy who wrote the email seems to suggest there is nothing that can be done and that we're all doomed!

"We're humped. Unless God steps in and fixes this. No human can. You can be sure of that."

He gives one piece of advice:

"The only piece of human technology that might address this is a nuclear bomb. I'm not kidding. If they put a nuke down there in the right spot it might seal up the hole. Nothing short of that will work."

But that sounds counter-intuitive to me.

There is something I do agree with here, though:

"We're so used to our politicians creating false crises to forward their criminal agendas that we aren't recognizing that we're staring straight into possibly the greatest disaster mankind will ever see."

Yes, our politicians do create false panics about this, that and the other but they're not the only ones.


I think the amount of alarmism that conspiracy sites such as Infowars, Poison Prison Planet etc... like to churn out also adds to the boy-who-cried wolf knee-jerkism that many people feel when they hear stories like the one above.

Buried at the bottom of the first report is this:

Smullen described the NOAA document as a regular daily briefing. "Your report makes it sound pretty dire. It's a scenario," he said, "It's a regular daily briefing sheet that considered different scenarios much like any first responder would."


Unfortunately, the conspiracy theorizing gets worse...

Reading the link that Glenn posted there was a spoof article by the very same Huffington Post titled "Goldman Sachs Reveals it Shorted Gulf of Mexico":

The new revelations came to light after government investigators turned up new emails from Goldman employee Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre in which he bragged to a girlfriend that the firm was taking a "big short" position on the Gulf.

"One oil rig goes down and we're going to be rolling in dough," Mr. Tourre wrote in one email. "Suck it, fishies and birdies!"


While "Pure Energy Systems" agreed that the writer Andy Borowitz was a comedian and that the article was a joke, they also point out that Goldman Sachs had made investments into the company responsible for drilling into the oil field. The writer says "just because his piece was satire, doesn't mean there isn't something to it" and points to a source called "A. True Ott Ph.D" (I no longer can tell what is satire) who says:

I have confirmed that there were indeed numerous "shorts" placed on TransOcean stock just days before the "problem"...

Who would dare to quote the actual e-mails from "Fabulous Fab", unless the writer would post them as a "satire" - especially after what happened to the Wall Street Journal writers who dared expose the 9-11 short sales involving Goldman Sachs. (They were assigned to Afghanistan, and had fatal "accidents" there.)


So, Dr Ott is a Truther? Quelle surprise! He's clearly very brave for speaking out given that he knows what happened to those who exposed Goldman Sachs' hand in 9/11. Or not.

Here's his website. Please buy his goods.

I'm going to give the last word to the PES guy:

Do we have a shred of clean justice left in our corrupt government system which has been bought out, blackmailed, threatened, or otherwise brought under the control of these New World Order manipulators?

It's a dark day in which we live. But I am confident that brighter days are ahead. This time of transition is going to be a wild ride.

You Bet There Was No Insider Trading Plot...

Nearly nine years, two recessions and thousands of conspiracy theories later, the U.S. government has made it official: Initial speculation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that plotters made financial bets against airlines or other companies hurt by the events was unfounded.

AOL News

Another Truther Goes Nuts...

..and murders his wife, attempts to kill his step-daughter and then shoots himself.

One Truther site, "What Really Happened [sic].com" has already gone into self-pity mode:


Wait ’till CNN gets ahold of this story, the spectre of the “White Supremacist” will be trotted out again… it will be mentioned that Maynard was a conspiracy theorist who railed against Blacks, Hispanics and J-ws [sic]

they grizzle.

Well,  he was a racist conspiracy theorizing nut and it appears his insane and bigotted beliefs were one factor that led to the murder of his wife and attempted murder of his daughter.

Truthers can whinge all they like about their portrayal as paranoid, Holocaust denying, anti-semitic, white supremacist loons (and they will), but it is those very paranoid, Holocaust denying, anti-semitic, white supremacist loons that give them a bad name.

It's too bad for them if the "mainstream media" end up reporting this simple truth.
From Screw Loose Change


Update: Someone in the comments box on the Screw Loose Change blog has pointed to a forum where Curt Maynard appears to have had something of a fanbase. It's a pretty sick bunch that liked his blog.

According to one "Mel Gibstein":

If I was going to take myself out Id take a boatload of Jews with me.

UNbelievable!

A bit of an unusual story, according to AFP via France 24:

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to UN chief Ban Ki-moon, asking him to launch an investigation into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, news reports said on Monday.

"The minimum expectation from your excellency is to set up an independent and trusted fact-finding group to comprehensively investigate the real factors behind September 11," Ahmadinejad said in the text of the letter carried by official news agencies.

But I've not been able to find it on Iranian news agencies IRNA and Press TV.

