New docs probe elaborate cons behind the war on terror 'mirage'

(T) ERROR shows how FBI creates 'terror plots' then 'twarts' them.

(T) ERROR shows how FBI creates ‘terror plots’ then ‘thwarts’ them.


War of Lies, 89 minutes, directed by Matthias Bittner; North American premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival April 29th, 2015
(T)ERROR, 84 minutes, directed by Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe; 84 minutes; international premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival May 3rd 2015
By Barrie Zwicker (Special to Truth and Shadows)
Before the screening of War of Lies, the film’s German director, Matthias Bittner, was called to the stage and introduced. He said very little, mainly cryptically that “in Germany this film will never be broadcast in a festival – even a student festival – or in a cinema.”
Someone in the audience asked: “Why?”
Bittner didn’t answer. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and quickly left the stage, pointedly looking at the audience, as if to say: “You decide – after you see the film.”
What the audience saw is that War of Lies exposes, from the inside, that the war on Iraq was based on lies, and that the German security forces were instrumentally involved. From this the audience could infer that this politically embarrassing fact is the reason the German establishment will do all it can to squelch the film.
Bittner’s answer might also apply to (T)ERROR, not in respect to German audiences of course, but more generally. For instance, compare the number of cinema goers who saw American Sniper to the number who eventually will see (T)ERROR.
The two documentaries have in common that they reveal, in intimate detail, the lives and slippery values of core actors employed by and/or manipulated by state “security agencies” in the manufacture of war-generating illusions. These shadowy figures normally never come within shouting distance of any documentary producer’s camera.
The central strength of (T)ERROR is its magnificent uniqueness in this respect. The producers were able to film an undercover FBI agent in real time as he went about the entrapment and betrayal of the FBI’s pre-selected target. No re-enactments here. The film carries on to a year after the victim was sent to prison for eight years, based on a technicality that qualifies as an illusion.
The central illusion treated in War of Lies, on the other hand, is the memorable lying broadcastWar of Lies poster from the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell in which he assured the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, namely mobile biological warfare labs, which were non-existent. Bittner’s dogged sleuthing enabled him to find a man the establishment had given a new identity.
Myrocia Watamaniuk’s fair sketch of the film, from the Hot Docs website, only sets the stage:

Is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply a proud Iraqi who helped rid the world of Saddam Hussein, or a brilliant con artist whose story about chemical weapons led the US to invade Iraq? Filmmaker Matthias Bittner sits down with the shadowy man himself in this confessional-cum-controversial thriller.
Escaping his native Iraq in 1999 to Germany, Janabi claimed to have been a chemical engineer working for the Iraqi military industrial complex when—according to Janabi—the German secret service sealed his fate. Stating that they too wanted to depose Hussein, Janabi eagerly gave details in exchange for asylum.
But after 9/11, his questionable file—ironically code-named “Curveball”—was passed on to the Americans, and to Janabi’s own alleged disbelief, his “information” green-lit Iraq’s invasion.
But who was really using whom? Could one desperate man’s story have really snowed two secret service agencies and snowballed into the largest military debacle of the 21st century?

