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?

JFK and Unreasonable Doubt

In the comments box to my post on Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Mark G makes an interesting observation, which I happen to disagree with:

On the JFK assassination, I think it ultimately comes down to gut instinct: is it more plausible to believe that Kennedy was killed by Oswald acting alone, or, do you think Kennedy was killed by some larger conspiracy, possibly involving the CIA and/or the Mafia? We all work backward from that gut feeling, in terms of citing evidence and argumentation. My gut tells me conspiracy, no doubt. Your gut, apparently, tells you Oswald acted alone. If this is the case, there's no way we can possibly persuade each other.

[I was writing a response to this in the comments box which became so large it was worth making another post]

I have to disagree with this. When I first started becoming interested in politics (US and UK politics) my "gut feeling" told me that JFK had been killed in a conspiracy. I believed it was common knowledge that JFK had been killed in a conspiracy. In fact, as you have pointed out, it can be regarded as the "official line" that JFK was killed in a conpiracy.

I remember watching JFK because I expected it would tell me more about it when, in reality, the film just confused me. What the Hell is he trying to say? I wondered. The more I looked at it the more confusing the picture seemed to be. I started to wonder if this was what Oliver Stone had intended. To make it less clear than it was.

So, at what you would call high school, I took an extra-curricular course that my history teacher ran called "Who Shot Kennedy?" He laid out a case which, if I remember correctly, implicated Lyndon Johnson. I can't remember if that is what he concluded but he definitely spent much of his time trying to rubbish the evidence that Oswald did it. He pointed to photographs he said were faked such as the famous one of Oswald holding his rifle in his backyard.

I also remember that whereas almost all of us were there to find out who killed Kennedy in a conspiracy only one kid entertained the idea that Oswald shot him alone. He kept talking about Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. It made me wonder, at the time, why anyone would take such a contrarian view that Oswald acted alone. Surely the idea of a conspiracy is more exciting, I thought. Why's this kid being so boring and trying to defend an obviously culpable US government? Anyway, I continued to believe that Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy because, well... it was what everyone else believed. In other words, my "gut feeling" was born from pure laziness and unwillingness to examine any evidence myself or arguments from the other side. I had only listened to conspiracy arguments which I didn't understand.

I later came to realize that I never understood the conspiracy arguments because they weren't really coherent and because conspiracy theorists spend much of their time doing nothing more than undermining the "official line" or rather the generally accepted historical narrative.

While conspiracy theorists like to focus in on very minor technical details that they say renders the whole "official line" false they can often only do this by obscuring or failing to look at the big picture.

Alexander Cockburn probably says this better I can, so I'll excerpt a very large chunk of an article he wrote on conspiracies:

Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense – I had such an opportunity for a number of years – will know that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt or penalty phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months, back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level of creating “reasonable doubt” in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as Texas, the justice system of California is generous in the provision of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Such challenges weren’t hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as regards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth.

But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. At least this is what I thought, hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator. But when, in such instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw the prosecution’s whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements, accused’s own movements and subsequent statements – it became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that, “cut and dried”.

Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony – as so often – is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course – as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios -- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.

So, going back to that piece of evidence I mentioned earlier. The photograph of Oswald holding the same rifle which was found in the Book Depository with Oswald's prints on and with the same pistol that had been used to shoot officer Tippit (the crime he was arrested for) is highly damning. Oswald could only claim that it was a fake and since then conspiracy theorists have tried to analyse the shadows on it to argue that the head had been glued on (photoshop having not been invented). The problem for this scenario is that his wife Marina, had, tesitified to having taken the photographs and that she'd done so because Oswald had asked her to. According to Wikipedia:

However, Marina Oswald testified in 1964,[140] 1969,[141] 1977,[142] and 1978,[143] and reaffirmed in 2000[144] that she took the photographs at Oswald's request. These photos were labelled CE 133-A and CE 133-B. CE 133-A shows the rifle in Oswald's left hand and newsletters in front of his chest in the other, while the rifle is held with the right hand in CE 133-B. Oswald's mother testified that on the day after the assassination she and Marina destroyed another photograph with Oswald holding the rifle with both hands over his head, with "To my daughter June" written on it.[145]

It's unfortunate for conspiracy theorists that there is more than just one of these pictures and that those closest to Oswald deny they were fakes (a report on their authenticity is here). The conspiracy theorists then have to posit other reasons why Marina and Oswald's mother may not be telling the truth. Were they coerced? Okay, who by and under pain of what? Why was there more than one photograph taken in the backyard and why is the story so elaborate?

