Demos and other unreleased tracks from the Truth & Shadows vault

Truthers gathered in Montreal at the World Social Forum in 2016. From left to right: Niels Harrit, Sean Sweeney, Elizabeth Woodworth, and Graeme MacQueen. (Photo: Craig McKee)

Broadcast council says yes to hate, Dawson’s disinfo about AE911Truth, Omar Khadr, and CIA in the movies

April 8, 2018

By Craig McKee

Since I began writing this blog in 2010, I’ve started dozens of articles that, for one reason or another, I never finished.
From time to time, I’ll get an idea and start writing it but then put it aside “just for the moment.” Perhaps I question whether I have enough substance for an entire piece. Sometimes I don’t push hard enough through any obstacles I’m encountering. Perfectionism can really slow things down. Or I’ll get distracted by something else – perhaps the sudden and unexpected appearance of a squirrel…
Some were false starts that deserved oblivion, and you won’t see anything of them here. Some are, I think, worth sharing, however incomplete. Perhaps their brevity could even be seen as a virtue. You’ll find 14 of these below, reproduced with no more than minor changes.
I like to think of myself creating these, as I do all of my articles, in a secluded house in the country while Bob Dylan and The Band write songs in another room. In reality, I probably wrote most of them in silent isolation, occasionally with Rick Springfield or the Indigo Girls playing in the background. These unfinished creations have not been rescued from a dusty trunk in an attic but from a folder on my computer. Not so romantic, but I hope worth discovering nonetheless.

On sneering contempt

December 2013—What does it mean to have an open mind?
It seems that many people take the term “open-minded” to mean that the person doesn’t have strong convictions – or even that they just don’t know a lot about the subject at hand.
Urbandictionary.com defines “open-minded” as “an ability to not dismiss an idea with sneering contempt, simply because it does not fit within your preconceived notions.” A second definition reads, “Open mindedness is when even if you think you are right, you know that you can be wrong and are always willing to listen to and hear an opposing or contradictory view.”
Here’s another question: How many people do you know who exhibit the sneering contempt for ideas that are not their own but who simultaneously take for granted that they have an open mind? It’s just that the ideas being presented to them are not worthy of their consideration, you see.

Dawson’s deceptions

February 2018—Ryan Dawson, who is best known for his smugness and for his videos harshly criticizing Israel, continues to prove himself to be a dishonest and when it comes to the Pentagon and 9/11. Clearly, he is no friend of the Truth Movement (he calls it the 9/11 “Kook Movement”).

Dawson mocks the “9/11 Kook Movement.”

Increasingly, he has turned to attacking controlled demolition and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth as well as Richard Gage and David Ray Griffin by name.  And he uses the familiar smokescreen that he is launching these attacks because he is just concerned about “the truth.”
Recently, he produced a short video to attack Gage and Griffin for things they haven’t said and don’t think. It is one big straw man argument. More than that, it is one big lie.
Dawson says that AE911Truth just last year decided that a 757 did hit the Pentagon. FALSE! He claims that it held the opposite view prior to that. FALSE! He refers to an AE911Truth “architectural study” that does not exist. Then he attacks AE for getting the basic architecture of the Pentagon wrong in its report – the one that doesn’t exist.
Dawson ridicules AE911Truth for not knowing that the first two floors of the Pentagon are open from the E ring to the C ring (no exterior walls between ground level and the top of the second floor). He says: “It must be embarrassing to have an architectural opinion that you couldn’t have a plane go through all these walls and not even know the basic architecture of the building that you’re making a claim about.”
What architectural opinion is he talking about? When did AE911Truth ever say the plane couldn’t go through three rings and six exterior walls? He says AE has been claiming the plane had to go through six walls “for years and years and years.” But he offers no support for this statement.
He comes up with another straw man when he mocks Gage and Griffin about the claim the plane “couldn’t evaporate.” Where did either of them say this, Ry? He goes further when he says he can’t believe they would go on a “long rant” about this. Where would I find this rant, Ry?
“Over and over again they say it couldn’t go through all these rings.” He says Griffin makes this point repeatedly. I have never heard him say this. Again, Dawson appears to just make it up.
I love this quote from the Dawson video, for its value as irony, if nothing else: “How can you have an opinion about something when your premise is wrong, your conclusion is wrong.”
Yes, Ry, how can you?

