My first article on Media Roots, an initiative by artist, activist and independent journalist Abby Martin, is now up. It's called "The War On Paranoid Rhetoric". I want to thank Abby for her help, and I want to encourage the 9/11 truth community to help Abby make Media Roots into an even bigger success than it is already. Here's an excerpt from the article, originally inspired by a Youtube video created by David Chandler:

Terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe have altered our societies. They have changed the way we travel, the way we conduct criminal trials, the way we think about our civil liberties. The Wolfowitz Doctrine's emphasis on unilateralism evolved into the Bush Doctrine: waging preemptive war against nations that might pose a threat to our security, timid protestations from the UN notwithstanding.

We are constantly encouraged to be on the lookout for danger, report suspicious activities and watch for left luggage in airport terminals or bus stations. And if we don't do it, creepy, fully automated camera surveillance systems will do it for us. In that sense, the Bush Doctrine has wormed its way into our everyday lives, and we frenetically look inward to foil plots before they happen, to detect radicalization in our friends and enemies, colleagues and neighbors. Radicalism, we are told, is a precursor of terrorist tendencies. Therefore, all radicals are potential terrorists.

Thought crime is no longer a taboo; Orwell rolls in his grave. It wasn't the action, but the reaction in the form of totalitarian legislation that brought us here. We are told terrorists attack us because they hate our freedoms. The past decade tells a different story: terrorists may terrorize, but no entity hates our freedoms more than our own government, which is always in an excellent position to act upon its hatred. We are nurturing a culture of vigilantes and snitches. Politicians campaign on fear, and have pissing matches with their challengers about who is most 'patriotic' and best prepared to 'protect' the country.

Read more...

Changed hyperlinks to footnotes, tried to provide cached versions of footnotes where possible. No further changes. Original source is, as stated below, The New York Observer. Reproduced under fair use. — SnowCrash

"Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque"
The New York Observer, Mark Ames, September 10, 2010

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas^[1] and the Muslim Brotherhood.^[2]

But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

Updated: the original Youtube video was censored shortly after I posted it, a year go.
Better rip it if you want to keep it, because it isn't available anywhere else.

Benjamin Netanyahu said, in 2001:

"I know what America is, America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."

Keeping that in mind, let's take Netanyahu's wise words to heart, as voiced in this speech:

"Wanted by the CIA: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange"
Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010

In this interview, Belfast Telegraph reporter Matthew Bell asks Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about "conspiracy theories". Assange subsequently explains his position.

His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? "I believe in facts about conspiracies," he says, choosing his words slowly. "Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." What about the Bilderberg conference? "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes."

Dear mr. Getler,

In your column, which can be found at http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2009/09/pbs_yes_and_no.html

you say the following about "9/11: Blueprint for Truth":

"I'm not going to review the films, but on a personal level I find the idea embedded in "Blueprint" of a government conspiracy to blow up those buildings to be preposterous and simply beyond belief and I fault the station for promoting this as part of a pledge drive and presenting it without an accompanying on-the-air program in which critics have their say."

Sir, unless you DO review those films, you have no business commenting on them whatsoever.

In your column, you commit the following logical fallacies in order to sway your readers towards your viewpoint:

1. Appeal to emotion
2. Argument from personal incredulity
3. Special pleading

Mark Basile is a long time chemical engineer from New Hampshire. He was mentioned when the "Active Thermitic Material" paper was released:

Important features of the research have been independently corroborated by Mark Basile in New Hampshire and by physicist Frédéric Henry-Couannier in France., proceeding from earlier scientific reports on these discoveries (e.g., by Prof. Jones speaking at a Physics Dept. Colloquium at Utah Valley University last year.) We understand that details will soon be forthcoming from these independent researchers.

Source: Michael Ramirez for Investor's Business Daily, 23 April, 2009.

Tsk tsk! Such jingoist fervor and enthusiasm! But: "enhanced interrogation" of whom? Binyam Mohamed? Christopher Hitchens? Children, perhaps? You seem confused, Michael. Maybe a German philosopher, international law and the 9/11 truth movement can help unconfuse you.

"He who fights monsters must take care lest he become a monster. When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you."

(I stumbled upon these great analyses of human behavior, and found some remarkable similarities to the in-fighting going on in the truth movement. Recommended reading -- SnowCrash)

The Three Faces Of Victim
Whether we know it, or not, most of us react to life as victims. Whenever we refuse to take responsibility for ourselves, we are unconsciously choosing to react as victim. This inevitably creates feelings of anger, fear, guilt or inadequacy and leaves us feeling betrayed, or taken advantage of by others. Victim-hood can be defined by the three positions beautifully outlined in a diagram developed by a well respected psychiatrist, and teacher of Transactional Analysis, named Stephen Karpman. He calls it the “drama triangle”, I will refer to it as the victim triangle. Having discovered this resource some thirty years ago, it has become one of the more important tools in my personal and professional life. The more I teach and apply the victim triangle to relationship the deeper my appreciation grows for this simple, powerfully accurate instrument.

(...)

(Update: this transcript is now no longer a transcript of the edited interview seen in "National Security Alert", but a transcript of the full version of the interview as shown in "The North Side Flyover", part 2.)

This is a first in a series of transcripts of CIT interviews. It is not an endorsement of CIT or flyover.

Transcripts can help to eliminate confusion about what witnesses literally said. If you find any crucial errors in this transcript, report them with a comment. If justified they'll eventually be corrected. Since blog posts go through a moderation queue the number of updates will be minimized.

You can either link to this blog post or you can copy & paste from it. For copying and pasting there is a HTML version at the bottom that you can use to improve readability.

(Updated with further developments from Democracy Now. Essentially, the Obama administration is threatening the security of British citizens to prevent disclosure of torture crimes; a less roundabout way to describe it would be that the White House is "threatening with increased risk of mass murder by ending intelligence sharing" -- SnowCrash)

British Lawmaker David Davis Challenges US Threats to Suppress Evidence of CIA Torture

Democracy Now, August 5, 2009

A British court heard evidence last week that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to prevent the disclosure of details regarding the CIA’s role in the alleged torture of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed. We hear from conservative British parliamentarian David Davis about the Obama administration’s attempts to suppress evidence in this case.

Below is a summary of opinion polls querying the American public on the viability of the official government narrative for 9/11. Polls have been conducted by such pollsters as Zogby, Scripps Howard, Reuters and Angus Reid and cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. Apparently, the official conspiracy theory isn't doing very well. In fact, the numbers are scaring the bejesus out of some of the pollsters, who are left looking for ways to trivialize such large numbers of their fellow citizens as "fringe elements". Tactics include suggesting the respondents are misguided because of ethnocentric bias, inability to cope with events of large magnitude, lack of intelligence, factual ignorance, one-sidedness, the internet or deeply embedded distrust of government. The last suggestion appears to have a chicken-or-egg problem.

Senator Joe Biden interviewed on CBS, September 14th, 2001 at 7:09am, regarding his meeting with the Pakistani ISI chief the day before.

I found the following interesting paragraphs in an article about prior knowledge of 9/11 by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, dated October 1, 2002.^[1]

I don't have the resources to continue an ongoing investigation into who had prior knowledge of the attacks - but I am sure someone out there does. Many things have happened since I broke my first story. On Nov. 9, 2001, my sources informed me that the same boy who predicted the attacks told school officials there would be a plane crash on Nov. 12. I decided to inform an FBI agent I knew who told me that, without specific information, there was little they could do.

Once again, the boy's prophecy came true. Three minutes after American Airlines Flight 587 took off from JFK International Airport to the Dominican Republic, its tail snapped off and both engines fell from its wings, dooming the plane to crash in Belle Harbor, located in the Rockaway section of Queens. None of the 260 people aboard survived. To date, authorities suspect the crash was an accident. I'm not so sure.

"US 'waterboarding' row rekindled"
BBC, July 13, 2009

Fresh claims have emerged that a key al-Qaeda suspect was waterboarded before the Bush government lawyers issued written authorisation to do so.

A former CIA agent has told the BBC that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded by the CIA in May or June 2002.

The date was provided by former CIA agent John Kiriakou. The practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002.

The CIA says waterboarding did not take place before August 2002.

Officials have refused to tell the BBC when it did occur.

Legal memos

Mr Kiriakou led the CIA team that captured Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan on 28 March 2002, and was the first to speak to the badly injured captive before returning to the US.

There he monitored the internal communications that came in (cable traffic) on Abu Zubaydah's interrogation at a secret CIA prison from the organisation's headquarters in Virginia.

by Kevin Connolly
BBC, July 13, 2009

In the world of intelligence gathering the past never really goes away - it stays around to haunt the present and set traps for the future.

The issue of how America conducted its "war on terror" - who it tortured and detained and on whose orders - is full of such traps.

We know that Barack Obama knows this - he talks about the need to move forward rather than to look back - but that is no guarantee that he will be able to resist calls for some sort of investigation of the Bush administration's intelligence policies.

The argument from the human rights lobby and the left of the Democratic Party appears to have gained ground in Washington in the last week or so - some sort of enquiry is now necessary, they believe, to re-assert the rule of law and restore America to the moral high ground of international diplomacy.

Dirty linen

The case against re-opening the wounds of the recent past lacks moral clarity, perhaps, but it is no less passionately held among Republicans.