"There's fool's gold because there's real gold." - 13th-century Persian poet Rumi
April 30, 2010 by StayFree
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"Lots of conspiracy theories are bogus, but rejecting them all just because of how they're framed is not wise. The way it is today, a gang of conspirators could get away with anything: they just need to start an Internet rumor of what they just did, framing it as a conspiracy theory, and anyone who tries to talk about it will be ignored."
- comment posted in discussion about "Petrocollapse" conference athttp:// www.theoildrum.com/ story/ 2005/ 10/ 5/ 212831/ 898#more "One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known… nothing of significance, that is."
-- E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy"“I have a legal case that will convict Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, General Myers, right now in court based upon evidence that is not scientific in nature, I don’t need to go there, that is a red herring when we focus on the crime that has been committed against this country. We’ve already proven who did it, the how doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. ...
“These discussions of what possibly induced that [collapse of the towers] is a major psychological operations campaign designed to keep the american people from looking at the evidence of guilt.”
- Michael Ruppert, February 14, 2005, interview on KZYX, “The Party’s Over”
Successful propaganda is not "based on lies but rather on truth interpreted in a particular war," wrote William Dorman. While the Reagan administration's presentation of the Flight 007 case did contain outright falsehood, limited truth and irrelevancy were much more common. As Anthony Marro put it, half-truths are "a specialty at the State Department" and for a reason Tennyson described a century ago:
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.-- David Pearson, "KAL 007: The Cover-Up," Summit Books (1987), p. 159
Crossing the Rubicon: a best seller without reviews
Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil is the best selling book about 9/11 from the skeptics point of view. It has sold very well despite a deafening silence from the media, an extremely unusual circumstance for a book. Even the publications that attacked From the Wilderness in the months after 9/11 for daring to connect the dots about 9/11 foreknowledge have refused to say anything (good or bad) about Rubicon. If the thesis was flawed, surely someone somewhere would describe the errors.
After Rubicon was published in September 2004, a strange smear campaign accelerated on the internet making a variety of bizarre accusations about the author. Most of these attacks came from internet personalities who promote extreme ideas about 9/11 complicity that lack substantive evidence, an effort that is probably the official response to the book.
No administration representative has dared say anything specific about the book or the evidence contained in it. The only politician in Washington who has publicly tried to get an answer to the book’s accusations is the Honorable Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia). This writer is aware of a few Democratic politicians and party officials who privately agree that there was official complicity in 9/11 -- one admitted to this author that he knew Cheney was running war games on 9/11, but an hour later, when in front of a microphone, refused to touch the subject when asked. Fear is the currency of empire.
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030105_mckinney_question.shtml
"Mr. Chairman, I have a question"
On-the-Record: Representative Cynthia McKinney Rocks Rumsfeld on War Games
and a follow-up: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml
State Department “Identifying Misinformation” website
In 2005, the U.S. State Department posted a website for "Identifying Misinformation" as part of their public relations efforts http:/
Their website, run at public expense, is an excellent guide to nearly every disinformation tactic on 9/11 complicity claims. It contains a mix of obvious government lies and highlights of fake claims that distract from the best evidence.
It is not surprising that the State Department, like other defenders of the official story, focused on the hoax that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon. but ignoring serious documentation of foreknowledge, and complicity as documented by Michael Ruppert, Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Dale Scott, Daniel Hopsicker, among others.
The State Department is promoting the sloppy (fake?) efforts to allege 9/11 complicity while avoiding serious efforts to establish the truth. 9/11 skeptics who don't believe the official story should recognize this is a crude effort by the government to select which "conspiracy theories" should be considered representative of the 9/11 truth movement.
Depleted Uranium: the real dirty bombs
The State Department webpage http:/
The State Department mentioned other government entities that have dismissed claims of depleted uranium: NATO, the Rand Corporation (a major military contractor), the European Commission and the World Health Organization. WHO is the only one of these agencies with a public health mission, but their independence on nuclear issues was compromised in the 1980s when they signed onto endorsements of food irradiation on behalf of the IAEA. www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.html
The State Department offers this explanation for the term “depleted” uranium”
-- http:/
Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples’ minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world “uranium.” For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is.
So-called "depleted" uranium is called this because the much of the uranium-235 isotope (0.7% of natural uranium) useful for nuclear power fuel and weapons has been removed. “Depleted” does not mean that its biological hazards have been mitigated.
