Spent About Half An Hour Watching The Towers Collapse Last Night

from the amazing collection of videos at "Terrorize".

They have at least ten different videos of each tower collapse.

I was trying to figure out how the collapses started-- what was noticeable before the huge eruption and the formation of the "pyroclastic" cloud. Unfortunately, due to the low resolution of most of the videos, it is hard to get a handle on what floors are collapsing first from these videos.

What is more striking is how in almost every video, you can see these "squibs" or explosive jets coming out the side of the towers-- often ten or more stories BELOW where the collapse is. Other times these squibs are right below the collapse area. It is really obvious.

The big question is what are these events?

The person who thinks it is a crazy conspiracy theory to think that the towers underwent controlled demoltion would say these are simply hot gases "venting" from the fires and the collapses. Why this venting would be so localized is not clear.

Of course these squibs look remarkably like little explosive events, and could mark where bombs/explosives are going off to aid in the collapses. Particularly, the bombs would be important to help destroy the massive core columns that "mysteriously failed" in the collapses.

Other oddities:

1) In one video, I swear I could see the top of the South tower tilted at an almost 45 degree angle before it disintegrated. Why this section didn't tumble sideways off the towers and why the tower then collapsed straight down is a mystery.

2) After the North tower collapses, there is a cathedral-like "spire" left-- a skeleton of the core-- that mysteriously seems to fall and disintegrate at the same time. It is very odd. I have posted on this some time back, but last night I saw a new video showing this from a different angle.

Seems As Though Bush Didn't Get As Rousing A Response From The Troops As He Would Have Liked...

LOL. Poor President Bush:

Still, the White House had allotted 40 minutes for the remarks. Without the applause that may have been anticipated, Mr. Bush wrapped up in just 28 minutes.

Good Article on the Unsolved Mysteries of Flight 93

from three years back. And none of these questions has been resolved since then.

1. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a 10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2,000 yards on account of the savage force of the plane's impact with the ground. The FBI conclusion: "Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact." Aviation experts I have contacted are very doubtful about this. One expert expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other papers would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to earth.

2. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time, according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they were unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade Centre tower. The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on CBS, have not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.

3. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported 911 phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last of the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board. The FBI has confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has received orders not to speak to the media any more.

4. The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for responding emergency crews". The reason, as numerous people have observed, why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September, all non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such was the density of 911 phone calls from people on the ground, in the Shanksville area, as to the location of the crash site that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary; and, third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time of tremendous national uncertainty when no one knew for sure whether there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help.

Most suspicious of all, perhaps, has been the failure of the FBI or anybody else to identify the pilot or the passengers of the purported Falcon, and their own failure to come forward and identify themselves.

There was one other plane, a single-engine Piper, in the air as Flight 93 headed to its doom. The pilot, Bill Wright, said that he was three miles away and so close he could see the United markings on the plane. Suddenly he received orders to get away from the hijacked plane and to land immediately. "That's one of the first things that went through my mind when they told us to get as far away from it as fast as we could," Wright later told a Pittsburgh TV station, "that either they were expecting it to blow up or they were going to shoot it down – but that's pure speculation."

From the overall evidence and the way the plane disappeared into a crater, my guess is the plane was first damaged in the air either by a missile or an on-board bomb, allowing the debris to spread widely. Then I think the plane was blown up a bomb when it crashed OR it was bombed by the white plane.

Another issue is -- how many planes were in that area? Flight 93, the white plane, a single engine Piper, an F-16 according to some accounts and also a C-130 overflew the area as well. How likely is it that two civilian planes were near flight 93 in this remote area?

In Sean Hannity's World

it is a crazy conspiracy theory to think Bush wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11.*

What a fucking twit.

*Post-Bush speech interview with Charlie Rangel (D-NY) on FoxNews. Rangel said Bush did want to invade Iraq before 9/11, cited the PNAC. Hannity seemed flabbergasted. (Note, I don't usually watch FoXNews, but did for giggles.)

Meanwhile, the speech sounded rather lame. I missed it so can't really say myself.

A Feasible WTC Demolition Theory

As described at this site (apparently) by a guy named Jeffrey King*.

The basic idea is that thermite was used to melt the core columns at the base of the towers. If even just one floor's worth of these columns was melted, this would cause a huge shift in the tower's structure that could lead to systemic collapse. Basically, the core would drop down about ten feet, while the outer walls would remain anchored. This would put huge stress on the floors, and could therefore induce a top-down floor by floor collapse.

This makes sense to me and explains a few things:

1) the molten steel found at the bottom of ground zero during the clean-up.

2) the lack of a seismic signal clearly indicating an explosion that initiated the collapse (as I understand it, thermite burns more than explodes).

3) why the towers started collapsing near where the planes crashed-- these were the weakest points in the structure after the core was taken out.

4) why the antenna of the North tower, which was anchored to the core, started falling down at the very beginning of the collapse.

Finally, this theory only requires large amounts of thermite being brought into the basement area-- probably via the underground garages. Thus, we don't need to posit that tons of explosives were brought INTO the towers and set up where people worked.

As far as why the concrete was powdered, I will say more about that in another post. The gist of it is that the old concrete may have develped explosive proporties of its own. But I need to do more research on this.

In any case, this thermite theory fits the evidence rather well.


*Caveat: he makes a rather racist remark about Arabs in his essay, and I disassociate myself from that.

What Exactly Will Penetrate Two Feet of Brick, Stone and Concrete?

The outer wall of the Pentagon-- graphic from Pentagonresearch.com 

The Drumbeat Gets Louder

"Former MI5 Agent Says 9/11 An Inside Job".

Attack Was 'Coup de'tat,' Buildings Were Demolished By Controlled Demolitions.

I think this guy might know what he's talking about.

More and more credible people seem to be "coming out" about 9/11.

In One Sense, Karl Rove Was Right

I am a liberal and I did want to issue indictments after 9/11.

To the motherfuckers in this administration that let 9/11 happen, to the motherfuckers in this administration that helped 9/11 happen and to the motherfuckers in this administration that made 9/11 happen.

Motherfucker.

Yeah, I'm talking to you, Rove.

A Theory For Why We Haven't Been Attacked Again Since 9/11

I don't think this is the complete answer, but it is a good rejoinder to conservatives on this issue that is not too conpsiracy-ish.

Kristin Breitweiser:

Finally Karl, please “understand” that the reason we have not suffered a repeat attack on our homeland is because Bin Laden no longer needs to attack us. Those of us with a pure and comprehensive “understanding of 9/11” know that Bin Laden committed the 9/11 attacks so he could increase recruitment for al Qaeda and increase worldwide hatred of America. That didn't happen. Because after 9/11, the world united with Americans and al Qaeda's recruitment levels never increased.

It was only after your invasion of Iraq, that Bin Laden's goals were met. Because of your war in Iraq two things happened that helped Bin Laden and the terrorists: al Qaeda recruitment soared and the United States is now alienated from and hated by the rest of the world. In effect, what Bin Laden could not achieve by murdering my husband and 3,000 others on 9/11, you handed to him on a silver platter with your invasion of Iraq - a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Bush's Plan

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

It is quite amazing how much Bush had planned. He wanted to be a war president, he wanted to be a great president, he wanted to have political capital, he wanted to get everything passed that he want to get passed.

Isn't it also amazing how much of this plan has been the template for his presidency? Too bad for him, not everything has worked out. After all, his administration is obsessed with creating its own reality, but obviously real reality, like gravity, has to kick in and bring things back to earth.

But I find it most amazing how Bush WANTED to be a war president and he got his wish. What are the odds that he would get a great incentive for war and a rallying cry like 9/11?

Remember how shaky Bush looked right after 9/11?

I have to wonder if his shakiness was actually nervousness that his administration had actually carried out a fake terror attack and he was worried that they would be exposed?

A Very Intense Essay on the WTC Collapses

Here.

This one needs some serious time to read and study but it seems to make many strong points.

The author also points to this really interesting video on the collapses.

Fascinating Details About WTC7

The New York Times ---- November 4, 2001

THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Nov.. 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine New York station was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, seriously disrupting United States intelligence operations while bringing the war on terrorism dangerously close to home for America's spy agency, government officials say.

The C.I.A.'s undercover New York station was in the 47-story building at 7 World Trade Center, one of the smaller office towers destroyed in the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers that morning. All of the agency's employees at the site were safely evacuated soon after the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, the officials said. The intelligence agency's employees were able to watch from their office windows while the twin towers burned just before they evacuated their own building.

Immediately after the attack, the C.I.A. dispatched a special team to scour the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports that had been stored in the New York station, either on paper or in computers, officials said. It could not be learned whether the agency was successful in retrieving its classified records from the wreckage. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

The agency's New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas. The agency's officers in New York often work undercover, posing as diplomats and business executives, among other things, depending on the nature of their intelligence operations.
(snip)
But United States intelligence officials emphasize that there is no evidence that the hijackers knew that the undercover station was in the World Trade Center complex. With their undercover station in ruins, C.I.A. officers in New York have been forced to share space at the United States Mission to the United Nations, as well as borrow other federal government offices in the city, officials said. The C.I.A.'s plans for finding a new permanent station in New York could not be determined.

The agency is prohibited from conducting domestic espionage operations against Americans, but the agency maintains stations in a number of major United States cities, where C.I.A. case officers try to meet and recruit students and other foreigners to return to their countries and spy for the United States. The New York station, which has been led by its first female station chief for the last year, is believed to have been the largest and most important C.I.A. domestic station outside the Washington area.

The station has for years played an important role in espionage operations against Russian intelligence officers, many of whom work undercover as diplomats at the United Nations. Agency officers in New York often work with the F.B.I. to recruit and then help manage foreign agents spying for the United States. The bureau's New York office, at 26 Federal Plaza, was unaffected by the terrorist attack.
(snip)

Source.

I wonder what the false-front organization was?

Also, it's kind of funny imagining CIA agents crawling through the wreckage of WTC7 looking for classified papers.

It is interesting to wonder if this CIA station provided some pretext for the intense security at Ground Zero.

Desperate

Has anyone else listened to Bush at his last two press conferences and noticed the tone of exasperation in his voice? Literally he strains his voice as he tries to make his simple points-- "we will win", "it is a test of will", "spreading freedom", "it's hard work", "the killers" (the insurgents), "ideology of hatred and oppression", "but I'm optimistic" etc.

Is there any doubt that this is an increasingly desperate White House?

One only has to see Karl Rove going after "liberals" and their supposed reaction to 9/11 to know that he is simply getting desperate and reverting to his primordial nasty lizard-like form.

In one sense, these times are boring, in that not much is really happening politically-- the Bush administration is going nowhere, really. In another sense this is good, as the Bush administration is clearly handcuffed by the war and will not be able to wreak much damage with their agenda because there only eroding support for them. In yet another way, it is a time of great anticipation, watching this White House try to stay afloat and wondering how much longer they can keep the whole ball of shit in the air. Something has to give, all the lies have to catch up to them-- if it isn't the Downing Street memo, it will be 9/11.

Overall, I get the sense that the people, and the powers that be, are getting a little tired of old Georgie and his gang of seeming incompetents, and thus there is this desperate power struggle between the Bush administration and the real powers. The problem seems to be that Georgie has bit off more than he can chew and is not making the poeple happy. This is a problem for the powers that be, and they will increasingly put more and more pressure on the Bush administration.

It will be interesting to see how long they hold out before they collapse.

And if the Bush administration collapses, will it be slowly, or rapidly and catastrophically?

Peak Oil and Iraq

The price of oil has gone up again, this time to over $60 per barrel, which sent shivers into the US stock market and thus rapid declines the past two days.

Of course, lately, everytime the price of oil goes up, out comes someone talking about Peak Oil. Last night I heard someone on NPR's MarketPlace show talking about Peak Oil and the horrible effects it could have. Then after that segment, the show went chirping on, pretending as though Peak Oil didn't exist. It's amusing to see the media flirt with the prospect of Peak Oil but still maintain a sense of denial about it all.

There is one reason though, that I don't worry TOO much about the catastrophic effects of Peak Oil: Iraq.

There are HUGE untapped reserves there, and thanks to the Bush administration-- we own them!

I imagine cheap Iraqi oil wil start flooding the market about the time Saudi Arabia oil production peaks and starts going into decline-- in the next couple years.

SO-- thanks to the leadership of President Bush, we don't have to worry about Peak Oil for another ten to twenty years!

Of course, don't tell that to President Bush. He still thinks we went into Iraq to find WMD, er, I mean, liberate the Iraqis from a brutal dictator.

And don't tell the mainstream media either-- they just want to believe President Bush, no matter what nonsense he spouts.

Yet I wonder when the cognitive dissonance over Iraq and oil will finally break through. It is simply amazing how little attemntion the vast supplies of Iraqi oil receive in reference to Iraq, in contrast to the huge volumes of air time that discussions of the Iraq war and the insurgency receive. The mainstream media is dumb, but they can't be THAT dumb. They have to know deep down one major reason we're in Iraq is because of oil.

What Hit the Pentagon on 9/11?

Let me first start by saying, I think it is possible that flight 77 or a 757 hit the Pentagon on 9/11. In fact, in some ways this fits the evidence well and is the simplest explanation. But at the risk of offending people like Mark Rabinowitz, I don't think it is a slam dunk case. And furthermore, in some ways, I simply don't see how a Boeing 757/flight 77 was able to produce the complete scene we saw at the Pentagon on 9/11.

Assuming flight 77 truly hit the Pentagon, I think it either had to have had an amazing pilot at the controls who was not one of the known 9/11 hijackers, or the plane was piloted by remote technology. The 9/11 commission is simply lying when it says Hani Hanjour was the pilot.

Moreover, the spot on the Pentagon where the plane hit was highly suspicious. It was recently renovated and lightly populated. Why was this spot chosen by a terrorist?

But in terms of PHYSICAL EVIDENCE-- here are the reasons to think the Pentagon was hit by flight 77 (a Boeing 757):

1) it is the simplest explanation for what happened to the plane and its passengers

2) the hole in the Pentagon wall was a reasonable fit for a 757 if we assume the tail and part of the wings broke off and that these were never seen by first responders, reporters and photographers

3) the relative lack of plane debris from the huge plane was because the plane completely shredded as it exploded and then impacted inner columns and walls in the Pentagon

4) a Boeing 757 is a very large plane that with a large fuel load could have caused the explosion and inner devastation seen at the Pentagon

5) the government says that is what happened, and we should simply take their word without seeing any real proof

But wait-- there is more!!!

Here is what we need to either believe or rationalize if the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757/flight 77:

1) the squads of soldiers and FBI agents who picked up pieces of debris very rapidly after the crash were merely collecting evidence and were not trying to hide anything

2) the Pentagon security camera video of the crash is really the best set of pictures they had and it was not altered and key frames were not cut out

3) the FBI really has a good reason for not releasing the videos they confiscated from the gas station and nearby hotel

4) a Boeing 757 can travel over 500 mph only inches off the ground on essentially a level path without being affected by the ground effect and without crashing on the ground.

5) that even though the fuselage of the plane clearly blew up spewing debris on the Pentagon lawn, and the passengers of the plane were in the back section (according to Barbara Olson's call), not one human remain was blown out onto the Pentagon lawn by the huge explosion the plane made as it hit the building

6) a Boeing 757, with its engines only inches off the ground (since one engine apparently knocked a ground level hole in the chain link fence), and thus with the plane's belly only four feet off the ground, can pass over six foot tall cable spools without knocking them down. This picture illustrates my point very well, actually:

From Jean-Pierre Desmoulins's Pentagon site. The left cross is supposedly where the port engine traveled and hit a cement curb, knocking a hole in it. The middle cross is where the fuselage is supposed to have gone and the right cross is supposedly where the starboard engine went. 
However, one can clearly see the absurdity of this flight path. First, the hole in the curb is simply not the right dimensions for a 757 engine. Second, even if it was a 757 engine that knocked the hole in the curb, this means the plane's body would have to be only four feet off the ground. But you can see the six foot high cable spools were in the direct path of the fuselage and were not knocked down. So if you believe it was a 757 that hit the Pentagon, you have to believe the plane magically passed over these cable spools. But in fact, for the damage pattern seen at the Pentagon, the only way a Boeing 757 could have come in is with its engines just inches off the ground. So this is a serious problem.

7) a Boeing 757, which is not built to penetrate walls, can go through the three foot thick reinforced concrete wall of the Pentagon and pass completely through without leaving significant debris outside. Not only this, but the plane is so tough it can penetrate the wall by hitting at an oblique (52 degree) angle-- thus wasting much of its forward momentum on a force vector that is parallel and not perpendicular to the wall

8) the engine of a Boeing 757 can strike a 10,000 pound generator some one hundred feet from the pentagon wall, and either not break off the wing or break off and keep traveling in the direction of the plane and disappear into the Pentagon.

So, yes, one can think that flight 77/a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon.

But if you will indulge, I also wonder if something else could have hit there.

Last night I ruled out the A3 skywarrior as being able to knock that hole in the fence. But I mentioned a missile that might be a candidate: the SNARK SM-62 missile:
The SNARK missile in a hanger 

Sure, this is a wild idea, but bear with me.

First off, the thing is pretty big and looks like a plane. With small jets mounted on the wings, it even looks a bit like a 757. Or certainly it looks like a small plane, as a couple of witnesses said.

Second, the fuselage is about the right diameter to make the hole in the fence.

Third, we don't need to worry about this thing passing over the cable spools-- it would take a different path and avoid the spools.

Fourth, this thing could carry a lot of explosives and hence do a lot of damage, and since it is a missile, it is built to penetrate.

Fifth, this thing has been decomissioned and is no longer is service, and thus would be easier for rogue miltary personnel to get their hands on and program to fly. This would probably be easier to get hold of than a cruise missile.

Sixth, it is propoelled by a normal jet engine, so it would sound similar to a jet airplane and leave jet engine debris.

Seventh, the flight path of the flying object that hit the Pentagon is similar to that of a missile, with the circular correction path at the end before the impact.

Eighth, the missile would blow up and leave little debris, as was observed. To mimic an airliner crash, few parts from an American Airlines Boeing 757 could be packaged in one of the contractor's trailers and then blown up as the missile hit.

Ninth, a missile does not fly like a plane and would not have worry about the "ground effect".

Tenth, a missile hitting could be why there has been a cover-up of the Pentagon attack, and why the men outside the Pentagon cleaned up so quickly.


Why would the 9/11 planners use a missile and not a plane?

1) better penetration and more damage

2) they wanted to send a signal that this wasn't just terrorists-- so they made a Boeing 757 cover-story but really used a missile

3) this SNARK missile actually carried nuclear warheads and if this missile was identified by people who reported to Bush on 9/11, this might explain why he went to Offut Air Force Base to take control of the nulcear arsenal.

Okay, it's just CRAAAAZY, isn't it?

So, I am not saying this is what happened-- I am only putting it out there as an alternative theory.

Yes, the 757 theory is the simplest. But the 757 theory also has some severe problems!

The Hole In The Fence-- Continued

As shown graphically in my last post, whatever hit the Pentagon made a large hole in the fence in front of the electrical generator. The hole was about the size of a 757 engine, but for a variety of reasons, I think it is unlikely to have been made by a 757 engine.

One other possibility that might explain the damage pattern being made by a Boing 757 is that the engine did produce the hole in the fence at ground level and the wing track fairing made the gouge on top of the generator. The alignment would work out okay for that as far as I can see. This leaves the question of what smashed in the top of the generator? Whereas most people seem to think the top of the generator was smashed by the engine, I think if it was a 757 that made the hit, then the engine went in at ground level, went through the fence and smashed the very end of the generator, spinning it inwards towards the Pentagon. The top part of the generator, where it is clearly smashed may actually have been damaged by the generator exploding following the impact. This damage pattern could therefore fit with a 757. There are still two problems with this idea though:
1) wouldn't the impact of the engine on the generator, cause the engine to break off and then wouldn't we see it outside of the Pentagon?
2) if the plane was flying with its engines that just inches off the ground, it is hard to see how the plane didn't crash on the ground before reaching the wall AND how the plane avoided the cable spools that were six feet high and in front of the wall.

So there are still problems with a 757.

But Karl Schwarz's idea that an A3 skywarrior hit the Pentagon doesn't really work either. The hole in the fence is too large for an A3 engine and the hole is too small for the body of the plane.

The fact that the generator was hit by the flying object and the object still went on flying and hit the wall, makes me wonder if the main body of the flying object went into the fence and hit the generator-- for instance the main body of a missile. But I don't think this could have been a cruise missile.

In my next post, I will go over the idea that a certain type of winged-missile could have hit the Pentagon: the SNARK.

Did a Boeing 757 Make This Hole in the Fence and Damage the Generator at the Pentagon?

What is apparent is that there is a large hole in the fence that surrounded the construction area where the Pentagon was hit. The hole is right at ground level, and is very similar in size to a Boeing 757 engine. Are we really supposed to believe that the starboard engine of flight 77 made this hole in the fence and also knocked the generator askew AND also smashed the top of the generator? Are we also supposed to believe the wing flap fairing made a long gouge in the top in the generator? Actually, Killtown does a pretty good job of showing how the gouge is not from a Boeing 757 wing here.

But here I want to ask: WHAT THE HELL MADE THE HOLE IN THE FENCE AND SMASHED THE GENERATOR?

Wide view of the Pentagon hit (the orange circle indicates the hole in the fence; the generator is just to the right of the hole in the fence and is on fire) 


Close-up on the fence and generator 


The size of the engine and wing flap fairing spacings on a Boeing 757 

It seems impossible that:
1) a 757 engine could have knocked the hole in the fence and then jumped up to only smash the top of the generator,
2) a 757 engine could have been so low to the ground to make this hole in the fence without the plane crashing before it reached the wall,
3) the impact of a 757 engine on the generator didn't cause the engine to break off the wing.

So the whole scene here doesn't add up. What on earth happened to create this damage pattern?

I hate to say it, but a large missile with short wings might better explain the damage pattern-- the missile body would have made the large hole in the fence and the wing could have smashed the top of the generator. It's not clear what made the gouge on the top of the generator, but perhaps this was done by part of the plane that came in right behind the missile?

It sounds crazy, but how else can we explain the damage?

The only other explanation would be that a 757 engine made the hole in the fence and was just extremely lucky not to hit the ground before this-- then the plane engine pushed the generator backwards while the wing above the engine and the wing flap fairings produced the damage to the top of the generator. The problem with this is that this severe impact would have had to throw the 757 off its path considerably, and cause it to impact further to the right of the impact hole. Plus, the engine would probably have broken off. Plus, the wing would have damaged a longer section of generator.

So again, this official story doesn't add up.

Silverstein Say He Did Mean Demolition When He Said "Pull It"

Although it's still not clear what he DID mean.

Actually, more interestingly, in the Prison Planet article they say:

The question is, if Silverstein didn’t mean that "pull it" meant to demolish the building then what did he mean? It’s obvious that the kid’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he’s trying to make excuses.

Was Silverstein simply talking about evacuating the building?

We know for a fact that although the building had been evacuated there were still secret service personel in the building who died when it collapsed. They weren’t told to evacuate.

That's the first I ever heard that people died in the WTC7 collapse-- but it certainly fits with the Mike Ruppert theory that the Secret Service was running the attacks from WTC7 and they must have been knocked off as part of the cover-up.

Cool Flash Movie on the Collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7

Here.

I wonder if this demolition meme will gain any momentum-- particularly after former Bush I team member Morgan Reynolds came out and expressed his doubts about the collapse of these buildings.

Wrapping Up the Beamer Call

I think the idea that Lisa Beamer simply made up* a lot of the details about Beamer's call can explain many of the contradictions of the accounts of Beamer's call and the contradictions in Beamer's call with the other flight 93 calls.

So where does this leave us?

We can probably discard the more absurd parts of the Beamer story-- such that there was a hijacker with a bomb standing guard between first and coach class. This is just ridiculous on its face.

We can probably also discard the idea that 27 passengers were put in first class and that the rest of the passengers and flight attendants were sitting on the floor in the back since it is absurd as well.

We can also discard the idea that Beamer saw the pilot and co-pilot lying on the floor in first class, since it doesn't make sense that he would have seen them from the back-- plus no other call mentioned this.

So where does THIS leave us?

Basically, this leaves us with a guy calling from what was apparently a hijacked plane and very little else that is noteworthy. The main thing is that this guy's wife was very aggressive about pushing the story that he was a hero, even though the operator Lisa Jefferson had no real information that he joined the rebellion, this was mosty inferred.

The bottom line is that even if there important details about the hijacking in Beamer's call, the accounts are so muddled it is impossible to sort it out without seeing the transcript of the call or hearing the recording. And basically we will never get our hands on those, barring some miracle (and assuming these even exist and are not another lie).

The interesting question is if Lisa Beamer really sought out this attention on her own, or if she was pushed into this assignment somehow by some shadowy agent of the government.


*I don't think confusion or a poor memory can explain this, since Lisa Beamer was actively pushing the story. It's not like she was pressed to give details.

How Was the Myth of Beamer's Call Created?

Following up on this post from last night, it seems likely that Todd Beamer's "Let's roll" call from flight 93 was mostly a bold fabrication.

Interestingly and oddly, the first article to mention Beamer's call in the media has no sourcing except apparently Lisa Beamer (Todd's wife). Lisa Jefferson (the GTE operator) did not comment for the article. This article came out on Sunday, September 16th, and this was after Lisa Jefferson talked to Lisa Beamer to tell her about the call. I think it is rather plausible that Lisa Beamer essentially created many of the details of the call herself. Whether she did this in collaboration with the FBI or some other agency, or she did it all by herself, is hard to know. I would guess there was some minimal call from Beamer that was very different from what came out in the media, and that Lisa Beamer (perhaps with FBI guidance) created a nice set of details to mythologize the call. I would guess that 90% of what has been reported of the call is made up. The problem is that Lisa Beamer and Lisa Jefferson never got their story entirely straight, and this is why the accounts of the call differ so much. But clearly, someone in the government/media-industrial complex saw the large propaganda appeal of the call with the "Let's roll" catch phrase, and so they pushed the story hard to a grieving nation. Tellingly, this first article has a somewhat strange feel-- it reads more like a human interest story than a hard news story. After this article came out, the story took off, the call became a national sensation-- and "Let's roll" became a war-cry.

UPDATE: I found reporter Jim McKinnon's story behind the Todd Beamer story here (see page 3). Indeed, Lisa Beamer was the main source for the story, and she was eager to tell it.

I was on duty the Saturday after the attacks, when a reporter from the paper in East Brunswick, N.J., called. He asked Tom Birdsong if we had new information from the Somerset crash site. In exchange, he offered the name of Lisa Beamer, who had gotten word from GTE that her husband had left a message and appeared to have been a hero on board Flight 93. The reporter refused to give us access to Beamer when it turned out that we weren’t offering him much from Somerset. And that was almost that, considering there was nothing local about the New Jersey guy’s pitch. Then Birdsong asked me to call Lisa Beamer. I relied on news assistant Alyson Hudson, who dug up not only the Beamers’ number, but their former neighbors’ as well. I got Beamer on the first try. After I offered condolences, I launched into the interview. I didn’t have to ask her more than a half-dozen questions. She was eager to tell her story. I thought it best not to interrupt unless there was a pause. I typed as fast as I could. When she got to that now famous phrase, I was nearly floored. I asked her to repeat it: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”
(snip)
While I was writing, Alyson found a number for Lisa Jefferson, the GTE supervisor who took Todd Beamer’s call. While she was gracious on the phone, and I used every sweet-talking tactic I knew, she didn’t want to be interviewed.

There are a few other details about McKinnon writing the story, but basically, the important info is Lisa Beamer was the eager source and Lisa Jefferson didn't want to be interviewed.

Just Fucking Outrageous

CIA Director Porter Goss said he has an "excellent" idea where Osama bin Laden is hiding*, but the al Qaeda leader will not be brought to justice until weak links in counterterrorism efforts are strengthened, Time magazine reported on Sunday.

In his first interview since becoming head of the CIA last year, Goss also told the magazine the insurgency in Iraq was not quite in its last throes, but close to it.