Bittner’s film holds one’s attention totally even though it’s based on one extended interview interspersed with extremely well-chosen B roll.
“Curveball” was manipulated, and admits that he was. But was he more willing to be manipulated than he lets on – even to himself?
If one had to choose one word to describe the facts, characters and possibilities in War of Lies it would have to be nuance.
At the centre of the very non-nuanced questions Bittner puts to Janabi is the issue of accountability. Curveball’s “evidence” of Iraq’s “mobile biological warfare labs” was trotted out at the UN by Colin Powell, and by George Bush and Condi Rice and many other American “leaders” as the “smoking gun” that justified the bloody American invasion of Iraq.
Bittner shows Janabi footage of the gruesome human toll unleashed on Iraq and asks Janabi if it was worth it, in order to depose Saddam Hussein. Janabi says that it was, but also that he did not intend the war to be unleashed, and so it is not his responsibility.
He could not have known, he says, that when he produced his “evidence” of Iraq’s biological warfare capacity (that did not exist) 30 months or so before the invasion, that this “evidence” would have been emblazoned on the world stage, to be followed by his being outed by name, requiring that he be given a new identity.
Toward the end Janabi finally relents and agrees he does bear some responsibility for the horrors of the Iraq war. I got the impression that had the filmmaker not found him, Janabi would have been able to retain his self-created stance of relative, if not complete, innocence.
At the end I got the impression that Bittner got to know Janabi better than Janabi knows himself. In the course of the interviews I think Janabi is forced to rethink what he thinks of himself.
In the Q&A after the screening Bittner concludes, rightly I think: “In part he [Janabi] is responsible [for war on Iraq]. [But] he’s not the main problem. If not him, it would have been someone else.”
Someone else, some document, some satellite images, some secret cache of something, to trot out at the UN, the Americans always find justifications, however weak or usually fake, to launch their wars.
And what came across as almost a footnote struck me as rather central. Janabi’s main handler in Germany, whom he knew as “Dr. Paul,” turned out to be CIA.
In (T)ERROR, a pair of illusions are revealed for what they are: two essentially innocent men sent to prison for many years each to feed the narrative of “home grown terrorism.”
In these cases, as in all the hundreds of strikingly similar ones across the USA, the mainstream media were deeply complicit in failing to be skeptical, failing to investigate, failing to follow up, failing to ask questions – while nevertheless parroting the party line of political figures and security officials.
There are persons in this documentary you trust – such as Marlene, mother of Tariq Shah, who is unjustly serving a 13-year prison term. Others you wonder about – such as Khalifah al-Akili, unjustly serving an eight-year prison term. To trust others, such as Saeed Torres, you’d be taking your life in your hands. Torres, whose FBI code name was “Shariff,” was the informant instrumental in having Shah, and arguably al-Akili, sent to the slammer for those long stretches.
But everyone in this documentary – and that includes Torres – would qualify as Pope-consecrated saints compared to the FBI as an institution.
Torres, a black New York Muslim and former revolutionary, was drawn to become an FBI slimebag for money. Serious money. As we join him in his current assignment in Pittsburgh, his pay is to be US$200,000.
The term “false flag operation” is not used in the film. The preferred term seems to be “sting” for the minimum of 158 cases, and counting, since 9/11, in which the FBI targets victims such as Shah and al-Akili, consigning them to them to the U.S. prison complex gulag while generating (if they could be purchased) billions of dollars’ worth of headlines to hoodwink the public into believing the “war on terror” is anything more than a cruel mirage.
The uniqueness of (T)ERROR is achieved because Torres did not inform his FBI superiors that he knew co-director Cabral. The two had met years before, as they lived in the same brownstone. After Torres came out to her as an informant, he agreed to share his story, again without informing his superiors.
At some point al-Akili begins to post on his Facebook page that he suspects the FBI is targeting him. Cabral and partner Sutcliffe seized this opportunity to approach him. They soon find themselves interviewing al-Akili at the same time they are documenting “Shariff” interacting with al-Akili. Informant and target remain unaware the filmmakers are talking to the other.
Cabral and Sutcliffe also contact Steve Downs, executive director of National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms. Downs contributes observations that may be critical to the future of “stings” in Canada.
Of particular interest is the outcome of the current trial in B.C.’s Supreme Court of Christopher Nuttall and Amanda Korody. The duo of human wreckage allegedly perpetrated the so-called “Canada Day plot” of 2013 that involved pressure cooker canisters outside the B.C. Legislature. Their trial has weeks if not months to go until sentencing (barring the unlikely scenario in which charges against them will be thrown out on the basis that they were entrapped).
Here’s what Downs told Amy Goodman on her program Democracy Now! about what constitutes entrapment, at least south of the border:

