http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/03/84517.html

VOX Pop
1022 Cortelyou Rd.
Brooklyn, NY 11218
Telephone: 718 940 2084

At Sander Hicks' VOX Pop bookstore/cafe this Saturday, impeccable BCCI researcher Lucy Komisar will be promoting the new book, "A Game as Old As Empire" in which she has a chapter;

Saturday 3/31 @ Vox Pop, 5-9 PM, FREE:

Dinner special for only $9! Your choice of Turkey/Bison/Veggie Burger with Beer or Wine, voxpopnet.net/food.html, voxpopnet.net/beerwine.html

5-7 PM: James Henry and Lucy Komisar present A Game As Old As Empire

John Perkins's controversial exposé, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, came out of nowhere in late 2004 to become an international word-of-mouth sensation. Now Perkins is joined by a dozen contributors-journalists, investigators, activists, and even other economic hit men in A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption.

Matt Taibbi is at it again, and although he has apparently had his mouth washed out with soap, he's still madly trying to reconcile poll after poll after poll reflecting widespread distrust in the official story of 9/11 with his blind faith in the "Zelikow-Approved" 9/11 Commission Report.

His new piece is: THE LOW POST: Murrah Redux 9/11 Truth is a bald regurgitation of a silly tale we heard ten years ago.

(If you already feel like writing RS, here's their email: letters@rollingstone.com other contact options here: http://www.rollingstone.com/contactus-update )

Like Taibbi's earlier egregious, indefensible hit piece, he struggles with concepts that he cannot understand, and winds up with an amorphous stroll through a bunch of lazily stitched together anecdotes which suggest that he doesn't even really care about the issue, not even enough to make a half-hearted attempt at researching OKC.

Also here; http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c9a_1174245761

The above clip is from the second of two large files of footage captured on VHS, on 9/11. The files have been digitized into .avi's, but retain their PAL video information.

The first file is 3 hours long, consisting of about 1.5 hours of BBC News 24 footage (with time stamp) then the person recording switched the channel to Britain's Channel 4 for about an hour, then back to just under an hour of BBC News 24 at 20.00 BST.

697 MB .avi

The second file is three solid hours of BBC News 24 from 20.27 BST to 23.26. (Those interested in 911veritas' research will want to FFWD to the 1:12:00 mark or 21.39 time stamp for corroboration of the intial early announcement of the demise of WTC7.)

697 MB .avi

Dave Emory: ...the current seated President, George W. Bush, is not at all separate from the BCCI milieu ... this isn't something that's "long ago and far away".

Lucy Komisar: No... BCCI has been very good to the current Bush's business interests... in 1979 and 80 it helped finance his oil company which was called Arbusto Energy. The money came through a man named Bath who was in business, and one might think he was moving the money of Mr. Bin Mahfouz. That money turned out to be very useful for George Bush, when Harken Energy, (which absorbed Arbusto), got in money trouble in 1987, it got $25 million in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland, and as part of that deal, a seat on the board was given to a Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Baksh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz ...

The money comes from CIA, it goes through BCCI, in accounts that nobody knows about, that nobody can follow, and then money from the big shareholders of BCCI comes back to George Bush.

Isn't that an interesting circle?

(JackRiddler posted a list of interesting questions over at DemocraticUnderground. Lurkers, answer them over at DU, okay? -r.)

Questions for those who argue as skeptics against 9/11 skepticism

Tue Mar-13-07 03:12 PM

(NOTE: No name calling. I want to open a serious discussion with those who are willing. I ask people who support inside job theories to comment on the OP if they wish but to avoid snark in this thread and wait on adding their own new questions for 48 hours.)

Isn't Cheney's continued linking of the Saddam regime to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 events the most "outrageous conspiracy theory" of all? Did it not have more real-world impact than any other conspiracy theory? Note that he did it again yesterday:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/13/MNG7UOK2D61.DTL&type=printable

Should 9/11 have been responded to as a crime against humanity, or as an act of war?

Is it untrue that 9/11 was employed as the justification for military actions and domestic policies that would have otherwise been politically difficult or infeasible? Is it untrue that each of these actions and policies was explicitly desired and planned in advance by the main players of the Bush administration?