Goss did not say where he believed bin Laden was hiding, but intelligence experts have said the al Qaeda leader who has evaded an extensive U.S.-led manhunt is probably in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?" Goss said in the interview.

"In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice," Goss said. "We are making very good progress on it."

He cited some of the difficulties as "dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play."

What the FUCK??? Is this guy serious??? How can he even say this with a straight face?

Remeber during the 2004 presidential campaign, the right-wing made a big to-do over the idea that Kerry would allow some other country to have veto power over the secuirty interests of the US?

The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking here on so many levels.

Since when does the Bush administration fucking care about "fair play" and "international relations"????

And this is coming from the CIA director???

Can this administration get any more fucking weird????**

One thing for sure, 9/11 widow Kristen Breitwiser is not amused.

*Of course, he does! They've known all along where he was.
**Also today, Condi Rice shows how completely out of touch with reality she is by this gem:

Rice: Everyone Else Failed

You may think that the Bush administration’s strategy is the Middle East – including the war in Iraq – isn’t going so well. This morning Condoleezza Rice offered a different perspective. Not only is the administration’s policy successful, it is the only administration that has been successful for the last six decades:

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course.

The Modern Common Definition of "Conspiracy"

When someone propagates a story that the government did something really horrible but that the government won't admit that they did it-- it is a crazy conspiracy not worth considering, no matter how obvious the government's complicity is and no matter how horrible the crime.

I.E.-- as long as the government won't admit that it did this particular deed, it is a conspiracy theory to accuse them of doing it.

How Many Contradictions Can Fit Into One Phone Call?

This is a great piece:
« Let’s Roll ! » : Let’s deconstruct a phone call !

Basically the piece goes over the various news accounts of Todd Beamer's call from flight 93 and finds that every possible aspect of the call has conflicting accounts in the media. All I can figure is that the call is bogus and has been essentially made up by the various people involved in propagating the story of the call, such as Lisa Beamer and Lisa Jefferson, and the various media figures involved in spreading this propaganda.

A less sinister explanation is that the call was real but was actually very short and the two Lisa's have embellished the details considerably. The problem with this theory is that suppoosedly the call was recorded and also listened in on by the FBI, and so there should be a hard record of what was said in the call. But one might think the FBI would set the record straight about what was in the call-- or alternatively try to shut the women up, like they tried to silence other 9/11 witnesses.

But no, it seems as though the call was purposefully propagated as propaganda, and that much of it was simply made up.

So Much for the NY Times' New Public Editor

and the idea that he might open up some windows at the "old grey lady".

Mr. Calame's first real column is responding to wing-nuts criticizing the NYTimes coverage of the CIA air rendition story:

The Thinking Behind a Close Look at a C.I.A. Operation
By BYRON CALAME

A STRIKING number of readers have denounced The New York Times for describing the Central Intelligence Agency's covert air operations for transporting suspected terrorists in a Page 1 article on May 31.

The 2,900-word article focused on a C.I.A.-affiliated company, Aero Contractors Ltd., whose planes are often used when the agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country. The legal term for this is rendition, and the practical result is interrogation in a country with looser rules on what constitutes torture. Given the heated public debate over the rendition program, the article's detailed look at the C.I.A. air operations was especially controversial.

The generally strident e-mail messages demanded to know why The Times had decided to publish information that the readers believe will aid terrorists and make life in the United States less safe for everyone - especially the people carrying out the operation. Most of them didn't seem to be aware that the once-secret air operations had been mentioned in earlier articles and broadcasts elsewhere.

So it seems like an apt time to explore with readers The Times's process for handling covert intelligence stories as the war on terrorism continues. We'll start with a fairly typical reader complaint letter, and then consider a response prepared by one of the reporters and sent by the public editor's office to most of the readers who wrote to us about the article. Finally, I'll offer some comments from Times editors and my thoughts about the process.

Granted, he is defending the paper against these charges, but jeesh, this is the top priority for him? Responding to wing-nuts? After I and others wrote to him asking for more investigation into 9/11?

We're screwed.

LIAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I couldn't resist blasting this: Rice Says Administration Told Americans Iraq Would Be A “Generational Commitment”.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked if “the Bush administration fairly [can] be criticized for failing to level with the American people about how long and difficult this commitment will be?” Rice responded:

[T]he administration, I think, has said to the American people that it is a generational commitment to Iraq.

She is a pathological liar.

Although she did use the weasel words "I think". But overall, she is fucking lying her ass off.

What a disgrace to the position of Secretary of State.

Three schools of thought regarding the 9/11 NORAD wargames

1) the military/NORAD runs wargames all the time and 9/11 was no different-- it was just the novel threat that caught everyone off guard. This is the official explanation, of course. The official story also appears to be that wargames should not have called away the interceptors that were on constant alert (sort of like if the firemen at a station were involved in a training exercise, they would still leave some firemen at the station in case of a fire). The main problem with this scenario is that NORAD knew of the threat of hijacked aircraft being used as missiles, since NORAD had run drills based on this concept prior to 9/11. So they should not have been so confused and unready on 9/11-- particularly with the warnings that were available to the FAA and presumably other government agencies.

2) the multiple NORAD wargames were the main reason the 9/11 hijacked planes were not intercepted, and this was by design. This is promoted heavily by Mike Ruppert ("Crossing the Wilderness") and Mark Rabinowitz (Oil vs Empire website). The main problem with this scenario is that the wargames should not have called away the interceptors that were on constant alert. However, if the wargames also involved inserting extra blips simulating hijacked airplanes onto FAA and NORAD radar screens, then this would clearly cause a problem with the normal air defense response. Officially, supposedly, these extra blips were removed as soon as the first plane hit the WTC, but by then much of the confusion may have already set in and completely befuddled the interceptor response. For instance, three posts back, where I mention the strange air defense response on 9/11-- the fighters that were sent to intercept the phantom flight 11 were actually sent in the wrong direction intially!* One has to imagine that the wargames may have been one reason for this-- perhaps the commander saw planes coming from over the ocean that were really fake blips from the wargames. One particularly insidious way the wargames could have been used to facilitate 9/11 would have been to keep the extra blips on radar screens even after they were supposed to be removed.

3) the wargames were actually the MEANS by which the 9/11 attacks were carried out-- the wargames were the mechanism by which the rogue elements of the CIA/military programmed planes to fly into the WTC and Pentagon. The attacks were planned in secret under the cover of a live-fly hijacking drill which was run on 9/11. This idea was laid out by Webster Tarpley in "Synthetic Terror 9/11: Made in USA", and I find this idea most compelling. This scenario doesn't have any "problems" except the fact that it involves a very serious conspiracy. This scenario could be folded in with the second scenario where the wargames also distract the normal air response. A double whammy.

*Out over the Atlantic Ocean. See David Ray Griffin's "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions".

The South Tower Demoliiton

Check out this incredible video-- I don't think I've seen this particular clip before-- of the South tower collapse.

There are two remarkable things here.

One is the "squibs" of smoke that shoot out of the tower ABOVE the collapsing section-- several squibs in fact. Explosive charges? What else would shoot jets of smoke out ten and fifteen stories above where the plane crashed and where the fire was? The only other thing that would shoot out smoke is the floors collapsing-- but why would they collapse way up there first?

The second is you can really see the extreme angle that the top of the tower tilts before it simply disintegrates. I still don't understand what drove that upper chunk of building to completely break apart as it falls over. There is no normal explanation for that.

Just When Bush's Ratings on the Iraq War Fall...

NYTimes:Iraqis Found in Torture House Tell of Brutality of Insurgents.

Interestingly, this story has not been picked up yet by CNN, LA Times, Wash Post or MSNBC.

Clearly this is pro-administration propaganda. And remember, the NYTimes is a prized CIA asset.

The Strange Strange Air Defense Response on 9/11

I already knew that officially, according to the 9/11 commission report, no fighters were scrambled successfully in response to the hijackings of flight 11, flight 175, flight 77 and flight 93. This was over a period of almost one hour and 45 minutes, and one hour where it was clear the country was under unprecedented attack. This of course is completely outrageous.

But it wasn't until I read "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions" by David Ray Griffin that I learned that there actually were fighters scrambled rapidly to counter a hijacked aircraft. The problem is, that this hijacked aircraft was officially non-existant. This was the "phantom" flight 11 that continued flying after the "real" flight 11 hit the north tower.

As we know, there are reasons to believe that this aircraft DID exist. However, the important point for now is that this phantom flight 11 officially did not exist.

To quote from Griffin:

...the Commission has generally portrayed FAA personnel as reluctant to notify the military even after they are absolutely confident a hijacking has occurred. But now we are told that a controller, haing a suspicion that must have seemed extremely counterintuitive, expressed this suspicion as a conviction with such confidence to a NEADS technician that this technician passed it on as definite truth to the NEADS commander.

If all this were not implausible enough, we then have to believe that the NEADS commander would, without verifying the truth of this implausible message with the managers at the Boston center, give Langley a scramble order. The 9/11 commission has usually insisted that all such communications follow the the chain-of-command protocol. But here we are told that a conversation between some person at the Boston center and some technician at NEADS-- neither of whom can now be identified-- was sufficient to swing the US military into action.

Highly bizarre, to say the least.

The way this whole episode is treated by the 9/11 commissison undoubtedly indicates they are covering up something important, and my guess that what they are covering up is that this second phantom flight 11 was indeed real, and was a real threat to Washington DC. In fact, for all we really know, this second flight may have been what actually hit the Pentagon.

But the fact that a second mystery flight 11 existed is a killer to the official 9/11 story, especially since we have reason to think that this second flight 11 was important for how the 9/11 hijackings were carried out.

Another interesting possibility is that this second flight 11 was part of the hijacking exercise that was happening on 9/11, and the fighters that were scrambled were also part of that exercise, rather than a real defensive measure. Indeed, the Langley fighters travelled relatively slowly and did not arrive over Washington DC in time to prevent the Pentagon hit. In fact, these fighters initially went the WRONG WAY for some reason-- east over the ocean-- all the more reason to think they were participating in the wargames that morning.

How to Talk to People About 9/11 Truth

Questions posed by me. Answers by "Jack Riddler"/Nicholas Levis, a founding member of 911truth.org.

Q: what way do you recommend talking to neighbors or even strangers about 9/11? How does one start such a conversation? I personally find this incredibly daunting.

A: So do a lot of people. So did I, until I'd done it a thousand times (and each one was different). This is the perennial question and there are many approaches. The most important thing surely is to take your interlocutor seriously and on their own level, and to listen as well as speak. Try not to play "Crossfire," even if that's fun.

I have taken the opportunity of ANY political discussion to simply announce what I thought about 9/11. While many people then say they think the same thing, most people generally start off into one of the pre-set responses about "conspiracy theory" (e.g., "too many people would have to be involved," "where are the whistleblowers," "can they really be that evil," "the idea depresses me," "this is crazy/deluded," "you just want a simple explanation for the world.") So have some quick rejoinders ready and then shoot out the facts. Point out that the official story is a conspiracy theory, and that the worst conspiracy theory was Cheney's claim that Saddam did 9/11.

I have also approached it circuitously, sounding out how people feel about things before "going there." Some people are more tightly wound with the dominant propaganda and all you're going to do at best is get them to question a few things.

One thing to do is to just wear a button that says "Stop the 9/11 Cover-up", "Expose the Deception" or "9/11 Was an Inside Job." Or to give people deception dollars. That will get people started.

In New York we put up signs in visibility actions and all these people will come up to us with their "yeas" and "nays" and long conversations can ensue.

I've gone to many political events with the intent of posing "the 9/11 question" (which generally has to be different in each context). I've thrown it at Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, Dennis Kucinich, the 9/11 Commission itself, etc. etc. This will often get people coming to you afterwards to find out what you mean.

Always be ready with a website that you think is the right entry-level item, and with a book or video recommendation. Point out that it ain't a simple topic and it needs more than a few soundbites.

Nowadays people have the trauma behind them and are ready to talk rationally. Also, most seem to have been exposed to the idea. They might respond, "oh you're one of those people who think there was no plane at the Pentagon." If you get that one, no matter what you think about the Pentagon, odds are your interlocutor already has a strong opinion. Therefore you should be ready to immediately divert the discussion to other items that they may not know about, like the evidence for foreknowledge, fore-planning, the chain of command, etc. etc. I believe in painting the broadest possible canvas so that the details begin to look plausible and connected. If you get too deep into Mohamed Atta's personal life or some technicality of the timeline, many people will glaze over. Just be ready with references and try to motivate them to read on their own.

Irony is great fun but basically it only works with people who already agree with each other. Those who don't either don't get it or take it as disrespect, and there's little point in alienating them.

On the other hand, in contexts where the topic will NEVER be brought up, it's sometimes okay to FORCE it with a brief speech so that the yahoos and undecideds remain aware that there are people out there who don't agree with the official story.

Often all you can do is plant the seed of doubt for the first time; it can take months before people have digested the idea of complicity and are ready to examine it dispassionately, but I guarantee you that the seed-planting later bears fruit in at least half the people you approach.

Q: what film is best to show if one wanted to have a screening about 9/11?

A: A question that inspires passions among the skeptics. Some will swear by films that I consider very sloppy and full of disinfo, i.e. the ones that claim to reveal everything you need to know in a few dramatic visuals.

These same people will tend to consider my choices wimpy, but I think it best to give people time and space to develop the idea of inside job (which so many people initially resist). So I like the combination of "Hijacking Catastrophe" and "The Great Conspiracy." The former makes no claim that the U.S. govt was complicit in 9/11. Rather, it introduces PNAC's plan for world domination and concept of a "new Pearl Harbor" and goes into the post-9/11 actions of the regime, establishing the motive and "who benefits." Then in TGC, Barrie Zwicker sums up some of the best arguments on air defense stand down, 9/11 cover-up commission, Pakistani connection, foreknowledge, historical precedents, and WTC 7. I think it's the most professionally done and accurate of the videos.

Another one I really like is the original "Truth and Lies of 9/11" by Ruppert, from Nov. 2001. This one is a giant, 3-hour history lesson on oil, banking, drugs, CIA and the secret government, and a rather complete case for "Bush Knew".

Look up SGTV - Shadow Government Television - for 3 half-hour segments that cover the stolen election and 9/11. These are very intelligent and have youth appeal.

I think "In Plane Site" and "Loose Change" are embarrassing disasters, easily taken down by the "debunkers." Alex Jones's work is more politically astute (i.e., it has a coherent world-view sort of based on logic by comparison) but really goes over the top; not the right intro for middle class people.

My site, summeroftruth.org, is one gigantic compendium of resource links - many of the earliest and most definitive 9/11 research source articles in the papers, the books, the videos, the films all on one page.

WOW

June 15, 2005 — The interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in 2002 triggered concerns among senior Pentagon officials that they could face criminal prosecution under U.S. anti-torture laws.

Notes from a series of meetings at the Pentagon in early 2003 -- obtained by ABC News -- show that Alberto Mora, General Counsel of the Navy, warned his superiors that they might be breaking the law.

During a January 2003 meeting involving top Pentagon lawyer William Haynes and other officials, the memo shows that Mora warned that "use of coercive techniques ... has military, legal, and political implication ... has international implication ... and exposes us to liability and criminal prosecution."

Mora's deep concerns about interrogations at Guantanamo have been known, but not his warning that top officials could go to prison.

In another meeting held March 8, 2003, the group of top Pentagon lawyers concluded -- according to the memo -- "we need a presidential letter approving the use of the controversial interrogation to cover those who may be called upon to use them."

No such letter was issued.

White House: Tactics Are Legal

Today, the White House insisted that tactics used at Guantanamo Bay are now -- and have been -- legal.

What a bunch of sick fucks at the White House.

Kevin Ryan Speaks Out

Kevin Ryan was an executive at Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the company that certified the steel used in the construction of the World Trade Center, who questioned the common theory that fuel fires caused the Twin Towers to collapse. He lost his job over this brave stand.

Kevin Ryan:

Have you ever found yourself caught between several hundred million people and their most cherished lies? After writing a letter to a government scientist, pleading with him to clarify a report of his work, I found myself in just that situation. The letter was circulated on the internet and for a brief time I became a reluctant celebrity. Of course I stand behind what I wrote, although it was originally intended as a personal message, not an open letter. Since many have asked for clarification, here is my message to all.

To me, the report in question represents a decision point, not just for the US, but for humanity as a whole. We're at a point where we must decide if we will live consciously, or literally give up our entire reality for a thin veneer of lies. In the US these lies include cheap propaganda that passes for journalism, police-state measures that promise security, and mountains of debt that paint a picture of wealth. Additionally we've adopted many implicit self-deceptions, like the idea that we'll always enjoy a limitless share of the world's resources, no matter where these are located or who might disagree.

All people lie to themselves. It's one of the most important things we have yet to accept about our own nature. We lie to ourselves to justify our past actions, to protect our self-image, and to promote ourselves relative to others. This lying is at the root of many of our problems (e.g. nationalism and racism). Until we see this, and strive to understand if not control it, the resulting problems will continue unchecked and the outcome will be certain. Any organism or society that makes self-deception its modus operandi will make many bad, and ultimately fatal, decisions. The day will come when we are collectively fooling ourselves in such a way that we essentially trade everything we have for what's behind our fantasy curtain. It appears that day is near.

The official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a key part of our current self-deception. More importantly, this story may be our last chance to see just how critical our situation is so that we can all stop, and begin working together to solve the real problems we face. These problems, for the US and the world as a whole, amount to a growing storm of factors including environmental changes, resource depletion, and growth in resource usage.[1,2] Undoubtedly the secret Energy Taskforce report of May 2001 would verify this, and help us to understand that our government is responding to some of these threats with a carefully laid out plan. This plan assumes that people cannot rise above their own natural, ego-based self-deception, and therefore few of us will survive the coming storm. In essence, they're betting against us.

Anyone who honestly looks at the evidence has difficulty finding anything in the official story of 9/11 that is believable. It's not just one or two strange twists or holes in the story, the whole thing is bogus from start to end.[3] In my previous job I was in a position to question one part, the collapse of three tall buildings due to fire. But this isn't really a chemistry or engineering problem, and may be best approached initially through statistics.

The three WTC buildings in question weren't all designed the same way and weren't all hit by airplanes. The only thing they seemed to have in common were relatively small and manageable fires, as indicated by the work of firefighters right up to the moment of collapse. From the government's report we know that only a small percentage of the supporting columns in each of the first two buildings were severed, and that the jet fuel burned off in just a few minutes.

To follow the latest "leading hypothesis", what are the odds that all the fireproofing fell off in just the right places, even far from the point of impact? Without much test data, let's say it's one in a thousand. And what are the odds that the office furnishings converged to supply highly directed and (somehow) forced-oxygen fires at very precise points on the remaining columns? Is it another one in a thousand? What is the chance that those points would then all soften in unison, and give way perfectly, so that the highly dubious "progressive global collapse" theory could be born? I wouldn't even care to guess. But finally, with well over a hundred fires in tall buildings through history, what are the chances that the first, second and third incidents of fire-induced collapse would all occur on the same day? Let's say it's one in a million. Considering just these few points we're looking at a one in a trillion chance, using generous estimates and not really considering the third building (no plane, no jet fuel, different construction). (snip)

Clearly, Ryan is a major 9/11 skeptic.

Someone doubtful of Ryan's point of view might say that two of those buildings that collapsed from fire also had large airplanes slam into them, and that made all the difference in what the fire did. Thus, those other hundred steel buildings that caught fire but didn't collapse, didn't have airplanes ram into them. This is a valid point, however one of Ryan's key points is how did the buildings collapse so symmetrically?

And-- WHAT IS THE EXPLANATION FOR WTC7, which did not suffer an airplane hit?

An Attempt to Explain What Would Happen to the Tail of a 757 If Indeed a 757 Hit the Pentagon

Some reasonable but not entirely convincing theories.

The main question is where did this huge section of the plane go? It is not clear at all from the known record and I find it hard to believe that the tail smashed into tiny bits.

So either--
a) the tail flew somewhere out of camera range and later was moved (as the site I link to explains), or
b) a 757 didn't hit the Pentagon

I still tend to believe a Boeing 757/flight77 did not hit the Pentagon, for a variety of reasons. However, I think it is still possible.

Justice for 9/11

If you haven't already done so, please sign the petition.

Just Another Amazing September 11th Coincidence!

Force protection plan a 'timely alert'
By Debbie Sheehan
U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command
Public Affairs Office. FORT MONMOUTH, N.J-- The world will never be the same again. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11 have changed everything; from our sense of security to how we get to work.

"There was a plan in place, but we went from 0 to 60 overnight, so to speak," said Lt. Col. Stephen N. Wood, Garrison commander, here. "By sheer coincidence we were scheduled to conduct "Timely Alert II," a force protection exercise on Sept. 11 and because of that, some of the concrete barriers were already in place."

Wood said people on post told him when they first saw live footage of the events unfolding at the World Trade Center, they thought it was some elaborate training video to accompany the exercise.

Firefighters here said others told them the same thing. "You really outdid yourself this time," a worker said to Captain "Jack" Rindt, training officer for the Fort Monmouth Fire Department. Rindt could only express his sorrow while he acknowledged that indeed, what people were seeing was not a movie, even if it looked like one.

A Victory for Science

Of sorts.

Terri Schiavo's brain really WAS atrophied to half its original size AND she was blind.

As if we didn't already need confirmation what a fucker Frist is, there is also this story from today.

Interesting Comment from "OS3" on NORAD Radar

in my last post:

What is so painfully obvious about the abouve [sic] eroneous [sic] assumption is that it pretends to know the exact capabilities of our theater tactical and national defense grid.

Ask you [sic] yourself- have you ever heard of OTICIX? TADIX? TIBS? GCCS?
FOTC? Thats [sic] just to name a few.

There's no way a cruise missle [sic] would "evade" radar. The notion is rediculuous [sic]. First of all, there's an entire joint based database system that all it does it is look for missles 24 hours a day 365 days a year. One particular facet is called the TBMD Theater Balistic Missle Defense System, which includes but is not limited to Nuclear missiles. This database correlates the performance and characteristic of an "inflight" to even identify what type of missile it could be by using speed, size, point of origin etc etc......

And this database is networked around the world. So where as someone in the caspain [sic] sea may not see a missile in flight because that's not their AOR (Area Of Responsibility) NORAD definately would. And if not NORAD, there more than one local command track information site in that AOR, so someone would have seen it. Period.

Secondly, you need an infrastructure to fire a cruise missle, satalite [sic] or laser to guid [sic] it to its target. You have to give it coordinates....All of these tasks require that someone put the corridinates [sic] in, and essentially aim it. And well, who do you think in the military is just going to input coordinates that are for the Pentagon? You might say that they couldn't know...that a piece of paper just spits out a bunch of numbers and viola you just input them and press go. Whoever fires that missile, as an operator, knows exactly where that missile is going, even more so if its just one.

Lastly, why on earth would planes get close enough to the pentagon to evade NORAD. Well that's exactly why they were commercial aircraft and that's exactly what hit the Pentagon.

When you're using a system like GCCS (Global Command and Control Systems) you have to filter out certain track types.

Why? Do you know how many commercial aircraft there are in the sky at any one moment of the day? Thousands! Can you imagine as a radar operator trying to track each and every one as a hostile threat before 9/11?

So..... let me get this straight, NORAD (or TBMD) tracks the sky constantly to look for missiles-- even over the US (not just things coming from over the ocean). Yet how do they tell a missile from the thousands of commercial craft out there? They filter the commercial craft out. How do they do that? Well, the only way I can think they could screen out a fast traveling commercial jet from a missile is if they look at the plane's transponder or its IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) beacon. But what if the transponder or the IFF beacon is turned off? Wouldn't the plane be picked up by this system? Wouldn't this therefore imply that NORAD/AOR/TBMD knew exactly where the hijacked planes were on 9/11? Am I missing something?

FWIW:
OTICIX= Officer in Tactical Command Information Exchange System
TADIX= Tactical Data Information Exchange System
TIBS= Tactical Information Broadcast System
FOTC= Force Over-the-Horizon Track Coordinator

The Ground Effect: Why a 757 Going 500 mph Could Not Have Hit the Pentagon A Few Feet Off the Ground

The basic idea is a Boeing 757 is simply not designed to fly so fast so close to the ground and simply can't do it. This is because of the huge lift created under this huge plane going so fast. Not to mention there is an effect called "downwash", where the plane creates a huge suction under it as it flies. This would have picked up everything that was under a 757 and thrown it in all directions-- for instance cable spools and electrical generators.

This basically demolishes the official Pentagon story.

Listen to the 6-6-2005 interview with Nila Sagdevan here for details.

Interestingly, a military plane or a global hawk COULD travel so fast that low to the ground.

Maybe the Crash of Flight 93 Isn't So Strange After All?

On March 17, 1960, Northwest Airlines flight 710 left Minneapolis-St. Paul on schedule. It made a scheduled 1/2 hour stop at Chicago and took-off again for the warmth of Miami. On board were 33 men, 23 women, and one baby riding as passengers, along with six crew members. At about 1pm, the 63 people were cruising above a cloud layer at 18,000 feet over Tell City, Indiana.

Then something happened.

Witnesses on the ground heard tearing sounds in the sky. They looked up and saw the thick fuselage of the Electra emerging from the clouds. The entire right wing was missing, and only a stub of the left wing remained attached to the Electra.

The airliner seemed to float for a while, defying the laws of gravity. But then it dipped, diving straight down toward the ground, trailing white smoke and pieces of aircraft. The 63 people entombed in the fuselage struck the muddy ground, vertically, at 618 miles per hour.

All 63 people on board were killed, but there were no bodies- and hardly any aircraft wreckage! The tremendous velocity of the aircraft caused the Electra to telescope when it struck the earth. It created a 60 foot deep crater. Rescuers found nothing at the site of impact larger than a spoon.

Definitely this crash has significant similarities with flight 93; the major difference is that flight 93 had its wings. I think the wings might have slowed down the telescoping effect somewhat for flight 93. Flight 710 fell from the sky after the wings broke off, while flight 93 was supposedly crashed on purpose by the terrorists. Both planes were going similar speeds. Flight 93 supposedly crashed at a 45 degree angle, flight 710 appears to have gone in at a 90 degree angle.

According to Jere Longman's "Among the Heroes", the nose of flight 93 smashed to bits and scattered before the rest of the plane went into the ground, which always seems odd to me. I think if the front broke off and the plane was going at a 45 degree angle, this would tend to inhibit the rest of the plane from going straight into the ground. But in any case, the main point here is that prior to flight 93, there was another plane crash where the plane essentially burrowed into the ground leaving very little visible debris. Thus, a precedent.

This hardly means flight 93 wasn't shot down or anything else weird, just that the crater itself may not be incredibly unusual.

UPDATE: this description I found online of the flight 710 crash is not accurate. There actaully was major pieces of debris sticking out of the ground where flight 710 crashed, such as the tail.* So, this leaves the flight 93 crash suspiciously unique.

*See page 5 of this official crash report.

One of The Most Important Articles Ever Published

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA


How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up


BY CARL BERNSTEIN

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence­ gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America’s leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception . . . .

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Pres International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

. . . . .

From the Agency’s perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community.

. . . . .

THE AGENCY’S DEALINGS WITH THE PRESS BEGAN during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.



American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing us commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against “global Communism.” Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and govern­ment was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner; publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA era and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. “Let’s not pick on some poor reporters, for God’s sake,” William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee’s investigators. “Let’s go to the manage­ments. They were witting” In all, about twenty-five news organizations (including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.

. . . . .

Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue. Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. “You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it,” said one Agency official. “They were genuinely motivated and highly suscep­tible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces—shredded the consensus and threw it in the air.” Another Agency official observed: “Many journalists didn’t give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency.”

. . . . .

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, “You’re going to be a journalist,” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

• Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations — usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. . . .

• Stringers and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms. . . .

• Employees of so-called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers — both English and foreign language — which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. . . .

• Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well-known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as “known assets” and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects.

. . . . .

MURKY DETAILS OF CIA RELATIONSHIPS with individuals and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency’s use of journalists for intelligence purposes.

• The New York Times. The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy . . . to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

. . . . .

CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency’s working rela­tionship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions.

. . . . .

• The Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.

. . . . .

At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley’s coopera­tion with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant’s investigators. “It wouldn’t do any good,” said one CBS executive. “It is the single subject about which his memory has failed.”

. . . . .

• Time and Newsweek magazines. According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic expe­rience.

. . . . .

At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of several foreign correspondents and stringers under ar­rangements approved by senior editors at the magazine.

. . . . .

“To the best of my knowledge:’ said [Harry] Kern, [Newsweek’s foreign editor from 1945 to 1956] “nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA.... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on .... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side.” CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive.

. . . . .

When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency. . . . But Graham, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.
. . . . .

Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.
. . . . .

• Other major news organizations. According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news‑gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, . . . Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and the Miami Herald. . . .


“And that's just a small part of the list,” in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files ‑ a course opposed by almost all of the thirty‑five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.

COLBY CUTS HIS LOSSES

THE CIA’S USE OF JOURNALISTS CONTINUED virtually unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.


He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his most valuable intelligence assets in the journalistic community.

. . . . .

After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” . . . The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.

The Agency's unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter's job;[i] and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.

Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977


[i] [Earlier in the article, Bernstein had stated the following:] Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the busi­ness. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work; he is ac­corded unusual access, by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off-limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long-term personal relationships with sources and — perhaps more than any other category of American operative — is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.

9/11 Verses

Cool site with lots of links to interesting and useful 9/11 resources.

For instance, this site links to lots of excellent audio files.

I've only begun to explore the site.

A Curious Article on Flight 93

in the Pittsburgh TRIBUNE-REVIEW:

A few minutes before the crash, John Hixon was outside with his dog when he looked up and saw Flight 93 cast a large shadow over a pond at his Delmont home.

The jetliner appeared to be gliding, he said, because the turbines in the plane's engines were revolving in a low, soft whir as it cruised over Westmoreland County.

"It was making a funny sound," Hixon said. "It was flying awfully low, and almost hit the tree tops. It went over the top of my neighbor's house and then it was gone."

Gliding? Well that certainly doesn't fit the conventional story of flight 93 going down at almost 600 miles per hour. Why were the engines off?

As the ill-fated Flight 93 passed over his district before going down, U.S. Rep. John C. Murtha watched the New York attacks on television.

The Cambria County Democrat was in a meeting with House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri in Room 210 of the Capitol when the first two hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center. They had the TV on as they were conducting business.

"We recognized immediately it was not an accident," Murtha said, but added that he kept working and went on to another subcommittee meeting for a defense bill. A few minutes later, he got a call from a Defense Department employee who said a bomb had gone off in the Pentagon.

"Then, we saw people running past our doorways. The police ran in and said, 'A plane is coming to Washington and we think the target is the Capitol.' We evacuated the building."
(snip)
Murtha, who flew to the crash site in a Blackhawk military helicopter, said his impression was that the hijacked jetliner disintegrated upon impact, with the tail collapsing into the front. Considering that debris was found miles away, he believes the plane started to come apart during the struggle on board.

Flight 93 was coming apart before it crashed? Why would it do that?

And a bomb went off at the Pentagon?

More Evidence of a Bogus War on Terrorism

Washington Post:

Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."

Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government's efforts against terrorism.

But the numbers are misleading at best.

An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.

Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.

Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here. Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States.

Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.

Just one in nine individuals on the list had an alleged connection to the al Qaeda terrorist network and only 14 people convicted of terrorism-related crimes -- including Faris and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui -- have clear links to the group. Many more cases involve Colombian drug cartels, supporters of the Palestinian cause, Rwandan war criminals or others with no apparent ties to al Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.

But a large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance -- through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck -- and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.

Why am I not surprised by this?

A handy-dandy list of the suspects is here.

Why I Question the Pentagon Hit

Of the many aspects of 9/11, perhaps the most widely discussed and most controversial issue is whether something besides flight 77 hit the Pentagon. As I have gone over on this blog several times, I think something strange happened there that can't be explained by the official story.

I think it is possible that flight 77 hit the Pentagon, but there are just a few unlikely aspects about it. If it was flight 77, then the plane was likely piloted by remote control. As well, the plane may have carried an explosive device. But even those modifications to flight 77 don't explain everything.

I know I am being stubborn about this, much to the displeasure of certain 9/11 skeptics who believe questioning the Pentagon hit is counter-productive to the "cause". But I would like to understand how a 757 could fly in the constricted space low to the ground, puncture a fuselage-sized hole with minimal wing contribution, explode massively, create the "exit hole" but leave so little clear debris.

But you know what? I am in good company. Both Webster Griffin Tarpley and David Ray Griffin, two high-profile 9/11 skeptics, also question the pentagon hit. As long as they question what happened at the Pentagon, I think I am on safe ground.

But what is really needed to settle this issue is:
1) either the FBI to show the reassembled plane they say they put together using recovered parts from the Pentagon.
or
2) for the FBI to release other videos that they confiscated of the attack
or
3) for the Pentagon to release the other frames of their security camera video that thye clipped out.

Just How Pathetic Is the FBI?

Jeff Wells:

What's really fascinating is the "sobering admission" that the FBI should have known that terrorists were training at American flight schools. But I'm not talking about the Phoenix Memo, Zacarias Moussaoui and Colleen Rowley, though that's what they are talking about. As much as these trails suggest intention - and let's remember, they all lead to Special Agent Dave Frasca and his Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters - the talking point has always been incompetence, though Frasca was the one promoted.

And here's my fascination: for an agency which, before 9/11, appeared clueless that members of al Qaeda were training at flight schools, the FBI inexplicably and immediately knew, upon the attacks, which flight schools al Qaeda members had attended. And this was long before suspects should have been identified.

Venice Florida's Huffman Aviation was the principal flight school used by Mohammed Atta and associates, though used for what is a good question, as Atta was already a pilot. (The best answer may be a familiar one to students of deep politics: trafficking narcotics.) A former Huffman manager told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker that a carload of FBI agents pulled up outside his house in the middle of the day, on the day of the attack.

"They were outside my house four hours after the attack," he says in Welcome to Terrorland. Hopsicker writes that "they didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut."

The shaken source had quit Huffman because he'd found the workplace to be something else than he'd expected. Something, well, spooky: "I had to leave and get out. I wish I didn't know as much as I know. I told them they had nothing to fear from me."

What did he know?

"[T]hese guys [Atta et al] were double agents.... I gleaned early on that the operation I was working for had government protection. They were let into this country. How did the FBI get here so soon? Ask yourself: How'd they get here so soon?"

And note: when he says "here," he doesn't mean Huffman Aviation; he means his own house. So, only four hours after the attack, the FBI didn't merely know enough to visit Atta's flight school; it knew enough to visit the home of a former employee of Atta's flight school who had quit because he suspected Atta and his cadres were double agents. It wasn't investigating the attacks, it was intimidating witnesses.

In the August 25, 2003 edition of The New York Observer, author Gail Sheehy recounts an exchange following a formal meeting between senior FBI agents and the 9/11 widows known as the "Jersey Girls." Kristen Breitweiser was having difficulty reconciling something:

"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the US? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously FBI agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply.

Amazing, isn't it, how the FBI's luck changed?

Rather than drop the ball, the FBI ran with it, though some tried to call foul. For instance, those agents who contacted attorney David Schippers about imminent attacks in lower Manhattan, and even provided the proposed dates and targets, and names of suspects, after their own investigations had been squashed and their careers threatened.

Neocon Foreknowledge of 9/11?

Extremely intriguing find by Paul Thompson:

Mid-September 2001-October 2001
"Pentagon Tells Ex-CIA Director to Tie Iraq to 9/11"
It is later reported that "Within just a few days" of 9/11, Richard Perle convene(s) the Defense Policy Board "to discuss how Washington could use the incidents as justification for attacking Iraq, and (ex-CIA director and prominent neoconservative James) Woolsey (is) tasked to go to Europe to collect evidence that Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda. He spen(ds) many weeks on that mission, emerging with the story that an unnamed informant had told Czech intelligence that he had seen the leader of the Sep. 11 skyjackers meet with an Iraqi agent in Prague in the April before the attack. Even though the report was dismissed as not credible by US, British, French, and Israeli intelligence agencies, it (becomes) the basis--endlessly repeated by Woolsey and other neocons on television talk shows and in op-ed pages of major newspapers--of a major propaganda campaign against Iraq..." (Foreign Policy In Focus, 4/8/03) Woolsey starts his propaganda campaign two days after 9/11 with an article attempting to connect Iraq to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He claims that Iraqi intelligence helped bomber Ramzi Yousef steal the identity of a Kuwaiti student studying at a college in Wales. He argues that if his theory is correct, "then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again." (New Republic, 9/13/01) Woosley or someone else connected to US intelligence appear to have been pursuing this line of inquiry shortly before 9/11. The London Times notes shortly after 9/11, "Until two months ago the US security agencies had never asked anyone at the college to verify Ramzi Yousef's confession of his days in Wales. Why they suddenly re-opened the files on him only seven weeks before the suicide attacks in America is not clear." (London Times, 9/22/01)

What I find really intriguing is the London Times article mention that someone started pursuing new investigative leads into Yousef (who had been convicted of his role in the 1993 WTC bombing plot in 1997 and was safely locked away in solitary confinement a Supermax prison, unable to communicate with anyone in the outside world), seven weeks before 9/11. I strongly suspect that Woolsey was involved in this investigation before 9/11 - there's no way he could have cogently argued a highly complicated argument trying to tie Yousef to Iraq in a roughly 24 hour time period after 9/11, assuming someone gave him that info immediately and he did little else. He had to have been working on it before 9/11. If he just happened to be working on a hunch in the vague hopes that it would be useful to tie Iraq and al-Qaeda together at some point in the future, it would have been a really remarkable hunch because the Yousef argument had so much extra punch when it turned out that the WTC was hit.

I would bet that the ex-CIA director Woolsey had foreknowledge of a major terrorist attack and was specifically trying to tie Iraq into it.

I suppose the innocuous explanation is that Woolsey knew of a coming attack and was trying to get info about it from Yousef. This seems implausible for two reasons:
1) Woolsey was/is a neocon with a strong agenda of attacking Iraq,
2) Why would Yousef have any knowledge of a new plot if he had been in solitary confinement for four years?

The Pristine American Airlines Debris on the Pentagon Lawn

Most people who've looked at the pictures of the Pentagon crash have seen this picture of what clearly seems to be a chunk from the fuselage of an American Airlines plane:

757 debris on Pentagon lawn 
This piece of debris has generated a lot of debate, but one thing that should not be debateable is that if this piece came from flight 77, then it came from the first third of the fuselage:

An American Airlines 757 

According to the conventional version of flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, the front of the fuselage knocked a hole in the wall and penetrated into the building, and then the plane blew up as it impacted inner columns and as the wings hit the building. This would mean this piece of debris HAD to go back out through the impact hole, through the explosion, to get back on the lawn. This piece would seem, therefore to be a 9/11 version of the "pristine bullet", since it has emerged all by itself onto the lawn, relatively unscathed from the fire.

So here are the questions:
1) If this piece of debris was blown off the fuselage of American flight 77, how exactly did it get on the lawn, at least a hundred feet from where the plane hit the building?
2) How come this piece does not look the least bit singed or soot-stained?
3) Doesn't this piece indicate the fuselage blew up? If so, why aren't there many more pieces of fuselage debris around it on the lawn?
4) If the front of the fuselage blew up, then why aren't interior content of the fuselage on the lawn such as luggage and seats and bodies?
5) If the rest of the fuselage and wings and tail blew into small pieces of metal confetti, as some would like to believe, then how come this piece came off in such a large chunk?

While I have a hard time believing this piece was planted on the lawn by some person after the crash, I can't see how it came from flight 77 either-- by the conventional story anyway.

The only thing I can figure is this piece of debris was from another plane crash and was put in some sort of container that was blown up as the smaller plane/missile impacted the Pentagon.

What the $#@!%& Hit the Pentagon????

Yesterday I spent a lot of time (too much time actually) on the Democratic Underground 9/11 board arguing with a supporter of the official story about whether flight 77 hit the Pentagon. This person basically thinks I am crazy for not accepting the official version of events, and maybe I am. But then again, maybe I am not.

In any case, I thought it would be worthwhile to go through the possibilities in a somewhat systematic way, and perhaps this will shed some new light on this problem.

A. Problems with the Official Flight 77 Scenario.:
1) how did the incompetent Hani Hanjour pilot the plane in such a tight circular descent and come in perfectly at ground level without hitting the ground?
2) what happened to the wings upon impact? In particular, the right wing must have broken off in large pieces but is nowhere to be seen.
3) what happened to the tail upon impact? The tail should have suffered the least damage and considering its size, should not have entered the impact hole.
4) how did the plane, with its engines just inches off the ground, navigate around the large cable spools and large electrical generator in front of the pentagon but sitll manage to hit between the first and second floors?
5) how come so little plane debris was found?
6) what happened to the black boxes? Wouldn't they be of interest in reconstructing the plane's path? If they were damaged as to be unreadable, how could human remains be found that could produce viable DNA? (the same can be asked if the plane debris disappeared by incineration.)
7) why the hijacker crash in such an odd, sparsely populated part of Pentagon?
8) what produced the large, round, soot-singed exit hole on the A-E drive?
9) why didn't the air defenses for Washington DC and the Pentagon intercept this hijacked plane?
10) why is the FBI hiding videos of this crash?
11) why didn't people on the ground who witnessed the jet say anything about the incredible loud noise a 757 would make going so fast so low to the ground?

All these problems present major problems for the official story, and thus the official story is almost impossible (but not completely impossible).

B. Problems with a Scenario Where Flight 77 is Piloted by Remote Control.:
1) what happened to the wings upon impact? In particular, the right wing must have broken off in large pieces but is nowhere to be seen.
2) what happened to the tail upon impact? The tail should have suffered the least damage and considering its size, should not have entered the impact hole.
3) how did the plane, with its engines just inches off the ground, navigate around the large cable spools and large electrical generator in front of the pentagon but sitll manage to hit between the first and second floors?
4) how come so little plane debris was found?
5) what produced the large, round, soot-singed exit hole on the A-E drive?
6) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
7) why didn't the air defenses for Washington DC and the Pentagon intercept this hijacked plane?
8) why is the FBI hiding videos of this crash?
9) why didn't people on the ground who witnessed the jet say anything about the incredible loud noise a 757 would make going so fast so low to the ground?


