1. Oh, how droll:
“I guess Gerry didn’t get the memo. So, for his sake I will repeat it here so that he can save himself from future embarrassment:
Date: June 1, 2009
To: All journalistic staffers;
From: Corporate Headquarters;
re: No Further reporting on 9/11
Given our role within the media to uphold the national interest and to preserve our vital relationship with the governing administration, you are no longer to report on the events of 9/11 in any way other than to affirm the official account provided through the 9/11 Commission Report.
In particular, you must refrain from engaging in any way, whether positively or negatively, with the so-called “9/11 Truth Movement.” While in times past it was acceptable to ridicule and demean the movement as “fringe conspiracy nuts,” in recent years their ranks have swelled to include many highly qualified and credible scholars, architects, engineers, lawyers, former military and intelligence officials, aviation professionals and religious leaders. Of special concern is a paper recently published in the peer-reviewed literature that documents the finding of unexploded, high-tech, nanothermitic material in the dust of the World Trade Center collapses, which very conclusively demonstrates their case for governmental complicity in the events of 9/11.
Engaging with the Truth Movement in any way provides an unacceptable opportunity for them to promulgate their evidence to an unwitting audience, which will further undermine our ability to protect our national and corporate interests. The best way to deal with the 9/11 Truth Movement is to ignore them.
Regards,
The Management”
Now for the truth:
“Article published Jun 22, 2009
Question report on 9/11
I’m glad that Linda Carbonella Victoire’s letter (June 14) expresses respect for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The media blackout of the 9/11 truth movement, which includes hundreds of highly credentialed Americans, has resulted in a disproportionate amount of misinformation. Professional people who have pointed out logistical problems with the official story of 9/11, because of the conspiracy theorist label, have done so at the risk of losing their credibility or their livelihood.
The 1970 documentary film “Building the World Trade Center” shows clearly that the buildings’ primary support was not “their central elevator shaft” but 47 massive steel core columns, and that these columns were in fact anchored firmly to the bedrock. The perimeter columns were over-designed by 2000 percent. The tower’s tube design provided superior resistance to lateral forces and became the standard for skyscrapers since the 1960s, including the Sears Tower. The WTC’s lead engineer John Skilling said the towers could survive both the impact of a 707(cruising faster than today’s 767) and the resulting jet fuel fire.
On 9/11 not only did the intact structures below the impact zones ultimately fail to resist the shifted loads from the damaged columns, they provided zero resistance, since the towers fell at virtually free-fall speed with perfect symmetry. Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, also collapsed in this manner.
So these would have been the three worst engineering failures in modern history, calling into question the safety of hundreds of similarly designed buildings. So why was there not the forensic investigation necessary to determined exactly how the buildings failed? The answer is that these were not structural failures but highly sophisticated controlled demolitions. This is the suspicion of virtually all of the architects and engineers who have been shown the footage of the Building 7 collapse.”
…
“Article published Jun 20, 2009
The truth about 9/11
I read with interest the letter from William Rice about 9/11 and the subsequent response from a reader to Rice’s observations that discount all the facts that he presented. 9/11 discussions on op-ed pages rarely go well. One writer will offer an observation and then another will claim that observation to be absurd. This was exactly the case last week. No matter what fact you may present that shows the official version of events to be dubious, you will almost certainly be called a conspiracy theorist, or worse. TV personality and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently lumped those of us who claim to be part of the 9/11 Truth Movement in the same category as James W. Von Brunn, the man accused of murdering a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. It’s a strange leap of logic, but 9/11 discussions rarely elicit logical thinking.
Here is a fact that we do know: All three buildings in New York collapsed at free fall speed. This is verified by both video footage and by seismic readings taken at Columbia University. The official version of events is that WTC 1 and 2 collapsed because fire from the jet collisions weakened the structure causing the top section to fall to the next lower level which collapsed. (WTC 7 is said to have collapsed solely from fires started by falling debris.) This is known as the pancake theory. Floor upon floor collapses to the level below all the way down.
But for this to happen at free fall speed, the laws of physics would have had to be suspended. The law of Conservation of Momentum says essentially that a motion will not change unless an external force acts upon it. Therefore, a moving object that encounters resistance will be slowed. Can you think of any instance where this wouldn’t be true? So if the WTC buildings were pancaking down, they would have encountered resistance the entire route of descent. Free fall speed would have been impossible. The only possible explanation that would legitimize the pancake theory would be that resistance had been removed. Hmmm.
We don’t know if the events of 9/11 were planned by anyone in government, or if they were executed by some entity outside government. We do know that the laws of physics can’t be suspended. That should be enough to make anyone question the official version of events.
Larry Gilbert
Middlesex”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/20485
2. “Iran: It’s All About US
Or is it?
The domestic debate over the administration’s response to the Iranian events underscores the defining characteristic of neoconservatives everywhere: their extreme narcissism. According to President Obama’s critics, the slaughter that’s said to be taking place in the streets of Iran’s cities, the mass arrests, the unrestrained violence is all about us. The President, say the neocons — and, yes, they’re back — is showing weakness in the face of authoritarian brutality and repression: he needs to speak out and flat out refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the Iranian regime.
