We must also resist those in our movement who want us to accept more and more of the official account
May 1, 2017
By Craig McKee
It’s a question you would think we would have answered long ago: How can we collectively pull the truth out of 9/11 if we are pulling in different directions?
As determined and sincere truth seekers, we continue to do what we can to open the eyes of people everywhere to the fact that they have been lied to about 9/11. But to be successful, we must also explain what those lies are. In other words, we have to show how the official story of this world-changing event cannot be true.
This raises another crucial question: does the 9/11 Truth Movement have a strong and coherent message—one that is understandable and potentially persuasive? Or are we allowing ourselves to be split into numerous competing camps?
We must simplify and focus our message if we are to survive as a movement with realistic hope of developing a critical mass of public support.
And we must reduce the amount of time and energy we devote to internal differences—although these are unavoidable and sometimes useful—while increasing the amount of time and energy we devote to easy-to-understand outreach. Many of us struggle—and fail—to convince our family and friends to look at this evidence. So we all know what we’re up against. Sometimes we are able to plant a seed that we hope will take root, even if not right away. We’ve had to content ourselves with small victories.
It’s about finding a balance by firmly making the case while not alienating the listener by being overly aggressive. We don’t always succeed. But not using the truth as a blunt instrument does not mean we should in any way water down the case we are making to seem more “credible.” The truth is the truth.
There are probably as many ways to approach a potential newcomer as there are Truthers. And each of us thinks we have the magic formula to reach others because we all have our own theories about exactly what happened on 9/11. But I would argue that it’s not the individual theories that can easily be brought into alignment so we can present a coherent message, it’s the focus on what’s impossible in the official story.
Some Truthers don’t particularly care if they get through to others or not; it’s about ego and arrogance for them. Others are focused on getting the approval of the mainstream media (as if the media even care about what we say), and they give dire warnings about how the sky will fall if we don’t ignore certain compelling evidence to appear more reasonable. These people have no clue what we’re really up against. Yes, we want to be credible in what we say and to base our statements on evidence, but we must also be bold enough to make the strongest case possible.
More importantly, we have to consider exactly which case we are attempting to make. Some will say we should stick to the safest evidence and chuck the rest. They would have us talk about Building 7, the Twin Towers, and nothing else. They might get into the impossibility of Hani Hanjour flying a 757 into the side of the Pentagon but not much beyond that. Truther Jon Gold takes this to an extreme when he says we should stay away from controlled demolition of the towers and accept that there were real hijackers and that a real 757 hit the Pentagon. He says we should throw all our eggs into the “we’ve been lied to” basket and stop there. This may plant a seed of doubt, but beyond that it is useless.
Look at all the evidence
For me, becoming convinced of the correctness of the Truth Movement cause was the result of an accumulation of evidence, not picking just one thing. In essence, it came from looking at the official story and then at all the information that contradicts it. That meant looking at the Twin Towers, Building 7, and the Pentagon and Shanksville. It meant looking at the military stand down and exercises, the financial irregularities, the doctoring and withholding of video evidence, the impossible accounts of the alleged hijackers, molten metal under the towers, the Larry Silverstein angle, and so much more.
The more you look, the more the official story is revealed to be a web of lies.
So the idea of simplifying the message when approaching potential initiates really means sticking to the actual evidence and what we know is false in the official story. This means not proclaiming with certainty that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon or that Flight 93 was shot down. It also means not preparing to go to war with other Truthers about which type of explosive was used to bring the towers down.
This approach is essentially the one taken by David Ray Griffin in his many books on 9/11. Methodical. Well sourced. One piece of evidence at a time. How anyone could read Griffin’s work and emerge still believing the official story is beyond me. (I find it a shame that the 9/11 Consensus Panel does not achieve the dissection of the official story that Griffin’s own books so effectively do.)
I also appreciate the approach taken by Massimo Mazzucco in September 11: The New Pearl Harbor in which he looks at flaws in the official story, then the counter arguments by the debunkers, and finally at questions the debunkers must be able to answer about those arguments.
(Note: Crucial to my 9/11 education in addition to Griffin was the video National Security Alert, among others, by Citizen Investigation Team; the numerous video presentations by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, including live talks by Richard Gage; the videos and articles from Pilots for 9/11 Truth; and a host of books, including Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11, Paul Zarembka’s The Hidden History of 9-11, and Graeme MacQueen’s recent advancement of the story, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. And those are just the highlights of a very long list.)
