January 22, 2012 | By Chris Mondics, Inquirer Staff Writer

In a ferocious legal battle pitting government lawyers against victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Justice Department is fighting to block thousands of individuals and businesses from taking $6.6 million in frozen al-Qaeda assets seized from an alleged terrorism financier.

Frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2007, the money is sought by the attorneys for 6,000 individual victims and insurers who suffered billions in losses from the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The money, in a Chicago brokerage account controlled by senior al-Qaeda operative Abu al-Tayyeb until his arrest in Saudi Arabia in 2006, drew little public notice until lawyers for 9/11 victims moved in June to collect on a 2007 default judgment.

Read more here: http://articles.philly.com/2012-01-22/business/30652937_1_qaeda-al-qaeda...

http://www.ae911truth.org/en/news-section/41-articles/602-a-new-911-inve...

A New 9/11 Investigation - Coming to a Theater Near You? Hollywood Stars Seek to Make Feature Film Focused on WTC Demolitions
Written by Howard Cohen
Friday, 20 January 2012 15:11

“A Violation of Trust” (formerly titled “Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator”) is a feature film project that is willing to do what the world’s governments and legal bodies are unwilling to do – open a real investigation of 9/11 for the entire world to see. It dramatizes the first day of “The President’s New Investigation of 9/11”, with actors performing from a tightly-written, factually-accurate script that pits the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reports against the work of 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin and the scientific research highlighted by leading 9/11 truth organizations, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts
Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 21.2 (Fall 2011)
Kurtis Hagen

ABSTRACT: In an article published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the government and its allies ought to actively undermine groups that espouse conspiracy theories deemed “demonstrably false.” They propose infiltrating such groups in order to “cure” conspiracy theorists by treating their “crippled epistemology” with “cognitive diversity.” They base their proposal on an analysis of the “causes” of such conspiracy theories, which emphasizes informational and reputational cascades. Some may regard their proposal as outrageous and anti-democratic. I agree. However, in this article I merely argue that their argument is flawed in at least the following ways: (1) their account of the popularity of conspiracy theories is implausible, and (2) their proposal relies on misleading “stylized facts,” including a caricature of those who doubt official narratives and a deceptive depiction of the relevant history.

[NOTE: I have included extended excerpts below, believing this to be within the scope of fair use.]  

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

[Update]: The program did well, airing 678 times in 32% of all U.S. television households, reaching a gross audience of 2,731,200 viewers. .PDF file attached

A five minute version of the newly-released documentary, "Architects & Engineers - Solving the Mystery of WTC 7," is now showing on National Public Television stations across the United States. The mini-doc will run as part of the "Spotlight On" series of educational, short five minute programs that have been broadcasting nationally on Public Television for 19 years. *Narrated by Ed Asner.

Spotlight On: A Strong Alternative to Advertising. Public Awareness Programming.

- Guaranteed 500 National Airings on Public Television
- Guaranteed 3 Million Viewers
- Confirmed Nielson-based Monitoring Report
- Approximately 40%-60% airings in Prime Time

http://www.trivue.org - Architects and Engineers

Please report any airings you see to: MediaOutreach@AE911Truth.org

Written by AE911Truth

What began in Iowa on Tuesday, January 3, 2012 and will continue to June 26 is an American tradition that AE911Truth needs you to participate in. Americans will be heading to their caucuses and primaries to select their preferred Presidential candidate. There are currently many Republican candidates traversing states and making local appearances in small venues. This gives you, the supporters of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a unique accessible opportunity to interact with the candidates and to make a simple statement or ask a simple question to educate and pin them down on the issue of a new investigation and have them state their stance – publicly, and ideally in front of the media. You can find the candidate’s web-sites to see where they will be meeting voters near you.

Because it is important to engage the candidate and the other people in attendance with as much finesse as possible, we suggest:

Option 1: (A statement)

This statement is fairly concise yet includes the important detail that we are not alone in our call for a real investigation. By not asking a specific question, and thereby not eliciting a response, it may very well have more impact during the awkward moment following with the audience, media, and the candidate himself.

David Chandler and I have now published an Addendum to our paper "The Pentagon Attack on 9/11:
A Refutation of the Pentagon Flyover Hypothesis Based on Analysis of the Flight Path"
http://stj911.org/legge/Legge_Chandler_NOC_Refutation.html

The Addendum draws on two additional pieces of evidence to revise the calculations of bank angle and wing loading which would be required if the plane followed the curved path north of the Citgo service station. This strengthens the previous conclusions set out in the original paper. Previously the failure of the many witnesses to mention a steep bank was taken as proof that the curved path did not happen, while the survival of the aircraft, if it deviated round the service station, was regarded as unlikely. With this new analysis of the witness testimony, showing the plane was flying wings level near the Naval Annex, survival of the plane is now found to be absolutely impossible. There is thus no rational explanation of the event other than that the plane flew virtually straight past the Naval Annex and the service station to the impact point.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/9264-a...

Noam Chomsky: The U.S.-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement is ‘part of a global program of world militarization’
by Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers | December 16, 2011, 1:18 pm

[Editor's. note: This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim.]

Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for the guidance and wisdom that you have consistently given through your teaching and speeches in many places. We want to start off with a question from Faiz.

Detailed investigation reveals unexpected connections among people who played critical roles related to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Earlier articles have covered some of those connections with respect to the World Trade Center (WTC) and the official reports which were produced to explain the WTC events.[1] This article will begin to outline a wider set of connections that encompasses more aspects of 9/11. Readers may find that, with respect to the 9/11 attacks and those who were responsible for protecting us from terrorism, it is a small world after all.

Barry McDaniel came to the WTC security company Stratesec, in 1998, to become its Chief Operating Officer. In the years before 9/11, Stratesec had contracts to provide security services not only for the WTC, but also for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes hijacked on 9/11, and Dulles Airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off that day.

At the WTC, McDaniel was in charge of the security operation in terms of what he called a “completion contract,” to provide services “up to the day the buildings fell down.”[2] McDaniel came to Stratesec directly from BDM International, where he had been Vice President for nine years. BDM was a major subsidiary of The Carlyle Group for most of that time. When Barry McDaniel started at BDM, the company began getting a large amount of government business “in an area the Navy called Black Projects,” or budgets that were kept secret.[3]

Scientific American magazine, through columnists like Michael Shermer, has supported the notion that the World Trade Center was destroyed by fire, just like the government said it was. However, a recent article in the magazine, "Castles in the Air" (September, 2011), discusses the building boom in high-rise steel superstructure buildings and does point out how ironic it is that these buildings continue to be built.

A letter to the editor about the article was published in the January 2012 edition from Luke Bisby, a Senior Research Fellow in Structures and Fire at the University of Edinburgh (see the link below). His letter comes to the conclusion that architects and engineers need to face the reality of what a fire can do to a high-rise building. Neither the letter writer, nor the editorial staff of Scientific American bothered to note that over 1,600 architects and engineers have faced the notion that fire destroyed all three buildings at the World Trade Center and rejected it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=letters-jan-12

From the History Commons Groups blog:

Numerous new entries have been added to the Complete 9/11 Timeline at History Commons, many of which deal with the US military's actions around the time of--and in response to--the 9/11 attacks, while other new entries provide important information about the military's responses to suspicious aircraft prior to 9/11.

New timeline entries describe how NORAD--the military organization responsible for defending US airspace--regularly launched fighter jets in response to suspicious aircraft in the years before 9/11, with fighters able to take off within minutes of a scramble order.