Never mind that this is completely irrelevant, a non-issue that won’t even come up in the real world — since we don’t have any diplomatic relations with the Iranians to begin with, not since the taking of the hostages at our embassy in 1979. So the issue of “recognition” will never come up. Not that this matters to the neocons: they have one agenda in mind, aside from undermining Obama’s presidency and scoring partisan points (most but not all are Republicans), and that is provoking an armed conflict between the US and Iran.
For all their inflated rhetoric about “exporting democracy” and launching a “global democratic revolution,” as George W. Bush once phrased it, the neoconservatives could care less about the fate of the Iranian people. If they did care, they’d be advising Obama to keep quiet and let them handle it — because the regime is using the canard of foreign involvement in the protests to discredit and marginalize the opposition. Not only that, but they are preparing the way for the prosecution of the movement’s leaders, including Mousavi: already Iranian state television is featuring the “confessions” of jailed demonstrators who attribute their “terrorist” activities to instructions from Voice of America and the BBC.
Yet the neocons want Obama to ignore the danger posed to actual Iranians inside Iran, and grandstand it for the cameras. Everything must be sacrificed in pursuit of self-glorification: this is the core motivation of what I have called the neoconservative personality. As Professor Claes Ryn, an authentic conservative, pointedly put it:
“Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint. That former personality was inseparable from, indeed, the creator of, the notion of limited, decentralized government.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/06/25/iran-its-all-about-us/
3. “Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein bluffed about WMDs fearing Iranian arsenal, secret FBI files show
Saddam Hussein feared Iran‘s arsenal more than a U.S. attack, and even considered asking ex-President George W. Bush “to protect” Iraq from its neighbor, once secret FBI files show.
The FBI interrogations of the toppled tyrant – codename “Desert Spider” – were declassified after a Freedom of Information Act request.
The records show Saddam happily boasted of duping the world about stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. And he consistently denied cooperating with Osama Bin Laden‘s Al Qaeda.
Of all his enemies, Iraq’s ex-president – who insisted he still held office during captivity – hated Iran most.
Asked how he would have faced “fanatic” Iranian ayatollahs if Iraq had been proven toothless by UN weapons inspectors in 2003, Saddam said he would have cut a deal with Bush.”
4. “Iran Was an Easier Enemy Before We Saw Their Faces
If you want to kill with a clean conscience, the faces of the enemy had better be blank. Start to see them as human beings and it becomes harder to blockade and bomb them, to mine, and pollute, and “destabilize.” President Clinton had no imagining of the disease he would bring to the innocent in Sudan by the “surgical” missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998. George W. Bush had a happy warrior’s notion of the fury he would unleash on Falluja when he gave the order to destroy that city after the election of 2004. The Sudan bombing was treated by the American press as a distraction from a sex scandal. The second siege of Falluja–tens of thousands of houses crushed or cratered–was hardly covered at all.
The faces of the people, and not “the face of the enemy.” The difference between the abstract and the individual is decisive for imagination. It is the faces that are indelible, as we saw in the streets of Tehran, whether the men and women were holding up cell phones or placards written black on green, or waving a bloodied shirt or bandage; or holding a rock, as some in Iran did, and as the members of other crowds, less kindly portrayed in the American press, have been known to do. It isn’t the face of the enemy that we see in these pictures. No, these are people much like ourselves, who don’t want to die at the hands of their government–or at the hands of ours, either, for that matter.
…
The large plans for good wars need to reduce the enemy to an abstraction before the bombing feels right. The most famous of American war promoters, John McCain, has a simple and emphatic ability to abstract–Iraq, Gaza, Georgia, Iran, it is all one to him. They turn him on and fire him up. Wars, he thinks (and was raised to think), are simply the spectacular way that we settle our affairs in this world. But successful abstraction is a mental trick that is not possible to everyone.
…
All vicarious politics is sick–the more eager, excited, and fraternal, the more prone to self-deception. The vicarious politics of liberation only adds a dimension of self-righteousness to the fault Edmund Burke detected in the politics of all revolutions: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.” But the reformers of Tehran know well enough what they are about; they know in spite of (perhaps at odds with) the help with which we would encumber them. They are not calling it revolution. And whatever they end up doing, we should not try to name it or clinch its meaning for them.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/iran-was-an-easier-enemy_b_220186.html
5. “The Army’s decision to bar a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit in Iraq because he “refused to highlight” good news drew a harsh rebuke from media watchdogs, who said the action compromises the integrity of the media embed program.
…
“It’s not meant to be a public relations program for the military.”
…
Stripes officials called Druzin’s reporting consistently accurate and fair, and noted that, under the Pentagon’s rules governing the media embed system, reporters are not required to answer a commander’s questions or adjust their stories according to a commander’s preferences.”
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=63443