“Well, we have to face the reality that although there is technically an entrapment defense, it really no longer exists. I should say that most Western countries, particularly in Europe, do not permit entrapment by the government. I mean, it’s obvious that the government should not be in the business of creating crimes for their own citizens. They should be protecting their citizens.
In the United States, there was case law that set up an entrapment defense very early on. But over the years, an exception was created for anybody who was predisposed. That would be particularly in drug cases. If you had prior drug arrests or prior drug convictions that could … be used to show that you were predisposed to commit this kind of crime. The government could then go in and do an entrapment in the sense of a buy or a sell arrangement. And so, that kind of case law went on for a while.
And then it was expanded to say, “Well, what does it really mean to be predisposed?” And the Supreme Court created another exception by saying, well, predisposed also would include a ready response by the government. In other words, even if you’d never been involved in anything before, if the government offered you something that was illegal, and you immediately accepted it or enthusiastically accepted it, that would be a ready response, which would indicate that you were predisposed.
That ready response exception has grown, under the war on terror, into an exception that is so big that it has completely swallowed up the rule. There really is no entrapment defense anymore, because … the only way you can escape from the ready response doctrine is to withdraw from the plot. If you withdraw from the plot, there is no crime, so there’s nothing to charge. If you go through with the plot, then they will say, “Well, that was a ready response.” And the courts have tended to uphold that. So, my sense of it is, right now, although the law is still a little bit in flux, that the entrapment defense really doesn’t exist in the United States anymore. It’s more a theory than in practice.

Does it exist in Canadian law? And are we talking pre-Bill C-51 or post-Bill C-51? In the case currently before the B.C. Supreme Court, a reading of the 22 newspaper reports of the trial to date by Vancouver Sun reporter Ian Mulgrew supports, for this reviewer at least, a conclusion that the couple was entrapped. It might as well have been an FBI op.
For this writer the key question regarding the eventual outcome of the Nuttall-Korody trial will be: did the court find the couple was entrapped? And if so, will the couple escape conviction on all charges?
Just one sidelight to the trial so far is this question: How many Mounties were involved in setting up the couple? Answer: 240.

37 comments

  1. @Barrie Zwicker Quote” At the centre of the very non-nuanced questions Bittner puts to Janabi is the issue of accountability. Curveball’s “evidence” of Iraq’s “mobile biological warfare labs” was trotted out at the UN by Colin Powell, and by George Bush and Condi Rice and many other American “leaders” as the “smoking gun” that justified the bloody American invasion of Iraq.”
    If the US Government from George Bush down went to the inordinate lengths of creating a huge fake attack on 9/11 why did they not just blame it on Iraq? Why didn’t they even just involve a few Iraqis? Why didn’t they fabricate some evidence that the Iraqis knew about it , or colluded with Osama Bin Laden in carrying it out? They create this huge terrorist attack themselves, they control what happens and who is going to be blamed for it , but apparently they just forgot to use it to put the blame on Saddam and therefore provide a ready made justification for invading Iraq.

    1. As Agent Wright has been taught;
      “Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.”~Marshall McLuhan
      \\][//

  2. It is obvious to the lucid observer that not only the Bill of Rights, but the entirety of the US Constitution has been abandoned.
    It is supposed by many that this is the result of 9/11.
    I propose this has been a long project, beginning with the dubious circumstances in which the document itself was designed, drafted, and passed into law.
    And this goes further back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, wherein only as many of half of the signers actually believed in the principles of Unalienable rights to Liberty.
    The “United States of America” seems to be a complete myth from the very beginning.
    But the inalienability of human individual rights and Liberty are not a myth. At the center of the American myth is a universal and eternal Truth.
    Liberty is not the invention of revolution. Liberty is the discovery of enlightened reason.
    \\][//