Update: Aha! The Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA has the story:

TEHRAN (ISNA)-Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the UN Chief Ban Ki-moon to appoint a fact-finding committee on major elements behind September 11 attack.

“At least, you are expected to form an independent fact-finding committee trusted by regional countries on major elements behind September 11 attack which was carried out as the main pretext to attack the Middle East,” Ahmadinejad said in his letter to Ban Ki-moon.

He also called for probe into NATO intention for presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and results of nine-year presence and conflic.

Ahmadinejad then urged Ban ki-moon to declare the investigation results to the UN General Assembly.

He also referred to measures of some NATO intelligence and security forces based in Afghanistan and approach of some US and European media to support leader of Jundallah terrorist cell Abdolmalek Rigi and called for condemning his crimes and defending rights of Iranian nation as the major victim of terrorism.

Ahmadinejad sent a video footage of some of Rigi’s crimes, media support for him and his confessions of winning support from NATO members.

Ahmadinejad stressed millions of people have been killed, injured or displaced and drugs cultivation has been grown since presence of NATO and the US forces in the region.

To say that the 9/11 attacks were carried out as a pretext to invade the Middle East clearly suggests that Mr. Ahmadinejad has made up his mind that the perpetrators are one and the same as those who invaded the Middle East.

I hope Mr Ahmadinejad is successful in his attempts and I am sure that his government will provide a hefty amount of financial assistance for the investigation.

BBC mentions the letter to the UN but only says that Ahmadinejad is asking for the causes of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to be looked into. Not that Iran's charismatic Prez is flirting with Troof again.

Reuters has the story here, concentrating on Ahmadinejad's anger that NATO may have been helping Judallah's Rigi.

Update 2: Some very astute commentary going on at Infowars!

Monkey_Magic says: This is freaking fantastic !!! Expose those Zionist Banking Mafia henchmen !!!

I think I'll give M_M the benefit of the doubt and assume s/he's being ironic. But look!

Keith4130 opines: With the collapse of maggot mainstream media, his voice now cannot be silenced. FU CFR and Bilderberg traitor scum lurkers.

And Sir Baby De Porky helpfully explains: In the word Nazi , ” Na ” stood for ” national socialism ” , and ” zi ” stood for ” zionism ” !!!

How does he know this?

It’s from a Eustace Mullins speech in Canada which you can see on the
” Wide eye cinema ” site !!!

Eustace Mullins, who's he?

"Eustace Mullins was a member of the Southeast Bureau editorial staff of Willis Carto's American Free Press and a contributing editor to the Barnes Review."

Oh dear, I think those names sound familiar. Maybe he didn't realize the reputation of his cohorts...or maybe not.

Aptly named "broken joe" wisely observes, Unfortunately, the U.N. will make no REAL investigation into 9/11. The U.N. is just a tool for the same bankers that conducted the attack in the first place. If the U.N. does investigate 9/11, the conclusion will be,”Iran did it,” and all the truth deniers will just say,”See I knew it was them Iranians.

S T O P T H E P R E S S! ! !

Looks like there's been a reporting error here!!!!!!!!!

The full text of Ahmadinejad's letter has been released and can be read at ISNA, which is the same place that seemed to report Ahmadinejad's call for a UN investigation into 9/11.

But, it seems two paragraphs have been compressed by ISNA's original report.

Here they are:

Following September 11 attacks, and on the pretext of fighting against a number of terrorist operatives, more than a million people in our region have been victimized and a few more millions been displaced, two members of the United Nations have been occupied by NATO and U.S. military forces, and a third country is susceptible to military aggressions. The current method of combating terrorism, even if the claims of its proponents are accepted as true, has obviously failed.

If terrorism nearly exists, isn't it possible to apply a rational method that has been efficiently used by the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus in dealing with Abdulmalik Riggi. We have emphasized time and again that settlement of problems in our region does not need wide-scale military expeditions or actions.

Excellency, you are at least expected to appoint an independent fact-finding team which is trusted by the countries of the region, to launch a comprehensive investigation into the main intentions of NATO military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, the methods used, and the outcome of their presence and engagement, with results to be presented to the General Assembly.



Ahmadinejad is asking for an investigation into the intentions of the NATO missions in Afghanistan (and Iraq) which began after the September 11th attacks and is questioning whether the wars are as advertised rather than whether the attacks happened as the US said.

Sorry Ahmadinejad (and all my readers).

Tragic Flights

Two opinions inevitably expressed following Saturday's tragic aircrash in Russia which killed the Polish president and many of his top military staff are:

a) There may have been a Russian conspiracy behind it. Or a NATO one.

And...

b) This isn't surprising given that Poland's version of Air Force One happened to use the Soviet relic, Tupolev Tu-154.