This scenario is better than the official story, it can explain the plane's flight path better and why the black boxes might be covered up, but cannot explain the physical evidence. This scenario is feasible but not highly likely.

C. Problems with a Scenario Where a Remote-Controlled Boeing 757 that is not Flight 77 Hits the Pentagon.:
1) what happened to the wings upon impact? In particular, the right wing must have broken off in large pieces but is nowhere to be seen.
2) what happened to the tail upon impact? The tail should have suffered the least damage and considering its size, should not have entered the impact hole.
3) how did the plane, with its engines just inches off the ground, navigate around the large cable spools and large electrical generator in front of the pentagon but sitll manage to hit between the first and second floors?
4) how come so little plane debris was found?
5) what produced the large, round, soot-singed exit hole on the A-E drive?
6) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
7) what happened to the real flight 77 and its passengers?
8) the cover-up must have involved planting tissue remains into the coroner's specimens that were used to identify the victims.
9) why didn't the air defenses for Washington DC and the Pentagon intercept this hijacked plane?
10) why is the FBI hiding videos of this crash?
11) why didn't people on the ground who witnessed the jet say anything about the incredible loud noise a 757 would make going so fast so low to the ground?


While this scenario is better than the official story-- it can explain the plane's flight path better and why the black boxes might be covered up, but cannot explain the physical evidence. This scenario is less feasible than Senario B, and thus is not highly likely.

D. Problems with the Scenario where a Bunker-Busting Cruise Missile Hit the Pentagon:
1) who stole the missile and programmed it to hit the Pentagon?
2) what happened to the real flight 77 and its passengers?
3) the cover-up must have involved planting tissue remains into the coroner's specimens that were used to identify the victims.
4) scores of eye-witnesses say they saw a large jet
5) plane parts must have been planted somehow.

Thus, this scenario can explain the physical evidence much better but gets very sticky when it gets to what happened to the real flight 77 and the planting of evidence, not to mention the real problems with eye-witnesses. But certainly the missile theory can explain much that the Flight 77 theory can not. Overall this scenario is possible but relatively unlikely.

E. Problems with the Scenario that an A-3 SkyWarrior Firing a Missile (a la Karl Schwarz) Hit the Pentagon:
1) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
2) what happened to the real flight 77 and its passengers?
3) the cover-up must have involved planting tissue remains into the coroner's specimens that were used to identify the victims.
4) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
5) the 757 landing gear must have been planted.

Thus, this scenario can explain the physical evidence much better but gets very sticky when it gets to what happened to the real flight 77 and the planting of evidence. But certainly this theory can explain much that the Flight 77 theory can not. Overall this scenario is surprisingly the best fit so far.

F. Problems with the Scenario that some other sort of military plane carrying a bunker-busting bomb or missile hit the Pentagon:
1) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
2) what happened to the real flight 77 and its passengers?
3) the cover-up must have involved planting tissue remains into the coroner's specimens that were used to identify the victims.
4) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
5) the 757 landing gear must have been planted.

Again, this scenario can explain the physical evidence better but gets caught up when it gets to what happened to the real flight 77 and the planting of evidence. But certainly this theory can explain much that the Flight 77 theory can not. Overall this scenario is a surprisingly good fit.


G. Problems with a Scenario where pre-planted explosives were used to damage the Pentagon and a low flying 757 over-flew the Pentagon at the same time as the explosives went off.:
1) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
2) what happened to the real flight 77 and its passengers?
3) the cover-up must have involved planting tissue remains into the coroner's specimens that were used to identify the victims.
4) who or what was piloting the plane remotely and how was this orchestrated?
5) the 757 landing gear and other plane parts must have been planted.
6) witnesses would have seen the plane fly over.

This scenario might possibly explain the physical evidence better than the official story but gets caught up when it gets to what happened to the real flight 77 and the planting of evidence. Overall this scenario is weak but not impossible.

Bottom line: I cannot rule out that flight 77 hit the Pentagon. However, the physical evidence is not strong for this. From other facts we know about 9/11, I think it is quite possible that there was a massive cover-up involving flight 77 and what hit the Pentagon. I don't think the government has proven its case that flight 77 hit the Pentagon and they will need to show more evidence to convince me. (Like I'm sure they care.)

Yes, the Failure to Detect the 9/11 Plot by the FBI Is All Just Due to Incompetence and Bungling

...even when the CIA intentionally blocks information about the 9/11 hijackers.

The case of the San Diego hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Al-Hazmi, has been a source of friction between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. since Sept. 11, and the inspector general cites missteps and communication failures at both agencies.

The two men were known to have taken part in a meeting of Qaeda operatives in Malaysia in 2000 and entered the United States weeks later, settling in San Diego before taking part in the Sept. 11 attacks as two of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

The F.B.I. was aware of the Malaysia meeting but was not formally told by the C.I.A. that Mr. Midhar had gotten a visa to enter the United States, the report found. Still, an F.B.I. agent assigned to the C.I.A. knew about the visa and sought to share that and other information about Mr. Midhar with F.B.I. officials in New York and Washington, even drafting a memorandum.

But the report found that a C.I.A. supervisor blocked its sending, saying the agent did not have the proper authority. After another inquiry, the agent did not follow up.

The incident underscored problems in the use of F.B.I. agents assigned to the C.I.A. who found their jobs there were "ill-defined and with little direction," the report said.

Other missed opportunities came when F.B.I. agents failed to aggressively question a San Diego informant who was renting the men an apartment. Other key pieces of information were not passed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I., the report found.

The F.B.I. in New York remained unaware of much of what the C.I.A. knew about the two men when bureau agents undertook a cursory search for them weeks before the attacks, the report said.

The New York office assigned few resources and an inexperienced agent to track the men, and "little urgency was given to the investigation," the report said. "The F.B.I. was not close to locating Midhar and Hazmi before they participated in the Sept. 11 attacks," it concluded.

See? It's all just bureaucratic bungling and a lack of urgency. I guess the FBI and CIA simply didn't know what terrorists could do before 9/11. (eye roll)

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

Mounting scandals for Bush.

Nothing about 9/11 yet, though.

Somehow I have a feeling Bush will get nailed over something-- just not over the most shameful act of treason in our nation's history: 9/11.

Bush as Bad as Pinochet

Paul Craig Roberts makes a good case.

General Augusto Pinochet, approaching his 90th year, has survived many years of legal harassments resulting from alleged human rights violations during the period of the Chilean military government's war on terrorism. On the basis of a U.S. Senate staff report, Pinochet is now going to be investigated for stashing $13 million in U.S. banks.

What is interesting about the Pinochet case is that everything the former president of Chile is accused of, George W. Bush and his cronies are guilty of. Indeed, why are Senate staff wasting their time on 30-year-old alleged crimes of an elderly Chilean when the president of the United States ought to be in the dock? The prosecutor's brief – the Downing Street Memo – is already written.

In December 2004, a Chilean appeals court ruled that Pinochet could be put on trial for murders resulting from Operation Condor. An agreement by six South American governments in the 1970s, Condor was a "coalition of the willing" organized to hunt down and kill the terrorists who were attempting to destabilize their societies.

How does Operation Condor differ from the actions of the U.S. and Israeli governments to hunt down and kill terrorists? Both George Bush and Ariel Sharon have used precision missiles, snipers, and special forces hit teams to "take out" suspected terrorists, often with collateral damage. Why can Bush and Sharon conduct a war on terror, but not Pinochet?

Given what we know about the "collateral damage" that often accompanies the "taking out" of terrorists and about the large number of innocent detainees mistaken for terrorists and held in America's gulag of detention centers, it is more than likely that Pinochet's war on terror had collateral damage of its own.

LIAR

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President George W. Bush said Tuesday that there was "nothing farther from the truth" than allegations in a British government memorandum that his administration had decided to go to war in Iraq months before he took his case to the American people.

The British document -- known as the Downing Street memo since its publication in a British newspaper --says the Bush administration considered an invasion of Iraq to be "inevitable" as early as July 2002 and that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."

I Apologize If This Is Getting Tedious

...but there are two ways to treat the flight 93 hijacking story: either to try to make sense of the official story or to assume it was fake.

As I posted in my last post, if we assume the flight 93 hijacking was real, then there simply has to be a cover-up of some sort.

There is NO FUCKING WAY that flight 93 was not tracked and intercepted by NORAD (although it is interesting to think exactly what kind of plane was being tracked by NORAD-- the real flight 93 or some fake decoy flight).

But beyond that, there are too many reasons to think that the flight 93 hijacking was fake, as I went over in this post:

Reasons to think the flight 93 hijacking was fake:

1) there was a live-fly hijacking exercise happening on 9/11

2) the pilots really should not have been taken by surprise by the hijackers-- they should have alerted air traffic control of the hijackers long before the hijackers entered the cockpit:

a) the pilots and flight attendants of the flight had a special procedure planned for a hijacking, they were aware of the possibility of a hijacking

b) at least 8 minutes elapsed between when the hijack was first reported and when the struggle in the cockpit occurred. This should have given the flight attendants plenty of time to warn the pilots of the hijacking. The pilots could have easily radioed Air Traffic Control or pushed the hijacking signal on the transponder-- but they didn't!

c) the pilots should have known about the WTC attacks and hijackings shortly after 9am, almost a half hour before the cockpit struggle

d) United Airlines was warning all its flights of hijackings after the WTC attacks, the flight 93 pilots should have received the warning

3) the passenger phone calls have seriously conflicting accounts of the hijacking, suggesting that the passengers may have been "making up" details of the hijackings or that the "passengers" were working from an intentionally misleading script

4) the fact that shortly before 10am, someone piloting flight 93 requested a flight path to go to Washington DC. Why would a hijacker do this? This sounds more like a pilot decided to call off the hijacking exercise and pilot a normal course.

5) the evidence that flight 93 was damaged by a missile before it crashed is strong. One reason a shoot-down may have occurred is that they didn't want the flight 93 pilots and passengers to be able to talk about the hijacking drill.

Reasons to think the flight 93 hijacking was NOT fake:
1) the unlikelihood that a "live-fly hijacking drill" would be run with ordinary passengers
2) the unlikelihood that the passengers could fake their reactions in the phone calls
3) the unlikelihood that this could be covered up.

While it is up to you to decide which set of reasons is stronger, I will point out that in the "Reasons to think the flight 93 hijacking was NOT fake" list:
1) we don't really know the key people on the flight were ordinary random passengers
2) only some of the passengers-- the key ones such as Todd Beamer and Jeremy Glick-- had to fake their reactions
3) lots of things are covered up about 9/11 and so saying there couldn't be a cover-up doesn't fly (so to speak). Moreover, the crash of flight 93, by whatever reason, is clearly being cover-up.

In the "Reasons to think the flight 93 hijacking was fake" list:
1, 2 and 3 are hard facts. 4 and 5 are speculative but suggestive.

Last night I actually found one other reason to think the flight 93 hijacking was fake.

This has to do with the radio transmissions made from flight 93 heard over the airwaves by air traffic control and other planes. As Joe Vialls explains:

...the Cleveland Center tape proves unequivocally that the “Arab Hijacker with Bomb” calls were complete fakes.
At the start of the tape a young American voice, which appears to be Flight 93’s co-pilot, confirms check-in at the aircraft’s intended cruising altitude of Flight Level 350 [35,000 feet] , and then looks for conflicting air traffic as instructed by Cleveland Center. But after these two brief exchanges with Cleveland there are no further proven transmissions from United Flight 93 at all. Nor are there any proper RDF [radio-direction-finding] logs available to prove the point of origin of the wholly independent “bomb” claims, which could easily have been transmitted from another unidentified aircraft, or from the ground.
Paradoxically, if we allow that the initial two calls from United Flight 93 regarding cruising altitude and conflicting traffic are genuine, then there is a very strong case for claiming the later calls about a "bomb” did NOT originate from the same aircraft. The quality of the first transmission is Signal strength 5, Readability 5, (5/5) while the quality of the later “bomb” transmissions is at best 5/1. It is ridiculous to claim that transmission quality would [or could] drop suddenly from 5/5 to 5/1 because a mythical “hijacker” was “excited”...

(snip)
Then it was time for phase two, i.e. leaving guttural and thus menacing “bomb” messages on the Cleveland working channel tape, which the perpetrators knew would eventually be examined by NTSB and FAA investigators. The trick here is to notice their exact timing. “Panicky Hijackers” have no regard at all for correct radio telephony procedures because they don't know what they are, so any genuine uncoordinated "panicky" transmissions would have certainly overlapped other aircraft communications on this busy channel, resulting in severely distorted and partly unreadable threats.
The unknown perpetrators of this covert operation were not stupid, and knew that for the faked threats to be “correctly” interpreted by the authorities later, they would have to be transmitted precisely in between other aircraft working the Cleveland channel. Notice on the tape itself, that each of the two “we have a bomb on board” messages is very carefully inserted BETWEEN transmissions from Cleveland Center and the other aircraft. There is not the slightest trace of overlap. Though a “panicky hijacker” might accidentally manage this once with a long garbled transmission, the odds of him doing it twice in a row in a ten-minute period are more than ten million-to-one against.

While I don't know about these specific odds, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the hijacker, broadcasting over the common frequency "by accident", would nicely insert their transmissions into open air space. This seems to me to strongly indicate that the "bomb" transmission was a fake, meant to be heard, which throws into question the whole flight 93 hijacking. This, taken together with the other reasons I mentioned for thinking the flight 93 hijacking was fake, is as close as one can get to solid proof using evidence that is in the public record. The actual tape recording of these transmissions can be heard at The Memory Hole.

A Clear Cover-Up Over When Flight 93 Was Hijacked

According to this timeline from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the hijacking started at 9:20am. It is not clear how they determined this exact time. They reference Tom Burnett's call, but according to Jere Longman's "Among the Heroes", Burnett's first call ended at 9:27am and only lasted ten seconds. The sounds of the cockpit struggle were heard at 9:28am, which would fit with a hijack starting around 8:20am. Certainly Burnett didn't call just as the hijack started. He must have called a few minutes after the hijack started, presumably when he thought it was safe for him to talk. So this puts the hijack starting time around 9:20am or earlier.

What time did the hijacking start?

The reason this is important is because the initial "official" time-line for flight 93 said the FAA reported flight 93 to NORAD as a possible hijacking at 9:16am. However, this 9:16am time was later rejected by NORAD and in the 9/11 commission report, they claim the FAA never warned NORAD of flight 93 being a hijack.

As I posted on earlier, the pilots and flight attendants of flight 93 had a special system worked out in the event of a hijacking which involved the flight attendant phoning the cockpit and using a code-word. There would be time for the flight attendants to alert the cockpit if the hijackers got out of their seats at 9:20am or earlier but didn't attack the cockpit until 9:28am.

What I suspect is that the pilots actually signaled to ground control that they had a hijack starting somewhat before 9:16am, say 9:14am. Given the urgency of what had already happened that day, this message would be passed onto the FAA and NORAD very rapidly. I think there is almost no doubt that NORAD was warned of flight 93 at 9:16am, and that this is being covered up.

I know of no interview with the air traffic controller who handled this hijacking message and very likely this person is being kept incommunicado with the press.

Why would the 9/11 commission deny that NORAD was informed of flight 93?

Here is what they said in their report:

In public testimony before this Commission in May 2003, NORAD officials stated that at 9:16, NEADS received hijack notification of United 93 from the FAA. This statement was incorrect.There was no hijack to report at 9:16. United 93 was proceeding normally at that time.

How is that for logic? Flight 93 couldn't have been hijacked because it was "proceeding normally".

So, a hijack is only apparent when a plane deviates from its course and turns off its transponder?

HOGWASH!

Almost certainly the FAA did notify NORAD of a hijacking at 9:16am, since a NORAD officer even confirmed this in testimony (William Scott testimony, May 23, 2003).

Clearly, the commission is trying to cover up how miserable the US air defense response was to the hijacked flights, and flight 93 was the most pathetic response of all (there was no response according to the official story). So the commission has basically rewritten history and said that NORAD was NEVER NOTIFIED by the FAA.

What is even worse is that the other cover-up is that there was an interceptor following flight 93, but this has been covered-up as well. This is presumably because it raises too many questions about whether there was a shootdown of flight 93 by the interceptor.

A Pamphlet That Will Make You Mad About 9/11 All Over Again

Here.

Islamic Terrorism, 9/11 and The Record of the Bush Administration/US Government: Two Different Scenarios

Which one of these scenarios is more probable?*

*This analysis does not include any specific detail of the 9/11 attacks.

(Abbreviations: AQ = Al Qaeda; BAUSG = Bush administration/United States Government; USIA = US intelligence agencies)

The Overt "Official" Scenario:
--Starting in the late 1970’s, AQ allied itself with the US in the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan and then AQ allied with the US in the fight against Russia in Chechnya, but starting in the 1990’s, AQ started hating the US for a number of reasons, mostly because of the “freedoms” enjoyed by Americans and because of the US alliance with Israel.

--The threat to the US from AQ grows over the years, starting with bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, followed by bombing of African embassies in 1998, then the USS Cole bombing in 2001.

--The threat of AQ culminates in the horrific attacks of 9/11/2001.

--The 9/11 attacks were daring attacks of imagination and caught the US air defenses completely off guard and by surprise.

--Even though USIA were tracking AQ, they did not have good enough penetrance into AQ and were unable to completely unravel the 9/11 plot in time.

--Even though USIA worked closely with the Pakistani intelligence service, who had successfully infiltrated AQ, the USIA were unable to completely unravel the 9/11 plot in time.

--Before 9/11, multiple warnings were issued of an imminent attack by both USIA and foreign intelligence agencies; these warnings even specified that hijacked airplanes might be used and the airplanes might be used as missiles.

--Before 9/11, the US Air Force and NORAD ran exercises simulating hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings, yet the 9/11 attacks took them by surprise.

--Despite the dire threat of a major attack that could kill hundreds or thousands of people, the warnings were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly help the Bush administration’s clear pre-9/11 agenda of invading Iraq, it is just a coincidence that the warnings of an imminent attack were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly strengthen the power of the executive branch and greatly help the Bush administration’s extreme right-wing domestic agenda getting passed, it is just a coincidence that the warnings of an imminent attack were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a major terrorist attack on the World Trade Center would effectively cover-up massive financial fraud that had been taking place, it is just a coincidence that the warnings of an imminent attack were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a major terrorist attack on US soil would provide a perfect distraction from massive corporate fraud (e.g. Enron) and the bursting of the stock market bubble, it is just a coincidence that the warnings of an imminent attack were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly strengthen the power of the military, provide a perfect excuse to increase the US global empire and thus enrich US defense contractor, energy and financial oligarchs, it is just a coincidence that the warnings of an imminent attack were fumbled throughout the BAUSG and thus every security agency throughout the country was caught by surprise by 9/11.

--While a number of FBI employees came forward as whistleblowers and complained that evidence relating to 9/11 had been or was being covered up, these are merely the exaggerated claims of disgruntled employees.

--Although the information technology company Ptech had access to FAA and other government agency computers before 9/11 and was run by a man with terrorist connections, this is not really important or anything that US citizens need to know about.

--After 9/11, potential terrorists were rounded up and detained in the US, the ITAQ base in Afghanistan was attacked, AQ members were rounded up and detained in concentration camps and the AQ organization was severely degraded.

--Two of the key leaders of AQ, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, evaded capture during the invasion of Afghanistan, and they have eluded capture for almost four years, despite living in areas controlled by the US or its ally Pakistan.

--The BAUSG says it is not particularly interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice even though they claim he is responsible for the killings of three thousand Americans.

--Even though Ayman Al-Zawahiri is thought to be the real mastermind behind AQ, he is almost completely ignored by the BAUSG.

--On the basis of a greatly exaggerated WMD threat and vague connections to AQ, Iraq was invaded by the BAUSG and a coalition of troops from non-Islamic countries, thus angering the Islamic world.

--At a time when the BAUSG is trying to placate the Islamic world, the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo scandals come to light, showing that the BAUSG systematically abused prisoners in a way highly insulting to Islamic people.

-- Almost four years after 9/11, there have been no new terrorist attacks on US soil, despite the fact that: 1) that the US is a huge country with thousands of vulnerable targets, 2) people move around the US with essentially unimpeded freedom, and 3) the BAUSG has fostered new hatred of the US by its unprovoked invasion of Iraq and its humiliation of Islamic people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.



The Covert "Conspiratorial" Scenario:
--Starting in the late 1970’s, AQ allied itself with the US in the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan and then AQ allied with the US in the fight against Russia in Chechnya, but starting in the 1990’s, AQ started worrying about the US for a number of reasons, mostly because of the spread of western freedoms, increased globalization and because of the US alliance with Israel.

--Under the watchful eyes of USIA, the threat to the US from AQ is nurtured over the years, starting with bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, followed by bombing of African embassies in 1998, then the USS Cole bombing in 2001.

--The threat of AQ was allowed by USIA to manifest in the horrific attacks of 9/11/2001.

--The 9/11 attacks were actively facilitated by the BAUSG and the US air defenses were distracted by secret wargames run on 9/11.

--USIA had fully penetrated AQ, and actually recruited AQ agents for the 9/11 plot.

-- Since USIA worked closely with the Pakistani intelligence service, who had successfully infiltrated AQ, USIA had another layer of control over the AQ agents.

--Before 9/11, multiple warnings were issued of an imminent attack by both USIA and foreign intelligence agencies; these warnings even specified that hijacked airplanes might be used and the airplanes might be used as missiles—these warnings may have been made by honest intelligence agents or were a staged part of the 9/11 operation.

--Before 9/11, the US Air Force and NORAD ran exercises simulating hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings; the information from these exercises was used to facilitate the 9/11 attacks.

--The warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--Since a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly help the Bush administration’s clear pre-9/11 agenda of invading Iraq, it was important that warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--Since a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly strengthen the power of the executive branch and greatly help the Bush administration’s extreme right-wing domestic agenda getting passed, it was important that warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--Since a major terrorist attack on the World Trade Center would effectively cover-up massive financial fraud that had been taking place, it was important that warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--Since a major terrorist attack on US soil would provide a perfect distraction from massive corporate fraud (e.g. Enron) and the bursting of the stock market bubble, it was important that warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--Since a major terrorist attack on US soil would greatly strengthen the power of the military, provide a perfect excuse to increase the US global empire and thus enrich US defense contractor, energy and financial oligarchs, it was important that warnings of 9/11 were specifically intercepted by moles throughout the BAUSG and thus honest security agents throughout the country were caught by surprise by 9/11.

--When a number of FBI employees came forward as whistleblowers and complained that evidence relating to 9/11 had been or was being covered up, they were right.

--The information technology company Ptech had access to FAA and other government agency computers before 9/11 and was run by a man with terrorist connections, and this is part of how the 9/11 attacks were set-up.

--After 9/11, terrorists and many innocent men were rounded up and detained in the US, the AQ base in Afghanistan was attacked after AQ had fled for safety to the mountains of Afghanistan, low-level AQ members were rounded up and detained in concentration camps, the number of AQ agents was depleted but the key AQ leadership was allowed to persist.

--Two of the key leaders of AQ, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, evaded capture during the invasion of Afghanistan, and they have eluded capture for almost four years because they are US intelligence assets.

--The BAUSG is not particularly interested in bringing Osama bin Laden to justice for the killings of three thousand Americans because he isn’t really responsible for the 9/11 attacks and he is a useful US intelligence asset.

--Ayman Al-Zawahiri is an even more useful intelligence asset than bin Laden and thus is easily ignored by the BAUSG.

--On the basis of a greatly exaggerated WMD threat and vague connections to AQ, Iraq was invaded by the BAUSG and a coalition of troops from non-Islamic countries, thus angering the Islamic world; this was done partly on purpose in order to promote a “clash of civilizations” between the US and Islamic world, since the US deemed the Islamic world as a threat top its global supremacy; this was also done to secure the huge Iraqi oil reserves.

--At a time when the BAUSG is ostensibly and overtly trying to placate the Islamic world, the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo scandals come to light, showing that the BAUSG systematically abused prisoners in a way highly insulting to Islamic people; this was done on purpose in order to promote a “clash of civilizations” between the US and Islamic world, since the US deemed the Islamic world as a threat top its global supremacy.

--Because the BAUSG has ultimate control over AQ, there have been no new terrorist attacks on US soil almost four years after 9/11.

Long But Good Take-Down of the Official Pentagon Story

Here.

While I have a couple of quibbles with what this person says, overall he/she makes a lot of good points and brings in some new information I wasn't aware of. In particular the lack of a seismic signal from the Pentagon impact is interesting and somewhat strange. They also point out the weird movement of the fires and the ineffective fire response, and importantly bring up the three blast holes that exit on A-E drive from the C ring.

I Also Spent A Half-Hour Rearranging My Links Section

I broke up the 9/11 links into different categories. I also added a couple of new sites and fixed a few links.

I should point out that Democratic Underground has a fairly lively 9/11 discussion board, but I can't seem to link to it directly, so you have to go to the site, go into Disucssion Forums, go into Politics & Issues Forums, then scroll down to September 11th. There is usually something interesting there and often something new.

Link Madness

I just spent an hour and a half trying to figure out how to make my links open new windows, and finally found out how, but now I am not sure I want to do it since it seems to annoy some poeple.

Personally I like having a new window open with a link. Let me know your preference if you have one.

I tried copying the little button Atrios has for choosing if you want new windows, but it didn't work when I put it in my template and I am no programming whiz, that is for sure.

Follow-Up On The Pentagon Generator Story

In my previous post, I described damage to the large electrical generator that was parked in front of the Pentagon.

The damage pattern is strange (of course), but I may have figured out one or two things.

First, a 757 engine and wing track fairing could have produced the damage on the generator IF the starboard wing was tilted down to the starboard side, rather than level or tilted up.

I also said "If the engine was pushing the generator away as it was impacting, wouldn't the gouge be crooked instead of a straight line?" The picture I looked at showed a fairly straight gouge. However this picture shows a crooked gouge consistent with the wing track fairing making a gouge as the engine was pushing the trailer away (look at the lower right hand corner of the magnified view).

So, what this may mean is that the plane was coming in initially at a banked angle, where the starboard wing was banked down, but then when the starboard engine hit the generator, it actually pushed the plane up so that the starboard wing was banked up-- which is the way in which a 757 is thought to have come in. This would actually comport with eye-witnesses who claimed that one wing hit the ground before the plane crashed. But what they were actually seeing was the starboard wing hit the generator.

However, this still doesn't explain the very strange hole in the fence at ground level. Unless the starboard engine actually hit the fence and generator just inches off the ground and smashed the very end of the generator completely. This would make some sense since in this picture (the #5 item), the generator is right next to the corner of the fence. As you can see, right after the Pentagon strike, there is no part of the trailer in that corner of the fence. This would mean the engine took out a huge chunk of the generator trailer (which is possible). The problem then, if this is the case, what made the large dent in the generator and made the gouge mark? Also, at this angle, it seems as though the rest of the wing would have impacted the top of the trailer-- unless the plane was perfectly tilted to avoid this. So even this explanation doesn't completely work.

One minor point is that an A-3 Skywarrior, proposed by Karl Schwarz as the Pentagon attack plane, does not have large wing track fairings that could make this gouge. This doesn't rule out the A-3, but it makes it even harder to explain the generator damage. The A-3 is the one military plane that could pass for a 757.

The last point I'd like to make here is that if you look at this picture that shows all the obstacles in front of the Pentagon shortly before it was hit, one has to wonder why any pilot intent on hitting the building would come in so low when there were so many obstacles in the way! And this picture doesn't even show the large cable spools that were in front of the impact area. I have to think a pilot talented enough to navigate to Washington DC, find the Pentagon, and then make a fast and tight circular descent to impact the Pentagon, would be able to come in with an approach path that would avoid all the obstacles in front of the Pentagon.

Yet More Evidence That The Official Pentagon Story Is BS

I thought the Pentagon "exit hole" was weird, but the story of the electrical generator in front of the impact site is just as strange if not more so.

The view held by people who believe Flight 77 hit the Pentagon is that the plane's starboard engine hit the generator trailer as the plane was coming in just a few feet off the ground. This version says that the engine smashed the top front left of the generator and that a outer flap track fairing on the wing made a deep gouge on the right-hand side top of the generator.

This view is probably best explained by Jean-Pierre Desmoulins, at his site here. He probably gives the most detail explaining how a 757 could produce the damage pattern observed in front of the Pentagon and how the engines impacted various objects in the approach path.

But if you look at this picture here, the idea that the engine just took out the top of the generator is not so easy to accept.

As you can see, several things happened with this generator:
1) There is a large hole in the fence, right at ground level, and two fence poles are knocked inwards, flattened on the ground. The hole in the fence is about the size of a 757 engine.
2) The top left hand side of the generator is crushed. The impact was severe enough to start a fire-- and in fact, this is where much of the smoke comes from in several pictures of the Pentagon impact.
3) The generator was apparently pushed AWAY from the path of the engine, because the posiiton of the generator is not in line with the engine's official path, plus this overhead shot shows a previous orientation of the trailer.
4) A deep gouge was made in the top of the generator, possibly by the outer flap track fairing.

The problem is: NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE!!!

1) How can the fence be crushed in right at ground level, but only the top of the generator be smashed?

2) How can the engine of a plane impact this generator severely and not dramatically alter the plane's course or at minimum knock off the engine?

3) As Killtown explains (scroll down), the bottom of a 757 engine (which is what supposedly hit the generator) is several feet below the wing track fairing. A 757 wing and engine could not have produced the damage pattern on the generator.

4) How could the engine push the generator away but still make the gouge in the top? If the engine was pushing the generator away as it was impacting, wouldn't the gouge be crooked instead of a straight line? This really doesn't make sense.

5) The smashed in top of the generator isn't in the shape of a 757 engine-- it is not round.

From this evidence, I have to conclude the following:

1) A 757 engine and wing track fairing did not produce the damage on the generator. It must have been another type of plane, with a different engine configuration.

2) There must have been SOMETHING ELSE that flew in behind the plane and knocked the fence in and pushed the generator away from the approach path.

Could there have been two planes that went in? Or a non-757 plane followed by a missile?

This latter idea might explain some things, like why the security camera video is severely edited and a missile might explain the exit hole. But this isn't entirely satisfying either.

I welcome any suggestions.

Thanks!

Bombs and Explosions in the WTC Well Before the Collapses

Following up on this post, where I discussed two different men describing explosive events in the WTC basement well before the collapses of the buildings***, I remembered some other relevant stories.

First, is this Dick Eastman story:

Here is evidence supplied by the Head of Security of the WTC on network television indicating that the FBI floors (the 23rd and 24th floors) of the North Tower -- 60 floors below the crashbombing impact -- had been devestated and reduced to debris before the collapse of that tower, and that this same Head of Security himself dug through rubble that had pinned down two people to get those trapped persons out (they were saved, btw.) These floors were, thus bombed sometime between the ariel crashbombing of the building and its total collapse. Most likely it was bombed so that FBI agents working there would not be able or interested in removing critical files and evidence that the people behind the sabotage wanted destroyed.

Second is this fellow, who escaped from the South tower, and was going down the stairs when the plane hit:

My father thought I was still on the 73rd floor, and within 10 seconds of my call watched the second plane hit the South tower. He believed it was all over at that instant. I felt the impact of the explosion that I believed was at my feet. I heard the crashing glass around me as the building rocked. My hands began to shake and my knees buckled. I knew I could not stay where I was and I had to go lower. I made my way to the stairs, passing people along the way. I saw the horror and the fear in several faces as I went by them. I still believed the impact was at my feet and as I descended past floor 50 and floor 40 I was sure I was going to see disaster.

Were bombs planted on lower floors that went off when the plane hit?

This site covers people who witnessed bombs going off in the towers.

The bottom line seems to be that conventional bombs were set in the towers and were detonated when the planes hit-- no doubt using the plane impact as a distraction.

But how these conventional bombs fit in with the eventual total destruction of the towers is not clear. Were they the beginning of the controlled demolition? Or something different? Why would they have bombs go off early but then collapse the building with different bombs? Or did these early bombs help promote the collapse of the buildings by the official pancake model?

***It is highly unlikely that the desctruction they observed was due to the impact of the plane vibrating the basement region.

The Pentagon Hit-- Debunking the Debunkers

This is interesting from 9/11 Dossier (an excellent British 911 site).

But the Killtown site is very extensive in this regard. Nice work there!

Speaking of the WTC Collpase

What the fuck was going on in the basement?

The two decided to ascend the stairs to the C level, to a small machine shop where Vito Deleo and David Williams were supposed to be working. When the two arrived at the C level, they found the machine shop gone.

“There was nothing there but rubble, “Mike said. “We’re talking about a 50 ton hydraulic press – gone!” The two began yelling for their co-workers, but there was no answer. They saw a perfect line of smoke streaming through the air. “You could stand here,” he said, “and two inches over you couldn’t breathe. We couldn’t see through the smoke so we started screaming.” But there was still no answer.

The two made their way to the parking garage, but found that it, too, was gone. “There were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can’t see anything” he said.

They decided to ascend two more levels to the building’s lobby. As they ascended to the B Level, one floor above, they were astonished to see a steel and concrete fire door that weighed about 300 pounds, wrinkled up “like a piece of aluminum foil” and lying on the floor. “They got us again,” Mike told his co-worker, referring to the terrorist attack at the center in 1993. Having been through that bombing, Mike recalled seeing similar things happen to the building’s structure. He was convinced a bomb had gone off in the building.

Note, this was happening right after the plane crash and well before the collapse of the buildings.

And this is wild:

Construction worker Phillip Morelli describes being thrown to the ground by two explosions while in the fourth subbasement of the North Tower. The first, which threw him to the ground and seemed to coincide with the plane crash, was followed by a larger blast that again threw him to the ground and this time blew out walls. He then made his way to the South Tower and was in the subbasement there when the second plane hit, again associated with a powerful underground blast.

So it seems that major bombs were set in the basements of BOTH TOWERS that went off after the planes hit.

How did these events relate to the eventual collapse of both towers?????

First "Popular Mechanics" Now "Scientific American"

takes on 9/11 conspiracies. Jim Hoffman rebuts the essay quite well here.

But really, you only have to read this one line from the Scientific American piece to know it is crap:

Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.

Well, who can argue with brilliant logic like that?

The Deep Politics of Watergate

A fascinating post by Jeff Wells.

I am still new to the conspiracy game, so it still amazes me how the "official version of events" belies a much more complicated and nasty truth. I have to wonder if the media knows all these deeper roots to these stories. If so, how do they keep the official version straight in their head? If not, they must be incredibly stupid. I suspect most real reporters do know something of the deeper truth but submerge it in their heads and keep the much simpler official version on the surface of their thoughts.

Additionally, I had no idea that there was something suspicious about the shooting of George Wallace. In fact, the shootings of JFK, RFK, MLK and Wallace, which all took place in the 60's, all had an amazing similarity with unexplainable shot trajectories and a hapless and dazed patsy that was presented to the media as the clear culprit. Moreover, the patsies all had some connection to US intelligence agents. The modus operandi for all these shootings is strikingly similar, as if they were all done out of the same playbook. That would actually make a great study-- to compare all these shootings side-by-side and figure out exactly what elements were similar and if any people were common to all the crimes. It might make a good book, assuming someone hasn't already done this.

Multiple Pre-9/11 Attack Warnings

From Paul Thompson:

Sometimes the stuff I find amazes even me. For instance, this entry which I just wrote up today and haven't put on line yet:

Early September 2001
Phone Call Warning of Big Event in the US in Coming Days Is Just One of Many Such Warnings Recorded by CIA
A few days before 9/11, an Islamic radical named Mamdouh Habib is in Pakistan and calls his wife in Australia. Her phone is being monitored by Australian intelligence. In the conversation he says that something big is going to happen in the US in the next few days. He is later arrested after 9/11 and is held by the US in the Guantanamo prison before finally being released in 2005. He is released because his captors eventually decide that he didn't have any special foreknowledge or involvement in the 9/11 plot. He had been in Afghanistan training camps and had picked up the information there. The New York Times paraphrases an Australian official, "Just about everyone in Kandahar (Afghanistan) and the Qaeda camps knew that something big was coming, he said. 'There was a buzz.'" (York Times, 1/29/05) Furthermore, according to The Australian, this call "mirrored several other conversations between accused terrorists that were tapped around the same time by the Pakistani Internal Security Department on behalf of the CIA." This was part of what the CIA called a sharp increase in "chatter" intercepted from operatives in terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the days just before the attacks, alluding to an imminent big event. (Australian, 2/2/05)

----

How could US intelligence possibly not know there was going to be an attack in the US within a matter of days after warnings like that? It seems knowledge of the attack was practically as common as dirt in parts of Afghanistan. US intelligence was listening very closely at the time. I've got a comment elsewhere from a National Security Council staffer pointing out that every phone line in Afghanistan was being tapped, every hotel in Pakistan was being bugged. In examples of just a few other entries I already have up:
- They overheard bin Laden tell his mother in law on the phone on September 9 that something big would be happening in two days.
- They knew from satellite surveillance that the Afghan training camps were moving in the days before the attacks.
- They overheard a message telling al-Qaeda operatives to return to Afghanistan by Sept. 10.
- They overheard a phone call from bin Laden shortly before September 11 contacting an associate in Pakistan, referring to an incident that would take place in the US on, or around 9/11, and then discussing possible repercussions.

The list just goes on and on. Yet nothing was done. Absolutely no warnings were given to airports, airlines, NORAD, the military, or any other first response defenders at all. Security was not stepped up at any likely targets. Top leaders were not warned. The only clear warning that we're absolutely sure of was given to Salman Rushdie, of all people, who wasn't allowed to fly in the US that week because the FAA told his publisher they had "intelligence of something about to happen." The FAA confirmed to the press that Rushdie was in fact warned.

I'd really like to see the usual incompetence theory defenders here defend all this as just more incompetence.

The 9/11 Timeline: http://www.complete911timeline.org

I'm not at all surprised US intelligence had these warnings. But what surprises me is how many people STILL deny that there was no government complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

AIR CIA

From ferrying drugs to ferrying terror suspects to other countries to be tortured, the fun never stops for the CIA.

Note: while it is nice the NY Times is trying to expose some of these tricks the CIA uses, how likely is it that any news agency will dig much further into what the CIA does with these terror "suspects" or any into other connection between the CIA and Al Qaeda?

Two Articles Calling For Bush's Impeachment Appear on the Same Day

The 'I' word, By Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese, May 31, 2005

War Crimes and Constitutional Punishment; It's Time to Get Serious About Impeaching Bush, By NORMAN SOLOMON, May 31, 2005

Are things actually heating up a little for Bush?

One can only dream...

Possible Evidence for Explosives in the Steel from the World Trade Center

Findings from Vincent Sauvé, skeptica@pacbell.net

The FEMA report titled World Trade Center Building Performance Study, Appendix C (Available at http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm) “Limited Metallurgical Examination”, shows evidence of explosives used, by way of photographs, microscopic, and chemical examination. They do not draw this conclusion though. Instead, the authors write (in these selected sentences): “Evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure.”... “The thinning of the steel occurred by high temperature corrosion due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation.”...“The unusual thinning of the member is most likely due to an attack of the steel by grain boundary penetration of sulfur forming sulfides that contain both iron and copper.”...“A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel.”... “The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified. The rate of corrosion is also unknown. It is possible that this is the result of long-term heating in the ground following the collapse of the buildings. It is also possible that the phenomenon started prior to collapse and accelerated the weakening of the steel structure. A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed to determine what risk, if any, is presented to existing steel structures exposed to severe and long-burning fires.”

I would like to note that when faced with a mystery, the proper thing to do is to experiment. An experiment could be done to test if high explosives or a “long-burning fire” could reproduce the observed corrosive destruction of the steel. A real investigation, as opposed to a whitewash investigation, would do this. Actually, if you think about it, a long-burning fire might be able to soften the steel but it wouldn’t be able to inject the chemical ingredients of explosives into the steel, as the examination shows. (See Information Box below.)

Where were samples 1 and 2 found within the wreckage? This is important. This doesn't appear to be discussed in the report. Why not? If the samples were found near the top of the pile that would mean, most likely, that they came from the top portion of the building. This is important because there would be no “long-term heating in the ground following the collapse of the buildings” of the above-mentioned samples. If the location isn’t mentioned in the report (I scanned the sections that this information should be in to no avail) this can be taken as a good sign of a cover-up (ineptness is another possibility). Also, what was the condition of the rest of the beam that the sample was cut from? If the sample came from a beam that was deeply buried and underwent “long-term heating”, shouldn’t the damaged area that the sample came from be quite large, in as much, as it would necessarily be a large mass of material that would be able to retain high heat for a long time period? (This is basic physics any engineer worth his salt should understand.)

It is clear to me that this FEMA report isn't an impartial investigation that is after the truth. Also striking is how often it is mentioned throughout the report of the need for further investigations. The FEMA report is nothing but a preliminary report that no insurance company, victims family, or other interested party should be content with.

Information Box
(snip)
Sulfur
"The most popular vaporizing agent due to the fact it lowers ignition temperature for most pyrotechnic mixtures."
--From the web page: Pyrotechnic Chemicals at http://members.aol.com/PyRoKiNg29/pyrochem99.html

Sulfidation
"The reaction of a metal or alloy with a sulfur-containing species to produce a sulfur compound that forms on or beneath the surface on the metal or alloy." Definition provided by The Hendrix Group, Materials and Corrosion Engineers at http://www.hghouston.com/popup/sulfidation.html

So, some of the steel from the WTC shows signs of "attack" with severe corrosion, signs of exposure to high temperatures, oxidation and sulfidation. Hmmm, what could cause that? I wonder......