If the conspiracists wanted to frame Oswald, then why did they bother killing officer Tippit? And if that was part of the plan then what was the purpose of the assassination attempt on General Walker in which a bullet that matched Oswald's gun was found? Essentially, a lot of conspiracy theorists will say that, apart from the bullet matching the rifle, there was no evidence that it was Oswald, so the bullet could have been planted. But, again, what would have been the point?

Anyway, the point I am making is not just that the photographs prove Oswald did it (although the rifle may as well be smoking) but that in the bigger picture the evidence always ends up pointing the same way, towards Oswald, and only by employing ultra-skepticism towards each and every line of evidence, unreasonable doubt in most cases, can we really avoid concluding that the most likely explanation for Kennedy's death is, Oswald did it.

New World Order Gossip!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson

This blog is not interested in gossip and private lives etc... etc... but as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are clearly very prominent members of the New World Order shape-shifting lizard community this is clearly BIG NEWS!!!1!

Update: As ever the Daily Mail's readership doesn't disappoint with its comments on this most important story.

He sure knows how to conduct foreign affairs!
- Willie Eckerslyke, Morecambe

so much for Tory 'family values' Lets be honest about this. They are all at it. as i have said before there is Nobody to trust , nobody worth a vote.
- Paul Taylor, Shenzhen China

So what ?
- George, Overseas

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.

Cui Bono

"Cui Bono", often translated as "who benefits?", is a favourite investigative principal of conspiracy theorists. It allows them to spin all kinds of fanciful nonsense whereby any accidental or perceived benefit resulting from tragedy can be used to finger otherwise unlikely culprits. For example, 9/11 conspiracy theorists often point to the fact that there are large gas reserves in Central Asia, particularly in Turkmenistan to argue that ultimately 9/11 was staged by the US in order to invade Afghanistan and build a pipeline through that country and down to the Pakistani coast where it will no doubt be run off with by the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors.

The pipeline has been the central character of what Ronald Weick calls a shaggy-dog story with no punchline explaining every action of the US's involvement in Central Asia. Pointing to UNOCAL's attempts to build a trans-Afghan pipeline in the nineties, some conspiracy theorists believe that the Afghan war was purely an attempt to resurrect this project. That the ensuing chaos justified troop presence there or that the US was deliberately provoking conflict. It didn't seem to matter that conflict was almost certainly the last thing prospective investors wanted to see there. I have even seen arguments that the continued US presence is deliberately stirring up conflict in order to prevent pipelines being built from Central Asia to China. Of course the problem with that little theory is that one look at the map above shows there is no need to build a trans-Afghan pipeline to move gas from Turkmenistan (or any of the other Central Asian republics) to China.

Also, the real world of geo-politics seems to work a little differently to the rules of Risk. Just because the Yankees have their black(water) armies sitting on Afghanistan doesn't mean China can't have its red armies parked there too. Or if not its red armies, it doesn't mean that it can't operate its own copper mine in Afghanistan.

However, China does seem to know at least one thing about the strategy of Risk. Let your opponents squabble with each other and build up slowly and quietly.

From 30th January's Economist:

[F]or most of the 18 years since the Soviet Union’s break-up, China has taken a back seat in the fierce competition between Russia and America for influence in this resource-rich region. In 2009, with the energy needs of its burgeoning economy continually growing, it woke up to new opportunities in its western backyard...

...In June, for example, China agreed to lend Turkmenistan $4 billion to develop its largest gasfield, South Yolotan, close to the Afghan border. This was part of a 30-year deal that should eventually bring China 40 billion cubic metres of gas each year. The same month Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin’s successor, announced a loan of $10 billion loan to the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security forum grouping China, Russia and four Central Asian countries, to shore up members faltering in the global downturn. In November China’s largest oil-and-gas provider, jointly with Kazakhstan’s oil-and-gas firm, bought MangistauMunaiGas, a big oil producer in Kazakhstan. In exchange, China had lent the country $10 billion earlier last year.

China needs to be careful with its plans, however. If the Truthers get wind of who the true beneficiaries of the situation in Afghanistan are, China may have to face the inept wrath of the conspiraloons who may just ask the question... Hu benefits?