An ugly response to Khadr settlement

August 2017—The success of “war on terror” propaganda is the only thing I can come up with to explain the truly ugly and ignorant reaction from my fellow Canadians to the news that former child soldier (or more to the point, political prisoner) Omar Khadr has reached a $10.5-million settlement (that’s $8.3 million in U.S. dollars) of his 2004 lawsuit with the Canadian government over its failure to defend his rights when he was being detained and tortured by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This story sickens me on so many levels. It sickens me that so many of my fellow Canadians can dismiss the torture and detention without due process of a 15-year-old boy who was clearly falsely accused of murdering an American soldier. It sickens me that they are more worried about the size of the cash settlement given to this young man, now 30 [he turned 31 in Sept. 2017], because of what was done to him and because of how his own government stood by and did nothing.

Khadr was imprisoned and tortured while he was still a child.

Apparently, we love the idea of rights and fair trials and all that. But when a real person, in this case a child, is tortured by a foreign government and held for years without trial, we get a little fuzzy about rights and freedoms. They’re all well and good some of the time, but not so much when “terrorism” is involved. In other words, scare us a bit and we’ll hand over our rights and abandon the very principles we claim to be fighting for around the world.

Problem, reaction, solution

April 2015—Hollywood has a message for us: be very afraid. Be afraid of connecting with other people. Be suspicious of each other. Be afraid of terrorist masterminds who want to exploit any weaknesses our society has so they can kill us. Another message: the powers that be want to protect us from these and many other threats. They want to come to the rescue when we’re attacked. They care about us. They are a force for good. This, of course, is a lie.

Conspiracy theories 1: ‘Truthers’ who mock

June 2015—It’s really upsetting when people who should know better buy into the ridicule of conspiracy theories and theorists. I have a real problem trusting any member of the 9/11 Truth Movement who does this. David Chandler and Jonathan Cole, in their 2011 “Joint Statement on the Pentagon,” write that “the mystery that surrounds the Pentagon makes it an attractive target of speculation and the subject of truly wild conspiracy theories.”
They go further when they link the idea that no plane hit the Pentagon to more extreme claims: “This is not the only instance of theories that seem designed to be easily discredited. There are groups that insist the towers at the World Trade Center were taken down by space lasers. Others claim no planes hit the Twin Towers at all; they were just holograms. What better way to tar the movement than to seed it with absurdly false theories that fuel a media circus, while making the Movement look ridiculous?”
These kinds of statements make the work of every truth activist more difficult. Actually, anytime Chandler and Cole use the word “Pentagon” in a sentence, it’s bad news for all of us.

Conspiracy theories 2: We’re not a group

July 2016—Many people talk derisively about conspiracy theorists as if they are a single, homogeneous group. They aren’t. A better term would be human beings. A sub group of that might be human beings who are willing to look beyond the surface of things, who are willing to have their assumptions challenged, who are willing to do some research.
For some reason, this sub group of human beings is dismissed, shunned, ridiculed, and attacked by another sub group of people who consider themselves to be more rational, more about facts and evidence. This sub group has been successfully conditioned to believe they can dismiss a theory without looking at the evidence simply because it conflicts the one they’ve been fed by the mainstream media or heard from their authorities.

Conspiracy theories 3: Double standards

March 2014—When the media spend endless hours speculating about whether the pilots of Malaysian Flight 370 intentionally flew the plane to a pre-determined destination or whether terrorists were behind the disappearance of the plane, why aren’t they called conspiracy theorists?
Because they’re the media, that’s why. They get to set the rules. If CNN concluded that the plane had crashed in bad weather, anyone who suggested foul play would be labelled a conspiracy theorist because they’d be departing from the accepted mainstream version of events.

