9-11: Institutional Analysis vs. Conspiracy Theory

I sent Sam a message describing 9/11 blogger as a site that searches for what really happened on 9/11, since He formely worked for the U.S. embassy in the Phillippines. I found his article in Counterpunch (No ,don't razz Me...I'm not a leftgatekeeper, I keep track of what the other side says) .This is what He wrote back;
am karmilowicz
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:50:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: sam karmilowicz
Subject: Allegations of war crimes and human rights
violations against the U.S
To: tb-petitions@ohchr.org

To whom it may concern:

My name is Samuel Karmilowicz. I am a former Special Agent of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security Service.

I believe information that I acquired while I was a U.S. State Department Security Office at the U.S.embassy in Manila may be of interest since it reveals the U.S. government's complicity in the torturing of Abdul Murad, an alleged terrorist suspect while he was held in captivity by the Philippine Intelligence Bureau; the U.S. government's use of me as an unwitting courier to collect and transfer what I later determined to be the proceeds of torture; and information indicating that the U.S. government had prior knowledge that Tariq Javed Rana, a suspected Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence operative had ties to Ramzi Yousef and Khaled Shaik Mohammed while these individuals were devising what is now acknowledged to be the plot to use commercial airline carriers as missiles to destroy buildings such as the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, and the World Trade Center Towers in New York City. My evidence reveals that the U.S. government has deliberately withheld information from the American public in order to assert - what is now acknowledged to be - false pretenses to invade and occupy the nation of Iraq. Recent comments by Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan also indicate the U.S. threatened to bomb Pakistan into 'the stone age' if the government of Pakistan refused to comply with their demands - an outcome that closely parallels the collective and disproportionate punishment that the people of Lebanon received from the Israeli army last month.

(Thanks, Elizabeth for sending this in.)

Drawing the Lessons of 9-11 (book review, Sid Shniad)

The Hidden History of 9-11-2001
Research in Political Economy
2006 Volume 23.
Ed. by Paul Zarembka

Governments have long found it useful to manufacture rationale for pursuing war and repression. The sinking of the Battleship Maine at the outset of the Spanish-American-Cuba War is the classic example. When President Harry Truman wanted to offer assistance to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey in 1947, Republican senator Arthur Vandenburg promised his support if Truman would “scare the hell out of the American people.” In 1962, the Pentagon mounted Operation Northwoods, a plan involving false-flag actions, state-sponsored terrorism and the hijacking of planes on U.S. and Cuban soil designed to generate American public support for an invasion of Cuba. Then there was the case of the distraught young Iraqi woman testifying before U.S. Congressional hearings in the run-up to Gulf War I about babies being tossed out of incubators by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers.

The essays included in The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 lead to the conclusion that the attack on the World Trade Center may have been the biggest false-flag operation of them all. This 2006 issue of Research in Political Economy examines different aspects of 9-11, which, taken together, provide a serious challenge to those who dismiss the possibility that a government-based conspiracy was behind the events of 9-11.

This is the recording of a live webcast of Steven Jones' presentation from the Lifting the Fog conference held on the campus of UC Berkeley thanks to 911Truth.org

I wrote to Kevin Barrett and asked if he was planning on leaving Scholars for 9/11 truth. He wrote back the following. It seems written for public consumption so here it is:

No and yes.
More on this later...meanwhile see, below.
Kevin

As activists, when people ask us "what do you think of X theory about what happened," our answer should always be "well, that theory is no more improbable than the official story, whose probability is zero...but our job is not to prove what happened, but to show that the official story is demonstrably false, and force a new investigation."

The case of st911 is tricky, because it's dedicated to research more than activism. I think researchers have to be willing to allow other researchers to propose hypotheses, no matter how outlandish-sounding. The best response is evidence-based critique, not ad-hominem attack.

Morgan Reynolds, who was himself critiqued way too harshly by Jim Hoffman, seems to have caught the ad-hominem bug in his silly attacks on Steven Jones, which mix legitimate critique with ill-founded invective. I hope Steve can keep his cool and his trademark professional politeness, ignore the misrepresentations, and stick to evidence-based critique of whatever new hypotheses are proposed. So far Steve and David are the two researchers who have best combined lucid research with professional demeanor, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.

Meanwhile I hope to have Steve on the new GCN radio show "The Dynamic Duo" ASAP. I think a case can be made that my co-host on that show and st911 colleague Jim Fetzer is jumping the gun by prematurely hyping the exotic weaponry hypothesis, and I want to argue that activists should focus on the gaping holes in the official story, not exotic weaponry.

Above all, the format for proposed 9/11 debates needs to be a simple pro versus con on the 9/11 Commission Report -- that's the only debate that matters, and it's one we can't possibly lose.

Kevin

P.S. Important caveat: I haven't had time to look at the exotic weapons arguments in enough detail to have an informed opinion of their scientific (as opposed to rhetorical) merits.