  3. In quoting McLuhan, hybridrogue1 makes a sad but true observation about A.Wright’s intentions. A.Wright is using his rhetorically-barbed questions to continue his personal disinformation campaign to besmirch the cause of 9/11 Truth.
    Nevertheless his questions have answers. Just not the ones he likely prefers.
    As Graeme MacQueen writes in his book The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (page 49): “…the 2001 anthrax attacks were products of a domestic conspiracy initiated by parties in high positions within the U.S. state. I contend that the conspirators utilized the strategy of tension while framing a Muslim Other (al-Qaeda and Iraq), to push the American population and its elected representatives into a form of civic self-immolation: frightened, they ceded liberties and powers.”
    The U.S. conspirators conflated 9/11 and the anthrax attacks as being perpetrated by a conflated al-Qaeda and Iraq. Al-Qaeda was conveniently amorphous. It and 9/11 could be linked to the “anthrax attacks.” It was meant by the tall foreheads of the psywar crowd to be a double whammy.
    On pages 72 to 85 of his book MacQueen shows the “Double Perpetrator” strategy of the U.S. government. Besides U.S. regime officials or former ones, such as James Woolsey, trumpeting Iraq’s involvement in 9/11, were media mouthpieces including Charles Krauthammer and George Will (“Both spoke openly about Iraq as a target,” writes MacQueen), Judith Miller, William Broad, Stephen Engelberg and Richard Cohen.
    As it was put on October 14th, 2001, by The Observer in the U.K., one of the scores of media outlets complicit in the blanket of lies:
    “American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack – and have named Iraq as prime suspect as the source of the deadly spores. Their inquiries are adding to what US hawks say is a growing mass of evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, possibly indirectly, with the September 11 hijackers.”
    The strategy fell apart. The “anthrax attacks” are all but forgotten by most, apparently including A.Wright. The first patsy targeted for the deadly anthrax nonsense, Steven Hatfill, refused to stand down and successfully sued the U.S. treasury for $5.82-million. The second patsy, Bruce Ivins, “committed suicide” and so didn’t sue. Suicides don’t sue. Just last month Richard Lambert, who headed the anthrax investigation, launched a $2.5-million lawsuit (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/watchful-eye/former-oak-ridge-counterintelligence-chief-suing-fbi-doj_98276582) against the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI in U.S. District Court. He alleges he was obstructed many ways in his anthrax assignment. More U.S. government conspiracy facts that even Fox News reported…
    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/04/16/former-fbi-director-alleges-agency-concealing-evidence-in-anthrax-case/ .
    So in answering A.Wright’s questions with real evidence, yes the U.S. government fabricated “evidence” the Iraqis “knew about” 9/11, yes they “involved a few Iraqis” (such as Saddam Hussein, remember him?), yes they said Iraq colluded with binLaden, yes they “create this huge terrorist attack,” yes they control what happens, yes they (try to control) “who is going to be blamed,” but no they “didn’t forget to use it to blame Saddam and therefore provide a ready-made justification for invading Iraq.”
    The problem was that they screwed up the second half of the double whammy so badly that it was left dead in the rubble down in the memory hole.

    1. Thank you Barrie, for taking the time to explain the real history of these things YET AGAIN.
      It is up to each one of us to plug up our personal “memory holes” and never forget.
      This is what drives me:
      I am oppressed, and I am pissed off everyday about it!
      I refuse to put it in the back of my mind and forget it like we are encouraged to do by media every moment of the day.
      We are living in a panoptic maximum security police state, the most oppressive system ever devised, and I refuse to accept this. So I am tracking their activities, just like they are tracking mine.
      It is worthwhile to articulate this every once in awhile.
      \\][//

      1. Hey Barrie,
        What do you think of Sy Hersh’s elaborate modified limited hangout on the “killing of Osama bin Laden’?
        \\][//