Won’t even ask the question

Todashev: killed by police.

June 2013—One friend of mine, himself a long-time journalist (and a very capable one) posted on Facebook that Ibrahim Todashev, an acquaintance of alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had been shot to death by police while being questioned about his connection to Tsarnaev. I’ll paraphrase, but he posted the comment, “Oy, this will get those conspiracy nuts going.”
Sigh. A friend of a young man accused of multiple murders (a young man whose guilt is openly questioned by people like me) is shot to death IN POLICE CUSTODY WHILE BEING QUESTIONED ABOUT THE BOSTON BOMBING. It shouldn’t be conspiracy theorists questioning the circumstances of this, it should be everyone!
So my friend is more concerned about smirking about conspiracy “nuts” than he is about asking the most basic questions – questions that any journalist should immediately ask. How can someone being questioned by police end up shot to death? It’s not that my friend is satisfied with answers given by authorities; he doesn’t even ask the question.

9/11, Israel at 2016 World Social Forum

August 2016—If you criticize Israel, be prepared to pay a price. It might be nasty comments from some of your Facebook friends, and it might be the loss of your career. It might also mean a panel discussion you were going to be leading at the World Social Forum gets cancelled.
The WSF is in Montreal this year [2016] – a rare time the event has been held in the developed world – and criticism of Israel in some of the events has brought a predictable backlash from the Jewish community. And this has led to cancellation of some panels as well as the Canadian government removing its logo from the event’s publicity.

***

Mentioned dismissively in some of the mainstream coverage of the WSF was a presentation called “Why We Need to Uncover the 9/11 Deception” given by three familiar 9/11 Truth Movement researchers: Niels Harrit, Graeme MacQueen, and Elizabeth Woodworth.
After the event, I and several other truthers in attendance got together both right after the event and that evening and shared a meal, a few drinks, and some great conversation. Along with the three speakers, our group included Paul Zarembka from State University of New York at Buffalo; Sean Sweeney from City University of New York; my fellow Montrealer and AE911Truth volunteer Sandra Jelmi; and several others. Harrit had traveled all the way from Denmark to be there, MacQueen came from Ontario, and Woodworth crossed the country from British Columbia. It was a great opportunity to sit and talk with fellow truthers that we usually only contact through email.

Council excuses hate as ‘not unduly aggressive’

December 2014 —“Not unduly aggressive.” That’s what the chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council told me about Sun News calling Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth a mentally ill, anti-Semitic hate monger.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Why would I expect that the association representing private broadcasters in Canada would fairly deal with an assault on Gage and the entire 9/11 Truth Movement? The Council dismissed two complaints I filed earlier this year against the Sun News Network – declining to have them heard by their adjudicating panel on the grounds that similar cases have already been ruled on in the past. (Two articles have been published on Truth and Shadows about this story: one here and the second here.)
The crux of the seven-page decision is that it was okay for Sun News host Michael Coren to defame all 9/11 truthers because this type of group is not protected by the ethics codes used by the Council. In addition, Gage being a public figure apparently gives Coren the right to slander him in the name of free speech.