Actually the first opinion is inevitable because of the spookily grim coincidence that the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, was flying to Russia to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, in which the Soviet secret police killed 22,000 Polish officers. Many of the victims on board the Soviet-era plane were themselves senior officers in the Polish military. And because of its parallels with a previous aircrash of Wladyslaw Sikorski, itself the subject of a conspiracy theory.

Well, grim coincidences do happen and Russia has been more in the business of forgetting rather than highlighting such atrocities as the Katyn Massacre so I don't see any "cui bono" motive.

The second point also seems to be a bit wide of the mark as the accident currently looks to be due to a combination of bad weather and pilot error. Nevertheless most news reports seem keen to point out the safety record of the Tu-154 such as here in the Telegraph.

The Tu-154 has a fatal accident every 431,200 flights, according to London-based aviation consultant Ascend. The Boeing 737, the world’s best-selling passenger plane, crashes every 2.68 million flights.

After doing some quick mental calculations I found the Tu-154 has a fatal accident rate of 2.31910946196 per million flights while the 737 has a fatal accident rate of 0.37313432835 per million flights. Here are some statistics of other airliners to give a comparison.

The comparisons show that although the fatality rate is higher than most commercial airliners it isn't extraordinarily high and the figures may well be skewed by the fact that these aircraft are usually operated in ex-Soviet countries with lower airport safety standards and designed to fly in the worst conditions. Just as an example, I flew to Pyongyang on a Tu-154 operated by Air Koryo - the DPRK's national carrier.

Perhaps in order to conserve on fuel when we boarded the plane the engines weren't running and so there was no air conditioner. All the passengers were given these hand-held fans to cool themselves down manually:

The plane was pretty cramped and wouldn't be my choice of chief executive jet but the in-flight meal of a half-danish and half-hamsandwich hybrid washed down with a bottle of dark homebrew-like beer wasn't (as) bad (as it sounds).

And, as a final tangent, while looking through this list of previous fatal air accidents, I happened to notice one that was caused by a murder-suicide in 1987.

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 crashed after a former employee, David Burke, first shot his superviser, Raymond Thomson, then the pilots and finally himself. The plane descended almost completely vertically at over 700 miles per hour - breaking the sound barrier - before crashing into a field in California. Because of the force of the impact investigators arriving on the scene found it hard to believe that a plane as large as a BAe 146 could possibly have crashed there. Although all 44 passengers and crew were presumed dead (it not being possible to survive such a crash), 27 bodies could never be identified. But the crash also shows that some unlikely objects do survive crashes. A flight sickness bag was discovered bearing a message, apparently written by Burke to his superviser:

Hi Ray. I think it's sort of ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you'll get none.

Another grisly find was a revolver used to kill Thomson and the pilots which was discovered with Burke's thumb jammed in the trigger guard.

The crash was the subject of this episode of "Blackbox". Please listen to the detective who first arrives at the scene explain that nothing identifiable as part of a plane could be found, that pieces of paper seemed to be blowing gently in the wind, stuck in trees, etc...



This should put to rest arguments that on September 11th 2001, the crash site of United 93 in Shanksville was inconsistent with a plane crash meaning it was either shot down by a missile or never existed. The crash site of Flight 1771 was remarkably similar to that of United 93 and furthermore demonstrates that documents such as passports or driving licenses may very well survive such crashes while other things simply don't.

Vanity Pieces

I hadn't realized that Dr Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed had a letter printed in Vanity Fair taking issue with the way he was characterized by Christopher Hitchens when the latter had also put the boot into Gore Vidal for being a conspiracy theorist.

I'll quote the whole of his letter and Hitchens' reply here:

Dear Sir—

I was bemused to note major inaccuracies about myself in “Vidal Loco,” by Christopher Hitchens (February 2010).

Hitchens’s reduction of me to “conspiracy-mongering” and as having a “one-room sideshow” institute is contrasted by the fact that I’m an academic at the University of Sussex; my book, The War on Freedom, was used by the 9/11 commission; I’ve testified before the U.S. Congress; I’ve given evidence to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry; and my institute is advised by a board of 20 leading scholars. Hitchens also bizarrely targets my first publisher, which is not “deceased” but is in fact a flourishing alternative news source.

This hit piece is merely an example of Hitchens’s projecting his increasing distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering.

Yours,
Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex)




Hitchens Responds


I congratulate Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex) on “growing” his résumé in the past few years. But the facts remain what they are. When he brought out The War on Freedom, its place of publication was given as a distinctly unassuming street address in Brighton. I did not say that his publisher was deceased but that its then Web site was no more. Any bloody fool can testify anywhere, but nobody has yet been fool enough to accept his argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government. (His pathetically conspiratorial rambling about the behavior of the military and Federal Aviation Administration that day has since been utterly refuted by a long and exhaustive article, “9/11 Live: The norad Tapes,” by Michael Bronner, in Vanity Fair (September 2006). Finally, I think the expression “war-mongering” is better applied to somebody who makes excuses and offers smarmy justifications for the original aggressor, Osama bin Laden.