DU burns on impact, the reason it is used in some weapons system. Burning uranium pulverizes it into tiny particles that are easily inhaled and cause lung cancers. Uranium-238 has a half-life roughly as long as the Earth has been in existence. DU tipped weapons are the real "dirty bombs" and are a war crime to manufacture and use. From a public health perspective, calling this material "depleted" uranium is a form of linguistic detoxification.
The chemical toxicity of uranium, a heavy metal, is not changed by having its isotopic percentages changed -- uranium-235 and uranium-238 are the same, chemically. www.oilempire.us/depleted-uranium.html
Two sources of accurate information about DU on American veterans and Iraqi civilians are the National Gulf War Resources Center at www.ngwrc.org and the Military Toxics Project at www.miltoxproj.org
The best films on uranium poisoning in Iraq are Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (2000) and The Oil Factor (2005), both from Free Will Productions (filmed on location in Iraq). www.freewillprod.com
The film “Beyond Treason” (2005) about depleted uranium was produced by The Power Hour, the group that produced the film 911: In Plane Site, an effort that was mostly disinformation (a review is at www.oilempire.us/inplanesite.html).
The destruction of Fallujah in November 2004
The State Department webpage at http:/
Time has a way of exposing all lies. In November 2005, it was revealed that the US used white phosphorus weapons as part of the arsenal unleashed on the people of Fallujah, and that the US government had classified white phosphorus as a chemical weapon. http:/
When this information was leaked, the State Department posted the following retraction:
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive_Index/ Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html
[November 10, 2005 note: We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes …." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]
There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.”
One observer noted “soon this site will have to be updated every few hours to keep up with the doublespeak.”
The “Baghdad Burning” weblog has a very good, sobering commentary on the white phosphorus revelation at http:/
2005_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113218124805731713
December 27, 2005 - The Progressive Review
DAVID SWANSON - Last week, [Rep. John Conyers] released a 273-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War." This 273-page report covers many war-related crimes, including the use of white phosphorous. On page 165, following discussion of other crimes against humanity, the report states:
"Finally, there is evidence that the U.S. Military used an incendiary weapon in combat known as White Phosphorus, even though the U.S. Battle Book states, '[i]t is against the Law of Land Warfare to employ WP against personnel targets,' and which would be in contravention of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the War Crimes Act.". . .
As George Monbiot makes clear in the Guardian, a chemical weapon is illegal, according to the Chemical Weapons Convention, regardless of whether the people targeted with it are civilians. "The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people," Monbiot wrote, "rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the U.S. has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic."
http:/
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al-Qaeda’s role in 9/11
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jan/ 14-610042.html
Al Qaeda Says They Carried Out September 11th Attacks
Allegations doubting Al Qaeda involvement proven false
In a videotape broadcast on October 30, 2004, Osama bin Laden unequivocally admitted that he and al Qaeda had planned and directed the September 11 attacks.http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jan/ 24-318760.html
Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?
Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate
Walter Cronkite told CNN’s Larry King on October 29, 2004, after seeing this video of Osama taking credit for 9/11, that he was “a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.” http:/
Journalist Wayne Madsen wrote an excellent analysis of the significance of this video “Waking Up From Our Global Nightmare,” archived at
http:/
The State Department “misinformation” website ignores well-documented financial connections between the Bush and bin Laden clans that go back more than two decades. James Hatfield, in a July 3, 2001 article titled “Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?” detailed some of these business ties. http:/
The Carlyle Group, a secretive international financial organization, had the Bush and the bin Laden families as key investors before 9/11. When the planes hit the towers, bin Laden family members were at a Carlyle meeting at the Ritz Carlton hotel a few blocks from the White House. (“Crossing the Rubicon,” p. 129)
The BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares” (2004) concluded that “al Qaeda” as an organization did not really exist before 9/11.
“The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al Qaeda as an organisation did not exist. The attacks on America had been planned by a small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. .... the real danger was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals around the world who had no relationship to each other. In looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat.”
Unfortunately, “The Power of Nightmares” avoided the issue of how the Bush regime deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, but otherwise is one of the most powerful examinations of how the terrorist “threat” has been systematically exaggerated by those seeking to maintain their own power.