Ring Them Bells

Well, as Dylan's coming to Japan next month and I'm off to watch him I thought I'd put up a video of him playing live at Todaiji Temple in Nara. Todaiji temple is, in fact, the largest wooden building in the world (and its actually a smaller reconstruction of the original) housing a great big wooden seated Buddah statue. One of the pillars holding up the great structure has a hole at its base of about the same height and width of a miniature Dachshund which is supposedly the dimensions of the great Buddah's nostril. Legend has it that if you crawl through the hole you will achieve enlightenment. I've been through it twice which is, no doubt, how I came to be so wise.

The song, Ring Them Bells, is from the "Oh Mercy" album which some say signalled Dylan's return from the messy wilderness he was wandering for much of the Eighties. This is performed in the rock with orchestra genre that kids go wild for these days.

Thanks to MalibuColonyPlaza for putting up the video and more of the same concert.

Reality Deniers...

Everybody knows this instinctively even if they don't all grasp it intellectually. And many people have become mentally unbalanced, sick at heart or twisted because despite their instinctive knowlege, they can't consciously acknowledge it. And the more people deny the truth, the sicker they get.

In this case, the writer is talking about 9/11 Troof, suggesting that not believing it was an Inside Job is bad for your health.

Unfortunately, as with just about every other Truther claim the evidence is against him.

As in the case of ex-MI5 spy David Shayler, who became the Messiah...

...and then became... erm... Delores Kane...

Or freakily so, in the case of Alex Jones...



Or in the case of Jimmy Walter who appears to think he's a chicken...

Or tragically, in the case of Sean Fitzgerald...



I don't cite these examples just to engage in ad hominem attacks but to show that if there is any correlation between what someone believes about what happened on 9/11 and mental imbalance then it is the Truthers who come off less favourably.

One thing I am not sure about, however, is whether it was pre-existing mental imbalance that attracted Truthers to their theories or whether the belief in 9/11 Truth made them mentally unbalanced.

There is some evidence that it was there already in this case and in this one:

Daniel Dennett's Deepities

Daniel Dennett is my favourite of the "new athiests". In this talk, called The Evolution of Confusion, he explores what he considers to be one of the reasons for the existence of theology. He suggests it is an exercise that was invented by those who had trouble believing in religious dogma and who have struggled hard to try to discover some kind of argument which is intellectualy satisying. In other words, those who find a gap between their professed beliefs and their actual beliefs.



It's introduced by Richard Dawkins who similarly asks, "What's the point of philosophers?" To which the obvious answer is, "That depends on what you want to do."

Dennett explains what it is that philosophers do, which is mostly to assess uses of language in argument and when it is being misused, either mistakenly or deliberately and willfully. Why would language be misused? Dennett gives an example of Robert Wright, whose book The Evolution of God is, according to Dennett, an attempt to be obscure and to add mystery where there is none.

Dennett also coins the term "deepity" which is superficially similar to a "profundity" except that a "deepity" is true only in a trivial way according to one reading but is otherwise false according to a reading that would make it profound if it were true.

And then there are nonsensical claims which also sound profound, but are not. Although this is taken from a fictional character in a novel, Dennett shows that there are those who have put forward arguments in this form:

It is a measure of God's omnipotence that he needn't exist in order to save us.

The USS Maine and the RMS Lusitania

"What's the point?"

"What's the point in trying to debunk conspiracy theories?" People ask me. "Isn't this like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon?"

Well, yes it is. But just because it is like trying to drain the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon doesn't make it pointless and futile! Sometimes they are so easily debunked that they produce a warm feeling of satisfaction in an area just behind the eyes.

Two water-borne conspiracy theories that I only recently became aware of surround the sinkings of the USS Maine and the RMS Lusitania and according to conspiracy site, Hitchens Watch, are believed in by none other than Christopher Hitchens, himself.

Greywolf writes:

Christopher jumps back in time to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor and how this was used as a pretext for the US to launch the Spanish-American War. The Yankees finally owned up to this false flag op in 1976.

Wow! So the claim is that the USS Maine sailed into Havana Harbor and, in 1898, was deliberately sunk by the United States despite the large loss of life of those on board and then blamed on the Spanish? And not only that but owned up to 1976?

I would have thought I'd have heard of this false-flag attack if it were true and so I decided to pick up a few history books that are on my shelves and find out if they agree with the claim.