Some will say we should already be past simply saying what’s false in the official narrative; we should no longer be discussing the “minutiae” of the evidentiary details. Instead, this argument goes, we should be focusing on who is responsible for this massive crime. And I think there is truth to this. It has been more than 15 years after all. But I think this depends on who is the recipient of the message.
If someone has had no exposure to 9/11 truth and believes the official narrative right down the line, then going into Zionism, secret societies, and the Rothschilds might not be the best way to go to introduce doubt about the truthfulness of what they’ve been told (although they are certainly valid subjects for study). Before people are prepared to believe that the U.S. government and/or certain allies were responsible for this “catalyzing event,” we have to introduce doubt about the actual “facts.” And that must be done by showing that one element of the 9/11 official story after another simply is not true.
Particularly on social media, it is common to see alleged “Truthers” (some I’m certain are trolls if not actual government agents) as they insert endless “diversity” into the debate while employing every disinformation tactic in the book. Honest Truthers either ignore them (I’m trying to move in this direction) or drive themselves crazy trying to reduce their influence (I still have one foot in this group). Or they get fooled by them.
These online Clint Eastwoods goad others to “make my day” if they dare mention something that falls outside the bounds of their theory. The result is thousands of sometimes heated and even disrespectful arguments, with the movement coming out the loser. Everyone ends up frustrated and drained. Newcomers in particular get discouraged by those fancying themselves as Truther cops who patrol the Internet, attacking what they claim is disinformation and generally terrorizing anyone who doesn’t fall into line.
A ‘divisive’ debate?
I’ll admit that my thoughts on the issue are colored by my exposure to many brainless discussions about 9/11 within the intellectual wasteland that is Facebook. If I were to come across someone willing to take the plunge into examining the evidence, the last thing I would do would be to urge them to explore 9/11 groups on this social medium. I don’t mean to say all are bad; in fact I know there are some administered by good people who do their very best to ensure a fair discussion. But others are dominated by trolls and likely agents who will mock and ridicule any newcomer who dares to even ask a question about a supposedly taboo topic.
One issue that has been front and center in the debate over which evidence Truthers should present to the world is what happened, and did not happen, at the Pentagon.
This is something essential for the Truth Movement to address for two major reasons. First, the Pentagon event appeared to be an attack by an external enemy on the military of the United States (providing justification for a military response). Second, if the evidence shows that a large plane did not crash into the Pentagon and that explosives were used to simulate a crash, there is no other entity than the U.S. government itself that could have staged this deception. Simply proving the official account of a crash to be false proves an inside job took place.
What is troubling is that there is a small group of researchers, about whom I’ve written numerous times, who don’t want us to focus on what is false about the official story at the Pentagon; they want to convince us that most of it is true.
Among this group are David Chandler, Frank Legge (who recently passed away), Ken Jenkins, John Wyndham, Jonathan Cole, Jim Hoffman, and others who are pushing this position in one “scholarly paper” after another. And they never seem to have the time or inclination to show us what’s false in the official story. As I have said in numerous other articles, I believe there has been a disinformation campaign in progress for a dozen years or more that seeks to use the Pentagon event to divide the movement and to disqualify the powerful Pentagon evidence. I don’t say that all who push the large plane impact are knowingly part of this campaign, but some clearly are.
In recent years, these researchers have attempted to convince the movement not just that their interpretation of the evidence is correct, but more importantly that the movement is inevitably coming around to their way of thinking. This smacks of psychological manipulation. Cases in point include the October 2016 article in Foreign Policy Journal by John Wyndham entitled, “Bringing Closure to the 9/11 Pentagon Debate” as well as Jenkins’ and Chandler’s presentations at the 9/11 Film Festival in September 2015 (examined in these two articles: “Going full debunker: Chandler devotes most of Pentagon talk to boosting 9/11 official story” and “Jenkins misleads by linking Pentagon plane impact theory to AE911Truth”). The idea in each of these cases is clearly to manipulate people into concluding that the discussion is over, the issue decided, and anyone who doesn’t agree with the impact advocates is engaging in speculation or has “persistent beliefs.”