Movies make us think we need the CIA

August 2012—A movie theater is the ultimate surveillance world. The lights are off and we’re spying on the lives of fictitious characters on the big screen.
Actual spies, on the other hand, are often not portrayed in the most positive way in the movies. But even that can be deceiving. Hollywood portrayals of the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence organizations are really subtly programming us to accept the need for this world to exist and to tolerate the times when power is “misused.” We are systematically conditioned to accept the need for us to be controlled and watched. We’re also being conditioned to know that it’s going to get a lot worse.
We learn that the oppressive and ever-growing police state is necessary in a highly dangerous world where America – with all its flaws – is constantly under threat. This is, of course, the greatest deception of all, because America is the aggressor.
Yes it is entertainment, but it’s more. While the mainstream media are the power elite’s primary weapons in the propaganda war for your mind, Hollywood films play a key role. When we watch a spy thriller or any other nicely packaged piece of movie entertainment, we let our guard down and suspend critical thought because, “It’s only a movie.”
We love to hate the power-mad CIA operation heads who order their agents to kill indiscriminately, ignore privacy, and trample on any semblance of freedom and democracy. We feel sorry for the well-intentioned agents who risk their lives to “protect our freedoms.” And when the whole thing falls apart, we love seeing the bad guys get what’s coming to them while the system doesn’t miss a beat.

First CIT impression

April 2012—When I first watched National Security Alert by Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis of Citizen Investigation Team I was blown away. What these two guys did was to crack a huge hole in the official story of 9/11 at the Pentagon.
A group of highly credible witnesses were captured on video describing what they saw so that the world can judge whether they are believable. ALL of these witnesses place the plane that flew towards the Pentagon on the north side of the former Citgo gas station. NONE of them had the slightest doubt about the path they saw. Were they all mistaken? Were they all lying? No one has ever shown how either of these could be remotely possible. So, the conclusion I drew when I watched the film was that the plane flew on the north side. I still feel that way.
Several of the witnesses in the film described the plane banking to the right as it approached the Pentagon. When asked to draw the plane’s path on an aerial photo, all of them showed a path that curved to the right.

Citizen journalists

August 2012—The best work in investigative journalism is being done by individuals, usually unpaid, on web sites and blogs around the world. They are doing the investigating and the relentless uncovering truths about the most disturbing issues our world faces: the war on terror, false flag operations like 9/11, Oklahoma City, and the London 7/7 bombings.
Is it the mainstream media that have broken these stories? Quite the opposite. It’s the MSM that have covered them up. And they continue to do so.

Letter to the uninitiated

March 2015—Dear friend or family member,
So you think I have gone off the deep end. Or at least that I’m dangling my feet in it.
You think the world is pretty much as it is presented to you by the news media and your government. You think that while these and other institutions may be flawed, even deeply flawed, they are doing their best to tell us the truth and to make the world a better place.
You don’t believe that a broad conspiracy could exist to fundamentally deceive us about how our world works and who truly controls it. Even the word “conspiracy” provokes a ridiculing reaction from you – like a gag reflex. If the deception is too big, you reason, its existence would be revealed by someone, and this would lead to the whole thing crumbling.
You can’t figure out what the heck I’m talking about when I say otherwise. You suspect that I have shifted into some kind of alternative reality that you find puzzling and disturbing. In this reality, things we’re told by authority figures are often false, the identities of the bad guys and the good guys have become blurred – or reversed altogether – and the chaos we see in the world actually has a pattern.
You have been conditioned to reject this view without any critical thought, although I suspect there is a part of you, perhaps deeply buried, that thinks I might be right.

12 comments

  1. It’s always difficult to reason with people who know they don’t have to think because they know they’re right. As one Chinese saying puts it, a frog that lives at the bottom of a well looks up, sees the sky, and says I understand the universe.

  2. On the “sheer contempt” aspect of being close-minded: I had become a 9/11 truther around Spring of ’05, much to my folks’ chagrin. Then, on 7/7, the London bombings happened. As the events were beginning to unfold on TV and my mum (given the context, it’s important to know she’s British and proud of it) looked at me sternly, pointed and wagged her finger at me, and hissed, “And DON’T SAY it was a government conspiracy!!” Contempt breeds contempt and frankly I haven’t quite forgiven her for that moment.
    Ry Dawson is moving from being a subtle disinfo shill to a blatant disinfo shill; a former 9/11 blogger referred to this as “Going Fetzal.” Can AE formally ask him to cease and desist?
    The response to the Kadhr settlement is as heartbreaking as the story of the young man’s life.
    The CBSC response to the Sun’s characterization of Richard Gage makes my blood boil.
    As far as the Pentagon goes, Justin Keogh over at 911blogger is telling the nose-stretcher that “we have video” of a plane hitting the Pentagon. The link he points his readers to is the long-debunked “fish-eye lens” argument for why the Pentagon security camera video actually DOES show a 757.
    Good stuff Craig (even though heartbreaking/infuriating); I’ll contribute more thoughts soon. Nice bonus features DVD you compiled here. 🙂