        1. As I wrote in thanks to “Truth Troubadour” Vic Sadot, who has also nailed it as a limited hangout….
          It’s a load of very sophisticated crap, based largely on Hersh’s conversations with an anonymous intellectual psychopath.
          Hersh’s absurdities and omissions include, first and foremost, the Big Lie right off the top — that ObL was killed in Abbottabad, at the time claimed.
          Among the passel of internal inconsistences, contradictions and absurdities within the piece (I found dozens: for instance whose DNA did they match ObL’s DNA with? No identity hinted at. And would it not be both vital and fascinating to find out how they got ObL’s? He’s not a smoker, so a cast-aside ciggy butt is unlikely. A dialysis needle? Oops, no dialysis equipment allegedly found. A coffee cup?) consider these blockbuster omissions from Hersh’s piece:
          [a] No mention of ObL as a CIA asset
          [b] No mention of the mysterious helicopter crash that killed 17 Navy Seals in August 2011.
          Hersh’s piece is a limited hangout.
          He agrees that American officials lie in little matters (such as disposal of ObL’s body at sea, etc., etc., etc.) while pulling off a big lie of omission: that the CIA bumped ObL off soon after 9/11 because ObL went public that he was a patsy. ObL then followed in the gunned-down footsteps of “I am just a patsy” Lee Harvey Oswald.
          As PCR says of Hersh’s piece of work, his richly-embroidered concoction is true in that it “reveals” that the U.S. and its officials from bottom to top lie blatantly and frequently. We knew that. Consider this recent quote from an expert in propaganda:
          “Liars leave behind a record of the truth — in the pattern of their lies.” – Barrie Zwicker
          (This last, while an accurate quote, is meant as a bit of self-deprecating whimsy camouflaged in an ostensibly egotistical wrapping. Basically, you have to be me to get it.)

          1. Thanks Berrie,
            I am astonished that Global Research is re-upping the Hersh article and not mentioning that they themselves reported on bin Laden being dead for years… I didn’t see PCR’s comments on it. I will look for that.
            \\][//

  4. AIA Atlanta: three thousand eight hundred and ninety two to one hundred sixty.
    . Resolution 15-6, which called upon the AIA to support a new WTC 7 investigation, was voted down 3,892 to 160, garnering 4% of the delegates’ votes.
    4%

    1. I hate it that I was right about this being a fools errand. I know that we as a movement need to vastly improve our strategy and plan of action. These “fools errands” are getting us nowhere really fast and I submit it is time to change things in a big way or simply quit. I for one will no longer be limited in my actions by the “consensus” of the group consciousness. I am no longer going to stand on a corner with a damn sign that says “investigate 9/11” or “Google Building 7” because it is impotence at this stage. We either put on our big boy shoes and start kicking some ass (figuratively speaking) or we pack up our marbles and go home. There isn’t time left to do this the slow as molasses in winter time way. We need to grow up as activists and admit what doesn’t work and start taking actions that do work.

          1. And the little clip on your blog about computer simulating the lighting makes more than one reference to “the conspiracy theories.” Not a point in its favor (although this is admittedly not the substance of the piece).

          2. Yea, I know you are sensitive to the term Craig, but some people see the moon hoax as a ‘conspiracy theory’. There are some wacky conspiracy theories!
            I have argued against them myself, the bullshit from Shack about video fakery, the nonesense from Judy Wood, the nuking the WTC. As far as I am concerned those are all pseudoscience nonsense.
            And I know you’re not convinced of that yourself.
            That is why I am not interested in making those arguments here anymore.
            But if you want to post on HR1blog, go ahead, I will look for it and approve your commentary.
            I am interested in reading what you think is persuasive evidence, just like I am interested in what Adam thinks is.
            \\][//

          3. I have no problem with arguing against nukes at the WTC or Judy Wood’s DEW – both of which I do not agree with (so to imply that I am undecided on those would not be accurate). I do, however, feel that excessive “debunking” ends up giving disinformation the power to dominate the discourse. But beyond that, I believe that those who challenge officials stories of all kinds should never use the language of those who would seek to marginalize us.

          4. “I believe that those who challenge officials stories of all kinds should never use the language of those who would seek to marginalize us.”
            I do to Craig, but not everyone is as tuned into the massive conditioning played on the people, that does not mean they are irrational in their analysis.
            I don’t like the CT jibe anymore than anyone else here, I understand the psychology of using such doublespeak.
            But the analysis of the lighting is another matter isn’t it?
            I wasn’t entirely sure of your opinions on the nukes and DEW issue. I try to keep up with all of this, but I am keeping up with a lot of things, just like all of us.
            But I am glad you have firmed up your position on those issues.
            Getting back the moon hoax thing, I would really like to hear a persuasive argument put to it!
            I’ve never been on the moon, I don’t know for absolute certain that those landings took place – but I haven’t seen an alternative that convinces me. And now that there are satellite images of the sites coming in… well…
            Sure, it could be an ongoing coverup. Those are certainly going on. The recent bin Laden limited hangout by Hersh is a good reminder of that. But those are words. It is a larger program to continue generating fake imagery.
            So if you have an argument for the moon hoax that you think is solid, you are invited to make it on my blog.
            \\][//