Crossing the Rubicon is structured as an investigation of the “motive, means, and opportunity” for exposing the crimes of 9/11. There are certainly many forces in the Islamic world that have the motive to attack the United States in retaliation for its policies in the Middle East, but al-Qaeda did not have the means and opportunity to accomplish the attacks of September 11. The fact that someone takes credit for a crime is not proof that they perpetrated it, since there can be many political and psychological motivations. Whatever role the bin Laden organization had in 9/11, it is clear that the culpability is not exclusively theirs.
Chapter 12 of Crossing the Rubicon documents how multiple FBI investigations that could have prevented 9/11 were sabotaged by Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to disable this normal function of government to protect against terror attacks.
Crossing the Rubicon shows how multiple war game exercises were scheduled at the same time as the actual “attacks” and that these simulations helped paralyze the air defenses over New York and Washington. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to control Air Force and intelligence agency exercises. Osama bin Laden also does not have the power to promote those in charge of air defenses or to ensure that the so-called independent Commission set up to examine 9/11 would cover-up the facts.
An anonymous report written by an intelligence insider on September 11 (“Peeling the Onion”) suggested that the bin Laden group may have been manipulated:
“The onion [US / CIA, Pakistan, Taliban, bin Laden] provides plausible deniability. Assistance will be provided through cooperating elements of Pakistani intelligence and then through cooperating elements in the Taliban to bin Laden and perhaps on to elements of Laden's network operating without his direct control. The network cell conducting the operation will be suicide squads, perhaps recruited from the Palestinian population. Deniability for everyone and obliteration for the perpetrators. Pretty clean all around.
“Laden will never know that he is a pawn of the U.S. national security state. He will believe that Allah has suddenly blessed him with resources and capability that previously eluded him.” archived at www.oilempire.us/qaeda.html
In the 9/11 truth movement, a false dichotomy emerged between those who think that the government “Let it happen on purpose” (LIHOP) and those argue it was completely an inside job. While the full details of precisely how 9/11 was perpetrated may forever remain unknown, the most likely scenario is a combination of LIHOP and “inside job.” A hybrid scenario that fits the known evidence is "hijacking the hijackers." In this view, the hijackers were allowed to finish their preparations, board the planes, hijack the cockpits but then remote control technology was used to ensure that the planes not only completed their missions but also did not strike targets (Indian Point nuclear power station, north of New York City and the other parts of the Pentagon that were full of people) that would have caused even more damage. This hybrid scenario is described in more detail at “Understanding 9/11 paradigms.” www.oilempire.us/lihop-mihop.html
http:/
/ rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/ 2004/ 10/ skinny-on-osama.html
I've long thought that if we assume a decision had been taken to let it happen, then we should expect that measures were be taken to ensure it happened precisely as desired, and spectacularly so. With so much at stake, nothing would be left to the skill and luck of the 19 hijackers. Flight 77's 270 degree turn to hit the ground floor of the virtually unoccupied side of the Pentagon, while supposedly piloted by the grossly incompetent Hani Hanjour, is the most striking example. The recent report that the WTC black boxes were recovered after all, is suggestive of the same: that the data conflicted somehow with the received fiction. Perhaps the hijackers were themselves hijacked. [emphasis added]from Nicholas Levis, 911truth.org:
"Staging 9/11 as an inside job is going to work best (in fact, is likely to work only) if there actually exists an active network of anti-American terrorists who are deeply committed to killing Americans in response to U.S. policy. In other words, those who would blame Qaeda need a (relatively) real Qaeda. A partly-real enemy is much better than an entirely fabricated one.
"The most robust way for insider masterminds to stage 9/11 and get away with it is to arrange for their agents to infiltrate among "real foreign terrorists." Let them come up with their own plots (or plant plots among them), choose a plot that will produce the results desired by the masterminds, and see that through to fruition. At some point, the masterminds and their agents will hijack the plot from the would-be hijackers, to make sure it happens. You won't risk the whole game on the ability of amateurs to get away with it, you will help them along or even replace them (with a remote control hijacking, for example). But it's best to have "real terrorists" in play. They leave a more solid trail of evidence internationally. Cops and agents and academics of two dozen countries can honestly confirm the existence of an al-Qaeda network. That way there is less need to initiate outside observers into the plot and you don't have to hope they are all stupid, as they would have to be to fall for a complete fabrication of "Qaeda." (Qaeda at this point is just a term of convenience for the Islamist extremist networks.)
"The best result would be for a whole bunch of Islamist extremists running around believing that their crew pulled off 9/11 all by themselves (how inspiring for them!). The patsies should believe they actually did it. This was the case with the Reichstag Fire and Marinus van der Lubbe: the patsy believed he had done it." [emphasis added]
The Reichstag Fire seems to be the closest historical parallel to 9/11, where the perpetrator / patsy was allowed to try to commit the crime, but the full crime was actually done by a faction of the secret police. www.oilempire.us/reichstag-fire.html
Smearing Skeptics as Anti-Semites
The State Department webpage “The 4,000 Jews Rumor” at http:/
This page ostensibly is an effort to refute the hoax that 4,000 Jews, or 4,000 Israelis, were warned not to go to work at the WTC on 9/11, thereby showing Israeli involvement (or complicity) in the attacks. The State Department cites the bin Laden videotape of October 2004 to disprove Israeli involvement (Israeli foreknowledge is carefully avoided by this effort). The anonymous authors at the State Department say:
Vague conspiracy theories blaming Israel began to appear within 24 hours of the attacks. Syria's government-owned Al Thawra newspaper may have been the first newspaper to make the "4,000 Jews" claim. According to U.S. embassy reporting, its September 15th edition falsely claimed "four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions."
The 4,000 figure apparently came from an article entitled "Hundreds of Israelis missing in WTC attack" which appeared in the September 12th internet edition of the Jerusalem Post. It stated, "The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks."
Unknown conspiracy theorists apparently seized upon the 4,000 figure, transforming it into the false claim that 4,000 Jews did not report for work at the World Trade Center on September 11.
In this article, the State Department references the Jerusalem Post article at fpp.co.uk, the website of Holocaust Denier and pseudo-historian David Irving. (FPP is Focal Point Publications, which is Irving’s organization.) In other words, a United States Government media campaign dedicated to refuting “misinformation” is promoting a notorious neo-Nazi promoting Holocaust Denial without even mentioning his political affiliation and his efforts to promote lies about the Nazi genocides. Is Irving’s website really the only place to find this article by Jerusalem Post? Does the State Department consider Irving a reliable source of information? Or is the State Department trying to bait 9/11 skeptics to think of Irving’s website as a credible source of information about 9/11? (Note: the Jerusalem Post, a publication with extensive connections to the neo-conservatives, has an on-line archive that goes back to the late 1990s, but this September 12, 2001 article is not accesible from their archives.)
Irving, like several other Holocaust deniers, has published information about 9/11 complicity that might be true, but is unverifiable. He published a claim that Condolezza Rice was the source who warned then San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown not to fly on 9/11 (the September 12, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle published a story noting that Brown had been cautioned the night before not to fly to New York City on 9/11, but Brown has never revealed who warned him). It is plausible that Rice was his source (she probably knew him from her tenure at Stanford and on the board of San Francisco based Chevron corporation), but it is unlikely that proof will ever be made public. If Rice really was Brown’s source, then leaking the truth to a famous racist would be a great means to discredit the information.
From the Wilderness editor Jamey Hecht wrote in a public letter to the Anti-Defamation League that “Those who believed the rumor think they needn't look further, and those who rejected it think the same, for opposite reasons.” www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101304_open_letters.shtml
The “4,000 Jews” story distracted from well documented evidence of foreknowledge. Many of the US’s closest allies provided extremely specific information in advance. www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?
timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=foreignIntelligence and www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essaytheytriedtowarnus.html are excellent references to this material.
Mainstream news sources document that a few people were warned not to fly or to get out of the way. Barbara Bush’s book Reflections: Life After The White House stated
“my nephew Jim Pierce narrowly escaped injury or possible death. He was scheduled to attend a meeting on the 102nd floor of the South Tower, which was the second building hit. However, the night before, the meeting was moved to an adjacent building because the group had outgrown the conference room.
an excerpt is posted at http:// msnbc.msn.com/ id/ 3225746/ site/ newsweek/
Newsweek also reported two weeks after 9/11 that “On Sept. 10.... a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” Like most suspicious evidence about 9/11 in the mainstream media, there was not ever any follow-up.
The “4,000 Jews warned” story was a great false target for media attention to distract from a lot of evidence for foreknowledge (and consciously allowing it to happen). Since about one-third of New York is Jewish, having a lot of anti-semites promote information about 9/11 complicity was a brilliant technique to discourage many of the victims and bystanders from questioning the official story. Some of the websites now promoting disinformation about 9/11 complicity (fake claims that distract from real evidence) are also advocates of Holocaust Denial, which ensures that most Bush opponents will shy away from the embedded truths about 9/11 in the websites. www.oilempire.us/holocaust-denial.html discusses in detail how Holocaust Deniers are inserting disinformation into the 9/11 truth movement.
One curious fact that might or might not be relevant is the towers were less than half full when attacked. Figures vary, but the WTC had between 15,000 and 25,000 people inside at 8:46 am on 9/11 -- on a normal workday at least 50,000 people worked there. However, one WTC employee that I personally know of (a low-level computer operator) merely had not arrived at work and saw the events from a distance.
The idea that thousands in the towers would have been specifically warned makes no sense considering the perpetrators could not risk letting lots of people know what was going to happen. Warning more than a tiny handful of people would have risked exposing the operation. The fact that Barbara Olsen, wife of US Solictor Ted Olsen, was on the doomed Flight 77, suggests that very few actually were warned, and it was her bad luck to be caught up in the events. Once trapped on board, there was nothing anyone could have done to save her despite her loyalty to the regime. Her fate is reminiscent of a story from the Nazi death camp at Treblinka -- a German non-Jewish woman and her sons accidentally got on a train that took German Jews to the camp. According to survivors, she protested that she was not Jewish and her husband was a military officer. But she and her sons were killed anyway, since there was no way she could have been allowed to return to Germany with knowledge of the terrible truth.
Karl Rove paradigm: muddy the waters with fake evidence
Sifting through the volumes of 9/11 evidence is analogous to archeology. Only some of the evidence for the distant ancestors of all living beings has been unearthed and catalogued. However, the fact that the currently known fossil record is incomplete does not prevent science from attempting to determine patterns and draw tentative conclusions about the history of life on Earth, knowing that additional evidence is likely to alter the story as we gain further knowledge.
The early days of archeology saw spectacular forgeries "revealed" by unscrupulous advocates of particular theories, which parallels current efforts to distract and discredit 9/11 skeptics with disinformation. Some religious fundamentalists are now engaged in bizarre efforts to “prove” that the fossil record is consistent with a timeline for the Earth being about 6,000 years old, which shows the depths of distortion that some will use to discredit physical evidence.
It is unlikely that any story of 9/11 is 100% true, and hopefully enough of the documentation will be made public in the years to come - and enough whistleblowers step forward - so that historians will be able to more fully explain what happened to the United States of America.
The official story of 9/11 is dependent on bogus evidence to support a conspiracy theory -- the claim that 19 guys directed by a wealthy dialysis patient in a cave in Afghanistan managed to outwit the largest military and intelligence system in history, a system so incompetent that it needs a massive budget increase to protect the public from a repeat of the attack.
But a more subtle, different set of bogus evidence is also in wide circulation, making wild claims about official complicity based based on poor quality images, fraudulent photos, and misrepresentation of facts. This material masquerades as investigative journalism, but is largely devoid of verifiable evidence (some of it does include real facts to establish the bona fides of the disseminator to make the hoaxes more palatable to the reader). The volume of this disinformation became increasingly prominent as the 9/11 Truth Movement experienced political successes in persuading larger numbers of people that 9/11 was not a surprise attack.
White House advisor Karl Rove is famous for his skills with dirty tricks to sabotage political campaigns. Perhaps the most widely recognized Rove success was the allegedly fake memos given to CBS (see BS?) News in September, 2004 that documented how George W. Bush went AWOL from the Air National Guard. Those memos were immediately proclaimed to be fake after CBS used them, and in the ensuing brouhaha, the AWOL story was completely discredited even though the facts were correct. It would have been much harder for Rove to steal the 2004 election if the reality of the AWOL scandal had been taken seriously by the media, and using this faked, but true evidence was a successful gamble to immunize his candidate from these explosive facts.
The film Horns and Haloes documents the effort in 1999 and 2000 by writer Jim Hatfield to publish his book “Fortunate Son,” a biography of George W. Bush. Rove was a source for Hatfield’s revelation that Bush had indeed used cocaine as a younger man, but when the book was published, the media focused instead on Hatfield’s past, not Bush’s. Hatfield had served time in prison for attempted murder, and leaking the story to a writer with a criminal record was a very cynical strategy to neutralize the impact of Bush’s drug use.
Similar tactics were also used to wreck the “JFK Truth Movement,” the independent investigators who examined the assassination of President Kennedy. Perhaps the most notorious is the case of Charles Spiesel, a surprise witness for the prosecution who popped up during the trial of Clay Shaw (as depicted in the film JFK by Oliver Stone). On the witness stand, Mr. Spiesel admitted having heard Shaw discuss plans for the assassination with Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators. Under cross examination, he stated that he fingerprinted his daughter before she went to college and after she returned, to make sure she was the same person. Jim Garrison, the prosecuting attorney, wrote in his memoir “On the Trail of the Assassins”
I realized that the clandestine operation of the opposition was so cynical, so sophisticated, and, at the same time, so subtle, that destroying an old-fashioned state jury trial was very much like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun. .... it was clear by now that no jury would find an eminently respectable, prominent, distinguished community leader guilty of conspiring to kill the President, especially following an unforgettable example of genuine lunatic testimony from a prosecution witness."
This disinformation strategy is used to coverup many crimes of State. It is very effective, but not very creative, since the same approach is used over and over. Its practioners are like a musician with a one string guitar connected to a very loud amplifier -- they can’t play many notes, but everyone hears their noise.
The “Two Front War” for truth
http:/
/ cuban-exile.com/ doc_001-025/ doc0019b.html
The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi
The first question I tried to get approved was the one by experience in investigating the case had dictated as a priority: Was there an intelligence agency connection through anti-Castro Cubans and Oswald to the Kennedy assassination? That, I knew, would never pass muster because of the investigative approach and effort it would require. By the nature of its operations, an intelligence agency doesn't leave authentic tracks. One had to look for patterns. The issue I wanted to pursue involved the patterns of verified misinformation -- almost all linking Oswald to Castro -- which were born in Miami immediately after the assassination.
Propaganda Patterns, a report at www.oilempire.us/propaganda.html, is an effort to analyze the patterns of disinformation used to discredit serious investigation and exposure of numerous crimes, including 9/11. This analysis shows that the best evidence is usually in the middle between the “limited hang outs” (efforts to partially expose that ensure the full truths stay concealed) and distracting disinformation (efforts that encourage those drawn to limited hang outs not to probe deeper).
Most activists who have made efforts to spread information about official complicity in 9/11 have experienced the reluctance of many to face these truths, even among liberal opponents of the Bush regime. Many who have been active is discussing this evidence have been the recipient of similar psychological strategies by advocates of disinformation claims, urging deeper and deeper examination. The history of the “COINTELPRO” campaign contains countless examples where activists were encouraged to prove how radical they were, with the result that they alienated themselves from their allies. With 9/11 investigation efforts, it is important to ensure that ones suspicions mesh with documented evidence.
www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/review.html
A Critical Review of WTC 'No Plane' Theories
by Eric Salter
28 September 2005
It should go without saying that an investigation of a conspiracy like 9/11 will always be a two-front war against disinformation. On one side are the gatekeepers pursuing a limited hangout. On the other side are crackpots and disinfo agents pushing bogus, discrediting evidence. Weeding out bogus claims is neither gatekeeping nor censorship but an absolutely critical activity. [emphasis added]
Bad intentions and reverse psychology
Sometimes, it can be difficult to discern the intentions of family members and friends. Determining the motivations of website authors publishing inaccurate material is almost impossible
Many websites, publications, books and movies that contain erroneous 9/11 information about 9/11 complicity issues are well-meaning and merely have been fooled by some of the hoaxes -- but good intentions do not make the claims true. Many 9/11 websites that claim to have proof about 9/11 complicity promote claims that are not true -- some of these sites are incompetent, a few appear to be promoting nonsense deliberately. Most of the liars make sure to include enough real material to establish their bona fides before lying.
Some of the false claims about 9/11 conspiracy are probably disinformation to smother actual evidence with distracting nonsense, but some are possibly created (or at least echoed) by people without fact-checking skills. These increasingly wilder stories make truth seeking far more difficult. These smokescreens obscure public examination of a large body of incriminating evidence that is proven beyond reasonable doubt plus other evidence that has good standards but is not totally proven.
The REAL evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is hard to find due to loud liars offering phony evidence used to distract (and discredit) 9/11 skeptics. The growing flood of fake claims for complicity is evidence of a sophisticated psychological warfare effort to cover the tracks of the conspiracy.
Blurry photos that magically appear years later, just as the 9/11 truth movement grows in popularity and political influence, are not evidence if there is not a “chain of custody” proving the images authentic. Just because someone says "inside job" does not mean that their theories of what happened, whether well-intentioned or malicious, are proven or even provable.
Many, if not most of the people echoing these hoaxes are sincere in their beliefs - but their sincerity doesn't make these claims true, nor does it mitigate the ridicule factor that the hoaxes generate among the majority of the public. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job is a difficult enough point of view to advocate for the majority of people in the United States without making the thesis dependent on blurry images or other fraudulent types of evidence -- it is critical to focus on the claims that are proven beyond reasonable doubt, with the highest quality documented evidence.
There will never be complete agreement in the 9/11 truth movement given the widely varying quality of standards used by different people, the complete lack of peer review, and the presence of hoaxers trying to keep people off balance. It's more productive to persuade people outside the "truth movement" about the best evidence, and caution them about the hoaxes.
In early 2002, Kelia Ramares, a journalist at KPFA-FM / Pacifica Radio, wrote a blistering critique of syndicated columnist Norman Solomon’s “gatekeeping” efforts to discourage Pacifica from covering evidence of 9/11 complicity:
“You are leveraging your reputation in the community to commit character assassination against Ruppert, knowing it is highly unlikely anyone will call you on it.”
-- Kelia Ramares letter to Norman Solomon and Steve Rendall of FAIR
It is hard to know what Solomon’s intentions were in defending the official “surprise attack” story, although the timing of his attack (just as the evidence of foreknowledge was becoming more widely known) is suspicious.
But there is no ambiguity about the State Department’s intentions. Their “misinformation” campaign is doing the exact opposite that Mr. Solomon was doing -- the State Department is leveraging their lack of credibility among critics of US government policies to ensure that skeptics focus on the hoaxes and avoid the provable evidence. The State Department knows that anyone who suspects government collusion in 9/11 is unlikely to believe anything that they say -- and their choice of targets reflects a curious focus on the speculative and the bogus, apparently hoping that the skeptics would see this emphasis as a reason to embrace the claims that are “debunked” by the State Department.
http:/
/ rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/ 2005/ 10/ left-right-and-wrong.html
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2005
The Left, the Right, and the Wrong
Last July 27, the US State Department very thoughtfully posted a resource tool for journalists and media consumers entitled "How to Identify Misinformation." Though "there are no exact rules" to tell whether a story is true or false, the State Department offers clues. First among them, "Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?"Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.
The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories.
To demonstrate a pattern of falsity, the "counter-misinformation team" provides links to just three of the "many conspiracy theory websites which contain a great deal of unreliable information": Rense.com, Joe Vialls and Conspiracy Planet ....Consider its solitary example of 9/11 conspiracy theory: Thierry Meyssan's Pentagon cruise missile. I've written numerous times here what I think of the supposition that something other than Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Regardless of what any of us think, it remains the most divisive wedge issue and energy sink for 9/11 activists. Of course the State Department would draw attention to it, to the neglect of all others. No mention of insider trading, squelched investigations and coincident wargames. The "counter-misinformation team" is trying to proscribe counter-information by accentuating the preposterous. Meyssan's work becomes, in a sense, "approved" conspiracy theory, because it's the only one to receive official recognition. Not only in this State Department publication, but in virtually every mainstream treatment of alternative appraisals of 9/11 the "no plane" theory still takes pride of place. (A similar process is occurring with respect to reports of Katrina "conspiracy theory," in which soft rumours of the levees being blown take precedence over hard analysis of the intentional withholding of aid.)
What the State Department is doing by holding up these sites - one, Vialls, rather obscure - as exemplars of "conspiracy theory," is to administer a poison pill to contrary analysis. To the poor journalist or media consumer taking cues from the "counter-misinformation team," it will appear as though conspiracy theory has an essential core of anti-semitism.
Meyssan and Rumsfeld manufacture the missile hoax
The "no Boeing hit the Pentagon" claim is the most important and widespread 9/11 hoax. It was probably set up before the event since government agents seized surveillance camera videos within minutes of the crash (which is evidence for foreknowledge, but not for “no plane”). It is extremely unlikely that the conspirators who allowed (and assisted) 9/11 would not have taken care to create misdirecting hoaxes before the "attack," since they are very aware that large segments of the population would have suspicions about the events and therefore they would "need" to disrupt skeptical inquiry with red herrings, hoaxes, false dichotomies, etc.
This hoax is based on misrepresentation of photos taken shortly after the crash, ignoring of physical evidence and documented reports from hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw the plane. There is NO credible, verifiable evidence in support of ANY of the many and varied "theories" pretending that a plane did not crash into the Pentagon, and therefore, 9/11 was an inside job. See www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html for details.
It was first floated in early October 2001 by French author Thierry Meyssan and US War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Monsieur Meyssan started a webpage that suggested a plane did not hit the Pentagon on October 7, and Rumsfeld gave an interview to Parade magazine on October 12 where he said a "missile" hit the Pentagon. That "missile" quote was then used by many no plane advocates as part of the campaign to draw attention to this claim. Meyssan went on to create the "Hunt the Boeing" website and then published two books "The Horrifying Fraud" (published in English as "9/11 The Big Lie") and Pentagate. These books have been translated into a total of 28 languages, which ensures that they are the dominant version of the claim suggesting complicity or conspiracy that is seen around the world.
On September 4, 2004, two months before the pseudo Presidential election, Parade magazine claimed that this quote was a mis-statement and the sole source for the no plane hoaxes, thus dismissing 9/11 "truth" to an audience of millions of voters.
www.pentagate.info/revue-en.html
Chronologie
Lundi 8 octobre 2001 : le Réseau Voltaire publie sur son site internet « Les mystères de l'attentat contre le Pentagone ».translation: Monday October 8, 2001 - the Voltaire Network published on its internet site “The Mysteries of the attack on the Pentagon.”
This was the first website to suggest that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon.www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html
Friday, Oct. 12, 2001
Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine
(Interview with Lyric Wallwork Winik, Parade Magazine)
Q: This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?
Rumsfeld: There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues.
They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center.www.parade.com/aol/current/columns/intelligence.html
Parade magazine, September 4, 2004
In this week's "Intelligence Report," Lyric Wallwork Winik writes that 9/11 conspiracy theories are growing and that people from all walks of life believe them. How do these theories get started? ....
The Internet, too, is a potent tool for spreading conspiracy theories. PARADE found this out after Lyric Wallwork Winik interviewed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Oct. 2001. In a transcript of Winik's interview with Rumsfeld, which was published on the Department of Defense's Web site, Rumsfeld seemed to indicate that the Pentagon was hit by a missile on 9/11 instead of a plane. It turns out that a transcription error led to the confusion, but conspiracy theorists latched onto Rumsfeld's supposed admission and spread it over the Internet.
If this was really a “transcription error,” then why does the official Pentagon news service still have this quote on their website? Rummy’s “missile” quote was probably bait to set up the “no plane” hoax.
“REPORTS THAT say something hasn’t happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there are things we know we know.We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Physical Evidence: the hole in the “no plane” theories
The loudest claim for the no plane hoax is that the "hole" in the facade of the Pentagon was supposedly too small to have been created by a 757. Many of these claims state that photos taken during the half hour between the crash and the collapse of that part of the building show a hole merely 16 to 18 feet across. However, these photos show only the area hit by the fuselage of the plane, and the larger damage caused by the rest of the plane is obscured by firefighting foam and smoke. The hole on the ground floor (where most of the plane hit) is about 90 feet wide, with additional damage caused by the wingtips visible for tens of feet beyond the hole. The impact on the outside of the building was the size and shape of the cross-section of a 757. A number of photos and reconstructions documenting these facts are linked from www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html
http:/
/ 911research.wtc7.net/ essays/ pentagontrap.html
The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory:
Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics
by Jim Hoffman October 7, 2004
The idea that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon is easily the most controversial and divisive issue among researchers of the 9/11/01 attacks. Effectively promoted since early 2002, this idea has enjoyed an increasing acceptance in the 9/11 Truth Movement, despite its blatant incompatibility with the extensive body of eyewitness evidence that a 757-like twin-engine jetliner flew into the Pentagon and exploded.
Many researchers have ignored or dismissed this eyewitness evidence in favor of a seemingly overwhelming physical evidence case that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon, based on photographs of the crash site. As I show below, however, each of the pieces evidence adduced in favor of the no-757-crash theory can be reconciled with the crash of a 757.
Hoaxes Hidden in Plain Sight
The State Department campaign simultaneously cites rense.com as unreliable and as a source to debunk the no plane hoax.
http:/
/ usinfo.state.gov/ media/ Archive/ 2005/ Jul/ 27-595713.html
There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a gr