On reflection and on a rereading of his “book,” I would change my original article and remove the word “risible.” A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be “contemptible.”

Christopher Hitchens, B.A. (Oxford)
Roger S. Mertz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
Adjunct Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research
Andrew Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
Koret Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
I. F. Stone Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley
(See how boring this can get?)

Amy Goodman Harassed by WACjobs

We Are Cranks Change have a video up celebrating their successful harassment of left-wing journalist Amy Goodman. Goodman was actually at the scene of the collapse of WTC7 and because of her reputation for investigative journalism and questioning of government abuses of power she has unfortunately become a target for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.



In the video she does agree with some of the conspiracy theorists that further investigation of 9/11 is necessary and she has specified before that such things as the toxicity of the air over Ground Zero should be looked into (something that plenty of non-conspiracy theorists can agree with). But her apparent indulgence of them JAQing off to her has led to her being pursued everywhere she speaks with them demanding that she does some investigation herself (rather than them do it themselves perhaps?) This is typified by the guy with the megaphone yelling at one of her talks captured, apparently approvingly, in this video.

Well, no doubt they do consider themselves to be radical kids fighting the power but it tends to be the kind of thing that irritates the radical left as explained here by one of the editors of Counterpunch.

Maybe they see one of the "elder statesmen" of 9/11 Truth, nutjob Kevin Barrett, as their example. Here he is in action at one of Goodman's talks asking her when she's going to investigate the "controlled demolitions". Well, nothing wrong with waiting his turn to ask a question even if it is nuttier than the nuttiest nut in Nutland on National Nutday. But her answer that she thinks 9/11 should be further investigated has led her to be focus of other Truthers.



The video continues with Kevin Barrett speaking to Goodman after the show asking her to sign a book which she politely declines to do, probably because it is written by the Holocaust-denying weirdo Eric Hufshmid.

If anything this harassment by WAC only goes to further demonstrate that indulgence of 9/11 conspiracy theorists with an "open mind" is far more dangerous than simply calling them loons and telling them to shut up and go away. But don't take my word for it. Kevin Barrett has said the same on his own website:

"Amy, you will one day find yourself on the scaffold, condemned to hang alongside the other Goebbels-style traitors and mass-murder-coverup-conspirators from the corporate media you pretend to criticize.

They, at least, make no pretense of being anything but shills for the powers that be--which makes your crime infinitely worse than theirs."

Oh well, good thing I am an NWO shill and foot-soldier for the 9/11 Lies Movement.

Thanks to Parky at JREF for the heads-up.

ETA: In Dog-Bites-Man news it turns out that one of AE9/11Truth's engineers is a nutter.

9/11 Truth on I'mgonnakickyoassBabble

Just as CNN had Crossfire and the BBC have HardTalk, Russia Today have...CrossTalk!



But whereas Crossfire and HardTalk set up heated adversarial contests between those of opposing views this edition of CrossTalk features three 9/11 Truthers, ex-MI5 agent Annie Machon, the head of a UK organization Re-investigate 9/11 - Ian Henshall, and this blog's favourite Truther AE9/11Troot's Richard Gage!

Richard Gage says you don't have to be a scientist to agree with his "pure science, pure fizzikz" and that nobody can argue with it. That wraps that one up then.

Then some conspiracy theorist called Ian Henshall comes on to protest about being smeared and having strawman arguments made against him and guilt-by-association accusations. Then almost immediately after he characterises the "official story" as some guy in a cave directing 17 [sic] hijackers to fly into buildings and that anyone who believes it is a conspiracy theorist.

They also complain that no one will ever debate them but hang on a minute is that Richard Gage nodding along there at the back?

People debate Richard Gage all the time. For example, here is debating Mark Roberts on the TV show with the very original name, erm...HardFire!

I Am Not, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Member of the Truth Movement!

Japanese Diet lawmaker, Yukihisa Fujita of the Democratic Party Japan, was a bit annoyed to have had a Washington Post editorial ridiculing him for being a standard-bearer for 9/11 Truth. So he decided to opt for a standard tactic of the Truth Movement which is to disavow any conspiracy theorizing and instead claim to be just asking questions.

He's hit back with a blogpost, translated here, in which he claims:

At no point did I draw the conclusion that 9/11 was a conspiracy, and I clearly stated that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not be judged to be a result of a controlled demolition. Rather, I stated I had made my speech in the Diet from the stance that it was necessary to investigate the origins of the “War on Terror” from the perspective of assisting the relatives of the victims of 9/11, and in relation to the war in Afghanistan and the provision of humanitarian assistance.

