Fire in the C Ring But Not in the D Ring?

Fire on the C ring but not on the D ring? 

Gosh, I never noticed this before but it just jumped out at me now for some reason.

Look at the extensive evidence of fire on the C ring-- particularly where the "double doors" are blown out. Why isn't there corresponding fire on the D ring? The D ring should have been impacted more heavily than the C ring by the plane. This makes no sense for a plane hit, but does support the idea that explosives were used to bomb the C ring. Also, note how far off the fire was from the supposed path of the plane (indicated by the red line).

A few posts ago I went over why Barbara Honegger thinks the Pentagon was bombed instead of hit by a plane. This is the first photographic evidence I've found that strongly supports that idea.

Note: I suppose the official explanation for this fire pattern is that the plane only went through the first and second floors, the D ring was covered over the first and second floors and the fire only emerged of the C ring on the A-E drive out of the first and second floors. I suppose this is plausible. However, it seems very strange to me that damage from a LARGE JET PLANE entering the building would be limited to ONLY the BOTTOM TWO FLOORS. Are we supposed to believe that parts of the plane were powerful enough to travel through three building rings-worth of walls and interior compenents, yet these same plane pieces were not powerful enough to punch through the second floor ceiling?

Yeah, right.

Why Did the 7/7 London Bombers Leave Behind 16 Bombs?

The London bombers left a stash of 16 unexploded bombs in a car, some packed with nails, it was revealed today.

Security experts believe the July 7 plot, which killed 56 people, may have been planned to be much larger and the explosives intended for a second strike.

The bombs were recovered from a car believed to have been rented by suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, according to ABC News.

The vehicle was found five days after the attacks in Luton, where the bombers boarded a train to London.

Need I mention that this really takes the wind out of the idea that the 7/7 bombers were suicide bombers?

CIA Viewed from the Left and the Right

Digby has a good post about how liberals and conservatives think about the CIA. I think he gets it about right. Key excerpt:

I've been thinking a lot about how the Plame affair has brought up an interesting political contradiction: the right is now openly contemptuous of the CIA while the left is a vocal supporter. I think it's probably a good idea to clarify that bit so we don't get confused. The fact is that both sides have always been simultaneously vocal supporters and openly contemptuous of the CIA, but for entirely different reasons.

I usually don't speak for "the left" but for the purpose of this discussion I will use my views as a proxy for the lefty argument. I'm not generally a big fan of secretive government departments with no accountability. I always worry that they are up to things not sanctioned by the people and it has often turned out that they are. I have long been skeptical of the CIA because of the CIA's history of bad acts around the world that were not sanctioned or even known by more than a few people and were often, in hindsight, wrong --- like rendition, for instance. I don't believe that we should have a secret foreign policy operation that doesn't answer to the people. They tend to do bad shit that leaves the people holding the bag.

But I didn't just fall out of the back of Arnold's hummer, so I understand that a nation needs intelligence to protect itself and understand the world. I also understand that the way we obtain that information must be kept secret in order to protect the lives of those who are involved in getting it. I have never objected to the idea that we have spies around the world gathering information about what our enemies are up to. I also think that intelligence should, as much as possible, be objective and apolitical. Otherwise, we cannot accurately assess real threats. If the CIA (and the other intelligence agencies) only make objective analyses, the buck will stop at the president, where it always properly should.

Therefore, I see this Plame affair -- and the larger matter of the pre-war WMD threat assessment -- as a matter of compromised intelligence and an extension of the 30 year war the right has waged against what it thinks is the CIA's tepid threat analysis. Never mind that the right's hysterical analyses have always turned out to have been completely wrong.

But then accuracy was never the point because the right takes the opposite approach to the CIA's proper role. They have always been entirely in favor of the CIA working on behalf of any president who wanted to topple a left wing dictator or stage a coup without congressional knowledge. This is, in their view, the proper role of the CIA --- to covertly advance foreign policy on behalf of an executive (of whom they approve) and basically do illegal and immoral dirty work. But they have never valued the intelligence and analysis the CIA produced since it often challenged their preconcieved beliefs and as a result didn't validate their knee jerk impulse to invade, bomb, obliterate, topple somebody for reasons of ideology or geopolitical power. The CIA's intelligence often backed up the success of the containment policy that kept us from a major bloody hot war with the commies --- and for that they will never be trusted.(See Team B, and the Committee on the Present Danger parts I and II.)

More on Haroon Rashid Aswat

I previously posted that the London bombing mastermind was an intelligence asset of some sort here.

Here is more info on Aswat:

Former Justice Dept. prosecutor John Loftus claims alleged London bombing mastermind Haroon Rashid Aswat is a "double agent" who "works for the MI6".

For those who don't know who he is, Loftus is the author of "The Secret War Against the Jews", a (highly recommended) book resulting from his research into American corporations' and intelligence agencies' collusion with the Nazis before, during and after WWII, research which he conducted with an above top secret security clearance which gave him access to hitherto secret intelligence archives. He is now usually billed as a "terrorism expert".

Prosecutors in Seattle wanted to indict Aswat in 1999 for trying to set up a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon, but were ordered not to touch him by the highest level in the Justice Department. According to Loftus, the reason was that Aswat was an agent of British intelligence. He claims that "while British police were trying to catch him, the MI6 were trying to hide him".

Aswat allegedly left London for Pakistan on July 6, one day before the London bombing. He was then arrested in Pakistan, but released within 24 hours. He reportedly travelled to Zimbabwe and then Zambia, where he may have been arrested again (conflicting reports).
(http://www.foxnews.com / - click on "video" under "Answering questions", then click "Nabbed - finally".)

It would appear that someone's got some splainin' to do. Loftus says the CIA and Israeli intelligence have been critical of the MI6 for giving terrorists a free pass to operate in London, and he claims the reason for doing so has been "appeasement" - we leave you alone, you leave us alone. But many have suspected, long before 9/11, that radical Islamists have been used as a tool for Britain's covert foreign policy, notably in Bosnia in the 90s, when it is alleged that the MI6 clandestinely recruited young radicals in Britain's Pakistani community to fight a guerrilla war against the Serbs.

Former MI5 officer David Shayler has alleged, and French intel sources have corroborated, that the MI6 paid a Libyan al-Qa'ida cell £100,000 in 1995 to assassinate colonel Qaddafi.
(see http://www.guardian.co.uk/shayler/0,2759,339663,00.html for a collection of stories on Shayler)

And then there's this, reported in the Independent in January this year:

The Independent is reporting today that in his testimony before a US military tribunal, Bisher al-Rawi claims that he acted as a "go-between" for MI-5 and Abu Qatada, "the militant Islamic cleric alleged to be al-Qa'ida's "spiritual leader" in Europe." Al-Rawi was seized (kidnapped?) by US intelligence agents in 2002 while on a business trip to Gambia, on the strength of his relationship with Qatada.

Al-Rawi has named three MI5 agents - "Alex", "Matthew" and "Martin" - and asked that they be called as defence witnesses. The tribunal agreed, but "the British Government refused to allow them to give evidence.

(...)

The Independent closes with this:

His claims follow allegations, by Islamist militants as well as French security sources, that Abu Qatada had contacts with British intelligence, which the Palestinian strongly denies. His legal advisers are adamant that he was only questioned as part of routine attempts by MI5 to gather intelligence about Islamist groups in the UK.
(http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/01/mi5-asset... - The Independent link appears to have expired)

Haroom Rashid Aswat, Abu Qatada - which other "al-Qa'ida leaders" are or have been on Her Majesty's payroll, or at least have enjoyed cordial relations with Her security services? Isn't this a question the British media, in particular, ought to be asking? Furthermore, Mr Aswat is not the only "al-Qa'ida member" who appears to have been "untouchable" while in the US - the 19 9/11 hijackers and their associate Zaccharias Moussaoui seem to have been as well. The sabotage by the highest levels in the FBI of Coleen Rowley's desperate attempt to investigate Moussaoui, for instance, is a striking parallel to the "hands-off" order regarding Aswat, and it's far from being the only one.

I should point out, Webster Tarpley, in his excellent book "Synthetic Terror 911: Made in USA" goes into detail about how British intelligence coddles Islamic extremists, such that London is derisively called "Londonistan".

Has the Blogosphere Been Infiltrated by the CIA?

Just a general question. I don't have any evidence they have. However, blogs are a powerful new medium, and the CIA wants to control information and push propaganda-- thus it is natural they would try to get into blogs.

I wonder if at least some of the big liberal blogs have CIA ties, and whether this is why they refuse to really question 9/11. Granted, lots of ordinary people refuse to question 9/11. However, liberal blogs can act as a gatekeeper of what is "allowable" for liberals to question, and can therefore modulate the discourse.

I always find it odd that powerful liberal/progressive/Democratic blogs get involved in trivial and often boring debates over what some conservative goon said or meant, when at the same time, they seem to have no interest in the fascinating analyses that go on in the 9/11 skeptic community. And these are analyses of 9/11 that have could have incredible significance over the whole political landscape!

There is simply no doubt that if 9/11 truths were widely disseminated that it would radically shake the political foundations of this country.

Maybe that is what they are afraid of? Particularly since the Democratic party has invested so heavily in the bin Laden-9/11 myth? Much more so than the Republicans, as a matter of fact.

As a life-long Democrat, this really bothers me.

Was the Pentagon Actually Hit by Pre-planted Bombs?

The information here comes from a workshop run by Barbara Honegger at the Truth Emergency Convergence meeting on Sunday July 24, 2005 at American University in Washingon DC.

I have decided to break the info I learned from Barbara Honegger (BH) into two separate posts. This is part two. Part one, about what time the Pentagon was hit is here.

BH was an official in the Reagan administration and resigned in protest over his policies. She is a self-described former whistleblower and is now a military-affairs reporter. She has written a book, "October Surprise", about the Iran-Contra affair. She worked with Mike Ruppert on his "Crossing the Rubicon" but does not endorse all of Ruppert's conclusions-- particularly about Cheney being the mastermind behind 9/11 (and I agree with her).

BH describes the Pentagon hit as the "Rosetta Stone" and the "Holy Grail" of 9/11 because what happened there was very important for understanding 9/11 in general.

A key point is that the hit on the Pentagon, the killing of military personnel, was critical for engaging the military in this new "war", as opposed to 9/11 merely being a larger version of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In this post, I am not going to try and validate everything BH says, merely present what she presented. At the end of the post, I will add other pieces of evidence that support her thesis.

To cut to the chase, BH thinks the Pentagon was NOT hit by flight 77, but rather sets of bombs, a truck bomb (on a green fire-truck) and bombs planted inside the Pentagon as well. She this was perhaps followed by a heat-seeking missile. She does not claim to know exactly what hit the Pentagon, but doesn't think it was flight 77.

So why does she think this?

First, where the Pentagon was hit is highly suspicious, the "violent event" precisely took out two groups of people: the naval Command Center and the Army's Financial Auditing Office (this is significant because shortly before 9/11, Rumsfeld announced that huge amounts of money had been lost by the Pentagon).

Second, the dearth of airline debris that was found.

Third, the size of the initial hole in the Pentagon facade was too small for a 757.

Fourth, the initial report from Associated Press of what happened at the Pentagon described a "booby-trapped truck bomb".

Fifth, she describes the account of Robert Andrews, who was the Head of Special Operations at the Pentagon at this time (note: I have verified this). He says after he heard of what happened at the WTC on 9/11, he went to a special counter-terrorism center in the basement of the Pentagon (near where the "violent event" was). While he was in there, monitoring the situation, he says at 9:32am there was an explosion that almost completely destroyed the counter-terrorism center. He managed to escape and here is where is gets really interesting: Andrews said he emerged out on ground level at the innermost A ring of the Pentagon and he saw dead bodies on the ground there. This was a face-to-face interview between Honegger and Andrews, and BH said that immediately after Andrews said this, he blushed, as if he had said something he didn't want to say or mean to say.

6) After the "violent event" at the Pentagon, people started evacuating the building, and many people were loudly saying a bomb had gone off.

7) An Army auditor from Fort Monouth was working at the Pentagon during this time, and he said on 9/11 when he got off the Metro subway at the Pentagon, he saw bomb-sniffing dogs. This was the only time he ever saw bomb-sniffing dogs at the Pentagon. This auditor also confirmed that the violent event happened at 9:32am.

So this is the extent of what BH said relating a bomb event at the Pentagon. I don't think she is a complete flake, and I take what she says seriously. She was one of the first people to report about the military wargames on 9/11 and she was completely right about that.

Here are some other pieces of evidence that fit the explosives theory:

At least two witnesses smelled "cordite", a product of high explosives.

The linear path of damage through the E-D-C rings of the Pentagon never really made complete sense to me for plane damage, particularly considering all the pillars and inner walls in the way.

In the damaged area, one section of the ceiling is blown out, see orange rectangle here. Note how the columns are more heavily damaged here than before and after-- almost as if there was a specific explosive event here. This piece of evidence has been noted by Dave McGowan here (scroll down).

US Congressional Representative John Murtha had an early report that a bomb went off at the Pentagon.

I have heard rumors that there was some sort of terror exercise at the Pentagon on 9/11 (hence the bomb-sniffing dogs), but I don't have a specific reference.

The French author Thierry Meyssan, famous for his missile-into-the-Pentagon theory, actually initially proposed that the Pentagon was hit by a truck bomb.

The web-site 911-strike deals with what happened at the Pentagon and entertains the idea of pre-planted bombs.

