Is THE NATION Going Sane?

The Nation: Letters from readers on 9/11

I wonder if Bush's more and more evident insistence on all war all the time is making some people reevaluate their position on 911.
--Ronald
http://desip.igc.org

The Nation
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070205/letter

Letters
by OUR READERS

[from the February 5, 2007 issue]

9/11: THE JURY'S STILL OUT
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"9/11: The Roots of Paranoia" by Christopher Hayes (Dec. 25) drew more mail than almost any Nation article in memory, except perhaps on the JFK assassination. Letters ran the gamut from the enraged (canceled subscriptions, charges of Nation stonewalling, anger at the use of the term "paranoia") to the complimentary ("My thanks to Mr. Hayes for trying to chart a middle road between credulity and paranoia"). But almost all agree that we don't know the whole story of what happened on September 11, 2001.

http://bleiersblog.blogspot.com/index.html

But we do know a crucial fact...

That our government was complicit in the orchestration and execution of the events of 9/11. Demonstrably. Unequivocally. Absolutely.

And that is the fact that we live in a nation run by criminals who have committed an apparently unending number of criminal acts against their own people and around the world. Next on the agenda? War against Iran.

When an article states 'We don't know the whole story" then that article is simply another limited hangout designed to appease but afraid or unwilling to do the 'full Monty".

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"There are none so hoplessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free" (Goethe).....

The Nation Get's Spanked for publishing 9/11 Hit Piece

I was very happy to see the Nation get bitch slapped for coming down so hard on the 9/11 Truth Movement. I too was one who shared my outrage in a scathing rebuttal. Unfortunately my retort went unpublished, so I will publish it myself, here...

***

To the editorial staff of "The Nation":

Here's what I don't understand. It's bad enough that you are clearly not advocates of 9/11 Truth... but why do self-professed gatekeepers (like the Nation) on the left feel the need to attack the 9/11 Truth Movement? Why not just shut-up about it? What do you possibly hope to gain by going after us? Especially considering that we ARE RIGHT... and you are soooo very WRONG.

The article, by Christopher Hayes entitled "9/11: The Roots of Paranoia" is poorly written, poorly researched, highly opinionated and is replete with circular logic. In a word... it is WEAK. Why the Nation continues to tempt fate by lending credibility to these "conspiracy deniers" is beyond me.

Mr. Hayes even acknowledges that "one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen." I have no doubt that the number is much larger, but let's just say it's only one-third. Clearly the majority of this group are going to be so-called "progressive thinkers". These are the people most likely to actually read "the Nation". Why risk alienating up to a 1/3 or more of your core readers? It just doesn't make any sense! I for one feel thoroughly alienated by the Nation. Quite frankly, given the importance of this topic, you sicken me!

Here's a snippet from the article that I find particularly detestable:

"The Reichstag example holds a lesson for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible." [end]

Here Mr. Hayes actually attempts to deny being a "conspiracy denier". Rather he says the evidence has shown that a 9/11 conspiracy is "virtually impossible". Enter "Popular Mechanics" stage left to proove his extremely bold (and reckless) assertion of fact. It's important to note that Mr. Hayes does not rely on the "official" 9/11 commission report to prove his assertion; rather, he goes on to claim that the 9/11 "commission report was something of a whitewash". Huh!?!?

Come on Mr. Hayes... you cannot have it both ways. Why the HELL would the government feel the need to publish a whitewash account of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, while leaving it to "Popular Mechanics" to publish the definitive thesis which purportedly provides evidence showing any conspiracy to be "virtually impossible"? It doesn't even make any sense!

Mr. Hayes then goes on to acknowledge that "for six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out [the] simple truth". But just when you think you cannot stand any more, get a load of his final paragraph:

"the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie."

While acknowleging that you (the Nation) are indeed "GATEKEEPERS of public discourse", he asserts that this is okay because you (presumably the Nation) "refuse[s] to allow the government to continue to lie".

I don't know where to start? Bush has proven himself to be nothing but a liar. Most recently he acknowledged as much when he admitted lying about replacing Rumsfeld. Where is the outrage from the Nation about this blatant lie? Why is the Nation devoting more valuable space targeting the Truth Movement?

Of course there is no mention in Mr. Hayes' article of Stephen Jones, Thermate, WTC7, lack of pentagon plane parts, squibs, free fall collapses, etc. etc. etc. But then again... you ARE the "gatekeepers of public discourse". Therefore, you determine what is proper to discuss.

The reality is that you people are a DISGRACE to "the Nation" and you should be ashamed of yourselves! One day soon, your hypocrisy will be laid bare for all the world to see. May God have mercy on your souls!