Is this true? (Spoiler warning: NO!)

Fujita's performance in the Diet can be assessed from the following videos. It looks like he's employing the same tedious pedantic questions and supposed concern for the Japanese victims of 9/11 when Fujita himself shows no apparent evidence of speaking on behalf of the victims' families. He merely asks why the Japanese government didn't conduct their own investigation.


Part 2 is here. He first starts out with questions about why the Pentagon didn't have a plane-shaped hole in its side about the width of a 757 and shows a photograph in which a massive gaping hole to the left is clearly visible. He continues to recycle old Truther myths about no wreckage on the lawn and the hole caused by the landing gear couldn't possibly have been made by a plane, Hani Hanjour who piloted the 757 obviously couldn't have hit the Pentagon etc...etc... all the time, no doubt, just asking questions which he would be more than happy to get the answers to. Of course, all of this has been answered, much of his questions are based on wrong premises and he may look back and be profoundly embarrassed one day. Then again, maybe everyone had an entertaining time at the Diet that day.

Part 3 blows Fujita's claim that he didn't believe in or consider a controlled demolition of the Twin Towers as he produces yet more stock material from the Truther's vault such as photographs of the firefighters talking about explosions and how it looked like there was a plan to bring down the buildings. He later gives a Richard Gage-like demonstration of free-fall to explain how WTC7 fell by dropping the 9/11 Commission Report. :-D LOL!

Thanks, I suppose, to "AfterTruth" for putting these videos up (and others about chemtrails - groovy!) even though the same person added a sneaky clip of Larry Silverstein saying "pull it" at the end and implied it was a reference to controlled demolition by referencing Implosion World's use of the term "pull". In good time-honoured lying-Truther fashion the rest of the article around the term pull is blurred but it is just possible to make out the fact that "pulling" a building in controlled demolition parlance is to literally pull a building down with cables. As with many other pieces of Truther "evidence" it has been so blatantly manipulated that it can't have been an honest mistake.

Update:Yukihisa Fujita has written a letter to the Washington Post to complain about the way that the interview was conducted, to point out that his views are not those of his party or government and that, anyway, there is nothing wrong with his views which aren't at all those of a conspiracy theorist...

I believe I am owed an apology for this attempt to damage my credibility by painting me with "poisonous thinking," "conspiratorial views," "intellectually bogus," "lunatic fringe" and "reckless and fact-averse," despite the fact that I had never stated "conspiracy" as such.

Here he is sat next to David Ray Griffin on a panel which also includes Benjamin Fulford and Yumi Kikuchi at a 9/11 Truther convention held in Tokyo in 2008.

And again.

Thanks to NagP for the finding the pictures and the letter to the Washington Post editor.

Update 2: Fujita has now been given a slap on the wrists by DPJ bigwig Tenzo Okumura.

Lordy, Lordy...!

Russia Today continue to bolster their reputable news credentials by talking to none other than one of them kids wot made Loose Change, Jason Bermas. He's made a new film seeking to expose the New World Order. Rather brave of him, I think. Imagine the power the New World Order must weild and here he is blurting it out on Kremlin propaganda station, Russia Today. I would think that would upset them.

Anyway, I haven't watched it yet so if there are any interesting or unintentionally comic moments please summarize in the comments box.

I think I'll try not to watch any more Russia Today, it's making my brain bleed.

Update: While Jason Bermas was talking to Russia Today, his collaborators on Loose Change, Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe were being interviewed for ABC's Nightline. As Avery shrewdly surmises ABC had turned up at the "Treason in America" conference thanks to the news that Pentagon "rage-shooter", John Patrick Bedell was a 9/11 Truther. But instead of answering any questions for fear of providing the Mainstream Media with easy-to-mock soundbites he ends up providing easy-to-mock angry histrionics. I hope, for his sake, he doesn't behave like this at job interviews... or go there with that haircut!



The Nightline segment finally came out looking like this:



Hat tip: Screw Loose Change

9/11 Never Happened...

...neither did the Holocaust, there are no gays in Iran, there is no nuclear weapons programme...etc...

Ahmadinejad shows off his comedy schtick!

Update 1: Actually, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency:

The September 11 attack on the US and collapse of twin towers were parts of complicated intelligence move to give enough excuses for them to prepare the ground for invasion of Afghanistan under pretext of fighting terrorism, he said.

The article is mostly about the arrest of Abdulmalek Rigi of Jundallah.

Thanks to Anonymous!

Update 2:Press TV also has the story:

The president described the September 11, 2001 destruction of the twin World Trade Center buildings in New York as a preconceived "scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure" and emphasized that the 9/11 incident was a "big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan."

"Depredation, bullying and killing the reality of humanity are the outcomes of the capitalist way of thinking," Ahmadinejad said on Saturday.

Update 3: As Marylander reminds us in the comments, Ahmadinejad's loony remarks are a far cry from the far more poignant reactions by many in Iran to the 9/11 attacks:

Dust

A new book is being published this month on the subject of the dust from the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11th 2001.

The author, Paul Lioy, is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Rutgers University, and an expert on air pollution and toxicity.

I expect him to confirm Steven Jones' discovery of top secret military grade magic explosives in his book.

Thanks to Big Al at JREF for pointing it out.

Paul Craig Roberts' Paranoid Style

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and snooker attire catalogue model

Crypto-Truther, Paul Craig Roberts is JAQing off about the events of 9/11.

He wants to know:

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust?

and

How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires?


Well, as a partial answer to the first, two passenger planes loaded with fuel crashed into the Twin Towers. which led to their collapses. One of those collapsed into the third skyscraper and set that on fire.

Of course, that makes the second slightly easier to answer too. The question is wrong. In fact none of the skyscrapers fell down as a result of "short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires". As a former assistant secretary of Ronald Reagan I would have thought he'd be a bit more informed than that. WTC7 fell down after burning for seven hours and according to many reports the fires were not small or isolated.

Paul Craig Roberts is writing in response to a Washington Times article about AE9/11 Truth's recent "press conference". Of course, it would be cheeky to point out that none of the press turned up to it and that the Washington Times is not a real newspaper anyway, so I won't do that. Instead, I'll focus on the merits of his "argument" which is essentially to say that his compatriates are a bunch of complete idiots who'll believe anything.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them.


Isn't there a logical contradiction somewhere in that statement? Americans believe their government even when they know their government is lying? It's a tricky feat to pull off.

...more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the Government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.


What's so fantastic about it? A group of guys hijacked planes. It's been done before, many times. They hijacked them almost simultaneously. That too is not unheard of. Then they flew them into buildings. That bit was all but unprecedented but we certainly know people have attempted similar things.

What is it about what Roberts calls the Government story that he finds so incredible? Is it the Muslim thing? Surely he's not one of those people who think that Muslims can't fly planes or outsmart a "Westerner" yet I can't see what else he is alluding to that makes it so "fantastic".

Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him.

What is this? Is he really saying here, that he first heard of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks? Again, for someone who once had a high position in government one would expect him to have been better informed than that. Or maybe not.

Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 "mastermind" emerged to take bin Laden's place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee who was waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.


What is he talking about? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not "suddenly emerge" last year!

This goes on and on for the rest of the article. With Roberts excoriating the "naifs" in his supercilious manner, ridiculing everyone for their stupidity while unself-consciously exposing his own ignorance throughout building up to an eschatological crescendo:

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war.

The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of "their" government, are facilitating this outcome.

Paul Craig Roberts has noticably been becoming ever more alarmist about the near future which reminds me of one of Richard Hofstadter's characteristics of the "paranoid style" in American politics:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

And yes, I hope to get round to finishing off my post on Hofstadter before the apocalypse.

Steven Jones Flirts With HAARP?

Hej til dig i Danmark!

At the slightly subdued looking jamboree that the Truth Movement are having for AE9/11 getting a thousand signatures for their petition to re-investigate 9/11, the three Most Scholarly Leaders: David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage and Steven Jones made a few closing remarks in which Griffin seems a bit upset with Cass Sunstein's paper on conspiracy theories and how to deal with their proponents, and Richard Gage gives an ever-so-slightly cult-esque sendoff, "unity...oneness...networks of love and connection". But Steven Jones has a giddy turn in between them when he reminds the audience that people from George Bush Senior to Henry Kissinger to Rahm Emmanuel have used the term "New World Order" and how it might relate to human-generated disasters. Jones' nervousness seems to come from fearing being thought of as the nuttiest man in a room full of nuts as he goes on to suggest that maybe, just maybe the Haiti earthquake was manufactured.

Surely this guy is an NWO shill infiltrating the 9/11 Truth Movement to make it look ridiculous. This is all too much for some Truthers.




Update: 28th February: Alien Entity has a good post at JREF putting Steven Jones' assertions that the oil reserves "around Port-au-Prince... are larger than the reserves of Venezuala" into perspective. The amounts of "proven reserves" of oil in the Greater Antilles area (which includes Haiti but isn't confined to Haiti) would be enough for seven days of the US's current consumption. Even unproven or "undiscovered" reserves are only estimated at 941 million barrels of oil whereas Venezualan oil reserves are estimated at 87 billion barrels.

So, once again, Steven Jones appears to be full of 9/11Troof.

Remember the Maine!

As they have done before, Russia Today are broadcasting more conspiracy silliness interviewing some kid from the organization, We Are Change, who are regular guests. In this case some new photographs taken in New York on 9/11 have been released presumably showing new evidence of explosions or a guy lighting a thermite charge with a match (or something like that).