TAP and the Pentagon
Part of the TAP mission statement prior to removal.
Compounding this troubling situation is the group Truth Action Project (TAP), which claims to want to unite the movement under its umbrella banner. The group’s chair, former AE911Truth board member Wayne Coste, is a regular participant in the 9/11 and Other Deep State Crimes Teleconference as am I. (Adam Ruff and I debated Coste on the Pentagon in a conference call in January 2016, winning a survey of participants 17-1.) Over the past year and a half, he has made a number of presentations on the monthly call in support of elements of the Pentagon official narrative—none of which is remotely credible in my view.
In fact, Coste’s impact position was clearly illuminated on TAP’s web site (in its mission statement) until September 2016 when the text was removed in an effort by TAP to gain an endorsement from AE911Truth prior to the “Justice in Focus 9/11” symposium in New York City. (A key section that was removed read: “…the 9/11 Truth Action Project proposes to show that not only were World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 all brought down by either classic or novel forms of controlled demolition but that the Pentagon destruction was also the result of the combination [of] a large commercial jet impact and explosives.”)
While that explicit position is no longer on the site, there is still a clear indication where TAP stands on its current Pentagon evidence page. From that page: “Meanwhile, the vast majority of impact damage was revealed in later images as a 100 foot contiguous opening in the first floor facade from column 8 to column 18. So the misperception of a “too small hole” arose from the lack of detail in early published photos.”
So those who do not believe the hole in the building is large enough to accommodate a 757 have “misperceived” the evidence. In fact, the contiguous opening is considerably less than 100 feet if you take into account that the damaged columns remain at least partially in place (some appear to have become detached at the bottom, but they are still there).
I do realize that there are those who would claim that in my frequent voicing of the importance of the Pentagon event to the overall 9/11 story—and my strong opposition to the impact position—I am guilty of the very thing I criticize: focusing on what they would call a pet theory and battling it out with any Truther who doesn’t fall into line. But I think there is a big difference.
My focus on the Pentagon is entirely consistent with my approach to 9/11 as a whole. It’s also consistent with what I think the movement as a whole should be doing—showing the official story to be false.
That government/mass media narrative says that Flight 77, under the control of hijacker Hani Hanjour, was flown into the west wall of the Pentagon at ground level, knocking over five light poles with one of those poles impaling the windshield of cab driver Lloyde England. The plane, we’re told, went through three rings of the building and emerged through a hole in the wall of the C ring. But so much about this story is obviously untrue. We can see this from the provably doctored official video; the highly credible witnesses who described a flight path irreconcilable with the “damage”; the absence of significant wreckage outside (or inside for that matter), including the wings and tail section; the hole that was not large enough to accommodate a 757, and a round “exit” hole that cannot be explained.
But I won’t go more deeply into the Pentagon details here because this article is about how we approach those outside the movement and which evidence we should focus on. Some would have us leave out the Pentagon because they claim it’s too “controversial” and “divisive” to talk about the absence of a plane at the scene of the Pentagon “plane crash.” But to do this would be to cast aside some of the very strongest evidence we have that 9/11 was an inside job. Many who don’t believe an impact took place have chosen to avoid the Pentagon altogether to keep the peace while the group that misleads us by supporting the official impact position fills the void.
I choose to stand up to those who are pushing an impact not because I must defend my own theory but because I can’t stand the idea that those who purport to be Truthers are pushing one element of the official story after another. And they are determined to drag the rest of the movement with them.
Battles we’ve already won
Applying my approach to the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers is considerably less contentious but it still has areas of fierce debate. I think it makes no sense whatsoever for some to attack a group like AE911Truth for its contention that thermite played a part in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, instead arguing that mini nukes or directed energy weapons were responsible. We all agree that some form of explosive destruction took place and that the buildings did not come down as a result of plane impacts. Why would we want to split over the type of material used? Why re-fight a battle that AE and the movement have effectively won?
And AE does not claim that thermite did the whole job. In fact, Niels Harrit, one of the authors of the research paper, “Active thermitic material discovered in dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” told me in an interview that while nanothermite was used, it was not the primary cause of the destruction of the buildings. In other words, something blew them up, and we don’t know what it was. But the controlled demolition position is a solid one, backed by overwhelming evidence, and it is essential to our efforts to educate others.
A buried plane at Shanksville?
As for Shanksville, it is beyond obvious that a 757 in the form of Flight 93 did not crash in a field and bury itself underground as the official story contends. But we get into trouble when we speculate about what happened instead. We can exchange some speculation as long as it is clearly labeled as such but we really must lead with the facts about how the official story is false. With Shanksville this isn’t hard to do. And that is really what we want to convince the public of. If they see that the story is false, then they might just want to dig deeper; they might just be willing to look at other aspects of 9/11.
Let’s not forget that the burden of proof is on the government to back up its claim that terrorists attacked America and that the official scenario is true. It’s their story; they have to prove it. They can’t.
In recent months and years, there have been many outside things that have threatened to splinter the Truth Movement, not the least of which are the battle lines drawn over the emergence of Donald Trump. As we focus on Russia, Syria, North Korea, inappropriate tweets, and “fake news,” it is easy to forget about 9/11, which remains to this day our best chance for exposing the global tyranny that threatens all of us.
And as one false flag, or potential false flag, after another plays itself out, it is easy to divide our focus yet further. Some point to crisis actors being used in certain events while others react to this suggestion with outrage, fearing that we’ll all be tarred as loony conspiracy theorists in the eyes of the world. It’s fine to disagree about these questions, but we must remember that it is the falsity of the official accounts that offers us the best opportunity to reveal the underlying lies that are devastating any hopes we have for a just and peaceful world.
Saying we’ve all been lied to is fine as far as it goes, but it isn’t enough. We have to show what those lies are. We must also do all we can to prevent more and more elements of the official story from taking root in the positions of Truthers where it has no business being.
And we can. Let’s do it together.
Well said, Craig. You’ve been saying this for years. So sick of supposed Truthers advocating for the same “facts” that support the Official Conspiracy Theory, including and most conspicuously the Pentagon large-aircraft-impact proponents. Chandler’s conversion was sickening.
Yes, no one can say I’m not consistent.
The only thing that’s sickening is the no-plane theory. Chandler’s conversion was inevitable since he isn’t led by presuppositions, like no-planers are. There isn’t one piece of evidence or eye witness testimony for the missile theory or the flyover theory, yet you guys are not embarrassed to declare a plane didn’t strike the Pentagon. That’s what’s sickening.
Is this a drive-by trolling or are you prepared to stick around and defend your hollow BS talking points?
Do you agree, for a start, that a plane on the alternative [north of the Citgo] flight path would have been in no position to hit the 5 light poles?
Mr. Norris is a consistent and constant Pentagon large plane impact theory kind of guy. He writes about it wherever he can. No matter how many of the “witness” statements one shows to be farcical or completely inaccurate, he never waivers. Got to admire the tenacity of his belief system.
I am not a proponent of the missile hypothesis, by the way.
If eyewitness accounts are so trustworthy, what’s going on with these? They are all different. Some saw the wings dig up the ground, others saw nothing at all. Some heard the metal go through the building. Others saw the plane cartwheel, others saw it explode. One guy wondered why there were no aircraft parts or debris. This is just a small sampling.
This guy’s take is indicative of the mindset that wants so much to believe the storyline, but can’t locate the physical proof to support the belief:
“Actually, there’s considerable evidence of the aircraft outside the E ring. It’s just not very visible.”
Don’t you just love eyewitness accounts? They are so reliable…
“my brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like a small hole in the building,” he said. “No tail. No wings. No nothing.” DeChiaro, Steve
”I thought, ‘This isn’t really happening. That is a big plane.’ Then I saw the faces of some of the passengers on board,” Cissell said. While he remembers seeing the crash, Cissell remembers none of the sounds.
“Everything was calm,’ Bowman said. “Most people knew it was a bomb.
“I could actually hear the metal going through the building.”
“It was an American Airlines airplane, I could see it very clearly.(…) I didn’t see the impact. (…) The sound itself sounded more like a thud rather than a bomb (…) rather than a loud bomb explosion it sounded muffled, heavy, very deep.
Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, said he witnessed an explosion near the Pentagon. “It was a huge fireball, a huge, orange fireball,” he said in an interview on his mobile phone. He said another witness told him a helicopter exploded.