Please publish this!

Chris Rose

did you hear that?

it's the sound of a huge, massive, disinfo ship changing direction. this is a good sign--we now know never to trust the Nation or any other pseudo alternative news source, but they still want to try to preserve some credibility. this is a great victory, let's keep the heat on these buggers!

____

Real Truther a.k.a. Verdadero Verdadero

WTCdemolition.com - Harvard Task Force

 

Too crazy to ignore

While the asymmetry of the original article versus the letters in response still places the advantage with Hayes and The Nation, I must say the publication of even a few letters in our defense is a good sign. They could have simply ignored us altogether; but apparently the response to Hayes' hit piece was overwhelming. Good on everyone who wrote them, whether or not you were published.

For those who choose to ignore the evidence, the Bush Administration's escalating lunacy has become the strongest force for 9/11 Truth. This would seem to be true of the Nation and its readers. Wonder what effect dropping nukes on Iran will have on 9/11 Truth...?

Still a bit of a shame that the letters obsessed over physical evidence. But what can you do...?

Its actually very common in

Its actually very common in the case of a paper or magazine that is beholden to corporate owners and editors, but staffed by progressives of some stripe or another, to use the op-ed/letters section to "leak" the underlings actual political position. Less risk that way than if they actually ran a sympathetic article.

It works in reverse too: our local crypto-fascist daily's Sunday edition will have a tally of the top topic(say war in Iraq), and how many letters they got, for or against(say, 120; 110 against, 8 for, 2 undecided), but they'll print 3 letters for and 1 against because it supports the papers official view(fighting for democracy in Iraq). But if the political wind changes, those printed proportions will reverse. At least we know the real(probably) total letter count.

I suppose just seeing the letters are getting printed could be a sign of a political thaw on 911.

Impeachment. Accountability. A better world.

Fetzer's letter to The Nation

As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, I read "9/11: The Roots of Paranoia" with great interest. Its author cites a few of the questions that have troubled students of 9/11, but neglects most of the answers that we have established based upon objective, scientific investigation. In the name of fair play, here is a summary of our findings, substantiation for which may be found at our website, www.st911.org.

One preliminary point. If belief in conspiracies is enough to qualify one as "paranoid," then our highest government officials should be escorted to homes for the mentally bewildered, since they had been propounding a conspiracy theory even prior to investigation. Consider:

The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, observed), the planes that hit were similar to those they were designed to withstand, and the buildings continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.

The melting point of steel at 2,800 degrees F is about 1,000 degrees higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800 degrees under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.

UL certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000 degrees F for three or four hours before it would significantly weaken, whereas these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of around 500 degrees--about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North--to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.

If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt and total demolition that was observed.

William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub-basements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a fifty-ton hydraulic press and the ripping of the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of many other custodians.

Rodriguez has reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane's impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross, "Seismic Proof: 9/11 Was an Inside Job," which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as fourteen and seventeen seconds prior to the airplanes' impacts.

Heavy-steel-construction buildings like the Twin Towers are not generally capable of "pancake collapse," which normally occurs only with concrete structures of "lift slab" construction and could not occur in redundant welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow has pointed out to me.

The destruction of the South Tower in about ten seconds and of the North Tower in nine is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least twelve seconds, which, as Judy Wood has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.

The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where their floors do not move, a phenomenon that Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.

Pools of molten metal were found at the subbasement levels three, four and five weeks later, an effect that could not have been produced by the plane-impact/jet-fuel-fire/pancake collapse scenario, which, of course, implies that it was not produced by such a cause.

WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 pm after Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to "pull it," displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions: a complete, abrupt and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the official account that it is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report.

The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands forty-four feet above the ground; the debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

The Pentagon's own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when it was shown on The O'Reilly Factor; at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the seventy-one-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory--flying at high speed barely above ground level--physically impossible; and if it had come in at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757.

If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, there should have been a debris field about the size of a city block, but the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed, as required by the government's official scenario.

There is more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes and their names were not on any passenger manifest. Several have turned up alive and well and living in the Middle East. The government has not even produced their tickets as evidence that they actually could have boarded the aircraft they are alleged to have hijacked. Did Osama call from a cave in Afghanistan and charge them to his MasterCard?

President Bush recently acknowledged that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The Senate Intelligence Committee has reported that Saddam was not in cahoots with Al Qaeda. And the FBI has acknowledged that it has "no hard evidence" to tie Osama to 9/11. If Saddam did not do it and Osama did not do it, then who is responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans that day? We believe the nation is entitled to the truth.

JAMES H. FETZER