Okay, so it's not that interesting, but I did notice when asked why the US government would want to stage the attacks themselves, the WAC guy says that false flags have been going on since the dawn of civilization and cites as one of his examples, the USS Maine! This one seems to be the precedent de jour right now so I just thought I'd mention to regular readers Mark and Peter, residents of New York, that if they head down (up?) to a place called Fort Totten they can see some 100 year-old grafitti commemorating the sinking of that ship.

I stole the following picture from this site.

Of course, as I mentioned before, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for saying the USS Maine was sunk in a false flag attack.

When did this conspiracy theory become Mainestream?

Dr Ahmed's Diagnosis

When Christopher Hitchens called Gore Vidal out for being a 9/11 Truther in Vanity Fair, a number of people were quick to pick sides and defend whichever one of the two happens to be their literary hero. Those who like Hitchens tended to agree with him for calling Vidal a crackpot and those who like Vidal tended to see it as unsporting of Hitchens to lay into an old man who may have simply gone potty.

Then there are those who defend Vidal on the grounds that his Truther-esque statements may well be...er...true. In this case, no less a personage as Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed MA DPhil (Sussex) has stepped in to defend Vidal on these very grounds in an article in the Independent. It's interesting, to me at least, that while Truthers so often refer to those without the Truth as sheeple it is they who do the most bleating. In particular they like to bleat about "appeals to authority" which they like to point out as a fallacy and complain about getting ad hominem attacks from the zombified sheeple. But if ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority are unfair then what is the purpose of organizations referring to themselves grandly as Scholars for Truth, or Architects and Engineers for Truth? Surely it is to promote themselves as some kind of authority. And what is with the long string of letters after Dr Ahmed's name? Is he thinking of founding the NoDumbSchmucks for Truth movement?

To be fair, Dr Ahmed does have a personal stake in this given that Hitchens was expressing astonishment that Gore Vidal could put his name to one of Dr Ahmed's books. Hitchens says:

Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced “the best, most balanced report” on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called “a small but reputable homeland publisher.” Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his “Institute” a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called “Media Monitors Network” in association with “Tree of Life,” whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing.

If this type of ad hominem attack smarts a bit, it isn't surprising that Dr Ahmed feels self-conscious enough about his credentials to spend a good deal of his article pointing out where that boorish oaf, Hitchens, has gone wrong ("Hitchens conveniently overlooks the fact that I am at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex...etc..."). And, just for good measure, what looks like Dr Ahmed's entire media CV is tacked on as a postscript.

But the problem with Dr Ahmed's article is that it tries to have things too many ways. First, by saying it was unfair of Hitchens to call the old guy a "crackpot" being of "crackpot" vintage and secondly to say that maybe Vidal's still got all his marbles after all, which undercuts his first plea for the defence. Dr Ahmed partly bases this claim on the discredited idea that the FBI don't want Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

Gore describes bin Laden as ‘still not the proven mastermind.’ Hitchens thinks this is self-evidently absurd, but it would seem the FBI agree with Gore, not Hitchens: according to Sonoma State University’s Project Censored, one of the top 25 censored news stories of 2008 was that ‘He [bin Laden] has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’

This claim largely comes from the fact that Bin Laden's FBI Wanted poster doesn't mention the 9/11 attacks. And that one Rex Tomb, of the FBI, gave the following reason for the omission:

“The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.”

Wow! Looks like the New World Order made a major slip-up in not telling the FBI to put the 9/11 attacks on the FBI poster. Either that or they're surprisingly honest about the fact that there is no reason to suspect Bin Laden.

Or perhaps there is another explanation, as appeared in the Washington Post:

"There's no mystery here," said FBI spokesman Rex Tomb. "They could add 9/11 on there, but they have not because they don't need to at this point. . . . There is a logic to it."

The point is that the FBI were sent out to Kenya and Tanzania to investigate the embassy bombings in 1998 and made Bin Laden a suspect in what they considered to be a crime. The 9/11 attacks were treated more as an act of war and one in which evidence took the form of intelligence that those investigating the attacks wouldn't want to compromise by revealing it. Or else Rex Tomb has been leaned on after initially letting the cat out of the bag.

More of that is here. In fact, one of the problems identified in not catching those responsible for 9/11 before it happened came from different investigative bodies, the FBI and the CIA not communicating enough with each other and sharing information for the simple reason that the FBI would seek to use the evidence in court, and therefore make it public, while the CIA wanted such information to remain secret in order to further discover more about the Bin Laden network.

And just in case there is any doubt the US State Department has listed Bin Laden as wanted for the 9/11 attacks.

The claims of responsibility also probably weigh in on the side of Bin Laden's guilt.

Thirdly, Dr Ahmed makes a parallel between Hitchens' past indulgence of conspiracy theories such as the idea that USS Maine was deliberately sunk by the US in 1898 as a pretext for the Spanish-American War and the Lusitania was deliberately imperiled by Churchill to get the Americans into World War One and Gore Vidal's current conspiracy theorizing about Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

This suggests Dr Ahmed has been reading Hitchens Watch where it was also said that it was rich of Hitchens to call Vidal a conspiraloon given his own crown of baco-foil. (I looked at that here.)

If Gore’s scepticism about Pearl Harbour [sic] represents a ‘crackpot’ strain, then what do Hitchens’s writings about the sinking of the Lusitania in his Blood, Class and Empire (2004) say about him? Hitchens points to how the US sank its own ship, the USS Maine, in Havana as a pretext for the Spanish-American War. This was precedent for Winston Churchill’s ‘pivotal role’ in the Lusitania deception, a ‘psychological warfare’ operation that ‘prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe’ by placing the ship in the line of German fire. He concludes ominously:

‘I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.’

Talk about pot calling the kettle black? Whether either of them is right or wrong, compared to Hitchens’s repeated, heated, solemn references to ‘conspiracy’, Gore is far more measured, albeit laden with a heavy-dose of the blackest irony.

Well, all Dr Ahmed can achieve from this tactic is to show that Hitchens is as nutty as himself and Gore Vidal. But this Phyrric victory doesn't make any of his own theories or Gore Vidal's theories on Pearl Harbor or pipelines look any less half-baked.

Conspiracy theorist: Christopher Hitchens

Nobody Knows...

Some blogger who goes by the appropriate handle of Nobody, has a post up attacking poor shills like me for trying to cover up the obvious inside job attacks on September 11th 2001. I haven't got round to reading the whole thing, short as it is, because it tries to make a case so laughable that I'd rather waste time writing this instead (and because Mossad pays me to write, not to read!)

Nobody first starts out with the hokey old conspiracy theorist tactic of establishing a precendent. In this case, pointing out the Franklin Delano Roosevelt must have, must have, known about Japan's impending surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (presumably meaning that FDR wasn't surprised one bit).

Nobody sketches his argument here:

It's a cold hard truth that Roosevelt wanted the US in the war and Pearl Harbour [sic] was the means he used to achieve this. And sure, he sacrificed a couple thousand of his own people. No big deal - I doubt anyone in Washington would have batted an eyelid. They wanted a war, and in a war sacrificing people - in large numbers - is just part of the game. It's done all the time. Mind you, what you don't do is sacrifice expensive hardware. That's why Pearl Harbour [sic] was full of WWI vintage ships and all the shiny new vessels were out to sea.

The hole in this theory is that the US had eight battleships docked at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. Some, but by no means all of them were of World War One-era but battleships were still seen as the key to naval wars at the time. The aircraft carriers were indeed out to sea, but with the Japanese still outnumbering them heavily in that department (six Japanese carriers were involved in the attack at Pearl Harbor alone!) it seems ludicrous to believe Roosevelt would allow such a crippling blow to the US navy in the hopes of fighting back with a much reduced force. Not only did they lose 2000 servicemen and women and nearly 200 aircraft, if Roosevelt were to have given the Japanese the first hit for free then he would have had no guarantee that the attack on Pearl Harbor wouldn't have been even more devestating than it was.

Besides, it neglects a very important consideration. The war that FDR wanted to be in was one against Hitler. Allowing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor was no guarantee that FDR could get that war meaning that he could have ended up fighting the war he didn't want with a reduced military capability.

As I pointed out to Nobody, in his comments section:

How did FDR arrange for Hitler to declare war on the US?

But anyway, while I may get back to Pearl Harbor at a later date, the invoking of this - as David Ray Griffin does - is merely an attempt to set a precedent for the argument that the neo-cons/the New World Order/Deep State USA were behind the 9/11 attacks.

Nobody initially used the following photograph to illustrate one of the theories that the Twin Towers were brought down in controlled demolitions:

How this picture demonstrates that is not completely clear except that a doctored version of the photograph appeared on a paper by Dr. Steven Jones to prove that there was molten steel in the ruins of the towers which seem to prove that the towers were brought down by thermite (or thermate, or nanothermite, or superthermite or something).

Anyway, like the killjoy I am I pointed this out too:

Also, that photograph of workers at Ground Zero presumably shows glowing molten metal, right?

Wrong. It is the light of a torch and I think it might be one of the pictures that Steven Jones touched up.

So, since then I think Nobody has changed the photograph or left this one up instead.

Oh dear!



Thanks to RKOwens for putting up that and many other videos which debunk the 9/11 Truthers' silliness.