Do you justify the appointment of Philip Zelikow as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission? Does not this appointment on its face indicate a cover-up?

(Nice piece over at www.dissidentvoice.org. -r.)

9-11: The Truth Matters

by Kim Petersen
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 13, 2007

On 11 September 2001, I sat with a Palestinian family in the living room of their home in Aqaba, Jordan and watched subdued as planes struck US landmarks. It wasn’t long before the Saudi rebel Osama bin Laden was fingered as the culprit. That the corporate media had so quickly named a responsible party was suspicious. My suspicion was further aroused when, days later, I spoke with a friend who trained pilots for Royal Jordanian Airlines. The captain claimed that flight 93 had not crashed; it had been shot down. To adduce his point he pointed out how there were no large chunks of fuselage among the wreckage and that the wreckage was scattered over too wide an area. Assuming his facts were true, then the media portrayal of the 9-11 Gestalt was immediately questionable.

Reports quickly surfaced about Israelis celebrating during the attack, that no Arabs were on the planes, that onboard cell phones could not function under those circumstances, that US air force interceptor planes had taken inordinately long to scramble, that the WTC buildings’ owner had massively insured the buildings for a terrorist attack, that only a demolition could collapse the buildings in such a manner, that jet fuel did not burn hot enough to melt steel, that the president sat with school children apparently unfazed by the news of the attack, and so on. True or not, it was no wonder that people became engaged in a movement to determine what happened on 9-11.

How does one arrive at the “truth”?

Certainly not through close-mindedness. Would one be likely to arrive at the “truth” if he is unwilling to consider all the evidence? Open-minded skepticism -- the willingness to consider many views skeptically -- seems a logical formula by which to arrive at the truth. Open-minded skepticism includes critical appraisal of facts, pertinent literature, and hypotheses in reaching one’s own conclusions. Of course, hashing one’s conclusions over with others helps to winnow out wrong conclusions and refine incongruencies. Consequently, I have maintained an open-mindedness to information emerging from 9-11 but with requisite skepticism. There was no way that I could, with limited resources and at great distance, check on the mass of information and evidence that had to be sifted through to conclude anything definite. I could only conjecture about isolated pieces of information.

Continued...
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar07/Petersen13.htm

February was an action packed month. Significantly, and ominously, Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations heavy Zbigniew Brzezinski set the tone with his warning to the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations;

"A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq, or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." - Brzezinski's warning, Feb. 1, 2007

(Brzezinski was preceded in January by Congressman Ron Paul's warning of a "contrived Gulf of Tonkin type incident" as a pretext for war with Iran.)

The significance of Brzezinski's warning can't be overstated. Webster Griffin Tarpley was so moved by Zbig's oratorio that he issued this press release, calling for protests to bring awareness to the issue of a staged pretext. The protests continue, every Saturday at 1pm, at Lafayette Park in front of the White House.

Brzezinski's warning is as close as we likely to get to an actual admission from the supposedly non-existent oligarchy in this country that they do occasionally stage events to herd the sheeple in the direction that they deem best. LIHOP, MIHOP, IHOP... when Zbig is nervous enough to go before the Senate with that kind of message, parsing 9/11 into degrees of HOP is rather moot.

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The very next day, The Maginot Line of the Left was broken with a significant penetration by Sander Hicks at AlterNet.org, "9/11: The Case Isn't Closed". A tsunami of support for the article is seen in the comments section below the main posting. That's what you get for marginalizing 9/11 skepticism for 5 years, AlterNet. Hicks used the momentum generated with his piece to urge the Brooklyn DA to investigate 9/11.

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Anybody?

In the meantime, check out this kick-ass talk by Scott from last November's COPA conference if you haven't seen it yet;

"JFK & 9/11: Insights Gained From Studying Both"

It turns out there are several parallels in these "meta-events".

Transcript at globalresearch.ca

(Scott's research into Ali Mohamed, et al, is more open-ended than Peter Lance's, check out the other links at globalresearch.ca and at Lobster magazine.)

Gwynne Dyer is one of the best minds out there when it comes to military history, and the history of war. He is also remarkably prescient at times when it comes to short-term projection of tactical scenarios. However, it's pretty clear that he knows next to nothing about 9/11 skepticism, but he still felt a need to write this crappy hit piece about Loose Change. My comments in red. -r.)

That makes 10,000 sworn to 9/11 silence

Growing obsession with 9/11 doc’s theories only detracts from Bush’s real crimes (Because Gwynne Dyer says so! If indeed 9/11 was a complex psychological operation designed to trigger a knee-jerk fascist military response to initiate the “Global War on Terror” – then the “real crimes” that Dyer alludes to are a bunch of bat-squeeze by comparison. It’s not “obsession” it’s a mass awakening via the new medium of the internet. Deal with it.)

By GWYNNE DYER

I don't think that Sheikh is a Red Herring or disinfo. I think he is a protected asset, probably MI6.

This essay was transmitted verbally for the record at Rep. Cynthia McKinney's July 22nd, 2005 Congressional Briefing: "The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right?" by John Newman. Newman has a background in Military Intelligence and is the author of "JFK and Vietnam" and "Oswald and the CIA". As time goes on, Newman has been proven correct with speculation in his first two books, notably by Joan Mellen's further analysis of Oswald's role as a government agent in "Farewell to Justice". Newman was first to parse the JFK document data dump and come out with nuggets that have stood the test of time.

The likelihood of India's intel shop having access to communications signals that Echelon or one of Echelon's ears or eyes didn't have, is preposterous. Especially when it comes to a "made man" like Sheikh, because the Eye of Sauron would definitely be upon him. The hapless FBI agents who went to verify the wire transfer story were probably pretty disappointed when they reported back from India to their superiors and were met with, "Yeah, we know. Now shut up."

This story likely exists as a bona fide limited hangout so that the finger can be pinned on Pakistan, should Musharraf not play along as required. In my opinion, Musharraf is trying to spoil that play by exposing Sheikh's alleged MI6 connections. It's likely that he knows exactly what Sheikh's true role was, a fixer.

Newman bends over backwards like Peter Lance with the "Triple Agent" meme. After wading through decades of JFK disinfo, he's got to know that Sheikh is as much of an Oswald as Atta.

I think that Daniel Pearl got too close to the source. He started asking the wrong questions -- questions about where the money actually came from and that was it for him. Bernard Henri Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" is an interesting read in that regard.

Anyhow, Newman's story below;

Not new, but certainly interesting.

EDIT: Back again at 1748 Central.

911veritas has created an updated version of his BBC video.

You can download it from 911podcasts here;

500 MB version 25m, 43s - right click and save:
http://www.911podcasts.com/files/video/wtc7-20min-warning-onbbc.avi

Once you have it downloaded, please mirror if you can, and post a link below, once we have a mirror or two, we'll bump to the front page.

If you can seed a .torrent, please do.

The provenance for the original unedited video begins at the First Amendment Center in Washington DC.* According to this post, this video has been "archived" but not continuously available, since October, 2001;

March 01, 2007 10:18:32am

I apologize, I have started to understand more of the history of this collection (it started way before my time). There is an important correction to a previous post: the Television Archive is a separate not-for-profit from the Internet Archive.

For posterity, please put feelers out for a copy of Jane Standley's live report on the BBC World News service on 9/11, that matches this one:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=49f_1172526096&c=1

A raw, unedited VHS recording in PAL format is preferred, so that we can all independently verify that the source file discovered on the Internet Archive was not altered in any way before it was upped to the Archive.

If the person who ripped and upped the footage to the Archive can send us a copy, that would be great, too.

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Mr. Hickman posted this today;

March 01, 2007 10:18:32am

I apologize, I have started to understand more of the history of this collection (it started way before my time). There is an important correction to a previous post: the Television Archive is a separate not-for-profit from the Internet Archive.

I now understand that these materials were available, in streaming form, from October 11, 2001 (when it was launched at the First Amendment Center in Washington DC) for a couple of years. Unfortunately a datacenter move brought these down. The Internet Archive has been working, pro-bono (meaning free), to bring these back up in an appropriate way. When we can do a reasonable job of this, we will let everyone know. Until then, please be patient with us.

In the mean time, we hope the BBC is ok with our allowing some form of distribution of this key program. In which case we will do this immediately. Fingers crossed on that front.

Paul Hickman

Office Manager

This post was modified by PaulForrest on 2007-03-01 18:18:32