Then it dawned on me what was about to happen. I watched in horror as the plane flew at treetop level, banked slightly to the left, drug it’s wing along the ground and slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon exploding into a giant orange fireball. Then black smoke. Then white smoke.
“The only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside was that we saw pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was horrific.
“You could almost see the people in the windows,” he said as he watched the plane disappear behind a line of trees, followed by a tall plume of black smoke.
The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider and I watched in horror as it gently rocked and slowly glided straight into the Pentagon. At the point where the fuselage hit the wall, it seemed to simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall. It appeared as a smoke ring that encircled the fuselage at the point of contact and it seemed to be several feet thick.
The plane approached the Pentagon about six feet off the ground, clipping a light pole, a car antenna, a construction trailer and an emergency generator before slicing into the building,
The plane penetrated three of the Pentagon’s five rings, but was probably stopped from going farther by hundreds of concrete columns.
The plane peeled back as it entered, leaving pieces of the front of the plane near the outside of the building and pieces from the rear of the aircraft farther inside, Evey said.
Amazingly, the plane pushed through the outermost “E Ring”, and drove deep into the interior, its nose coming to rest just inside the “C Ring.”
The airplane traveled in a path about like this, and the nose of the aircraft broke through this innermost wall of C ring into A-E Drive.
QUESTION: One thing that’s confusing — if it came in the way you described, at an angle, why then are not the wings outside? I mean, the wings would have shorn off. The tail would have shorn off. And yet there’s apparently no evidence of the aircraft outside the E ring. EVEY: Actually, there’s considerable evidence of the aircraft outside the E ring. It’s just not very visible.
On its way in, the wing clipped. Our guess is an engine clipped a generator. We had an emergency temporary generator to provide life-safety emergency electrical power, should the power go off in the building. The wing actually clipped that generator, and portions of it broke off. There are other parts of the plane that are scattered about outside the building. None of those parts are very large, however. You don’t see big pieces of the airplane sitting there extending up into the air. But there are many small pieces.
As I stepped onto the highway next to the triage area, I knelt down to tie my shoe and all over the highway were small pieces of aircraft skin, none bigger than a half-dollar.
Right before the plane hit the building, you could see the silhouettes of people in the back two rows. You couldn’t see if they were male or female, but you could tell there was a human being in there.”
The plane was a two-engine turbo prop that flew up the river from National. Then it turned back toward the Pentagon. We thought it had been waved off and then it hit the building.
Next to me was a cab from D.C., its windshield smashed out by pieces of lampposts. There were pieces of the plane all over the highway, pieces of wing, I think.
“We saw a huge black cloud of smoke,” she said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.
All in all, I probably only had the aircraft in my field of view for approximately 3 seconds. The aircraft was at a sharp downward angle of attack, on a direct course for the Pentagon. It was “clean”, in as much as, there were no flaps applied and no apparent landing gear deployed.
I cannot understand how that plane hit where it did giving the direction the aircraft was taking at the time. As most know, the Pentagon lies at the bottom of two hills from the west with the east side being next to the river at 14th street bridge. One hill is at the Navy Annex and the other is Arlington Cemetery. The plane came up I-395 also known as Shirley Hwy. (most likely used as a reference point.) The plane had been seen making a lazy pattern in the no fly zone over the White House and US Cap. Why the plane did not hit incoming traffic coming down the river from the north to Reagan Nat’l. is beyond me
The wings came off as if it went through an arch way leaving a hole in the side of the building it seems a little larger than the wide body of the aircraft. The entry point was so clean that the roof (shown in news photo) fell in on the wreckage.
Jarvis, who was around the corner from the disaster, tried but failed to see the plane when he left the building. “There was just nothing left. It was incinerated. We couldn’t see a tail or a wing or anything,” he says. “Just a big black hole in the building with smoke pouring out of it.”
The nose penetrated into the portico. And then it sort of disappeared, and there was fire and smoke everywhere. . . . It was very sort of surreal.”
One of the aircraft’s engines somehow ricocheted out of the building and arched into the Pentagon’s mall parking area between the main building and the new loading dock facility, said Charles H. Krohn, the Army’s deputy chief of public affairs. Those fleeing the building heard a loud secondary explosion about 10 min. after the initial impact.