First, Niall Ferguson's Colossus, a book in which the author claims the United States has always been an imperialist power. There's only one reference - page 48:

Within just three months of the American declaration of war - the trumped-up pretext for which was the accidental explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay, supposedly the fault of Spain - the Spanish forces in both the Caribbean and the Philippines were defeated.

Accidental? That's not what I was promised. Apparently the Yankees have owned up to it being a "false flag" operation. Either Ferguson has been skimping on his research or, far more likely given that he is a war-mongering neo-con, he's pushing the "accident" theory (sometimes known as the "cock-up theory of history") to deflect attention to the confessed bad behaviour of the US.

So, I picked up Hugh Brogan's The Penguin History of the USA to find out what the author has to say about the incident - on page 440, he describes how "rogue newspaper publisher", William Randolph Hearst was eager to foment a war between Spain and the US - this is more like it. Of the incident itself he says:

[Hearst] got his way. A United States battleship, the Maine, on a courtesy visit to Havana, blew up in the harbour on 15th February 1898, killing most of the crew. The explosion was almost certainly an accident, but Hearst thought otherwise. "Remember the Maine!" screamed his papers, announcing that the episode was the result of a fiendish Spanish plot.

Accident? What is Brogan playing at? Not only has no one apparently told him that the Yankees owned up to their false flag in 1976 (Brogan's book was first published in 1985!), but now he's accusing William Rondolph Hearst of being a conspiracy theorist!

Maybe we'll be on safer ground with Howard Zinn, whose credentials are solidly left-wing and whose opposition to war-like foreign policy by the United States is second-to-none. He'll skewer those dastardly Yankee Imperialist Aggressors. Page 304 of A People's History of the United States:

In February 1898, the US battleship Maine, in Havana harbor as a symbol of American interest in the Cuban events, was destroyed by a mysterious explosion and sank, with the loss of 268 men. There was no evidence produced on the cause of the explosion, but excitement grew swiftly in the United States, and McKinley began to move in the direction of war.

What?!? This isn't fair! I was promised a false-flag conspiracy theory that blamed the Yankee Imperialist Aggressors and I'm let down even by Howard Zinn. I have to conclude that Zinn must be one of the fabled "Left Gatekeepers"! Pretending to criticize US foreign policy while actually giving it a pass on its egregious conspiracies.

Unless of course, it simply isn't true that there was a false-flag incident. Where does the claim, that the US have admitted to a false-flag attack come from in the first place?

Well, looking at Wikipedia it appears there are two theories that mainstream historians propose:

1) That the Maine hit a mine laid by the Spanish navy.

2) That the Maine's coal bunker spontaneously combusted detonating nearby magazines.

1976 is the year in which Admiral Rickover conducted his own investigation essentially concluding that the latter hypothesis was the most likely. He didn't conclusively rule out other possibilities but suggested that an accidental coal-bunker fire was the most likely. His investigation formed the basis of his book, titled How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed.

(Interestingly, however, National Geographic conducted a study in 1999, ressurecting the mine hypothesis.)

In the 1920's the Cubans themselves built a monument to the USS Maine in Havana in which the sailors were honoured for their part in what the government of the time considered the US's assistance in gaining independence for Cuba from the Spanish.

So, just who believes in the false-flag theory if it doesn't form the basis of any officially accepted account?

Well, CNN tells us that it is believed in by Cuban officials who altered the monument to the Maine:

But in 1961, Cuban communist revolutionaries toppled the eagle from the top of that monument. Its mangled remains are proudly displayed in a downtown museum.

Some Cuban officials argue that the United States may have deliberately blown up the Maine to create a pretext for military action against Spain. And today, the wording on the monument describes the Maine's sailors as "victims sacrificed to the imperialist greed in its fervor to seize control of Cuba."

The theory is also hinted at by Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson, who is quoted on Wikipedia as saying:

"There is serious reason to believe – that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the 'USS Maine'; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the 'Lusitania' as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy".

And indeed, it seems to have been Hitchens' purpose in mentioning the Maine that serves as his basis for claiming that the Lusitania was allowed to sink by Winston Churchill, who was at the time first lord of the Admiralty. He's using a standard technique in citing precedent to make a conspiracy seem more credible.

I'll leave it to David Aaronovitch to make this maneouvre more clear:

As has already been noted, conspiracists work hard to convince people that conspiracy is everywhere. An individual theory will seem less improbable if an entire history of similar cases can be cited. These can be as ancient as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and today may include references to Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, and the 1965 Gulf of Tonkin incident. The plot to murder JFK is first base if you want to convince people that RFK and MLK were also murdered by arms of the American state.

As for the specific claims about the Lusitania, please read this website.


Please note: Howard Zinn passed away on exactly the same day as J.D Salinger 27th January, 2010. As with Salinger's death, I deny all responsibility.

Happy Now?

Online critics of mine have suggested that it is cowardice on my part to hide behind what they assume to be a pseudonym, "angrysoba". How dare I use such a moniker from behind which I dispense my radically conventional views?

So I've decided to post my picture...

Happy now?



Full album

Silly Goose, Tony Gosling, on the 7/7 Bombings

Anything Yanks can do, Brits can do better!
This video is a couple of years old now but I thought I'd post it because it is a good demonstration of what Iranian state media outlet Press TV does best: fomenting conspiracy theories. It is a debate primarily between David Aaronovitch and Bilderberg-botherer Tony Gosling about the suicide bombings on the London underground and a double-decker bus in 2005. It is hosted by Yvonne Ridley.

Tony Gosling is not persuaded that there are people out there who want to blow him up despite the fact they make videos saying exactly that. However, he does point out that Benjamin Netanyahu got a phone call at some point on that day allowing Aaronovitch to roll his eyes and moan, "Ohhhhh God!"

Anyway, it soon becomes clear that if the Americans can have a false-flag terror operation then so can the British. If the Madrid bombings can make the Spanish flee from Iraq then clearly the London bombings can only have been designed by the British government to have the opposite effect, right?

I don't want to prejudice your opinion either way, so please watch this video (there are five parts!) and see Tony Gosling made to look a fool.






If you liked that you may be interested in watching a bit of Peter Cook exhibiting an extraordinary display of clairvoyance in impersonating a well-known silly goose.






Here's an important debunking of the 7/7 conspiracy theory by someone who unwittingly set one off in the Guardian.

J. D Salinger Dies: I Didn't Do It!

A lot of conspiracy theorists find coincidences to be far too convenient to be believed. No way did four planes all get hijacked on the same day! Or, no way did three big buildings fall down later on! No way is that a coincidence, that's a conspiracy!

Well, technically they are completely correct, of course.

But I wonder what a conspiracy theorist will make of this one:

I had a half-day at NWO HQ on Wednesday, so I met up with a friend of mine (yes, even shills have friends) and we browsed Junkudo bookstore. I picked up J. D Salinger's Catcher In the Rye and asked, "Did you know J. D Salinger is still alive? He must be about ninety now and hasn't written anything for ages."

Later that day, J. D Salinger died.

He was 91.

Apologies to President Chavez of Venezuala (and all my readers)

I apologize unconditionally to Hugo Chavez, flambouyant president of Venezuala, for repeating lies that he accused the United States of causing the earthquake in Haiti by using a "tectonic weapon".

It was pointed out by "Anonymous" in the comments section of this thread.

The story about Chavez is a fabrication. He never said any such thing. You owe your readers an apology for spreading lies.

This story appears to have no basis in reality. I was wrong!

How Conveeeeeeeeenient!

Craig Murray has a post which responds to the news that Lord Hutton is sealing some of the evidence surrounding the death, by suicide, of David Kelly including the post-mortem.

In his blogpost titled, "David Kelly's Murder", Mr Murray makes this startling revelation:

Kelly's death was extremely convenient for Blair, Cheney and a myriad of other ultra ruthless people. It paved the way for war. We should not forget how very crucial the WMD issue was in convincing enough reluctant New Labour MPs to go along. Without the UK there would have been no coalition - most of the other Europeans would have quickly dropped out too. It is by no means clear that, despite Cheney's bluster, the Americans would have invaded Iraq alone.

So Kelly was the first man killed in the Iraq war.



To which I replied:

David Kelly committed suicide in July 2003. If I remember correctly the invasion of Iraq occurred in March 2003. How on Earth do you work out from that that David Kelly's death paved the way for war? Are you saying that no one died in that war from March 2003 until David Kelly's suicide in July 2003?

Instead of Dr Kelly's death being "convenient" it was almost certainly inconvenient and for this story to break now, a few days before Tony Blair takes the stand at the Chilcott inquiry it would surely be more likely to increase the level of scrutiny on Blair would it not?

It is interesting to see that those who usually consider the mainstream media to be slaves of a warmongering cabal are now saying that the only chinks in the armour of the impenetrable "propaganda matrix" are in fact...er...the BBC (i.e the state broadcaster) and the Daily Wail...er...Mail (the paper with one of the highest circulations in Britain and, coincidentally or not, the paper which serialized Norman Baker's detective novel).

Update: The Guardian posthumously published an article that had been written by David Kelly in which his thoughts on Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction are spelled out. It doesn't lend any credence to Craig Murray's "cui bono" claim.

Joooos HAARP

When the Israeli Defence Forces set up a field hospital in Port-au-prince following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, it might have been imagined that soi-disant "anti-Zionists" would give their foes the benefit of the doubt. As implacable as some of them may be, surely this operation was beyond criticism.

Not according to Daily Telegraph blogger, Stephanie Gutmann who penned a piece entitled, "Israel builds a field hospital in Haiti. Anti-Zionists not fooled!" in which she noticed a few pundits on the Internet wouldn't be placated by Israel's "humanitarian propaganda":

“Great,” said someone identifying himself as ‘Smart Alex’, “I just hope the IDF soldiers don’t harvest any of the dead Haitians’ organs without the permission of their families.

“I know, I know,” he wrote, “that was a cheap shot. But I believe well-deserved for a country that tries to use its U.S.-funded humanitarian efforts as propaganda to paper over its disastrous and vile treatment of the Palestinians.”

Fooled, they are not, as Alex Jones' conspiracy site Infowars has the story: "Activist: Watch Out For IDF Stealing Organs In Haiti"

What is this story based on? It's based on nothing more than the musings of some guy who made a You Tube video. No evidence, just pure speculation that the Jews IDF would spend millions of dollars flying out to Haiti for no other reason than an impractical organ grab. Now while it can't surprise too many people that a conspiracy site such as Infowars would run a story like that surely reputable news sources would show more robust journalistic standards. Well, that depends on whether you consider Iranian state media outlet, Press TV reputable.

While media reports from Haiti express amazement at Israel's well-equipped medical delegation to the quake-stricken nation, some critics have warned against organ theft.

The Israeli medical team dispatched to Haiti has set up a field hospital in the tremor-battered Caribbean country, winning Western media praise for doing what even their American peers have not yet managed to accomplish.

But a video posted on Youtube by an American resident of Seattle, Washington on Tuesday took the shine off the Israeli professionalism that media have raved about in the past few days.

In his video, T. West of a group called AfriSynergy Productions suggested that soldiers in the military delegation to the earthquake site in Haiti might be involved in stealing organs from their patients.

Al-Jazeera has the same story:

Israel harvesting organs in Haiti?

Cheap shots at those trying to help the victims of this earthquake don't stop there. Michel Chussudovsky of conspiracy site, Global Research, has a nudge-nudge wink-wink article about how the US was planning for this very earthquake in order to invade and takeover Haiti.

Nobody sane could possibly believe that the US actually caused the earthquake, though, could they?

Well, that depends on whether you consider president of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez, sane.



Of course the commentary of reputable news source, Russia Today, doesn't call Chavez out as being a loon for suggesting that the US used a "tectonic weapon" to zap Haiti with but says that it is believed in by Georgian conspiracy theorists.

Russia Today is well-known for its hosting of conspiracy theorists such as We Are Change and 9/11 Truthers. But what is Hugo Chavez talking about?

Although Chavez did not reveal his source, Press TV reports the Venezuelan media are reporting the earthquake may be associated with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), which has been accused of generating violent and disastrous changes in climate.

Press TV again? What a shocker! One can only wonder what drives these blame the Joooos/HAARP stories.

UPDATE: As "Anonymous" points out in the comments thread, the story that Hugo Chavez blamed the Haiti earthquake on the US using a "tectonic machine" was completely fabricated. I completely apologize for spreading this scurrilous rumour and will, in future, express greater skepticism towards stories I see on Russia Today or Press TV. More on that here.

So one again, APOLOGIES TO MR HUGO CHAVEZ FOR QUESTIONING HIS MENTAL HEALTH.

More here.