          5. “Getting back the moon hoax thing, I would really like to hear a persuasive argument put to it!”
            Dave McGowan has done a brilliant and hilarious job of showing how we never went to the moon in “Wagging the Moondoggie.” He shows that moon rocks have been faked and that key documents are missing but at the core of his argument is that there was technology so advanced back then like batteries that could cool, heat and drive space buggies and yet today we still don’t have such good batteries. McGowan offers up a plethora of startling examples that has me nearly convinced. http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/index.html

          6. Sorry Jimbo, but I simply cannot stand to read McGowan yap about his personal life and then throw in a few tidbits of what he thinks are proofs of his bizarre theories.
            I suffered through his Laural Canyon bullshit enough to catch the drift of what a dolt this sucker is.
            It’s like Fetzer, for me if Fetzer says it, it is automatically bullshit. Same with McGowan.
            Now, if someone were able to take what McGowan is saying and give a no nonsense presentation of just the facts, without all the hohoho & colored balloons provided by the McGowan clown I would appreciate that.
            \\][//

          7. Automatically bullshit? Wow. This is an usual lapse on your part, HR. Discounting any information because you don’t like the source is not logical. Information stands or falls on its own merits.

          8. “Discounting any information because you don’t like the source is not logical.”
            Ii is not illogical when I have found the source to be consistently unreliable. The choice of what each of us finds to be valid or not is a right we all have in common.
            There are many diverse sources of information to chose from. Like I said, I read McGowan’s, Laurel Canyon series, I found it utterly ludicrous. I don’t find him a clear thinker, I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.
            \\][//

          9. Has it ever occurred to anybody that Dave McGowan is a satirist and his whole shtick is spoof blended in with an overdose of daily autobiography?
            Take the film Dark Side of the Moon, as an example. It is a spoof, and yet the Moon Hoax crew took it as serious.
            \\][//

          10. No. No one who has read his stuff would think that. And I have a SERIOUS problem with your reference to the “Moon Hoax crew.” This is exactly the kind of thing a debunker would say to anyone engaged in conspiracy research. You might as well call them conspiracy nuts.
            I’ve seen many people fooled by satirical articles, but that has nothing to do with whether they are correct in their beliefs or not.

  5. I just wanted to leave a comment and give an in-advance thanks to Barrie for writing this; I haven’t read it all yet as I have been busy, and had limited time to deal with 9/11 activism, but there’s no way I can “move on with life” and forget about 9/11 truth; it’s got me for life, so I will get back to reading this soon! And offer comment when I do.

  6. “WE REACHED THE TIPPING POINT”: INCOME INEQUALITY IS HIGHEST SINCE RECORDS BEGAN
    &
    BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

    \\][//

  7. Claiming that there are “just certain kids we should have 24/7,” the controversial figure also proposed, citing inaccurate information, turning government schools across America into “community centers” that would offer students even more “after-school programming.” Despite escalating criticism of Duncan and his scheming — one analyst called it “scary” — the proposed plots were hardly surprising considering other elements of what senior officials often refer to as the “cradle-to-career” education agenda.
    In essence, according to Duncan in various speeches, government schools, now largely controlled from Washington, D.C., are being used as a “weapon” to “change the world.” With the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as what the education secretary called his “global partner,” public education will also serve as a tool to transform children into what he described as “green citizens.” If Obama’s “Green Jobs” Czar Van Jones had not been forced to resign over his self-declared revolutionary communist views, he could have even placed the newly minted “green citizens” into the “green jobs” Duncan says the feds are preparing them for.
    – See more at: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/obama-education-sec-govt-boarding-schools_052015#sthash.8crkiqUn.dpuf