Finally, there is the testimony of April Gallup (this was related at the workshop by author Jim Marrs who interviewed her), who was at the Pentagon when the violent event happened-- she actually crawled out of the hole in the E ring where the plane supposedly went in, and she saw no evidence of a plane. When she was in the hospital, she was visited by government-suit types who wouldn't say where they were from but kept drilling it into her head that a plane had hit the Pentagon. Marrs thought that they were "debriefing her" and getting her story straight.

So what to make of all this?

Of course, skeptics to this will always say "What happened to the real flight 77?" "What about all those eye-witnesses of a plane?"

My answer is a) I don't know, but there are several possibilities, and b) they are lying or they saw something besides flight 77, such as a missile.

One possibility we can't rule out is that there were planted bombs AND that flight 77 also hit the Pentagon. This might account for the evidence best-- particularly the massive confusion over when the Pentagon was hit, although it is really just a theory like anything else. And I have gone over on this site many times why flight 77/a Boeing 757 is unlikely to have hit the Pentagon. Nonetheless, combining a plane stirke with bombs is what has been proposed for the WTC hit as well.

I strongly think that something happened at the Pentagon besides a plane strike.

The planted bombs and a heat-seeking missile strike is feasible, but there is little evidence for a missile, really.

In general, I think it is quite possible that the evidence of a 757 hitting the Pentagon, such as airplane debris, was planted. The best way to do this would be to package bombs with the airplane parts in different parts of the Pentagon. While this may seem absurd, remember this section of the Pentagon had been recently renovated and non-military people had access to the building. The planting of the 757 parts may have been done in conjunction with the renovation. I know it sounds absurd, but I think it is possible that all the evidence of a plane hitting the Pentagon is a massive illusion-- including the downed-light poles on the highway. This would mean the eye-witnesses again, are either lying or they saw a plane fly over the Pentagon at the same time the bombs went off.

Familiar People

One really odd thing about the the Truth Emergency Convergence meeting I went to on Saturday and Sunday July 23-24, 2005 in Washingon DC was seeing a bunch of people in the audience I KNOW I've seen before but couldn't quite place them. It was very eery. Where on earth would I have seen people before who came to a 9/11 conspiracy meeting? I've never been to a 9/11 conspiracy meeting before. I haven't even watched any 9/11 videos, except for the ones on 911busters.com, and I don't think these people I saw this past weekend were in there.

Btw, I am working on the second part of the Barbara Honegger Pentagon post. It is just taking some time to put it together. Hopefully I will have it up later tonight.

A Member of the Mainstream Media Finally Gets It About Iraq!

Bob Herbert-- It's all about oil.

Astoundingly honest:

But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.

Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.

That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

Refusing the Evidence

An excellent piece by TV-NewsLIES.

WHY AMERICANS REFUSE TO BELIEVE
THE 9/11 EVIDENCE!!!
blind2blind2blind2

An Analysis by TvNewsLIES.org - April - 2005

The attacks of 9/11 were so unthinkable that most Americans would refuse to believe the complicity of their own government, even if presented with a mountain of evidence.

Very simply, it is possible to escape blame if you do something that nobody in the world believes you could do.

PROLOGUE

When I was 11 years old I sat next to my friend and fellow class clown Jeffery, quietly thinking of ways to torture the unsuspecting substitute teacher. Jeffery and I were competing comedians, always trying to "get over" on each other in school. Jeffery was good and there were no limits to what he would do.

On this particular day we sat next to each other, sharing one of the double desks with which Brooklyn school children of the 70’s were so familiar. As our unsuspecting substitute turned his back to write something on the black board, Jeffery raised his arm and launched all his own books across the room in the direction opposite from where I was seated, immediately turning towards me with a look of horror and shock plastered on his face. The teacher, alarmed by the noise of the book launching, spun around only to see Jeffery's books scattered around the room. His loose leaf binder had opened up and produced an explosion of confetti in the form of notes and homework sheets.

A quick glance our way by the teacher brought into view a shocked Jeffery, who appeared to be the victim, sitting right next to me and staring at me with an expression of, "What the hell did you just do?" splashed on his face. I sat there, speechless, as the person on the right side of Jeffery's books prior to their launch to the left. I had nothing to say because the truth was simply not believable and no convincing lie presented itself.

Anyone witnessing this scene from the teacher’s vantage point could only come to one conclusion, Jesse did it. Even if I tried to explain that Jeffery launched the books, who would believe me? After all, who would have done this to his own property? Jeffery would have to spend the next hour or so reassembling his loose leaf binder. There is no way he would have done this to himself. No way, except for one thing...he did do this to himself, his motive...comedy. I was the patsy for two good reasons. First, I was sitting right there when it happened’ and second - I had a history of being a clown. I understood why people thought I was guilty and let me be the first to commend Jeffery for executing the perfect crime. He did the unthinkable and set up a patsy with his convincing claim of innocence.

In this sad, but true story, I was kicked out of the class by our substitute teacher. I was only 11 years old but I knew enough to understand that there was no way in hell that anyone would believe me if I told the truth and said that Jeffery was guilty of tossing his books . And so, having no proof that I was blameless, I swallowed my defeat and walked out of the room wondering what form my revenge against Jeffery would take.

The point to be made is this: sometimes, the more outrageous an action, the easier it is to get away with. Sometimes, there is no way that people can connect the criminal with the crime: the very idea of guilt is so far out of the norm as to be unthinkable.

snip

Ironically, it’s almost funny when the fact-based 9/11 research community gathers to discuss the events of that day. The official government version of what happened loses so much credibility in the light of the available facts, films, testimony & chronicled history that it is almost impossible not to laugh in disbelief when we start to share what we know. The evidence that has been amassed is so persuasive as to rip the official version of 9/11 to shreds. And still, there is no one but ourselves to hear us.

We go on and on and on like people obsessed because as responsible citizens of the world we have assigned ourselves the task of exposing the truth. But we also have to accept the obstacles we face. We must understand how and why people refuse to believe what we say despite all the evidence in our possession. To explain that phenomenon I think about my friend Jeffery and his book launch. He did something no one believed he could possibly have done. As a result, he carried it off.

The people who were responsible for the attacks of 9/11 did something so unbelievable that most people would not believe they did it, even if presented with conclusive evidence of their guilt. As a result, they also carried it off, and the evidence be damned.

In the end, there is always the comment by those who would discredit the research and the evidence that has been uncovered. The defenders of the official version of 9/11 inevitably ask how so many people could keep a secret. "Wouldn't someone have blown the whistle by now?" is the constant challenge by the champions of denial. How naïve they are.

At the higher levels of government the issue is no longer about secrecy, but about survival. The extent of the 9/11 crimes are so great that a very real scenario of self preservation has arisen. It may well be that whistle blowers fear the consequences of exposing the truth about 9/11, not to themselves, but to the nation.

It is highly probable that they believe that their testimony would lead to the end of the United States of America as a viable power.

In this worst case scenario, the good people in our government and in our intelligence community may really fear that America would never ever regain its credibility in the world, and would never again be respected or trusted. They may envision a terrible time when the United States would relinquish its leadership position in the world and sink to the position of a rogue nation that had committed an unforgivable atrocity against its own people for political purposes. If this is so, can anyone blame them for not coming forward to expose what they know?

A deep love of country might easily create a dilemma for those who know the truth. What would happen at that unimaginable moment when a ranking government official was charged with complicity in 9/11? Would the nation recover? Could the nation heal after such a huge betrayal of the trust that has been cultivated and nurtured over our 230 year history as a nation?

The people who were involved in 9/11 know that there is more at stake than their exposure. They already have the blind loyalty of those Americans who would refuse to believe they could possibly have been involved. . But deep in their corrupted souls they also have another ace in the hole. They are counting on the protection of those who fear for the stability of the nation. They are convinced of their own invincibility and really believe that they will never be held accountable. But they also believe that no one of credibility will step forward to expose them.

As I did with Jeffery, let me be the first to admit that these folks seem to have committed the perfect crime. Not in the sense that they will never be discovered, but in the sense that they believe it will do more harm to the country to expose them than to play along with their charade.

But, in fact, they are badly mistaken. The United States of America will not crumble with the revelation of their actions because our foundation is too strong to falter at their hands. History is never without obstacles to progress and this ordeal will not be an exception. On the contrary, if and when the truth is ever known, this nation will be stronger and nobler for that knowledge.

This sums up my thinking about this issue very well.

Bush and the Timing of the Pentagon Hit on 9/11-- A Key Insight Into What the Secret Service May Have Known on 9/11

The information here comes from a workshop run by Barbara Honegger at the Truth Emergency Convergence meeting on Sunday July 24, 2005 at American University in Washingon DC. This was the only workshop I was able to attend. I was actually very lucky to stumble on this workshop because it was on the Pentagon hit, a part of 9/11 I have been extremely interested in. I truly stumbled upon this workshop because I didn't know my way around and this was the first workshop I found.

I have decided to break the info I learned from Barbara Honegger (BH) into two separate posts. This is part one.

BH is a former whistleblower and is now a military-affairs reporter. She worked with Mike Ruppert on his "Crossing the Rubicon" but does not endorse all of Ruppert's conclusions-- particularly about Cheney being the mastermind behind 9/11 (and I agree with her).

BH describes the Pentagon hit as the "Rosetta Stone" and the "Holy Grail" of 9/11 because what happened there was very important for understanding 9/11 in general.

A key point is that the hit on the Pentagon, the killing of military personnel, was critical for engaging the military in this new "war", as opposed to 9/11 merely being a larger version of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Okay, to the meat of it-- the exact time of the Pentagon hit has been in dispute since 9/11. Initially, the time was 9:47am, then 9:45am, then 9:42am, then finally 9:37am as the final time settled on by the 9/11 commission. So there clearly has been some doubt about the timing of the event.

Strikingly, BH has extremely strong evidence from several different sources that the Pentagon was hit between 9:31am and 9:32am, five to six minutes earlier than even the earliest time officially admitted. This is physical evidence (stopped clocks) and several witnesses to the Pentagon hit (as she calls it the "violent event" since it wasn't clearly a plane hitting-- this will be in part two).

So why is this five minutes SO IMPORTANT???

We don't truly know, but BH has a very interesting and feasible idea, and it relates to what Bush was doing on that morning.

Remember, he was sitting in the classroom after the first plane hit, was supposedly told the second tower was hit in the classroom but did NOTHING for many minutes. In fact, Bush lingered in the classroom for a long time, in part because his aides told him to stall and not to say anything yet about the WTC attacks.

Here's the interesting part: Bush left the classroom at 9:32am.

The idea therefore, is that Bush and his people ONLY reacted to 9/11 when the MILITRARY had gotten hit. They didn't really care so much about civilians dying.

The reason they are lying about the time of the Pentagon hit is that it gives Bush cover so it makes it look like he wasn't leaving the classroom just after learning the Pentagon was hit. The lie about the timing was all about public relations! They didn't want the public to know that Bush did nothing until it was clear there was an attack on the military and that he didn't react to "mere civilians" being hit.

I think this theory makes a lot of sense.

Of course, beyond this, the really interesting question is: what the HELL hit the Pentagon????

In my next post I'll tell you what I learned from BH about what HIT the Pentagon.

Hint: she doesn't think flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

UPDATE: I didn't cross-check what Honegger was saying with other sources so just took her word that he left at 9:32am.

But according to Paul Thompson's timeline, Bush left the classroom at 9:29am, then at 9;34am was rushed out of the school-- it looks like only after the Pentagon was hit at 9:32am did they realize Bush was in danger!

This makes even more sense now! They must have been expecting the twin tower attack but not the pentagon hit. When the Pentagon was hit, they knew Bush might be a target as well.

This implies that the PENTAGON HIT WAS UNEXPECTED!

This also makes me wonder if the other hijacked planes, 77 and 93 were possible back-up planes for the WTC hit? Because the secret service had to know other planes were hijacked when Bush was in the classroom, but they didn't do anything UNTIL the Pentagon was hit!

Random Points

I am still looking for a large chunk of time in which to post on the really interesting stuff I learned about the pentagon hit, but until then, here are a few thoughts relevant to 9/11 and our current situation:

1) a much more appropriate name for conspiracy theories is "deep politics"-- let's start using it.

2) the NORAD multiple plane hijacking exercises run before 9/11 and on 9/11, as Barbara Honegger has pointed out, is really the best example of specific foreknowledge of 9/11 by the military-- they were PRACTICING TO DEFEND AGAINST MULTIPLE HIJACKINGS!

3) A 757 is a much smaller plane than a 767, and the 757 only has one main aisle versus two aisles in a 767. Thus, the 767 presents more of a challenge for hijacking than a 757. Yet, on 9/11, the two 767's that were hijacked (supposedly), flight 11 and flight 175, had the same number of hijackers as the 757 that was supposedly hijacked, flight 77: FIVE. Flight 93 was also supposed to have five hijackers but they lost one and only had four. Moreover, a 767 needs many more flight attendants (nine) than a 757 (five). Again, this raises logistics problems for the hijackings. One really has to wonder why the hijackers used the same number of men for the 757s as the 767s.

4) The Plame leak prosecutor Fitzgerald may be the only person at this point in time who is capable of stopping the madness of the Bush administration.

5) 9/11 awareness is still growing and we must increase our effort to expose this massive fraud. Greater public awareness of 9/11 has the strong potential to bring down the Bush administration and change this country for the better.

Why These Are NOT ORDINARY TIMES We Are Living In

This is fucking ridiculous, the kind of ridiculousness that could get a LOT of people killed:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Yes, let's just all go to hell because no one is willing to "damage" their careers.

And how much do you want to bet there are nice plans in the works for "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States"?

These are NOT ORDINARY TIMES, and we must fight this lunacy with all we have.