UPDATE 2: A bit of clarification. There is apparently more than one media outlet going by the name, Al-Jazeera. Thanks to Parky on the James Randi Forums for the clarification here.

This is the respectable Al-Jazeera.

This is Al-Jazeera Magazine. A separate publication.

Madman Has Mad Theory

Mahathir, "anti-Zionist" hero and daft Truther has a theory!

Insane anti-Semitic...er...I mean Zionist ex-PM of Malaysia and noted loon, Mohamad Mahathir, has a theory about 9/11, according to the Jakarta Globe:

"Malaysia’s former premier Mahathir Mohamad said on Wednesday there was “strong evidence” the US faked the September 11 terror attacks as an excuse to go to war against Muslims.

There is strong evidence that the attacks were staged. If they can make Avatar, they can make anything,’ Mahathir told the Conference for the Support of Al-Quds (Jerusalem), as quoted by local media.

The former premier also blamed Jews for hindering progress in US foreign policy. Voicing his disappointment that Barack Obama had not yet ended the war in Afghanistan or closed the US terror detention center at Guantanamo, he explained that “there are forces in the United States which prevent the president from doing some things. One of the forces is the Jewish lobby.”

Jews “had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole governments to ransom," Mahathir said.

Mahathir has aired his views on 9/11 before at a conference attended by the proprietor of conspiracy site "Global Research.ca" Michel Chussodovsky and former US Congresswoman and current Truther, Cynthia McKinney in which he gave a novel take on the "some-of-my-best-friends-are..." defence:

He said that he followed the opinion of George Galloway, Member of Parliament of Britain, that we should distinguish between good Jews and bad Jews, and I agree entirely, I have many Jewish friends. But it should also not be allowed to call all Muslims terrorists, there are good Muslims and good Muslim terrorists, he joked to laughter of the audience.
…
Dr Mahathir said that the odd thing about 9/11 was that all 3 buildings collapsed rapidly straight down, as if they had explosives already inserted in certain places, and not from the effect of the aircraft hitting them, but due to a demolition method. He wondered why the 3rd building collapsed in the same way (WTC7) although it was not hit by any aircraft. The collapse of this building had been admitted by its jewish owner, as a controlled demolition when he said “we pulled it.”

Hat tip: Harry's Place

Update: Press TV report on a follow-up press conference with Dr Mahathir, "I have great respect for the Arabs but for them to hijack four planes is not very Arab. Just imagine the amount of planning that would be involved."

Yamaguchi Tsutomu: The Human Raft

Yamaguchi Tsutomu, who died on 4th January 2010, survived the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His obituary is in the Economist here.

WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus. Much was on his mind that morning. He had to pack his bags to leave Hiroshima after a three-month assignment as an engineer in the Mitsubishi shipyard; there were goodbyes to say at the office, then a 200-mile train journey back to Nagasaki to his wife Hisako and Katsutoshi, his baby son. He was slightly stressed when he got to his stop, still with half-an-hour’s walk ahead of him on a track that led through featureless potato fields. But it was a beautiful August day; the sky was clear, his spirits high. And then—readers will feel a tremor, but he felt none—he noticed an aircraft circling, and two parachutes dropping down.

The next thing he knew was a blaze of white magnesium light, and a huge ball of fire. He dived to the ground. The fireball, roaring upwards, sucked him up again and threw him, blinded, face-down into the mud of the potato field. He was two miles from the epicentre of the blast, in a rain of flaming scraps of paper and clothes. His upper body and half his face were badly burned, his hair gone and his eardrums ruptured. In this state, he made his way back to the devastated city to try to do what he had meant to do that day: catch the train. The river bridges were down. But one river was full of carbonised naked bodies of men, women, children, floating face-down “like blocks of wood”, and on these—part treading, part paddling—he got to the other side. His human raft.

Tony Judt's Grim Calculations

I hadn't realized until I looked at Aaronovitch Watch (a site which monitors the so-called Decent Left), today that Tony Judt has motor neurone disease.

I have a collection of his essays, Reappraisals, which features some excellent pieces on Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Albert Camus and others and is introduced with a variation of this essay which ponders how to make sense of a post-Cold War world.

This video of him, now quadriplegic, appearing in the Guardian, is a mostly dispassionate account in which he wrestles with the implications of his irreversible decline from this disease and the grim calculations he is forced to come to terms with.

James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss