Bad News Friday

You may recall that I have written about concerns over the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One article asked about the passenger lists and how our government was able to identify the 19 hijackers even though none of the names appeared on any of the manifests.

Another article, a research paper, by a professor in Utah questioned the accepted theory that all three towers fell as a result of the two plane impacts. Of course, I questioned why none of this has made the major news. Today, I read two articles about questions being raised by well-known scientists about the validity of the findings by the 9/11 commission. Sorry to lay this heavy news on you on a Friday, but we do not make up the news, we only write about it as it shows up.

There is also a couple of books out that I have not read but apparently make very strong cases in support of the findings of these scientists. I post both articles here for you convenience.

My concern is similar to one of the authors. This new evidence points to a conclusion that is almost too horrible to even consider. That our government would either plan and carry out such an event, or allow it to happen is incomprehensible. In fact Mr. Strieber's article says that if this new information turns out to be true, the next terrorist attack could mark the end of our democracy and the beginning of a dictatorship. He concludes that we are headed down the same road as Rome and Germany. Both empires ended rather badly as you might recall from your high school history class. If this should come to pass, all bets are off with regard to managing your investments and planning for retirement.

Talk about a new possible tipping point. This one qualifies. Watch to see if these articles are picked up by the major news outlets in the days to come.

Was 911 a Hoax?02-Feb-2006

I have always been concerned about what really happened on September 11, 2001, but I have also always thought that the attacks were the result of a combination of determined action on the part of terrorists and official incompetence. I did not really believe that they might have actually been orchestrated by our own government. Indeed, such a thought, in itself, seemed almost treasonous to me. I am a political moderate, but I am also a strong patriot. I don't believe in condoning anti-government activity in time of war unless it is warranted by fact.

However, a story appeared on Yahoo News on January 30 that has shocked me deeply. (To read it click here. (See below) If you read this more than 6 months after January 30, 2006 and the link no longer works, please search the Yahoo News archive, or search on PR Web.)

I don't want to believe that our leaders did this to us, that they are responsible for killing thousands of Americans in the interest of restoring the president's then abysmal popularity ratings and enabling them to end many of our freedoms, but a growing number of distinguished academics and scientists do think so, and that has me deeply, deeply worried.

This worry does not end with 911. There is so much wrong that it staggers the mind. In fact, it looks very much like the United States of America is well on its way to becoming a dictatorship. By that I mean that its established institutions will no longer be robust enough to protect the rights they promise its citizens.

On Monday, the story I have linked to above was published on Yahoo News. It's easy to say that the academics involved are just a bunch of liberals, but that simply isn't the case. Some are lefties, but they are mostly political moderates. They have been radicalized by what they have discovered. They are not really promoting a political agenda, but rather demanding an investigation of what increasingly seems to have been not simply official incompetence that led to mass murder, but an actual offical locomotion behind this murder.

That there was official incompetence is now generally accepted. That was even the conclusion of the 911 Commission. But this goes beyond that.

My initial reaction was that the whole business of accusing government officials of orchestrating the attacks was conspiracy theory nonsense. Then I watched "911 in Plane Sight" and I wondered. I liked the way the author of the DVD, Dave von Kleist, asked questions without drawing what seemed to me to be unwarranted conclusions. Then David Ray Griffin came along. I saw him on C-Span, and he seemed quite rational and his research was careful.

I interviewed him on Dreamland. I must add here that the fact that I interview somebody on my radio program doesn't mean that I endorse them. A lot of people get that wrong. It means that I think they're interesting, nothing more. I'm always open and encouraging with them. I conceal my opinions. My program is not about my opinions, it is about my guests' information, and I am often the only interviewer they get who has read their books and/or thought about their work carefully enough to ask them questions that enable them to express their ideas.

Griffin was a very convincing interview. He had done his homework. His book is carefully annotated, with every claim supported by careful documentation.

Frankly, I was appalled at what I read and heard from this man. I found it difficult to believe that he wasn't right. The thought flickered into my mind that I might live in a country run by a bunch of mass murderers.

Which I rejected. Not on rational grounds, on emotional ones. I guess my feeling is that if the light goes out in the United States, maybe mankind is a failed species. It's that large an issue, and if our leaders did indeed cause this catastrophe in order to juice their popularity ratings and cement themselves in power, that is a tragedy of historic proportions. Along with the collapse of the Roman republic and the transformation of Weimar Germany into the Nazi dictatorship, it is one of the great subversions of an institutional republic.

Other media are just now reacting to the Yahoo article. They are as stunned as I am. Robert Steinback, writing in the Miami Herald, puts it very well:

"The reflexive first reaction is incredulity -- how, one asks, could anyone even contemplate, never mind actually do such a barbaric thing? But before you shut your mind, check the resumés -- these aren't Generation X geeks subsisting on potato chips and PlayStation. Then look at the case they present."

The case is indeed a powerful one. It is, largely, not a political case or a case based on conspiracy theories. It could best be described as an engineering-based case. This is what makes it so terrifyingly convincing. These men know how structures work, and they are becoming convinced that these structures--the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--were not destroyed and damged in the ways the government has claimed. They are making an argument that the World Trade Center was, in fact, demolished, and that this was done with thousands of living human beings inside, without regard for their lives.

Immediately after 911, I posted a journal entry complaining that the FBI had failed so profoundly to protect us in this case that its failure was indistinguishable from treason. Now I think that it may have BEEN treason. And this treason may not have involved only the FBI.

I base this not only on the well-publicized investigatory failures of that agency, but also on the way another matter was handled by the administration. This was the fact, that emerged during the 911 hearings, that Condoleeza Rice, in her role as National Security Adviser, had received no fewer than 11 specific warnings from the Federal Aviation Administration that terrorists might use aircraft to strike the World Trade Center.

The fact that she had received this information was held classified prior to the election--illegally classified, incidentally--and only released afterward. Ms. Rice sat before 911 Commission and said that she and her colleagues were completely surprised by the attack.

Frankly, if they were surprised, then there must be some other presence within the government that is able to project its power without the leadership knowing, and is willing to use mass muder as a means of doing so.

I don't believe that. I believe that we need further investigation of 911 and the possible official role in it. In a couple of weeks, Jim Marrs and I are going to interview Webster Tarpley, who wrote 911: Synthetic Terror. I am not going to say what my opinion is of Mr. Tarpley's book. As I stated before, that's not what Dreamland is about. What I am going to do, though, is give him a chance to really air his ideas. As radical as they once appeared, it now seems that they deserve careful attention.

Something that now worries me terribly--in fact, keeps me awake at night--is fear that has arisen from the most recent Osama Bin Laden tape. In it, he states that there is shortly going to be another attack on the United States. He also goes on to condone a book by a liberal author critical of the Bush Administration.

This tape was immediately "validated" by the CIA. Gone was the long period of investigation and the hedging that came from CIA when George Tenet was director. Now, under Porter Goss, confirmation is immediate.

And yet, serious and competent researchers have cast doubt on the authenticity of this tape. So much so that the president has even spoken out against them.

Given what is emerging about 911, what are we to believe? The administration has reached another nadir of unpopularity, one even deeper than the one it was in before 911. However, if there is another terrorist attack at this point, it is going to be blamed, not honored with the support of a shocked nation.

So what would motivate it to orchestrate another attack, if indeed it orchestrated the first one? It knows that what few supporters it has left would abandon it if this was done. Homeland Security would be painted as another FEMA-style farce. Beyond being impeached, the president might literally be run out of town on a rail.

However, it could be that the attack will be so appalling that the administration will, quite simply, end the republic altogether and commence frank dictatorial rule.

If such an attack happens, there seems a distinct possibility that it will have been either officially inspired, actually orchestrated by a government run amok, or allowed to happen. Even if the terrorists are real and they are indeed responsible for such an attack, it wll represent a failure of government so profound that we will need the administration to resign. There will have to be a special election, or a special convention of the Electoral College to choose new leadership.

However, that's not what will happen. If there is an attack, the country will be battened down tight by the administration. It will become a dictatorship, and will remain so until the terrorists are defeated.

But they will never be defeated.

And then:

Experts Claim Official 9/11 Story is a Hoax

Mon Jan 30, 11:37 AM ET

Duluth, MN (PRWEB) January 30, 2006 -- A group of distinguished experts and scholars, including Robert M. Bowman, James H. Fetzer, Wayne Madsen, John McMurtry, Morgan Reynolds, and Andreas von Buelow, have concluded that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11.

They have joined with others in common cause as members of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (S9/11T), because they are convinced, based on their own research, that the administration has been deceiving the nation about critical events in New York and Washington, D.C.

These experts suggest these events may have been orchestrated by elements within the administration to manipulate Americans into supporting policies at home and abroad they would never have condoned absent "another Pearl Harbor."

They believe that this White House is incapable of investigating itself and hope the possibility that Congress might hold an unaccountable administration accountable is not merely naive or wishful thinking.

They are encouraging news services around the world to secure scientific advice by taking advantage of university resources to verify or to falsify their discoveries. Extraordinary situations, they believe, require extraordinary measures.

If this were done, they contend, one of the great hoaxes of history would stand naked before the eyes of the world and its perpetrators would be clearly exposed, which may be the only hope for saving this nation from ever greater abuse.

They hope this might include The New York Times, which, in their opinion, has repeatedly failed to exercise the leadership expected from our nation's newspaper of record by a series of inexplicable lapses. It has failed to vigorously investigate tainted elections, lies leading to the war in Iraq, or illegal NSA spying on the American people, major unconstitutional events. In their view, The Times might compensate for its loss of stature by helping to reveal the truth about one of the great turning-point events of modern history.

Stunning as it may be to acknowledge, they observe, the government has brought but one indictment against anyone and, to the best of their knowledge, has not even reprimanded anyone for incompetence or dereliction of duty. The official conspiracy theory--that nineteen Arab hijackers under control of one man in the wilds of Afghanistan brought this about--is unsupportable by the evidential data, which they have studied. They even believe there are good reasons for suspecting that video tapes officially attributed to Osama bin Laden are not genuine.

They have found the government's own investigiation to be severely flawed. The 9/11 Commission, designated to investigate the attack, was directed by Philip Zelikow, part of the Bush transition team in the NSA sector and the co-author of a book with Condoleezza Rice. A Bush supporter and director of national security affairs, he could hardly be expected to conduct an objective and impartial investigation.

They have discovered that The 9/11 Commission Report is replete with omissions, distortions, and factual errors, which David Ray Griffin has documented in his book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. The official report, for example, entirely ignores the collapse of WTC7, a 47-story building, which was hit by no airplanes, was only damaged by a few small fires, and fell seven hours after the attack.

Here are some of the kinds of considerations that these experts and scholar find profoundly troubling:

*In the history of structural engineering, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been brought down due to fires either before or since 9/11, so how can fires have brought down three in one day? How is this possible?

* The BBC has reported that at least five of the nineteen alleged "hijackers" have turned up alive and well living in Saudi Arabia, yet according to the FBI, they were among those killed in the attacks. How is this possible?

* Frank DeMartini, a project manager for the WTC, said the buildings were designed with load redistribution capabilities to withstand the impact of airliners, whose effects would be like "puncturing mosquito netting with a pencil." Yet they completely collapsed. How is this possible?

* Since the melting point of steel isabout 2,700*F, the temperature of jet fuel fires does not exceed 1,800*F under optimal conditions, and UL certified the steel used to 2,000*F for six hours, the buildings cannot have collapsed due to heat from the fires. How is this possible?

* Flight 77,which allegedly hit the building, left the radar screen in the vicinity of the Ohio/Kentucky border, only to "reappear" in very close proximity to the Pentagon shortly before impact. How is this possible?

* Foreign "terrorists" who were clever enough to coordinate hijacking four commercial airliners seemingly did not know that the least damage to the Pentagon would be done by hitting its west wing. How is this possible?

* Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, in an underground bunker at the White House, watched Vice President Cheney castigate a young officer for asking, as the plane drew closer and closer to the Pentagon, "Do the orders still stand?" The order cannot have been to shoot it down, but must have been the opposite. How is this possible?

* A former Inspector General for the Air Force has observed that Flight 93, which allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, should have left debris scattered over an area less than the size of a city block; but it is scattered over an area of about eight square miles. How is this possible?

* A tape recording of interviews with air traffic controllers on duty on 9/11 was deliberately crushed, cut into very small pieces, and distributed in assorted places to insure its total destruction. How is this possible?

* The Pentagon conducted a training exercise called "MASCAL" simulating the crash of a Boeing 757 into the building on 24 October 2000, and yet Condoleezza Rice, among others, has repeatedly asserted that "no one ever imagined" a domestic airplane could be used as a weapon. How is this possible?

Their own physics research has established that only controlled demolitions are consistent with the near-gravity speed of fall and virtually symmetrical collapse of all three of the WTC buildings. While turning concrete into very fine dust, they fell straight-down into their own footprints.

These experts and scholars have found themselves obliged to conclude that the 9/11 atrocity represents an instance of the approach--which has been identified by Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser--of "creating our own reality."

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UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA James Fetzer 218 724-2706 E-mail Information