    1. Thanks, Adam. And I appreciate you taking the time to comment on multiple segments in the piece. I wonder if anyone else will. I relate about your mother because I’ve been told that also. More than one friend has hit me with “Not everything is a conspiracy, you know!”
      By the way, Richard Gage posted a comment on Dawson’s video but Dawson deleted it.

  3. Why would ry Dawson disseminate disinformation? I always supported his strong exposition of the Zionist role in 9/11.

  4. Adam, I’m not sure I understand the “going Fetzal” reference. Does that refer to Jim Fetzer, and if so, do you believe that he is a blatant disinfo shill? Because I remember Hybridrogue used to say that, and I just do not buy it. And if this has all been covered somewhere else, just point me in the right direction. Thanks.

  5. He points that fire can weaken a building structure and every one hates him for that ,well the reality is that in fact this is true . he also criticizes israel well he only points out provable facts .
    Dawson actually is way ahead of the scope of the so called truth movement.

    1. Are the things he said in the video I linked to provable facts? Please explain which architectural study he’s referring to. And how he can claim that AE911Truth used to think a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon but now does. All of these things don’t exist.

  6. I think we develop our perception of things based on our self-image. Reality has no bearing at all. I’ve had long discussions with an x-air-traffic controller who can only see 9/11 from the airplanes, because that is his expertise – his identity – his self-image. If the planes (aa11, ual175, aa77, ual93) never left the ground, or were simply a minor feature of the set in the magic trick, his expertise is diminished or irreverent – for his existence to matter, AA-77 must exist and must enter the Pentagon. Men have fallen on swords for a mistaken smirch of “honor”. Worms have better responses to their environment that humans – they’re consistent – we vacillate between co-op and competition regardless of whether we are in silk or shit. The real mystery of 9/11 is not what happened, but what happened so easily created, a cartoon script delivered within 24 hrs. and has not evolved in any way, regardless of witnesses, ballistics, videos, measurements, analysis, and now as much a part of history as yesterday’s rainfall. We are trained to disbelieve our own senses. “Kook Movement” is very close to the truth – among all these competing perceptions there does exist faint glimmers of truth – dogs, birds, bugs, and children are excellent models. Among educated and trained humans – perhaps 1 in 10,000 can be objective. We all think we’re that 1. hahahahaha

  7. We get bombarded, from a million different directions, by news, data points, information, propaganda, analysis and opinion on a daily basis. So much of it that even a very interested person who might invest a great deal of time into trying to process all this information ends up failing to separate wheat from chaff, and connect the dots accurately and correctly in real time. Many moving targets of history move so fast that there is really no time to even understand it before it is already history (and usually too late.) And there are other processes in history that unfold so slowly, we barely notice that it is even moving, let alone guess its direction and destination before it is too late.
    In this context, I have always found it very enlightening to go back in time and read news articles, opinion pieces, watch documentaries, revisit predictions of the future that have come to pass, etc. After all, 20/20 hindsight is a beautiful thing.
    Thank you, Craig, for this potpourri of mini articles and unfinished thoughts, and for reminding us where we were, what we thought, what came of it (if anything at all.) Cumulatively, these snippets create a great chance to zoom out and have a better perspective of where we came from, and where we might be going, and hopefully learn from it all.
    And, in particular, what spoke to me the most is your painful attempt to explain to your loved ones and people around you how you, and myself by association, have not gone mad, lost our screws, ‘gone off the deep end”… Well, come to think of it, I suppose the jury is still out on that one! ;-}]