  8. (No reply box visible so I’ll post this out of turn. Hope that’s okay. Also apologies for writing this bit of criticism in the wake of the bad news about Mr. McGowan. What a coincidence this came up now. Or is it a coincidence?)
    “I read McGowan’s, Laurel Canyon series, I found it utterly ludicrous.”
    I agree. That book, or the series of articles I had read, was his weakest and hardest to buy conspiracy theory. I was and remain a sixties music fan and was voracious acid eater back in the day and it would take a tab of Orange Sunshine laced perhaps with scopolamine to make me think that because Jim Morrison and a number of other famous 60s music icons were children of military intelligence officers and officials they actively encouraged we young folks to take LSD so we’d forsake our anti-Vietnam War views. Yes, hybridrogue1, that sounds ludicrous. What the series did make we wonder about, however, was where all that LSD came from? I lived in a small upstate New York village and in 1968 and I could somehow buy Purple Double Domes for $3 a hit on the public library stairs. But I’m not complaining. That is one possible government conspiracy I adore. My parents, however, should have wondered. That said, consider his Laurel Canyon series was like one of the Rolling Stones later albums, McGowan’s “A Bigger Bang,” the Stones’ 22nd album that simply sucked. But “Moondoggie?” My god, that’s Dave’s “Beggars Banquet,” his “Let It Bleed.” And his 9/11 writing? Oh, I don’t know, his “Sticky Fingers?” Hybridrogue1, if you are genuinely interested in alternative thinking about the Apollo missions do please go back and read “Wagging the Moondoggie” and let us know what you think.

    1. “..if you are genuinely interested in alternative thinking about the Apollo missions do please go back and read “Wagging the Moondoggie” and let us know what you think.”
      Well by himiny Jimbo, by such popular and overwhelming demand, I guess I am just going to have to do that!
      Thanks, Willy \\][//

      1. “The issue that most of the Moon hoax and ‘debunking’ sites spend the most time on, by far, is the photographic anomalies. And that, I suppose, is to be expected, since with the original videotapes, telemetry tapes and blueprints all having conveniently disappeared, and with most of the Moon rocks missing and their legitimacy being unverifiable, there isn’t much else in the way of physical evidence to examine.”~Dave McGowan – Wagging the Moondoggie, Part IV
        . . . . .
        The Moon Rocks in fact are not all missing as McGowan tries to convince. Like many ancient relics & artifacts from the Earth’s past, the Moon Rocks are precious and demand huge prices on the black market of “private collectors”. The only Moon Rocks that are missing are the small samples gifted to the states and some foreign governments. And quite a few of these have been recovered. The US however has the majority of the samples from the moon in safe storage.
        I am really surprised to find these articles by McGowan to be so weak and based on spurious rhetoric after reading so many glowing reviews on his Moondoggie series.
        \\][//

    2. Well I’ll tell ya this Jimbo, McGowan sure can jabber along without saying anything. I just read Wagging the Moondoggie, Part I, and it didn’t have anything even slightly substantial.
      It better get down to it soon gawd dambit!!! grin…
      \\][//

    3. Due to my own romantic notions of the time and place, I’ve listened to many of Dave McGowan’s podcasts and read a fair portion of his Laurel Canyon series, but, as entertaining as it was, non of it really made much sense to me. It was the 60’s after all, so most parents, including those of rock stars, would’ve been ex-military. The fact that some of these fathers were quite high ranking or involved in intelligence agencies, doesn’t particularly make the case for complicity any more compelling either–I think it’s called a non-sequitur. I’d say having a top brass dad with a flat top would at least nurture rebellion in one form or another or at least make such behavior understandable. It was convincing enough for Mr Jan ‘trivium’ Irvin though. That said, I do tend to think that the hippie movement was by no means a spontaneous, grass roots, yoof uprising. I feel there’s meat in the idea of mass social engineering at play, but just don’t shoe horn in circumstantial evidence to make the case and call it solid research is all.

Leave a Reply to Barrie Zwicker Cancel reply

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