9/11 Truth Rally in Lafayette Park on July 23rd, 2005

This was a lot of fun, some of my favorite 9/11 people were there and spoke:
David Ray Griffin
Paul Thompson
Webster Tarpley

Tarpley in particular was very forceful and compelling.

Also good to hear speak were:
Morgan Reynolds (who was a real surprise treat-- very energetic)
Robert Bowman (didn't know him before but was very good)
Nafiz Ahmed (heard of him but hadn't read his stuff or heard him speak before-- he was low-key but very good)


Morgan Reynolds stuck around after his speech and was very affable and talked with me and others about 9/11. He is a very connected guy and a good ally for 9/11 truth.

I also met Nico Haupt (aka Ewing2001) for the first time-- he is an intense character. Lean and wolf-like, a smoker. He passed out some literature, some key points on 9/11 and had a sheet rebutting Karl Schwarz's 9/11 theories. I will post some of this stuff in the future.

Somewhat Off-Topic, But Unbelievably Maddening

White House threatens veto on detainee policies.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the
Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.

The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter.

In a statement, the White House said such amendments would "interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war."

"If legislation is presented that would restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice," the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.

You know, sometimes, you really have to step back in awe at the unmitigated gall of this administration.

Imagine that-- the Congress actually trying to legislate something decent and humane that would help our troops have the higher moral ground. But the Bush admin. says NO FUCKIN' WAY.

Then there is also the head-exploding hypocrisy of the Bush administration saying that diverting resources from the war would weaken the fight against terrorism.

Not only are these guys are evil mother-fuckers, but they IN-YOUR-FACE evil motherfuckers.

I'm Back from the Truth Emergency Convergence Rally

held in Washington DC over this past weekend. I'll be posting much more on this, but right now, let me just say a couple of things.

First, due to other family-related plans, I wasn't able to go to nearly everything I would have liked. The rally in Lafayette Park on Saturday was really fun and had some good energy. Turnout for the rally could have been better but wasn't bad. The people that were there were awesome. I met and saw in person a lot of people whose work I knew from the internet but never saw before. In retrospect the whole thing was a novel and exciting event. I'm very glad I went, although the trip was tiring.

The 7/21 London "Bombings"

are very bizarre for a few reasons. First, they come right after I found this weird story about British MI-6 Agents trying to blow up Chicago subway trains being arrested.

Second, is how all four attacks failed-- only the detonators seem to have gone off on the bombs.

Third, is how confused the story is--it is still not clear whether the police have arrested any suspected bombers yet, since they seem to have survived the attacks.

The fact that there were four bombs, three on a train and one on a bus is clearly some signature here.

But most strikingly is how the bombs didn't go off.

Either these were the lamest terrorists imaginable (failed at making four out of four bombs), or their MI-5/MI-6 controllers didn't WANT the bombs to go off.

I suspect it was the latter-- this attack wasn't really meant to hurt anyone, merely to send a message.

What message?

It's hard to believe that it is a mere coincidence that the US congress was debating renewal of the USA Patriot Act on the same day the bombs went off.

Of course, other more generic messages probably were about staying in Iraq and to keep thinking about invading Iran.

Another thing this particular scenario accomplishes is the capturing of "live terrorists". Assuming these captured bad guys never receive any normal judicial treatment, i.e. are held as "enemy combatants", they can be used as a convenient source of "information" about how these bad guys were linked to Al Qaeda and how now the authorities have rolled up the terror cell and how these new bombers were linked to the old bombers. In other words, the government can wrap up everything in a nice neat package that says whatever they want it to say.

As I Predicted...

the London bombing mastermind is well-known to western intelligence and even trained in the US to boot.

Aswat has been known to Western intelligence services for more than three years after the FBI accused him of trying to set up al-Qaeda training camps in the US.

Can you say "asset"?

I knew you could.

Were British MI-6 Agents Trying to Blow Up Chicago Subway Trains?

I'm really not sure what to make of this, but it is intriguing as hell:

Tony Blair's MI-6 Agents Caught Trying To Blow Up Chicago Subway:

To Derail US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's Grand Jury Investigations of Bush-Blair White House Leaks

By Tom Heneghan & Stew Webb Federal Whistleblowers

Heneghan-Webb Presidential & Vice Presidential Candidates 2004

VIVA' LA FRANCE:

French Intelligence and The U.S. Marshall Service Monday night July 18, 2005 caught four of Tony Blair's British MI-6 Agents trying to bomb the Chicago Subway system. The four were charged in Federal Court today with explosives.

Chicago US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald served Tony Blair a subpoena in the CIA Valerie Plame case on July 13, 2005 to answer questions regarding his role in the leaks connected to George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condi Rice, Andrew Card, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. Tony Blair has not yet responded to his subpoena. George W. Bush has not responded to his subpoena either. Tony Blair had supplied George W. Bush with falsified British Intelligence stating that Iraq leader Saddum Hussein had obtained "Yellow Cake" Nuclear materials from Nigeria. This was the reason Bush gave to start the war in Iraq. This has all now been proven to be lies by Bush and Blair. CIA Valerie Plame's husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson submitted his report prior to the Bush-Blair lies that Nigeria never sold yellow cake to Iraq. Wilson came forth stating Bush lied in his State of the Union address to the nation. Valerie Plame's CIA Network was further investigating Bush & Cheney's orchestrated attack on America on 9-11-2001. New York Police Bernard Kerik who ran a FEMA operation out of pier 29 known as Code Angel also known as Tripod II planted the bombs on the 7 World Trade Center Building that were demolished on 9-11-2001. This operation was a US Justice Department operation involving Gary Best of Defense Intelligence Agency a George H. W. Bush Shadow Government Crony who is currently in Prison in the French Guinea for espionage against the French Government. Best has admitted to French Authorities of his 9-11 involvements. As I am writing this press release two more British MI-6 agents were arrested a few minutes ago details are forthcoming.

The Stewweb website has some wild stuff about 9/11, it is rather over-the-top. Check out the 2004 Presidential Platform for Thomas G. Heneghan, candidate for President of the United States of America and Stewart A. Webb, candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. The platform sounds pretty good for the most part. I admire their sentiments on many counts.

"Hard Science and the Collapse of the World Trade Center"

From "Garlic and Grass":

The odd, swift collapse of WTC7 made me reconsider the Twin Towers and how they fell. As I had with WTC7, I first studied video footage available on the web. Then I acquired and watched a DVD of the collapses, frame by frame.

What struck me first was the way the second plane hit WTC2, the South Tower. I noticed that this plane, United Airlines Flight 175, which weighed over 160,000 pounds and was traveling at 350 mph, did not even visibly move the building when it slammed into it. How, I wondered, could a building that did not visibly move from a heavy high speed projectile collapse at near freefall speed less than an hour later?

Next, I turned my attention to steel beams that fell in freefall next to the building as it collapsed. The beams were falling at the same rate that the towers themselves were descending. Familiar with elementary physics, including principles of conservation of energy and momentum, this seemed quite impossible if the towers were indeed “pancaking,” which is the official theory.

The height of the South Tower is 1362 feet. I calculated that from that height, freefall in a vacuum (read, absolutely no resistance on earth) is 9.2 seconds. According to testimony provided to the 9-11 Commission, the tower fell in 10 seconds. Other data shows it took closer to 14 seconds. So the towers fell within 0.8-4.8 seconds of freefall in a vacuum. Just like WTC7, this speed seemed impossible if each of the 110 floors had to fail individually.

As I was considering this, another problem arose. There is a principle in physics called the Law of Conservation of Energy. There is also the Law of Conservation of Momentum. I'll briefly explain how these principles work. Let’s assume there are two identical Honda Civics on the freeway. One is sitting in neutral at a standstill (0 mph). The other is coasting at 60 mph. The second Honda slams into the back of the first one. The first Honda will then instantaneously be going much faster than it was, and the second will instantaneously be going much slower than it was.

This is how the principle works in the horizontal direction, and it works the same in the vertical direction — with the added constant force of gravity added to it. Jim Hoffman, a professional scientist published in several peer-reviewed scientific journals, took a long look at all of this. He calculated that even if the structure itself offered no resistance — that is to say, even if the 110 floors of each tower were hovering in mid-air — the "pancake" theory would still have taken a minimum of 15.5 seconds to reach the ground. So, even if the building essentially didn't exist — if it provided no resistance at all to the collapse — just the floors hitting each other and causing each other to decelerate would've taken 15.5 seconds to reach the ground.

But of course the buildings did exist. They had stood for over 30 years. The floors weren't hovering in mid-air. So how did the building provide no resistance?

Yet another observation one makes in watching the collapsing towers is the huge dust clouds and debris, including steel beams, that were thrown hundreds of feet out horizontally from the towers as they fell. If we are to believe the pancake theory, this amount of scattering debris, fine pulverized concrete dust, and sheetrock powder would clearly indicate massive resistance to the vertical collapse. So there is an impossible conflict. You either have a miraculous, historical, instantaneous, catastrophic failure that occurs within a fraction of a second of freefall and that kicks out little dust, or you have a solid, hefty building that remains virtually unaffected after a massive, speeding projectile hits it. You either have a house of cards or a house of bricks. The building either resists its collapse or it doesn't.

And we know the WTC Towers were made of reinforced steel and concrete that would act much more like bricks than cards.

Thus, put simply, the floors could not have been pancaking. The buildings fell too quickly. The floors must all have been falling simultaneously to reach the ground in such a short amount of time. But how?

The author is Dave Heller "who has degrees in physics and architecture, is a builder and engaged citizen in Berkeley, California."

I think this argument is the key to why the collapses of WTC 1, 2 and 7 can't have been progressive "pancake" collapses: the extreme speed at which they happened.

Did Two of the London Bombers Get Cold Feet and Later Get Shot by Police?

'Police shot bombers' reports New Zealander

A New Zealander working for Reuters in London says two colleagues witnessed the unconfirmed shooting by police of two apparent suicide bombers outside the HSBC tower at Canary Wharf in London.

The New Zealander, who did not want to be named, said the killing of the two men wearing bombs happened at 10.30am on Thursday (London time).

Following the shooting, the 8000 workers in the 44-storey tower were told to stay away from windows and remain in the building for at least six hours, the New Zealand man said.

He was not prepared to give the names of his two English colleagues, who he said witnessed the shooting from a building across the road from the tower.

Reports of attacks carried out by suicide bombers have been rife in London.

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper reported an unconfirmed incident of police shooting a bomber outside the HSBC tower.

Canadian Brendan Spinks, who works on the 18th floor of the tower, said he saw a "massive rush of policemen" outside the building after London was rocked by the bombings.

Were the London Bombers "Drug Mules"?

Xymphora puts out a reasonable theory:

I think the most likely scenario is that they were tricked into thinking they were involved as drug mules in the movement of drugs from Leeds to London (see also here). They would have no need to be concerned about the video cameras, as they would have no fear of being seen together and leading authorities back to their 'cell' (which of course doesn't exist). The rucksacks too big for the bombs inside might have been filled with stuffing intended to feel that they were filled with drugs. Their instructions would have been to meet with someone either on a particular subway car or bus, or at the end of a particular subway or bus route, and hand over the rucksack. Then they would all assemble at a central location in London to receive their payments.

No Islamic will or video celebrating suicide, no public celebration of the 'martyrs', unsatisfactory assumption of responsibility, overly large rucksacks, happy-go-lucky bombers with no concerns about being videotaped together or leaving behind identification that would lead back to the 'cell' which supposedly had plans for future attacks, uncharacteristic candidates for suicide bombers - it all adds up to one thing. Someone tricked the four into believing they were drug mules. Once we accept that fact, we have to accept that there is absolutely no reason to believe the Official Story that this violence was connected to Islamic terrorism. It could have been set up by anybody, including the intelligence organization of any country. Of course, the fact that four Muslim men were chosen as the patsies gives us a clue as to who might have been involved.

It is an attractive theory, however, a comment here makes several good points:

Somebody's already made this point but a 30 year old special needs teacher with a young family doesn't fit the the drug runner profile either. Aside from being Muslim, the only other thing that appears to connect these guys is a love of sport - if you wanted to work up an alternate story I'd start with that angle.

But I personally wouldn't

The drug mule scenario seems to be gaining ground on certain blogs that doubt the official explanation for the London Bombings.

This is really dangerous.

The consequences are that it will divide those who are sceptical and the alternate explanation may also serve as a 'straw man' that the authorities can knock down and discredit all those who doubt.

There's plenty wrong with the current story being told by the authorities. We would all be better advised to keep the ball in their half of the field, and pick at what's wrong in what they're saying, rather than setting up speculative alternate explanations that they can attack and serve as a distraction.

Don't repeat the mistakes of the past, please...

Another commenter at the same place also has some interesting points:

I note the good advice to concentrate on the endless flaws in the Official Version. The pattern of some of these flaws I do find suggestive, however.

Has anyone else wondered if the rucksacks and those carrying them are what Alfred Hitchcock called a "McGuffin"?

The circumstances of the blasts suggest they were unlikely to be hand-delivered - their simultaneity and all going off in trains. This seems even less credible performed by dupes and in a tight 20 minutes from Kings Cross. What if the bombs were put under or in the trains overnight? Like Madrid. Each bomb in a different carriage 1-2-3 from front to look random. Getting everyone to focus on these 4 individuals and their motivation has dragged attention from the blasts themselves. 2 eyewitnesses in bomb carriages on BBC site described a hole ripped in the floor and inspection covers blown out. Observer report on 10 July included hole ripping through floor as one of the features of their reconstruction. Very unlikely with bomb placed on floor, surely?