    1. David,
      I thank you for that thoughtful reaction to this post. Some of these were causing me guilt because I knew I should have been getting the damn things finished and posted. But for whatever reason, I didn’t get them finished. Some of them deserve to be revisited with more comprehensive treatments. The Omar Khadr case is one I must write about again. It’s too bad that some readers will tend to skip something that seems to be a Canadian story. But it could not be more central to the bogus war on terror.
      I’m glad you were affected by the last item. I find one of the most difficult things about doing the kind of research we all do is my seeming inability to convince even those closest to me that I’m not either paranoid or imagining things. I find it quite hurtful at times, in addition to being supremely frustrating.
      I also agree that looking back can be quite revealing. I must say that what pleases me is being able to look at something I wrote several years ago and feeling like I can stand by it today. I feel that particularly where the Pentagon and its corresponding disinfo campaign is concerned. I think I caught on to deceptions on this subject back in 2010 and 2011, and all that has happened since has only served to confirm that I was on the right track.

      1. Over the years, I have painfully discovered that not many people share my angle on this, but the way I see it, being “right” has never really been our real problem in seeking the so called “truth”. And when I say “us”, I don’t mean those of us who agree on everything, but those of us who are simply sincere, have critical thinking skills, and most importantly, who have the intellectual cojones to question authority and groupthink.
        From the moment I watched the second tower fall in identical fashion with my bare eyes, it was obvious to me that they were brought down on purpose, and by forces way beyond the two planes. And, from the moment we were fed a nicely packaged “Osama’s Nineteen” script within less than 48 hours, it was equally obvious that those who were feeding us the story were the true perpetrators and beneficiaries.
        I am not telling this to show you how “right” or how darn smart I was to figure this out in a matter of days, but to actually tell you how bloody stupid and wrong I was in assuming that this lie was so damn blatant and so damn BIG, that it was a matter of weeks or months before it’d all got exposed, and the “people” would be up in arms demanding justice. Ha, fuckin’ ha, eh?
        So, our problem was not really being right or wrong about any one aspect of the whole matter, or whether or not we said or wrote what we could have, or took one position over another… We simply failed to see and comprehend the extent to which “they” would go in pushing, covering up and maintaining the lie, their capabilities of social engineeiring and mass manipulation, their methods of subversion and misdirection… We also failed to recognize the size and the scope of the conspiracy. It was neither a “rogue group” in the government, nor the Israelis, zionists, illuminati, nor the three stooges named DubyaDickAndDon, but it was the entire establishment, all members of Nato an its sphere of influence, the UN, all of the oligarchs, the Vatican, the Russians, the Chinese, and every asshole who chose to BELIEVE or stay quiet whether knowingly or not, whether willingly or not.
        And perhaps most importantly, we have failed to understand human and crowd psychology and how easily we can be manipulated… Which rendered us our own worst enemy. As Tao put it, understanding yourself is only half of the equation, and understanding the enemy is the other half. As a “group”, we seem to have failed miserably in both.
        I hope you won’t find my words patronizing, but I don’t feel Craig McKee has much to worry about in the shoulda woulda coulda department. (perhaps with the exception of still not kissing and making up with HR1 ;-}])
        Thank you for your reply, Craig. I really appreciate it.

  8. A few years ago I had been supportive of Rivero of WRH who is pals with Ry Dawson. It became obvious to me that although they both expressed belief of Israel’s 9/11 involvement, neither of them would ever acknowledge or accuse the US Military of any guilt, ever. I believe that both Rivero and Dawson are programmed shills being used to cover up for the military. Both have been conveniently located in US military occupied areas– Hawaii/Japan. Dawson’s postings at WRH have had the characteristics of a disinformation agent. I once accused him of such, and was subsequently booted out of commenting. An expert controller of information will present factual information, but interspersed with either falsehoods, or with not acknowledging important actual proven facts.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *