Grab Bag

  • The Loose Change crew has been busy as usual, they guest-hosted John Stadtmiller's show on Wednesday, August 30. You can download Hour one here, and hour two here. Loose Change Second Edition Recut is now available on the new DivX - Stage6 high-quality streaming format. You can check it out here.
  • A decent, short article on Sergeant Buswell by Steven Hammons, here: Army intelligence analyst who questions official 9-11 story is honorable patriot
  • Leland Lehrman in New Mexico publishes a web newsletter and website called Mother Media, and is very involved with 9/11 activism. I haven't seen this posted outside of his newsletter, so here it is;

    Clear the Thorns, Then Plant the Corn

    by Leland Lehrman

    People, including my patient wife Vera, sometimes wonder why I consider 9/11 justice so important. They've moved on, or whatever, so what's with me?

    I'm just obeying the Golden Rule.

    In this case, that means that if I would make criminal justice for 9/11 important if my family were affected, then I must make criminal justice for 9/11 important because my neighbor's was affected.

    It's part of the reason people agitate against war. We want people to do the same for us if we end up in bomb shelters.

    For all our sakes, dedicated activists deconstructed the myths regarding the crime of the previous century: the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 was orders of magnitude more significant. Similarly, Oliver Stone's JFK has been surpassed by 911 Press for Truth, Who Killed John O'Neill, Loose Change 2 and Terrorstorm, Mothermedia's current ranking champions of 911 investigative journalism. (DVDs available on request)

    Politicians put their lives on the line for the sake of their policies and they know they must accept that. Ordinary citizens don't. 9/11 was an attack on ordinary people. You or I could be next. That's why it demands such a high level of accountability. And that's why the total lack of accountability for this crime against humanity is so appalling that it deserves the energetic efforts of all decent human beings. Name me a single political, intelligence or law enforcement figure who has been fired or disciplined for incompetence on 9/11. Exactly. In fact, according to several different insider reports - including that of Time Magazine's Woman of the Year FBI agent Colleen Rowley - those who were the most at fault on 9/11 actually got promoted.

    When my family returned to America from my wife's home country, the Czech Republic, we were looking for an organic farming, ecological and spiritual community in which to settle down and enjoy the fruits of marriage and our wonderful children.

    But then the Iraq War started dragging us to the edge of Hell. And then the 2004 Skull and Bones election made America look like a third-world Orwellian dictatorship.

    Against personal resistance to the idea, I realized that any hope humans still have of enjoying our life on Earth rests on our ability to identify and clear the spiritual and political thorns from Our Garden now, before there is nothing left but berriless brambles and poison ivy.

    We can't expect to negotiate a peaceful ecological solution to our worlds' problems with criminals. We have to defeat them, in the courts of law and public opinion, and at the ballotbox.

    Of course we must continue to plant corn, but where can we plant and tend without fear for our future? Can we really expect to ignore our way to peace? Some well-wishers with spiritual aspirations think that focusing on the peaceful and the good will magically make problems disappear. But it hasn't happened yet, and this approach makes the fundamental gardening mistake of trying to sow among thorns without first pulling them up by the roots. Understandably, this approach is common among those who are anxious to avoid feelings of helplessness.

    And yet, it is just such feelings of helplessness which we need to experience and work through in order to emerge with our power intact - not watered down by propped up affirmations which attempt to deny the obvious.

    Prayer too is necessary. We all know how to do it, so what are we waiting for? God help us drive out hatred and bring Love to Mother Earth.

    Political action is basically a combination of three things which we must also now do well: identifying problem politicians, identifying quality candidates and identifying those in each constituency who have the means to elect the quality candidates. To this end, two important electoral initiatives have emerged from the citizen-driven internet: The Anti-War Pro-Peace Candidates list at whatreallyhappened.com and the Politics 911 initiative, a project of 911truth.org.

    Check it out and let's get busy.

    Leland Lehrman can be reached at: leland.lehrman@gmail.com

    Subscribe to Mother Media newsletter: mothermedia@33o.com

    www.mothermedia.org

Don't forget Tuesday

What?

What is this going to prove for the truth movement?? Why is this so big?

The answer is clear

What the scientific truth ACTUALLY is.

joel

Yeah, here come the big-budget cabal hit pieces, just in time to save the day against those silly skeptics on the anniversary. All nicely packaged and over-produced with lots of layered-up eye candy and dramatic voiceovers.

Some people will believe, but I see the re-awakening of America and WE'RE NOT HAVIN' IT!!!

the softpower of culture

Perhaps the truth movement must make a call (and/or commission) individual curators and artists which forward the politics of freedom of expression. It is well established that American culture; notably counter-cultural pop culture (including film, poetry, novels, music and visual art) has had vast impact, historically.

This call could begin by being as broad as stressing the powers of the American constitution and the human rights granted under that sacred national text to question authority.

American culture has before screamed such radical notions as “freedom”! Critical goodwill, as transmitted through culture, is something that the neo-cons might be incapable of spinning. Those best to do it are free artists (unaffiliated with corporate interests) who can act out truths and give them beauty - and thus preserve American liberty.

WTC Steel Destruction: 9/11 Timeline names man responsible

A couple of new entries in the Complete 9/11 Timeline reveal who was responsible for the quick desctruction of the WTC steel. It appears the man most responsible was Michael Burton, along with his agency, the Department of Design and Construction. Mayor Giuliani also appears to have had a say in things:

Shortly After September 11, 2001: City Officials Make Decision to Scrap Remaining WTC Steel
Following the World Trade Center collapses, a decision is made to quickly transport the remaining structural steel to scrap yards, to be shipped abroad and melted down for reuse. Consequently, virtually all of it is disposed of before investigators trying to assess why the WTC collapsed can examine it. Michael Burton and other officials at the Department of Design and Construction—the New York City agency overseeing the cleanup operation (see (September 11, 2001-May 2002))—are responsible for making this decision. Burton clears it with Richard Tomasetti of Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers, the prime consultant on the cleanup job. However, referring to the subsequent WTC investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (see August 21, 2002), Tomasetti will later admit that had he known the direction that investigations into the collapses would take, he would have taken a different stand. [Langewiesche, 2002, pp. 30; Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 330 and 396] Authors and New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton write that Michael Burton, “who had become the effective czar for the cleanup job, had made it clear that he cared very little about engineering subtleties like the question of why the towers first stood, then collapsed on September 11. ‘We know why they fell,’ he said. ‘Because they flew two planes into the towers.’ But he was deeply immersed in the details of hauling steel out of the debris pile.” [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 299] Much of the WTC steel will be shipped to India, China, and other Asian countries for recycling (see September 12-October 2001).
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a091101scrapsteel

(September 11, 2001-May 2002): Little-Known City Agency Takes Charge of Ground Zero Cleanup Operation
The New York City agency that oversees the Ground Zero cleanup operation following the 9/11 attacks is the Department of Design and Construction (DDC). [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 299] This obscure 1,300-man bureaucracy is normally responsible for overseeing municipal construction contracts, such as street repairs and jails. Its two top officials are Kenneth Holden and his lieutenant, Michael Burton. [Langewiesche, 2002, pp. 9] Burton is in lower Manhattan the morning of 9/11, instead of in his office in Queens, for a meeting at City Hall, just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. [Engineering News-Record, 4/22/2002] That afternoon, he meets Holden and together they begin organizing the cleanup operation. By 5:30 p.m., the group of workers they have assembled gains permission to explore the WTC ruins. Under Burton’s direction, the team of “unbuilders” subsequently undertakes what journalist William Langewiesche describes as “the most aggressive possible schedule of demolition and debris removal.” Yet this appears to go against established procedures. On previous occasions the standard emergency response to natural or man-made disasters in the US, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was to rapidly nationalize efforts on the ground, under the direction of FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers. [Langewiesche, 2002, pp. 66, 90, 94, 146] New York’s official emergency plans, which were written before 9/11, in fact require the Department of Sanitation to remove debris after a building collapse. A mid-level official who was involved in writing the latest plans mentions a week after 9/11 that she doesn’t even know quite what the DDC is. DDC’s only previous experiences of dealing with emergencies are a sinking EMS station in Brooklyn, caused by a water leak, and a structural failure at Yankee Stadium. According to Langewiesche, there is no specific moment when Holden and Burton are placed in charge of the Ground Zero cleanup effort. “Rather, there was a shift of power in their direction that was never quite formalized and, indeed, was unjustified by bureaucratic logic or political considerations.” Reportedly, at some point, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made a “back-room decision to scrap the organization charts, to finesse the city’s own Office of Emergency Management (OEM), and to allow the DDC to proceed.” [Engineering News-Record, 4/22/2002; Langewiesche, 2002, pp. 66, 88 and 118] The Ground Zero cleanup operation officially ends in May 2002. [CBS News, 5/16/2002; New York Times, 5/29/2002]
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a091101ddc

what we need

Is a comprehensive list of names of people responsible for different things on 9/11--destruction of steel, names of people at FAA and Norad, etc. When these people see their names in print, not accused of anything but what they actually were rported to have done, they will scramble to try to cover their asses by pointing out why and on whose orders they did what they did.... anyone got the time and the dime?
_

"Among the 'spider-man' skeptics are those who claim that no human can shoot web and stick to walls... They conveniently ignore the fact that he was bitten by a radioactive spider."

Daily Bugle editorial debunking the claims of spider-man deniers

Excellent video on Google

Excellent video on Google about the Pentagon crash witnesses.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6317630216235657870&q=greta+van+...

thats a great video, USA

thats a great video, USA Today, AKA the organ of the state seems to have had a curious amount of employees that "saw" Flight 77 hit. almost every witness that claims to have seen FLight 77 either works for big media or for the government.

Interesting

Its' grab bag time, so here you go:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/40755/

Interesting testimony *under oath* from at programmer who used to work on the voting-machines.

thanks Martin S.

I made a blog entry for that article. Goto blog section and read or post comment there. 911 Truth is First hand, but Voting fraud is 2nd in line.

Trial Evidence Displayed at

Trial Evidence Displayed at Oklahoma Bombing Memorial
Congressman Plans Hearings on 'Possible Foreign Connections' to the Blast
By RON JENKINS, AP

OKLAHOMA CITY (Sept. 2) -- FBI evidence that helped convict Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols went on display Friday at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, even as a congressman and others continue to raise questions about the 1995 explosion that killed 168 people.

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/trial-evidence-displayed-at-oklahom...

Is it just me, or...

...are the blog and latest comments lists not showing up for you all as well?

its not just you.

its not just you.

Excellent Book Review

August 30, 2006

Call me crazy. I blame terrorists.

How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials knew of or participated in 9/11?

MARK STEYN

Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."

Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.

But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet."

So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions.

In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m.

Ooooo-kay. We now turn to a brand-new book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. Brad Reagan? There's a name for conspiracy theorists to ponder, notwithstanding his cover as a "contributing editor" for Popular Mechanics. First things first: Maj. Rick Gibney is a lieutenant-colonel. At 9:58 a.m. he wasn't in Shanksville, Pa., but in Fargo, N.D. At 10:45, he took off for Bozeman, Mont., where he picked up Edward Jacoby, Jr., director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, and flew him back to Albany, N.Y., in a two-seat F-16B, unarmed -- i.e., no Sidewinders. The white plane was not an attractively painted A-10 Thunderbolt but a Dassault Falcon 20 corporate jet belonging to the company that owns Wrangler, North Face and other clothing lines. It was coming into Johnstown, near Shanksville, when Flight 93 disappeared and the FAA radioed to ask them if they could look around. "The plane circled the crash site twice," write Dunbar and Reagan, "and then flew directly over it to mark the exact latitude and longitude on the plane's navigation system."

Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11.

Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock.

Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11.

Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all.

Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory?

Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe.

But what are we to make of the Scripps Howard poll taken this month in which 36 per cent of those surveyed thought it "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks or had knowledge of them beforehand?

Debunking 9/11 Myths does a grand job of explaining such popular conspiracy-website mainstays as how a 125-foot-wide plane leaves a 16-foot hole in the Pentagon. Answer: it didn't. The 16-foot hole in the Pentagon's Ring C was made by the plane's landing gear. But the problem isn't scientific, it's psychological: if you're prepared to believe that government agents went to the trouble of researching, say, gay rugby player Mark Bingham's family background and vocal characteristics so they could fake cellphone calls back to his mom, then clearly you're not going to be deterred by mere facts. As James B. Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, remarks toward the end of this book, the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory."

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."

Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.