The 4th guy gets connected to the bus bomb, an odd event which is intended to be suggestive of the non-existent rucksack bombs. Another apparently random, "human error" touch. This bomb too has been pre-placed. Look at the bombed bus photos and recall what the police have been saying about where it went off. Have a look at the back of one of those same London buses. The bus blast serves as proof of the rucksack bombs and it gives a focus for the visual appetite of the media. Compare number of images of bus to Tube. I've only seen one long shot of a train. Another big distraction is the notion of small bombs, let alone home-made. These bombs don't really seem small to me, knocking down a wall next to one train and damaging the tunnel above another. Stops people thinking about big bombs, professionally placed, unchallenged, like Madrid.

People will notice that it would be hard to steer these 4 guys into the right carriages in the right trains and onto the 30 bus. Who says they were in these places? The police seemed satisfied that them recording the presence of ID at the bomb sites is quite sufficient. No DNA tests for example. (The Sun reported the Jamaican guy's wife demanding DNA proof.) The 4 were 4 of the first 5 dead identified, weren't they?

The wealth of CCTV evidence is a bit conspicuous by its absence, isn't it? The bus is already written off. Just one of those things, it seems, from police reaction. Bomb on bus and out-of-action CCTV can not possibly be connected in Scotland Yard's mind, like possible signs of a criminal having been on the vehicle overnight. Where is the film from the various bombed trains? Have we seen even the much-cited Kings Cross footage, come to that? No footage showed any rucksack bombers at Madrid, ditto the 9/11 hijackers. We must await revelations.

Another advantage of dead men is that you can say and write whatever you like about them. If these guys' ID hadn't been found on those trains and they were not presumed dead, none of this stuff about them could be put in media releases or placed in the media, could it? And what might people be thinking in that absence?

Yes, many suspicious things here and I'm glad to see British skeptics thinking about this.

What Drives The Phenomenon of Suicide Bombers

Xymphora:

From an interview by Scott McConnell in The American Conservative of Robert Pape, a man who has studied suicide bombers all over the world and has written a book about suicide bombing called "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism", here are a few comments by Professor Pape:

"Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources - Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others - so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. The terrorists are often quite proud of what they do in their local communities, and they produce albums and all kinds of other information that can be very helpful to understand suicide-terrorist attacks.

This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka."

and (my emphasis in bold):

"The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign - over 95 percent of all the incidents - has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw."

and:

"Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us."

and:

"I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn't occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community. That is true not only in places such as Lebanon and in Iraq today but also in Sri Lanka, where it is the Sinhala Buddhists who are having a dispute with the Hindu Tamils."

The West's current problem with terrorism has only one solution, the withdrawal of Western troops from the Middle East and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Occupied Territories. Any time you read somebody writing about the necessity of fighting the 'war on terror', and of the dangers of 'appeasement', you are reading somebody who has a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, and everything to do with keeping the occupying troops in place. If it is so important to keep the troops in place - whether it be for American corporate control of the oil fields or the building of an Israeli Empire - the West is going to have to get used to accepting the cost of increasingly severe terrorist attacks. The 'war on terror' as conceived by the neocons is:

* immoral, as it further punishes the victims of Western aggression;

* insane, as it advocates stopping terrorism by increasing the activity that caused the terrorism in the first place; and

* senseless, as it simply cannot be won.

Interestingly, the London bombers do NOT really fit into this suicide bomber mold.

Plane Swaps on 9/11, Bomber Swaps on 7/7?

Pictures of Hasib Hussain do not match descriptions of the 7/7 bus bomber.

London Bomb Ingredients and Linking a Bomber to British Intelligence

A London Times article starts out saying: "Explosives match al-Qaeda blueprint for bombmaking" and says how the manufacturing of the bombs matches Al Qaeda designs.

But then they end the article with this kicker:

The bombs detonated in the Underground and on the bus appear to have been a carefully balanced mix of commercially available materials and military-style ingredients. The evidence of this explosive primer in the four London bombs indicates for the first time that the ingredients were acquired in this country and not brought in from abroad.

Interestingly, the French have annoyed the British by spilling the beans that the bombs had military ingredients, criticizing the Iraq war and releasing other key info:

Britain's era of good will with Europe lasted 48 hours — all because of the French. After the July 7 terrorist attacks in London, Scotland Yard brought together law enforcement and intelligence officials from two dozen European countries and the United States, sharing crucial intelligence and pleading for help in tracking down the bombers. But the continentwide spirit of cooperation was shattered when Christophe Chaboud, France's new antiterrorism coordinator, broke the cardinal rule of the club. He leaked. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde that appeared on newsstands on July 11 — two days after the exceptionally open briefing — Chaboud announced that he knew ''the nature of the explosives'' used in the London bombings. It ''appears to be military, which is very worrisome,'' he said, adding: ''We're more used to cells making homemade explosives from chemical substances.''

But Chaboud did not stop with his assessment of the explosives and their origins, which, it turned out, were wrong. He plunged into politics, saying Europe was a more dangerous place because of the war in Iraq. ''The war in Iraq has revived the logic of total conflict against the West,'' he declared, without adding the obvious: that Britain supported the war and France did not. The British reacted with fury, sending communiqués to a number of European friends that expressed deep disappointment that the bonds of trust had been broken, according to two European officials who received the missives. So poisonous is the atmosphere that the talk in European intelligence circles is that the British feel that the French may have leaked bad information on purpose. ''They believe they released this incorrect information deliberately,'' said the head of a European intelligence agency. The result, he added, is ''there's not much good will left between them.''

It seems to me as though Chaboud WAS correct, both about the bombs and about the war.

Then get this:

After an emergency EU summit meeting of justice and interior ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, suggested that part of the cell responsible for the London terror attacks had been arrested in the past. The remarks prompted an immediate response from the British home secretary, Charles Clarke, who had called the meeting. ''I've heard Sarkozy's remarks to the press, and there is absolutely no foundation in them,''

Oh really, Mr. Clarke? Have you seen this story:

MI5 said bomber was not a threat. One of the London bombers was investigated by MI5 last year but was deemed not to be a threat, it has been revealed. Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, was subject to a routine assessment by the security service because of an indirect connection to an alleged terror plot.

Hmmm, one of the bombers was investigated by an intelligence service but was then ignored. Where have I heard that before? Where? Where? Where?

And just how likely IS it that these intelligence agencies dropped the ball on these people and had NO IDEA what these terrorists were up to?

Were the London Bombings Done by Suicide Bombers?

WAS IT SUICIDE?
Why did they buy return train tickets to Luton? Why did they buy pay & display tickets for cars? Why were there no usual shouts of 'Allah Akhbar'? Why were bombs in bags and not on their bodies?
By Jeff Edwards

THE London bombers may have been duped into killing themselves so their secrets stayed hidden.

Police and MI5 are probing if the four men were told by their al-Qaeda controller they had time to escape after setting off timers. Instead, the devices exploded immediately.

A security source said: "If the bombers lived and were caught they'd probably have cracked. Would their masters have allowed that to happen? We think not."

The evidence is compelling: The terrorists bought return rail tickets, and pay and display car park tickets, before boarding _ a train at Luton for London. None of the men was heard to cry "Allah Akhbar!" - "God is great" - usually screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bomb.

Their devices were in large rucksacks which could be easily dumped instead of being strapped to their bodies. They carried wallets containing their driving licences, bank cards and other personal items. Suicide bombers normally strip themselves of identifying material.

Similar terror attacks against public transport in Madrid last year were carried out by recruits who had time to escape and planned to strike again.

Bomber Hasib Hussain detonated his device at the rear of the top deck of a No 30 bus, not in the middle of the bottom deck where most damage would be caused.

Additionally, two of the bombers had strong personal reasons for staying alive.

Jermaine Lindsay's partner Samantha Lewthwaite, 22, mother of his one-year-old son, is expecting her second baby within days. Mohammed Sidique Khan's wife Hasina, mum of a 14-month-old daughter, is also pregnant.

Our source disclosed: "The theory that they were not a suicide squad is gathering pace. They were the weakest link.

"We think it's possible they were told that when they pressed buttons to set off timers they'd have a short time to abandon the bombs and get away before the blast. Instead, the bombs exploded immediately."

Another intelligence source added: "Whoever is behind this didn't want to waste their best operatives on a suicide mission. Instead they used easily recruited low-grade men who may have believed they'd walk away."

(snip)

Police are urgently investigating the missing 81 minutes between Hussain arriving from Luton in London and the time his bomb went off.

His device may have malfunctioned. He may have lost his nerve. Or he may have panicked when he discovered the Northern Line, on which he is thought to have been due to travel, was suspended.

Officers want to discover if Hussain met anyone else who either strengthened his faltering resolve or reset his flawed bomb.

So again, the bombers were low-level patsies. It's quite possible they were duped into believing they could ditch the bags and escape.

It is interesting the alleged bus bomber, who detonated his bomb last, did it when and where he did. Did he find out what happened to his colleagues and worried he wouldn't have time to escape? Did he try to put the bomb in a place where he thought he could get away?

But really, this all begs the most important question: who was controlling these bombers?

Random thought: is it possible some drug has been developed that turns ordinary people into suicide bombers? Or is Islam really that powerful? Or are mind control techniques being used?

Certainly, someone is making extreme use of this suicide bomb practice in Iraq lately.

Lastly, here are some good "tin-foily" articles on the London bombings:

Mutiple parallels between 7/7 and 9/11.

20 good questions Re: London bombings

The ever changing story of the London bombings (as the official story clicks in).

Miscellaneous interesting details on the bombings

More miscellaneous interesting details on the bombings including a clarification from Peter Power about his terror drill on 7/7.

Patsies

The alleged London bombers.

Germaine Lindsay: Jamaican-born man living in Buckinghamshire. Believed to have carried out King's Cross attack.

Mohammad Sidique Khan: Aged 30, from Beeston, Leeds, recently moved to Dewsbury, married with baby. ID found at Edgware Road blast site.

Hasib Mir Hussain: Aged 18, lived Holbeck, Leeds. Reported missing on day of bombings. Said to have turned very religious two years ago. ID found in No 30 bus.

Shehzad Tanweer: Aged 22, born Bradford, lived Beeston, Leeds. Studied religion in Pakistan. Forensic evidence linking him to Aldgate blast.

I would bet a fair amount of money that whoever set-up these patsies (be they real suicide bombers or just poor souls who were used unwittingly) for the attacks, i.e. the terrorist controller, has links to or is well-known by British intelligence.

Uh-Oh

"Poll: Bush Approval Rating at 42 Percent"

It's getting close to desperation time for Bush. Would they dare to try another terror attack?

I'm Back

Sorry for the absence. I went away on a family vacation and I thought I would have internet access-- but I didn't!

Although I was initially quite upset at not being able to access the internet and post on my blog, it was actually a nice break from being away from the computer and the 24 hour news cycle and all the 9/11 unpleasantness as well.

The vacation wasn't so much of a break for me-- when you have little kids, vacations are mostly about making them happy-- but overall it was fun and rather nice to get away from things.

I will start posting regularly tomorrow.

Just to Clarify...

I find it hard to believe Bush or Blair "ordered" 9/11 or the London bombings.* In fact, I imagine Bush and Blair are truly disturbed by these terror attacks, and don't wish them on their peoples. But, these are also cold calculating men, and very willing to cover up government complicity in these terrible deeds-- but as a practical matter, it seems unlikely that they would directly order these attacks.


Much more likely is that the 9/11 and London (and probably Madrid and possibly Bali) attacks were run by the same international gang of criminals that uses "Al Qaeda" or Islamic extremists as proxies. This international gang of criminals would primarily be an Anglo-American cabal of elites with strong ties to the US and British government. The Bush Family Evil Empire most likely comprises a large segment of this "gang".

All these attacks were meant to send messages to the US and British governments-- a message for war on the Middle East, a clash of civilizations, a start of world war four and for massive hegemony over oil-rich Middle-East and Asian nations.

*Karl Rove on the other hand-- I'm not sure I would put anything past him. The Plame affair, as I said before, is small potatoes.

Terrorist Math: 3+1=4

I noticed a strange coincidence with 9/11 and the London bombings, although what it means I don't know for sure-- I think maybe it is some sort of signature to show these acts were done by the same people.

On 9/11, 4 planes were hijacked, 3 hit buildings, 1 didn't-- this 1 plane crashed on the ground, and much later than the first 3 planes.

On 7/7, 4 mass transit vehicles were bombed, 3 subway trains (inside the ground), 1 bus above ground-- and this bus was bombed much later than the 3 trains.

Is this all just a coincidence?

It is hard to believe it is.

Why Would the London Bombers Do the Bombing at the Same Time as an Ongoing Terror Drill?

A Couple of Reasons:

1) it provides an easy way to plant the bombs-- a perfect pretext. If anyone is caught, they just say they were running a drill. They were just following orders, someone just gave them the package to put there.

2) the drill may momentarily delay the emergency response due to confusion whether it is a drill or real-- allowing extra time for the conspirators to get away.

3) most importantly is that it provides a signal that the bombings were done with inside knowledge. These bombings aren't for simply scaring the public, they are meant to send a signal to people like Bush and Blair that they better "get with the program". In this case, the program may be not withdrawing from Iraq or the program may even be invading Iran.

And here is one indication that this drill is important-- none of the major media outlets have reported this after the BBC5 interview. Surely this is interesting news that is relevant to a major story! But the media is covering it up, probably because it so obviously points to an inside job-- and of course the MAINSTREAM MEDIA SIMPLY REFUSE TO EVEN CONSIDER THAT POSSIBILITY.

A Good Rundown on Interesting Aspects to the London Bombing

Here, by Ewing2001 of "911 skeptics unite!" fame.

Lots of good info.

It's like 9/11 all over again (but on a smaller scale).

Listening to Terrorism "Experts"...

is really a waste of time.

Half the stuff they say is obvious and predictable, the other half they pull out of their asses.

Interview with Webster Tarpley on the London Bombings

here.

From 7/7, so doesn't have all the new info, but still-- Tarpley is calling it Synthetic Terror right off the bat.

UPDATE: Listening to the show. It is fascinating. Lots of recent politics. Tarpley says the London bombing was a message to Bush from the "invisible government" about taking on Iran. Also refers to the recent scares in DC over planes breaking DC airspace. Talking about Bush getting a right-wing opposition and "watergating" Bush.


FURTHER UPDATE: Link is busted. I couldn't fix it, sorry. The 30 minutes I heard was quite good.

Why Do Security Cameras Always Fail When You Need Them to Catch Terrorists?

British Transport Police have recovered nearly a million used tickets from barriers across the rail network, hoping some will carry the bombers' fingerprints as they travelled into London.

But the investigation received a serious setback when it was discovered the CCTV cameras on the bus that blew up were not working so detectives will not get vital images of the bomber.

One senior Yard source said: "It's a big blow and a disappointment. If the cameras had been running we would have had pin-sharp close-up pictures of the person who carried out this atrocity.

"We don't know if the driver forgot to switch them on or if there was a technical problem but there are no images."

The bus had four cameras - one covering people getting on, the second at the exit doors and one on each deck scanning the length of the vehicle.

But the anti-terrorist squad are confident that other CCTV footage will help nail the three other terrorists.

Senior sources at the Yard said they were seizing film from an estimated 2,000 cameras in the biggest operation of its kind.

What an amazing coincidence. Four cameras on the bus, none of them worked.

This is amazingly like the multiple airport security cameras on 9/11 that apparently failed to catch images of the hijackers before they got on the planes...

Unbelievable

London Underground Bombing 'Exercises' Took Place at Same Time as Real Attack; Culpability cover scenario echoes 9/11 wargames.

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running an exercise for an unnamed company that revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as happened in real life on the morning of July 7th.

On a BBC Radio 5 interview that aired on the evening of the 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, better known to you and I as a PR firm.

Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Power told the host that at the exact same time that the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

You can bet the farm that this story will never appear in the mainstream media again.

Read the rest of the article too-- there are important parallels of this attack to 9/11 and other terror attacks.

In A Weird Article About the CIA in Italy, A Weird Story About the CIA and 9/11

I'm not sure what to make of this:

In fact, the CIA, despite his law-enforcement limitations - agents were not supposed to carry weapons in the US, and did not have the power of arrest - decided to put bin Laden out of business by setting up his host, Afghanistan's Taliban, as the perpretrator of coordinated hijackings in the States, efforts intended to blackmail America into making further concessions to terrorists. To arrange the operation. A. B. 'Buzzy' Krongard, who thought that killing bin Laden - what the Clinton administration had repeatedly attempted - would only make matters worse, was appointed Executive Director.

With the Bureau deeply in the doghouse, it was essentially forced to delegate responsibility for keeping track, and rendering harmless the growing number of Al-Qaeda operatives in America, seeking training to crash airliners into public buildings, to the Agency. As Freeh was being forced out, so was counterterrorism expert O'Neill, who fervently believed that Al-Qaeda was planning to attack the WTC again, taking up the post of security director of the complex instead, and in which he died on the fatal day.

Meanwhile, squad superivor Thomas Frields of the Bureau's Washington Field Office somehow lost a tip from a former Iranian intelligence officer four months before the 9/11bombings that Al-Qaeda was planning to attack targets in Chicago, LA, and NYC with suicide bombers using planes. Then Frields claims that he never saw the report from Phoenix agent Kenneth J. Williams in July that a suprising number of Arabs were taking flying lessons. Then Frields refused the request from the Bureau's general counsel in Minneapolis, Coleen Rowley, that a warramt be issued to inspect visa violator Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop on suspicion that he wanted, as Paul Sperry wrote for WorldNetDaily.com on March 28, 2004, "...to take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center."

To keep track, and counter these growing threats, the CIA recruited teams from the Special Activites Division for the operation - to accompany the highjacked aircraft to LA where the unsuspecting hijackers would be overwhelmed by the forces hidden within the aircraft and on the ground. This would then justify Operation Gateway to eliminate the Taliban regime - what Bush's National Security advisers had approved a $200 million authorization a week before the attacks to get things started.

To start the ball rolling in the airliners, the Agency placed a squad of agents on the second plane leaving Boston, even a larger group on the one going from Newark to San Francisco, and three agents - along with Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, and general overseer of the operation - on the plane which crashed into The Pentagon. The first plane from Boston - the one carrying operation leaders Khalid-Al-Midhar and Nawaq-Al-Hamzi - had no agents on it for fear that their presence would tip off the highjackers.

The only trouble with the plan was that the planners had not taken seriously the claim that Arabs would act as suicide bombers, and that the highjackers could have the expertise to fly the planes into pre-selected targets. The scope of this miscalculation was well demonstrated when Ms. Olson frantically called her husband, Ted, twice for further instructions, air defense directors did not know whether the highjackings were part of a planned exercise or the real thing, and the President and his security in Florida reacted laconically to the unfolding tragedy. They knew that the presidential party had nothing to worry about, as it was well away from any possible action. Little wonder that the government was most dogged in preventing the release of the full passsenger lists for the flights for fear of disclosing that its countermeasures constituted the making of a terrible tragedy.

Given its scope, though, the Bush administration could not act, much less acknowledge, as if anything this monstrous had happened. Denial, and belated admissions of serious incompetence -especially regarding the Bureau, its new Director Robert Mueller having yet to take command -became the order of the day. To clean up the record, as best it could, the Bureau appointed Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds, assuming that she would do the job.

Instead, Edmonds made a terrible case of counterterrorism look even worse. She went through all the untranslated and unused material, hundreds if not thousands of them, that the Bureau had indicating the attacks, and charged that the people responsible for preventing them - now counterterrorism chief Dale Watson, Radical Fundamentalist Unit chief David Frasca, Frields, headquarters supervisory special agent Michael Maltbie, and others - had benefited, been promoted, for their "incompetence and corruption". Alledegly, on the very morning of the attacks, Frasca called Rowley, and told her not to proceed with her investigation of Moussaoui "...because Minneapolis might 'screw up' something else going on elswhere in the country."

"Edmonds was fired last year," the Ceneter for Media & Democracy reported in 2003, "after reporting her concerns to FBI officials." Her subsequent efforts to force her rehiring, and to gain compensation for denial of her rights were frustrated by Attorney General John Ashcroft's claiming the State Secret Privilege. Once she started talking to the Senate's Judiciary Committee and the 9-11 Commission behind closed doors about specific plots, dates, airplanes used as weapons, and specific individuals and activities, the Justice Department reclassified information regarding her to prevent further disclosure to her astonishing story.

This article is by someone named Trowbridge H. Ford, who seems to have written a large number of very obscure books on English history.

This scenario that CIA agents were on the hijacked flights is basically the 9/11 sting operation scenario I have talked about before.

There may well be something to this idea, but I do NOT think it explains everything about 9/11-- for instance the lack of air defenses. Possibly this "sting operation" with the CIA agents was actually the live-fly hijacking drill that Mike Ruppert discovered was being run on 9/11.

But this scenario is certainly something to keep in mind, and it does explain why there would be a cover-up and why the passenger manifests have not been released.

On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the "poor" CIA agents had no idea that the planes would be crashed and that they could do nothing to stop it.

Perhaps the CIA agents were actually the hijackers (running the "drill"), and the planes were swapped for remote drones? Or the CIA agents were set-up themselves and the planes were taken over by remote control?

Thus, although this scenario is interesting, it raises just as many questions as it answers. And finally, how does this Trowbridge H. Ford know this information anyway? Mr. Ford seems to have some good knowledge of the CIA from his essay, but is this just open-source information or does he have an inside source?

Lots of Doubts

about the London bombing out in the conspiracy blogosphere...

There is a lot of good information in these pieces.

The best part is that it seems that many people have not been so easily fooled this time-- and more and more people are waking up to the bullshit going on.

Did the British Warn the Israelis or Did the Israelis Warn the British?

Accounts differ:

The Associated Press reported July 7 that an anonymous source in the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Scotland Yard had warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terrorist attacks in the U.K. capital. The information reportedly was passed to the embassy minutes before the first bomb struck at 0851 London time. The Israeli Embassy promptly ordered Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in his hotel on the morning of July 7. Netanyahu was scheduled to participate in an Israeli Investment Forum Conference at the Grand Eastern Hotel, located next to the Liverpool Street Tube station -- the first target in the series of bombings that hit London on July 7.

Several hours later, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom officially denied reports that Scotland Yard passed any information to Israel regarding the bombings, and British police denied they had any advanced warning of the attacks. The British authorities similarly denied that any information exchange had occurred.

Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned “minutes before” the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks “a couple of days” previous. Israel has apparently given other warnings about possible attacks that turned out to be aborted operations. The British government did not want to disrupt the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or call off visits by foreign dignitaries to London, hoping this would be another false alarm.

The British government sat on this information for days and failed to respond. Though the Israeli government is playing along publicly, it may not stay quiet for long. This is sure to apply pressure on Blair very soon for his failure to deter this major terrorist attack.

Sad and Disturbing

AN ATTACK ON ARAB LONDON. News reports are in about the location of the Tube bombs, and the stations picked for the horrific rush-hour assaults are especially chilling. These attacks were not just attacks on our closest ally, but on the very idea of Arab and Muslim integration into the West. Among the targets in the worst attack on London since World War II was the Edgware Road station, located in the heart of wealthy, assimilated Arab London. Middle Easterners of a variety of religions and South Asian Muslims are a substantial minority of the population in London, and the Edgware Road area is the pre-eminent Arab neighborhood in the city, with a fantastic variety of Lebanese coffee shops, Saudi grocery stores, and Persian restaurants. Some even call it "Little Lebanon," though the residents and shop clients come from all over the Middle East and North Africa, and the area especially attracts a young, hip crowd that compares it to Amman or Dubai. Edgware Road is Arab London's main street.

Though we have no idea yet whether the stations or train lines that were bombed were specifically targeted, it's hard to imagine that whatever terrorist organization or cell was behind the attacks failed to consider the symbolic power of an attack on Edgware Road.

Furthermore, the timing of the attacks and their location along the arc of the Metropolitan and Circle lines spreading along in time and space from East London -- where 60 percent of London Muslims reside -- suggests a specific intention with regard to targets. After all, the Circle line can just as easily take riders to Westminster's collection of government buildings as to Edgware Road. And Al-Qaeda has a history of engaging in symbolically significant attacks against financial centers, banks, military installations, and government buildings. Why not against Arab allies of the West, as well?

The New York Times is now reporting that the other underground bombs appear to have detonated close to the Liverpool and King's Cross stations, which are transportation hubs connecting overland trains to the underground. But Edgware Road is not a hub in the same way.

In recent months we've seen Islamic jihadists increasingly going after targets in the Arab and Muslim world who have allied themselves with the west. The victims of the bombing attacks and terrorist incidents in Iraq are overwhelmingly Arab Muslims. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has just claimed that it killed the Egyptian envoy to Iraq, after condemning him as "the ambassador of the infidels." When the casualty count is in, I suspect some fraction of the victims of today's henious attacks will be Arab or Muslim, as well.

Some Relevant Information About London and Islamic Terrorism

from Webster G. Tarpley "Synthetic terror 911: Made in USA":

AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN

The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the US controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that “England supports all revolutions but her own.” In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel,Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, andRussia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain US radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.

A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the US State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden’s current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman’s spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the US East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable. Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. “The track of … the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists,” wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations.

On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: “Israeli security sources say the fanatics…are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here….Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations.” (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996) In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semiofficial organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that “Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism.” (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that “…some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that.” (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of Islamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of “Londonistan.” The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: “Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale…and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals.” (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German news magazine: “In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya.

Today–not officially, but effectively in the open–they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan.” (Focus, September 2001) Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-US sermons to the some 4,000 Muslim inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden’s spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the US because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.

BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES"

A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a selfstyled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama. Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe.

Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered “live fire” weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the US end of the “Ultimate Jihad Challenge” training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. “Ultimate Jihad Challenge” included instruction in “art of bone breaking,” and learning to “improvise explosive devices.” British Muslims would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. “All serious firearms training must be done overseas” because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin’s apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Muslims and others
learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.

The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden’s sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Muslims were going abroad each year for military training. “We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal
and discuss … ongoing attacks being suffered by Muslims in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir,” Bakri Mohammed said. “We … make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland.” Bakri’s al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world’s 50-plus existing Muslim-majority states and replacing them with a single “khilafah” (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)

Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that “Britain was at the heart of the terrorist’s planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction,” according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the US east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Saad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)

Some Details

LONDON, July 7 - Investigators searching for clues in the attacks here said Thursday that the three bombs used in the subway apparently were detonated by timers, not suicide bombers, and that a fourth device may have been intended for a target other than the city bus that it destroyed. (snip)
A group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe announced on a Web site that it was responsible for the bombings. The announcement also threatened Italy and Denmark, which have provided troops to the American-led coalition fighting in Iraq.

The authenticity of the message could not be confirmed, and several experts said they strongly doubted that it was authentic. (snip)
Counterterrorism officials in London said they were still trying to determine the type of explosives that were used. One official speculated that the No. 30 bus whose roof was blown off at 9:47 a.m. in Bloomsbury was demolished accidentally by a suicide bomber. But another theory gaining momentum was that the bomb exploded prematurely as a bomber was carrying it to an intended target, several American and British counterterrorism officials said.

The officials said that the three subway bombs appeared to have been detonated by timers, not cellphones or other remote triggers. The bombs on the trains were believed to be package bombs and are believed to have been left by the attackers who fled before they went off.

Officials refused to confirm or deny reports that two unexploded package bombs were recovered from trains. A senior American intelligence official said the British had conducted "at least one controlled explosion" of a suspicious package found after the attacks, but he said he could not confirm that the package was another bomb.

The bombings in Madrid and London were separated by 16 months, and the ones in Madrid were set off by cell phones. But the attacks bear eerie similarities and grim lessons for counterterrorism officials. (snip)
"There have been a lot of attempts" in London, said Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge who has investigated Al Qaeda for years. "And in this case, they finally hit some of the easiest targets with these trains. Their only real obstacle to this kind of action is getting the explosives. Once they have them, it's very easy to attack targets like Sunday trains."

Mr. Mates, of the Intelligence and Security Committee, said it had been only a matter of time before a coordinated attack struck London. He said the authorities had thwarted at least three coordinated attacks in London since 9/11. "We've caught and prevented those who were trying to get through and stopped them," he said.

Britain has considerable experience investigating bombs and identifying those responsible, based on years of attacks in London and in Northern Ireland by the Irish Republican Army.

Okay-- Why Are There So Few Details About the Attacks in London?

What kind of bombs there were?

What form they were in?

Suicide bombers?

These were pretty powerful bombs!

How the hell did the terrorists get their hands on this stuff?????

Note: Prison Planet has some interesting things to say.

Personally, I think it is synthetic terror all the way.

Reality Check

Today in London was like every recent day in Iraq.



How fucking depressing.

Laugh of the Day

I'm running out of tin foil to make hats.
Must replenish tinfoil supply.

Crap

Four London Blasts Kill 40, Injure 300.

LONDON - Three blasts rocked the London subway and one tore open a packed double-decker bus during the morning rush hour Thursday, sending bloodied victims fleeing after what a shaken Prime Minister
Tony Blair called "barbaric" terrorist attacks. A U.S. law enforcement official said at least 40 people were killed and London hospitals reported more than 300 wounded.

Blair said the "terrorist attacks" were clearly designed to coincide with the opening of the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. They also came a day after London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics.

The explosions hit three subway stations and a double-decker bus in rapid succession between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. Implementing an emergency plan, authorities immediately shut down the subway and bus lines that log 8.4 million passenger trips every weekday. It brought the city's transportation system to a standstill and left many central London streets deserted.

Clearly this is a much more primitive attack compared to 9/11, but still one has to wonder if this was still "set-up" at some level, i.e. synthetic terror. Quite interestingly, while this attack is being linked to the G8 summit, is it a mere coincidence that Britain was announcing a major plan to withdraw troops from Iraq and transfer them to Afghanistan?

I think not.

In FACT, a possible troop withdrawal from Iraq was linked to the Madrid train bombings. Fortunately, the Spanish saw through the ruse and elected a prime-minister that would withdraw the troops.

It will be interesting to see if Blair follows through on the Iraq withdrawal.

If 9/11 Was An Inside Job, What Do the Forewarnings Mean?

It is kind of a circular argument, isn't it? The forewarnings for 9/11 showed that the government knew it was coming, but they wanted the attacks to succeeed in a limited way and so they had to fix the operation so this would happen (MIHOP). Yet, if 9/11 was an inside job (or a MIHOP job), do the forewarnings mean anything?

To put it another way, what came first-- the forewarnings or the "MIHOP"?

I suspect the forewarnings do mean something and I also supect the MIHOP came first.

Very early warnings of Al Qaeda trying to mount something in the US must have tipped off intelligence agencies to some sort of attack, and from then on, most likely US agents (and other foreign agents) helped set up the attacks.

The major warnings for 9/11 a few months preceding and up to the attacks were almost certainly from honest CIA and FBI agents (and foreign intelligence agents) picking up the signs of the attack from the covert operatives engaged in setting up the attacks.

The forewarnings were the signs of the government trying to do its job-- in the face of a nasty government-sanctioned covert operation.

Many Interesting Details and Questions About 9/11...

in a German book by "medienanalyze", summarized by 9/11 researcher John Doe II.

The authors start their documentary by casting doubt on the identity of the 19 hijackers: At least six of the Arab people allegedly identified as hijackers made clear: the "identification" identified them wrongly. So who are they or are there hijackers at all?

The following people have the same name as the alleged hijackers and are alive: Salem Al-Hazmi (Flight 77), Ahmed Al-Nami (Flight 93), Abdulaziz Al-Omari (Flight 11), Said Al-Ghamdi (Flight 93), Walid Al-Sheri (Flight 11) and Wail Al-Sheri (Flight 11). As we all know the official list of the FBI wasn’t changed. The official list of the passengers was never published. No video footage of the hijackers save the one at Portland Airport (maybe) showing Atta. And then three years later the one from Dulles.

The authors are wondering how the press managed to have the photos of the 19 hijackers within two days if not with the help of the FBI. But then how did the FBI have the photos already at hand?

Khalid Al-Midhar:
Although Al-Midhar was known to the CIA due to the Malaysia meeting in January 2000. Al-Midhar personally went to the Washington International Airport on August, 26 to get his tickets (at that moment he was already on the Terrorist Watch List). Before he had aquired a new identity as a habitant of Falls Church (three miles away from the CIA headquarters). There he even managed to get five other new papers for his fellow terrorists. (But in all reports about the Fake-I.D.s it is never mentioned which names figured on the new papers).

But the authors wonder why did the terrorists need new papers just few weeks before the attacks (so far everything worked perfect with their “real” identity and they never appeared to behave carefully. And why did Atta open a Frequent-Flyer-account on August, 25? Did they have future planes after 911)?

The authors continue their investigation about the identitys of the terrorists (explicitly based on the work of Paul Thompson) by discussing the “two Attas” (although he was under surveillance of the CIA in Hamburg he had no problems to fly to the US, get a visa, fly to Madrid, return to the US etc), quoting the landlords of Atta Vonnie and Tony LaConca who don’t recognize Mohammed Atta on the official photos. The authors give examples of the very un-islamist life of Atta (parties and alcohol, girlfriend before marriage, etc) and his strange behaviour in the night before the attacks as if he wanted to make sure he would be remembered (I’m a pilot of American Airlines).

The “two Jarrahs”:
With Jarrah as well there are clear contradictions in his biography as he appears several times at different places at the same time. The authors more over mention the bizarre coincidence that the FBI found Jarrah’s letter to his girlfriend because Jarrah didn’t manage to writ her (and his!) adress correctly.

The “two Hanjours”.
At the very beginning the talk was of 18 hijackers because Hanjour’s name (so the official explanation) didn’t figure on the passenger list (although the Palm Beach Post gives the story of him buying his ticket on August, 31 with Moqed). With Hanjour as well there is the problem that he’s at the same time at different places. Moreover the authors give two examples of his handwriting. In 1996 his writing turns to the right side. Four years later his writing is completely different: smaller and turned to the left side.

The “proofs”:
The authors remark that although according to CNN (8/16/02) nine hijackers (of Flight 77 and Flight 93) have been found the death certificates will note: John Doe and suicide. But the question remains why isn’t each one of them identified and who are they? And at the end what proof do we have that the hijackers shown on the official photos have been on board?

Afterwards the authors wonder about the lists of the passengers. As they have never been officially published the only lists known are by CNN. But there again are mistakes. Jude and Natalie Larson figure on this list but on September, 18 (five days after CNN published the lists) the airline companies acknowlidge that this had been a mistake. The two of them weren’t on the flight and they are perfectly alive. The next problem: Adnan and Ameer Bukhari had been named as two hijackers. But on September, 14 the FBI had to acknowldige that Adnan is still alive and his brother died in a plane crash in September 2000.

The phonecalls via mobile phone:
According to the authors these calls mainly were made to unknown people and not to family members (eg Todd Beamer). And these calls to “officials” contain the keyphrases: arabs, hijacking and boxcutters.

Then they analyze in detail the phone call by Barbara Olson (the only call from Flight 77) that was the proof for the boxcutter story. They document the huge contradictions in the different summaries of the different calls (see also Paul Thompson’s Timeline) and quote Ted Olson who gave his decisive vote [sic] for Bush’s presidency: that they are a lot of different situations possible where it is legitimate for the gouvernement to lie.

The authors question the authenticity of Edward Felt (Flight 93). Why did he close himself into the toilet room? Why did he call the emergency operator? Why is Glenn Cramer (the one who received the phone call) not allowed to talk about it?

The authors wonder also about the call of the stewardesses Sweeney and Betty Ong (Flight 11). Sweeney gives the seats of the terrorists but they differ from the places where the terrorists were actually seated. She phones flight manager Michael Woodward (Boston) an official, somebody who didn’t know her and therfore couldn’t identify her voice. Strangely she says that two stewardess and a passenger had been murdered, the hijackers had reached the cockpit, while Sweeney gave their seat numbers, the flight took a sharp turn directly into the heart of Manhattan. But then the phone call had to last at least 30 minutes as the sharp turn happened at 8.28.
Betty Ong phoned Vanessa Minter from the flight reservation of American Airlines. She says the hijacker had sprayed something in the first class to prevent others from entering the cockpit. The calls last 25 minutes (from 8.21 till the crash). But the FBI says that only the first four minutes had been recorded and that the recording won’t made public.
Why didn’t Sweeney mention any spray?

The missing air defence:
According to the authors in the NATO the Quick reaction alert teams 15 minutes is a standard, 12 minutes better and ten minutes normal.

Washington’s air space below 18,000 feet is a no-fly zone and strictly forbidden.

The authors describe the “changes” of the starting times of the F-15 from Otis: On September, 13 Channel 4 claims at 8.39 two F-15 or F-16 started from Otis. But then the time changed from 8.39 starting time to 8.38 being informed and finally 8.52 take off. Then they quote Willaim Wibel from Otis saying (already on September 11) that it was 9.00 maybe even 9.30 when the airfighters were prepared for take off. And a “neighor” of Otis, Bill Thompson remarked that only around 10.00 maybe 10.30 there was an increased activity at Otis.

But the authors wonder as well why nobody saw or heard the F-15 approaching New York around 9.05?

Remote Control:
The authors remark the difficulty of the Flights: Flight 11 was still at a height of 30.000 feet just seven minutes before the crash, Flight 175 managed to crash into the WTC in a very difficult turn and especially Flight 77 made an almost impossible manoeuvre. Not only Egyptian president Mubarak wondered how pilots who didn’t even manage to fly a Cessna could have done that, Danielle O’Brien (a flight controller from Washington Dulles airport) even believed Flight 77 was a military airplane as it was very difficult to fly a Boeing 757 this way.
Therefore the authors start wondering if the four airplanes weren’t flown by remote control. They describe the possibilty of this technique and that already in 1984 a Boeing 720-027 was flown by remote control in order to do a crash test.
This technique is developped by Raytheon, Litton and also Boeing.
According to the authors this theory would also explain why the contact to the tower stopped and the transponder was turned off.

The C-130:

The authors point out the odds that eyewitnesses saw a C-130 next to Flight 77 and Flight 93 when they crashed. For the Flight 77 they name the eyewitnesses John O’Keefe and Bruce Warner. Besides that they remark that the firm Raytheon has equipped the C-130 with a lot of electronic warfare stuff. They are so called “Command & Control” units.

The authors figure out that Middletown (Pennsylvania) is placed on the route of all four airplanes and only there in the Air Force Base of the Harrisburg International Airport only there are airplanes of the type EC-130. (In contrast to the C-130 they have an extra 90-Kva generator for each engine).

During the hearings for the Joint Committee Col. Alan Scott mentions another C-130. Around 9:10 the tower asked several airplanes if they had seen Flight 77 (they also asked a C-130 on the way to Ohio). (The authors wonder if this airplane is identical with the EC-130 seen in New York).

Last but not least they point out that the slowness of the C-130 (only 450 mph) might explain why all four airplanes flew slower after they had been hijacked and deviated from their original route.

Then the authors come up with an interesting story. The Cleveland Center which is in charge of controlling the air traffic was also on 911 in charge of Flight 93. But when all the workers concentrate on the hijacked plan the center had to be evacuated due to a threat (expressed via telephone). All the workers but one left. Only one saw on the screen what happened in the end to Flight 93. The recordings of the radar are stored by the FBI the workers have been told not to talk.

Hijacked hijackers?
The authors wonder how it can be explained that F-16 and F-15 are always too late and a slow C-130 is always in time. Moreover they are wondering how also the decline of Flight 11 (29,000 feet in eight minutes. And how could the hijackers have foreseen it would be excellent flying weather on 911?). They build the hypothesis that either the known hijackers were not on board or they were simple passengers or they would even have been hijacked hijackers.

Raytheon:
Raytheon, the fourth biggest producer of arms in the US is also specialist of remote control technique. Especially the C-130 are equipped with their technique. The EC-130F is able to “hijack” a frequency with their own message. In three of four airplanes of 911 are senior members of Raytheon. The authors wonder if the members of Raytheon might not have been told that after a fake hijacking the airplanes would safely land with the help of their remote control technique but then the hijackers really get hijacked.

Two further members of Rathyon died on May, 8 2002 under bizarre circumstances. During a test flight of a T-39 Sabreliner two airplanes are suddenly lost to the radar and collide. There was no emergency call. And very bizarre the pilot of one airplane was Ambarak S. Al-Ghamdi. He had worked on a basis where according to Newsweek Said Al-Ghamdi and Ahmed Al-Ghamdi had lived in 1997.

The strange behaviour of people in positions with high responsibility on 911:
The authors describe that not a single politician was willing to take decisions on 911. Instead they tried to disappear or to do nothing or business as usual.

The attitude of the President in Sarasota is widely known.

But also the head of defence, Donald Rumsfeld; who was notified at 8.40 about the hijacking decided not to act. At 9.00 he then had a meeting with several Senators and Wolfowitz discussing how to achieve a majority for the budget for defence. At 9.25 Rumsfeld is still in the middle of this discussion explaining that the real threat of 21th century is terrorism and he foresees that there will be another attack. When the Pentagon was struck nobody could find Rumsfeld for half an hour. Only at 10.30 Rumsfeld appeared in the “National Military Command Center”.

Dick Cheney and Norman Mineta are carried into the bunker of the White House. It is not known what they had been doing before.

General Richard Myers only appeared at 9:45 “back to life”. For one and a half hours he discussed the formalities of his promotion with Senator Max Cleland. He acknowledges that he realized that the WTC was attacked but he thought it had been a small airplane. Even when the Pentagon was hit he wasn’t informed.

After 911: The democrats wanted to discuss on a meeting in Florida what could be done about the election manipulation of 2000.

On 911: In Washington the Carlyle Group has a dinner with the special guest Shafiq Bin Laden, the brother of Osama.

And General Tommy Franks was in Pakistan on 911 participating on conversations about terrorism and security.

Foreknowledge and other questions:
The authors mention the Pentagon drill in October 2000, the exercises of the medicines in May 2001 (assuming the attack of a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon) and the exercises of the NSA and CIA on 911 just a few miles away from Dulles Airport.
The authors wonder why the hijacker took the highly difficult to turn in order to struck the Pentagon at the very angle where the building was just protected against attacks and where due to the ongoing works mainly manual workers were killed. The authors wonder why the pilots didn’t went to crash straight into the Pentagon (which would have been a much easier manoeuvre and would have created a much higher degree of devastation) or didn’t crash into the side of the Pentagon where Rumsfeld has his room (and again this would have been much easier than the actual turn they made).
The authors mention that the enterprise that was responsible for building the protected side was AMEC. Interestingly they were also in charge of “cleaning up” at the Pentagon and on Ground Zero after 911. One part of the business of AMEC is also scanning of radio frequency and the planning of frequencies (something that could be useful in the C-130).

The authors remark as well that the News Service of the Army stated that within one hour of the first attacks temporary workers of the department for Defence were on the streets of New York and in the air to help. In view of the absence of Rumsfeld at that time and in view of the absence of air defence and any other action this is noteworthy. Besides the department of Transport pointed out that due to simulation and precise preparation they had been able to react within minutes. It’s a very good thing that the help was provided so quickly but due to the declared unprecedence of the attacks it is noteworthy as well.

The meeting:
Warren Buffet (second richest person in the world) had an interesting meeting on 911 in Nebraska. Several directors of the biggest American companies are there. Several of these firms have rooms in the WTC. Evidently a lot of them were saved from being victim of the attacks. At 2.00 p.m. the President arrived there. Why did he make this detour from Barksdale?

The enterprise NetJet to which belonged the Falcon Fairchild that was seen near Flight 93 although there was a flight ban is owned by Warren Buffet.

Mohammed Atta and the Vencie Flying Circus:
In the next chapter the authors analyze the film of Daniel Hopsicker (which is sold with the book).

The Hamburg terror cell:
Atta’s appartement in the Marienstraße was under surveillance of the BND (German secret service) from February 1999. But then the German police realized that Darkazanli and Zammar had been interviewed by American agents without the knowledge of their German counterparts. Moreover in 1999 the CIA tried to recruit Darkazanli as an agent.

The judge and two prosecutors of the Motassadeq-trial in Germany were asked to give testimony in the US. When they arrived at the American airport their three bags containing files on the trial were missing and they were obliged to go into court without these material. Two days later two of the bags were found.
The authors remark that it could be very possible that not only Binalshibh but also Atta and other hijackers were CIA-agents.

The proofs:
The authors analyse the quality of the official proofs of the guilt of the 19 hijackers: The passport of Satam Al-Suqami that was found a block away from the WTC (how is it possible that it survived?), Atta’s bag containing a pilot’s uniform (why did he need it as he already had a ticket) the Koran, his last will (but why did he put his last will in his bag and didn’t keep it with himself? Robert Frisk moreover showed that Atta’s last will is everything but not an expression of an Islam believer. The authors have the impression that all this proof creates more the impression of being made up than to explain or to prove something.

The authors ask to be shown proofs that really could prove something:
Fingerprints of the hijackers left on their boarding cards.
The complete documentation of the conversations between the tower and the four flights.
The complete recording of the cockpit voice recorders of Flight 77 and Flight 93.
The complete recordings of the Data recorder of Flight 77 and Flight 93.
The identification of the hijackers based on their DNA.
A documentation where which corps was found (inside or outside the cockpit).
Signature of the hijackers (the traces they left buying their tickets).
The complete documentation of the radar recording (proving if there had been airplanes nearby etc).
The complete documentation of Air Force Bases Andrews, Otis and Langley (who did take off with which plane and when).
In contrast to the proofs the authors demand they describe the destruction of possible proofs especially the rubbles of the WTC.

The blocked investigations:
Besides the Phoenix memo, the memo of Robert Wright and the testimony of Coleen Rowley the authors mention the case of James Hopkins. Again nobody seemed to be interested. Hopkins worked for the FAA and figured out that Adnan Bukhari (who was considered the first days to have been one of the hijackers) had attended in 1991 and 1998 the FAA academy in Oklahoma. He told his superiors. The day he told the FBI he was fired by the FAA. Later the Merit Systems Protection Board gave Hopkins right.
The authors end their analyses showing the problem of the Independent Commission and the Joint Inquiry and the secrecy of the ruling government (the change of the Presidential Records Act).

PostScript:
The authors reconstitute the history of the Jihad and the CIA involvement, the inability of the US army to capture leading Taliban (and some newspapers calling it all a “charade”). And indicate the importance of the PNAC and the need for a new Pearl Habour.

They give three different explanations of what might really have happened on 911:
1. The creation of the Taliban the Frankenstein of the US is responsible.
2. Let one happen stop the rest.
3. The creation of a new Pearl Habour

The authors tend to 2 and 3. And they describe also the possibility how 911 could have been a long planned Pearl Harbour with just 20, maybe 30 people really knowing what would happen.

So, some information that is probably old to many of you, but it is always good to refresh these facts. Plus there are some new details there as well-- for me, anyway. Finally, the questions and proofs are very important and still unresolved.

Uh Oh

This is big news:

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will be unable to meet projected western demand in 10 to 15 years, Saudi officials have warned.

At today's prices, the world will need the cartel to boost its production from 30m to 50m barrels a day to 50m by 2020 to meet rapidly rising demand, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy watchdog for consuming countries.

But senior Saudi energy officials have privately warned US and European counterparts that Opec would have an “extremely difficult time” meeting that demand. Saudi Arabia calculates there is a 4.5m b/d gap between what the world needs and what the kingdom can provide.

We're going to be hearing a LOT MORE about this in the near future.

Really, the "Plame Affair" Is Small Potatoes Compared to 9/11

Yet the Plame conspiracy theories get mainstream blog attention.

I'm not knocking "Spiderleaf"'s research or his/her "conspiracy theories" by any means, I just think it is funny how they can spend so much time on this but I wager they either scoff at or are completely uninterested in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Cable Spools and the Diesel Generator

I gotta say that Jim Hoffman of 911research.com gives a very superficial treatment to the important issue of the cable spools and the diesel generator in front of the Pentagon. This is an example where someone wants to debunk the idea that no-757 hit the Pentagon so badly, that they show biased analysis of the evidence.

I go over why the cable spools and the diesel generator are important here, here and here.

Hoffman on Reynolds

An interesting comment by Jim Hoffman on Morgan Reynold's recent article on 9/11.

Reynolds' article promotes two distinct theories:

* That the Twin Towers and Building 7 were destroyed through controlled demolition.
* That the initial damage to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, as well as the crater in Pennsylvania, were not caused by jetliner crashes.

The contrast between Reynold's handling of these two theories is striking.

Reynolds provides a compelling summary of the analysis of earlier researchers that the collapses of the WTC towers had to be the result of controlled demolition. That analysis employs diverse lines of reasoning and includes the application of basic principals of physics to the features of the towers' collapses documented by abundant physical evidence, such as scores of photographs of the collapses themselves.

In contrast, Reynolds' premise that jetliners were not involved at any of the four crash sites is baseless. Aside from the fact that there is no credible evidence that the initial damage was produced by anything other than jetliners, Reynolds fails to mention any of the bodies of evidence that jetliners did crash as reported, such as eyewitness accounts of each of the four crashes.

Each argument Reynolds advances for the no-jetliner theory is flawed. He confuses aluminum cladding for steel columns in North Tower crash photographs, fails to appreciate the effects of momentum on target damage and aircraft-part survivability in high-speed crashes, repeats an erroneous description of the Pentagon's facade damage, and makes unsupported claims that Flight 175 should have sliced through the South Tower's east corner and that its engine parts are "unconvincing."

As with the WTC towers' demolition, the points Reynolds makes in favor of the no-jetliner theory are all made by other authors, so the contrast between the the soundness of his arguments for the two theories may just reflect the contrast between the strengths of the theories themselves -- a contrast which Reynolds may not appreciate.

Reynolds' article, which combines strong theories with erroneous ones, is a microcosm of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Experience has shown that the mainstream media will amplify the least credible and most offensive theories and misrepresent them as gospel of the "conspiracy theorists." Reynolds' concluding paragraph highlights the importance of getting the science right.

If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an "inside job" and a government attack on America would be compelling. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right, "though heaven should fall."

I couldn't agree more.

I think Hoffman is basically right here. HOWEVER, I also think Hoffman is a little too quick to dismiss some of the oddities of the 9/11 plane crashes, particularly the Pentagon hit and the flight 93 crash. These, to me, anyway, are telltale signs of plane-swaps and thus of MIHOP. I'm not sure if Hoffman really appreciates that point, but I think Reynolds does.

Why LIHOP Equals MIHOP

LIHOP = "Let It Happen On Purpose"

MIHOP = "Make It Happen On Purpose"

If you read Paul Thompson's 9/11 timeline and the evidence presented by Mike Ruppert in "Crossing the Rubicon", the evidence is really overwhelming that governmental authorities at some level knew "9/11 was coming".

The important question that follows from this finding is: if intelligence agencies knew a major attack was coming, but wanted an attack to succeed for geopolitcal reasons, would they really let the attack proceed in an uncontrolled manner?

To me, it seems logical that the people in the US who wanted an attack to occur would also really wanted to limit its scope. Thus, they needed to be able to control the attacks. They didn't mind if an aging skyscraper was knocked down, or that a small section of the Pentagon was knocked down, but they probably didn't want something like Congress hit or the Whitehouse hit. They probably didn't want the part of the Pentagon taken out where the top generals worked. They probably didn't want to take the chance that a nuclear plant or a chemical plant would be hit.

This is where MIHOP comes in.

This is where the 9/11 LIHOPers needed to control the attacks.

How would they control the attacks?

One way would be to have incompetent patsies as the hijackers and have the planes piloted by remote control. Or have staged hijackings and swap the real planes with remote control drones. And there are other ways they could have controlled the attacks, of course, but the point remains:

LIHOP leads naturally to MIHOP.

Furthermore-- if there is MIHOP, there should be telltale signs from the physical evidence of MIHOP. For instance, the fact that no 9/11 hijacked plane warned ground control that they were hijacked, the fact that the transponders were all turned off, the rapid collapses of WTC1, 2 and 7, the strange flight path of the plane that hit the Pentagon and the strange fate of flight 93. These are important pieces of physical evidence that support MIHOP.

The Rove-Plame Case, Simplified

My take: The NY Times' Judith Miller is a CIA operative who knew of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. She passed this info onto Rove in such a way that he could pass it onto other journalists and gave Rove an alibi that he didn't know that her identity was secret. Rove passed the info onto Matthew Cooper and Robert Novak, who reported the info.

The questions the prosecutor Fitzgerald are trying to answer are a) whether Miller was truly the source and also b) whether Rove knew that Plame was an undercover agent when he passed on the info.

My guesses are yes and yes, and I hope that both Miller and Rove will be going to jail at some point.

So United Airlines Could Track the Hijacked Flight 93 But the Military Had No Idea About It (According to the 9/11 Commission)???

This is astounding.

From Jere Longman's "Among the Heroes":

By this time, flight attendants from flight 93 had called United's maintenance center in San Francisco and reported that the plane had been hijacked. The airline's customer service staff also received information that passengers were making calls from the phone's GTE Airfones. Senior management began to gather in the airline's crisis center, a terraced theater-like room that resembled NASA's Mission Control. Andy Studdart, United's chief operating officer, was in the control room. On a screen that was six feet long and four feet high, United's flights were displayed. Other flights were filtered out and Flight 93 was highlighted. Its track appeared red on a black background. At nine thirty-six, near Cleveland, the plane had made an ominous turn to the southeast.

Flight 93's transponder also had been turned off. The transponder is a receiver/transmitter that gives air traffic control a plane's identity, speed, direction and altitude. On the screen in the crisis center, the flight could still be tracked, but United Officials could no longer tell how high it was flying.

So, officially, no one from either the FAA or United alerted the military about what was going on, and so officially, the military never knew that flight 93 was hijacked until it had already crashed.

Just amazing.

The really maddening thing is how the 9/11 commission paints a picture where it is the oddest thing in the world for the FAA to alert the military of a hijack and the military to intercept a hijacked plane. But these are old protocols that were in use for years, and there were domestic hijackings in the US before 9/11.

So really, something very strange happened with the military on 9/11, and the commission was intent on covering it up.

So What The $#@! Is The Matter With Bob Kerrey?

This is just OUTRAGEOUS:

MR. KERREY: I've got some concern for the military in this whole situation, because the optics for me is, you all are taking a bullet for the FAA. I appreciate that may be wrong, but that's how it appears, because, General Arnold, you in particular on the day covered yourself in glory. I think the military performed, under the circumstances, exceptionally well, and I don't understand why the -- again, General Myers is the guy to ask, because there was a briefing at the White House on the 17th of September. And it feels like something happened in that briefing that produced almost a necessity to deliver a story that's different than what actually happened on that day.

General Arnold, is that an unfair optic on my part? As I said, if you look at what you all did on that day, it's hard to find fault. And we really haven't uncovered this stuff, it was readily available, the facts were all there. So it leaves the impression that there is an attempt to create a unified story there, and has you all, as I said, taking a bullet for the FAA, because the FAA should have told you what was going on -- it seems to me. It must be agonizing to -- you know, you lost 50 military personnel in the Pentagon and 75 civilians in the Pentagon that day -- it must be agonizing to know that Secret Service had information you didn't have. Help me out here. Am I looking at this wrong? Because, as I said, it looks like you guys did a good job on that day, and now it -- you know, it just gives the appearance that you're standing in front of the FAA, and unnecessarily so.

From the Twelfth Public Hearing, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES, Thursday, June 17, 2004.

REALLY NOW, Mr. Kerry? The military performed "exceptionally well" on 9/11 and it was the FAA that screwed up and the military is being blamed for this?

Pardon me while I scream.

One only has to look at the utter lack of air defense over Washington DC on 9/11 to throw this whole statement into absurdity.

Happy Independence Day!

Despite the massive problems with the US Government/National Security State in these modern times, the principles on which this nation was founded are still quite wonderful:

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Note, the grievances noted by the founders amount to a CONSPIRACY THEORY wherein the King of England endeavors to make nothing but trouble for Americans.

It seems to me that nowadays, our American press would surely hesitate to publish these "unfounded" rumours, much less publish the idea that people were rebelling against the government because of these unjust and terrible deeds.

Security at Manhattan Skyscrapers

from James Wolcott:

"The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world."

Can you imagine what the security will be like for workers, visitors, and deliverers to get into that fortress? You practically have to give blood and undergo a retinal scan now to get into some midtown buildings.

I'm curious-- if the twin towers were really brought down by airplane impacts/fuel fires and NOT by demolitions, why are people in NYC so uptight about skyscraper security in terms of street traffic now?

I'm just wondering if this tight security is some tacit hint that there were demolitions involved in the WTC collapses...

A Great Overview of the Lesser Known Phone Calls from Flight 93

Here. Well worth reading if you're an afficianado of 9/11 phone calls and their significance. I really don't know what these calls all mean, but there are many little odddities that stick out.

9/11 and "War of the Worlds"

I saw the new Spielberg flick "War of the Worlds" yesterday, and the allusions to 9/11 were rather obvious.

This morning, I see I'm not the only who saw this. Frank Rich:

"War of the Worlds" makes as many references to 9/11 as Mr. Bush did. The alien attack on America is the work of sleeper cells; the garments of the dead rain down on those fleeing urban apocalypse; poignant fliers are posted for The Missing.

There are actually more references-- the little girl keeps asking if the destruction was from "terrorists", there is the New York-Boston journey (the reverse of the Boston to New York flights on 9/11), the people running down the city street fleeing destruction, a plane crash and at the end, the specter of bioterrorism.

The plane crash was the most interesting allusion to 9/11 to me, in light of what happened at the Pentagon.

In "War of the Worlds", a Boeing 747-like plane crashes in a suburban neighborhood, and Spielberg recreates the crash in vivid detail. There are the huge engines on fire and still rotating, the broken fuselage and various and sundry pieces of debris. Most reminisicent to the Pentagon crash was the lime-green primer color on the inside of the debris fragments-- almost as if someone were paying homage to the official Pentagon story. But in contrast to the official Pentagon story was just HOW MUCH PLANE THERE WAS-- which makes all the more remarkable the essential disappearance of the plane wreckage at the Pentagon.

What do we know that survived the Pentagon crash? A few engine pieces, a landing gear, a wheel, a tire, some painted pieces of the fuselage, a door hatch of some kind and various odd mechanical fragments.

No parts of the wing, no tail parts, no fuselage parts, no seats were photographed. And neither were these seen by the first people at the fire scene.

So a huge 757 got almost completely shredded as it went into the Pentagon and exploded, leaving no large debris whatsoever?

I suppose, I suppose. But it is damn odd.

BIG DC RALLY

This looks good:

End the Fear Here!
Publicize the Master Lies Behind the Endless War

TRUTH, VETERAN & MEDIA ACTIVISTS
Come Help Build a Breakthrough Campaign to Expose and Explode the Seamless Deceit behind 9/11, Resource Wars, Troop Betrayal and Constitutional Jeopardy


DC LAUNCH: JULY 22~24, 2005 An unprecedented event series conjoining the power veteran/victim groups, key truth movements and the Indie Media to out the deadly coup now underway and launch a thousand Paul Reveres.

Featuring: the first National Press Club press conference exclusively for indie media & international journalists, Capitol Hill events, a Lafayette Park 911-war deceit rally/march, entertainment, new documentary films & presentations, a Lafayette Park 911-war deceit event, entertainment, and a strategy summit at American University between leaders from diverse truth, p&j and veteran movements as well as the independent and foreign press.

PLANNING ADVISORS AND PARTICIPANTS
afterdowningstreet.org, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, Dr. Bob Bowman of Veterans for Peace, FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, former HUD Asst. Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts, Dr. David Ray Griffin, Rep. Charles Key of the Oklahoma City Bombing Commission, CIA veteran Ray McGovern, Sunny Miller of Traprock Peace Center, Depleted Uranium authority Dr. Leuren Moret, Jenna Orkin of WTC Environmental Action, Peter Philips of Project Censored, former Bush Labor Dept. Economist Morgan Reynolds, velvetrevolution.us, and many more.

PURPOSE
Whenever citizens working on Iraq lies, 9/11, troop abuse, stolen elections and/or the “missing” government trillions gather and compare notes, potent insights emerge into the corporate coup d’йtat we face. This DC Convergence presumes that we now have enough dangerous truths, damning facts, and populist media to deliver the evidence of treachery nationwide. It’s now time to forge a strategy, join with veterans & victim families, and assist media activists in spreading the truth throughout the land.

Everything We Need to SUCCEED - We Now Have
. The facts and evidence from truth movement researchers
. Enduring inspiration from courageous whistleblowers and victim families
. The support of respected leaders across the political spectrum
. A nationwide communications network in independent media
. A country gradually waking up to the desperate need for truth

All That's Missing is A SHARED STRATEGY
- Come to DC and Help Create it . . .

http://www.truthemergency.us


EVENT SCHEDULE -- July 22-24

Friday, July 22: FIRST BIRTHDAY of THE 9/11 COVER-UP REPORT
A.M. and Afternoon:
National Press Club and Capitol Hill Events
- details soon at official website: http://www.truthemergency.us
6:00 - 9:00 PM: Reception & movies at American University Tavern

Saturday, July 23: 3RD ANNIVERSARY OF THE DOWNING STREET MEMO
11:00 ~ 2:30 PM: Lafayette Park, Speakers: Family members, whistle-blowers, spokespeople for major truth, veteran and media groups (see
http://truthemergency.us ) followed by a Beyond Downing Street event.
7:00 - 10:00 PM: AU Tavern: Dance with bands from Justice Through Music

Sunday, July 24 STRATEGY SUMMIT
9:00-12:00: Workshops -- 3-4/hour to choose from. Growing list of
specifics at http://www.truthemergency.us (Plenary Session 1:30~6:00 PM)
BRAINSTORMING and DISCUSSION on the Most Powerful Ways to COLLABORATE


CONVERGENCE COSTS
Capitol Hill, National Press Club & Lafayette Park Events: FREE
Saturday Night American U Truth Concert: $5 w/drink
Sunday - Workshops & Strategy Summit: $25 (or $15 w/ discount below)

$10 FINE PRINT DISCOUNT
Since we really are trying to achieve something here and prepared participants will contribute a lot more to the mix, we are offering a $10 Sunday discount to all of you who watch at least 7 of the following videos before you arrive. Since the only proof we can ask for is your solemn word, you can obviously lie your ass off to get in cheap. We just pray you see the irony of lying your way into a truth rescue event.

The Power of Nightmares
The Great Conspiracy
Ken Jenkins' "Perspective on 9/11"
Hijacking Catastrophe
Griffin's C-SPAN speech: "9-11 & American Empire" Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Weapons of Mass Deception
Beyond Treason
The Doctor, Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children
Waco: Rules of Engagement
Loss of Liberty
Counting on Democracy
Unconstitutional
Arsenal of Hypocrisy

(Tapes/DVDs available from http://peaceproject.com
and elsewhere on the Net.)

LODGING
Cheap rooms available at American University Fri, Sat, Sun nights for
early registrations. Triples: $35/bed; Doubles: $48/bed; Singles $70/bed
For Reservations/More information call: 205-344-2372

Contact
Phone: 707.616.7939
Email: sharethe911truth@yahoo.com
Online Discussion/Suggestion/Campaign Building List at ...
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/dctruthemergency

GET INVOLVED
If you sympathize but cannot attend, please help out by passing along this invitation, contributing a little bread, and, best of all, holding a local truth convergence of your own. See http://www.truthemergency.us for details.

TRUTH PAINT THE STREETS
Also please help spread around Truth Convergence flyers and hand-outs here: http://digitalstyledesigns.com/pages/downloads.htm

The Mystery of the Initial Floor Collapse of WTC1

The sequence of the WTC1 collapse can be seen fairly well in this video.

The following stills show the very early stages of the WTC1 collapse from the same angle as the video I linked to above:


Frame 1 


Frame 2 


Frame 3 

The front face of the building is where the plane went in-- you can see the dark irregular "scar" starting right above where the building facade is undamaged.


Frame 4 


Frame 5 

What the first three pictures show is a line of puffed out smoke that goes along one whole floor at the upper part of the plane entry hole.

The puffed out smoke most likely is from where a floor is collapsing onto another floor-- resulting in the smoke being compressed and being forced out the windows.

This sequence of stills tells us two important things.

First, the very first collapsing floor landed on a solid floor below it (otherwise the smoke would not have been compressed and been forced out), and this lower floor was closer to the entry hole than the collapsing floor. So this is odd, because one would expect the floors closest to the entry hole, where the plane went and where the fires should have been most intense, would collapse first.

Second, the first floor collapse only puffed out SMOKE-- not fire. One can see fire shooting out significantly as the collapse progresses in frames four and five. But one would expect the heat to be most intense where the fire was. Smoke alone puffing out would indicate either a dying, smoldering fire or that the smoke came from somewhere else. So-- if the floor collapse was induced by HEAT, why didn't fire come shooting out as the floor above the fire collapsed?

This sequence of shots would seem to indicate that the initial floor collapse was not caused by heat!

Bush Wants to Limit Military Covert Operations

This is interesting: regarding the new intelligence reforms--

Mr. Bush completely rejected only one idea, and he appears to be right in doing that. The details were classified, but Douglas Jehl reported in The Times that the axed proposal would have given the Pentagon greater authority to conduct covert operations.

Now I find it hard to believe that Bush really wants to limit covert operations in general. But there is one way this makes sense-- if 9/11 was a military covert operation, and in particular, if 9/11 was a covert operation that was a neocon-led military coup that actually threatened Bush if he didn't go along with their plans to attack the middle east. This is what Webster Tarpley has proposed in "Synthetic Terror 9/11: Made in USA", and there is some evidence to believe that Bush was threatened on 9/11. Specifically, this would be the coded threats that were made against Air Force One.

Sandra Day O'Conner leaves at an Opportune Time for the Bush Administration

It's certainly a nice distraction for the holiday weekend, away from Bush and the war.

Was she pressured into going out at this time?

She's a swing vote on abortion. It will be interesting to see how much Bush plays to the religious base on his appointment. This could be pretty wild.

Of course, Bush Sr "caved" into the moderates when he appointed Souter. I bet Jr has this in mind and will try to pick a real hard-ass conservative.

Blast From The Past-- Jesse Ventura Had Doubts About The Official 9/11 Story

FORMER MINNESOTA GOVERNOR JESSE VENTURA: Well, you know... At first, again, I wanted to believe 9/11, you know. But the problem I have with 9/11 is just a real simple one. I'm trying to figure out -- and of course they're now attempting to answer it somewhat -- how we could have failed so miserably in not having air defense.

I remember reading this last summer, but it's good to go back and remember ALL the former government officials who are skeptics about 9/11. It's also worth noting that Ventura was also a Navy SEAL, and thus has military expertise.

Goosestepping Towards A Police State

Bush creates a domestic spy service.

US President George W Bush has ordered the creation of a domestic intelligence service within the FBI, as part of a package of 70 new security measures.

The White House says it is enacting the measures to fight international terrorist groups and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

The authorities will also be given the power to seize the property of people deemed to be helping the spread of WMD*.

Groovy, eh?

Of course, the NYTimes thinks all this is just peachy.

It's pathetic how little debate this subject has gotten.

All because of 9/11.

The Bradblog has some good words on the topic.

*I wonder how broad the definition of WMD will become.