“The plane went into the building like a toy into a birthday cake,” he said. “The aircraft went in between the second and third floors.”
It sounded like the pilot had the throttle completely floored. The plane rolled left and then rolled right. Then he caught an edge of his wing on the ground.” There is a helicopter pad right in front of the side of the Pentagon. The wing touched there, then the plane cartwheeled into the building.
I saw the remains of the engines in the North parking lot of the Pentagon as well as melted aluminum and other debris left from the aircraft.
This is a hole in — there was a punch-out. They suspect that this was where a part of the aircraft came through this hole, although I didn’t see any evidence of the aircraft down there. (…) This pile here is all Pentagon metal. None of that is aircraft
Aren’t these eyewitness accounts the end-all of this investigation? Don’t they just convince you without a doubt that a large jetliner impacted the building that day? Who cares if they mostly all contradict each other-one or two of them must be correct, right? And the ones that support the official story must be the ones that we can trust the most, right?
http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/bart.html
Offering physically impossible accounts (which violate the laws of aerodynamics) does not appear to embarrass those who advance them. Nor are they bothered by the clean, clear Pentalawn, which is completely free of debris for the first 30 minutes or so. Nor are they bothered that witnesses on the scene, such as April Gallop and Jamie McIntyre, reported no signs of a plane anywhere–when April had just walked through the hole blown in the front of the building and observed no signs of any plane. Nor by the fact that the largest piece of debris–which did come from the fuselage of a Boeing 757–has been traced back to a crash near Cali, Colombia, in 1995. Nor by the witnesses found by CIT who observed a plane approaching north of the Citgo station. Nor the trucker buddy of my friend from JFK research who was there and observed a large plane fly toward and then over the building. Those who support the claim that Flight 77–which wasn’t even scheduled that day–hit the Pentagon appear to be part of an elaborate CIA op to continue to push nonsense in the hope that the American people will not be able to sort out fact from fiction. I am astonished that they continue to push such intellectual rubbish. For more, see “The Real Deal Ep #100 The 9/11 Crash Sites with Major General Albert Stubblebine”.
What laughable testimony. Was witnessing toys falling into birthday cakes something this person often saw?
I just did a YouTube search and there are no videos on there of a small toy slamming into the side or top of a birthday cake.
Assuming there is a thick layer of frosting, does a Happy Meal toy, even if thrown at the frosting with enough force, cause the toy to disappear completely underneath the frosting? Wouldn’t the frosting be pushed out of the way, with the toy still clearly visible in a little hole or crater (depending if it was thrown into the side or onto the top)?
How extremely telling that Jim Hoffman promotes such testimonies as credible, yet he shits all over the testimonies of the NoC witnesses, using spin to infer that the witnesses are all erroneous about the flight path in a manner that would make swell with pride the hearts of Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.
What makes “no planes” theory sickening? I have proven–again and again–that no Boeing 757 crashed in Shanksville; that no Boeig 757 hit the Pentagon; and that the 767s in New York as Flights 11 and 175 were fabricated images. If someone wants to contest that, let them produce the proof. Meanwhile, here’s my latest on 9/11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBBaDchDnOI
Me too. I don’t read anything in your post I disagree with.
Excellent article for the genuine 9/11 Truth movement to read by Craig McKee! Yes, we need a “big tent”. But we cannot accommodate intellectual bullying of the sort that Chomsky does to the lemming part of the left, within the genuine truth movement.
Craig McKee does a great service in advising these strategies. Unfortunately, it is necessary to denounce those who act in a clearly unprincipled manner to the detriment of the integrity of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here is my account of what can happen to a whistle-blower inside the 9/11 Truth Movement when he/she discovers that an acclaimed film director within the 9/11 truth movement has been censored. It gets re-explained away as a personality feud… We’re the “good guys”! So it is NOT possible that we censor someone else’s view on the Pentagon. Read what the film director Massimo Mazucco himself said as it is published here: Vic Sadot Expelled from Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance in Quickie Vote on 6-04-15 Truth Troubadour Blog
Also, we need to strongly reject the use of the term “TRUTHERS” within our own ranks just like we reject the term “conspiracy theorist”? There was an effective propaganda goal in mind when “Among The Truthers”. Why not call ourselves “truth seekers” and “truth speakers”. That’s a lot harder to simply dismiss as “crazy” than the image of people joined a passing fad of truthiness or an unstable mind. Everybody has a stake in the truth. Why not stress that? Why are we not objecting to having our greatest and braves scholars and activists being called “truthers”?
Likewise, everybody has “common ground” when it comes to the use of 9/11 and the US Army Anthrax Attacks on Congress that led to the smashing of the Bill of Rights, the use of torture to give Zelikow the “testimony” to put those “confessions” into 25% of the 9/11 Commission Report, and the passage of draconian Anti-Constitutional Executive powers that most people should unite against. Where is that conversation? I think the 28 pages campaign to get “missing pages” from a discredited 2002 Congressional cover-up report while being virtually silent about the campaign to release the 6,700 pages of 2014 Senate Torture Report should be seen as a huge scandal within the 9/11 Truth Movement!
Look for “Join the BORDC campaign to relase the Senate Torture Report”! The Bill of Rights Defense Committee: Will the Senate Torture Report Disappear? May 2, 2016 by Chip Gibbons. We demand the release of all 6,700 pages of the US Senate Report on the US Use of Torture!
Look for “Preview: 9/11 in the Academic Community” by Adnan Zuberi. (3:15) At 59 seconds into this trailer we hear Professor Michael Truscello of Mount Royal University state: “25% of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report are based on torture testimony.” Professor Graeme MacQueen of McMaster University, author of “The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for Domestic Conspiracy”, says, “They made it the core of their story and they don’t discuss that these guys were tortured.” Is that the report we want to base US laws and policy on?
Thanks, Vic. Your point about using “truther” is an interesting one. I guess I think the term has no power against us if we use it ourselves. But I’m sure some would see it your way. I don’t use “conspiracy theorists” ever because that term has been corrupted beyond repair for the past 50 years.
You say your goal is to reach “newcomers”; then you say that you think that “the term (truther) has no power against us if we use it ourselves”. If you want the “newcomers” to take you seriously and to respect the movement’s integrity as based on science and physics, it’s best to not play games with the term that represents you and your movement. I can’t edit my above comment, but I meant to say “by Jonathan Key” at the end of this sentence: “There was an effective propaganda goal in mind when “Among The Truthers” was published”. We are NOT “Truthers”. We are “truth seekers” and it is offensive to be called a “truther”. The scientific method, logic, and dialogue are our tools. Someone into “truthiness” does not operate that way. Otherwise, I am completely in agreement with the points made in this article by you, Craig McKee.
Vic, I think I would need more than a book by Jonathan Kay to disqualify the term. You seem to be suggesting that the term was created as a slur, but I’m not sure that’s true. Perhaps one of our readers can tell when it was first used. If it started within the Truth Movement then I don’t see why we should dump it. But I’m open to hearing what others think about this.
Jon Gold says he coined the phrase. On a firefighters forum as I recall.
Here he is with Pat Curley:
‘Actually, no Pat. Since I coined the phrase “9/11 Truther,” I get to decide its meaning. Not you, not the corporate media. Truth hurts, I know. Something you are incapable of.’
http://screwloosechange.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/is-truther-becoming-ultimate-insult.html
However the NYT claims the first use was in a report by Alan Feuer in the NYT itself, in 2006:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/magazine/the-weaponization-of-truther.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05conspiracy.html
To be perfectly honest, I think probably a lot of truthers, at least privately in their own minds, thought of the term. I know I did. It’s a shorter way of writing “truth activist.” We all have some commonality in the way our brains are wired. Kind of like how many people, albeit at different exact moments, thought of “Big Mac” as a nickname for Mark McGwire.
While I’m no friend of Jon Gold, I have to at least give him partial credit – at least in the sense that he thought of it before that 2006 NYT article. He owns a forum called “The YBBS,” which stands for “Your Bulletin Board sucks.” I can’t remember the story behind the name, but at any rate, an archive.org screen capture from as far back as 2005, a year and a half before that Times article, shows how Jon’s forum has a subforum called “The 9/11 Truther Forum.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20050118005108/http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/index.php
I have viewed the Pentagon Hole as a puzzle that has captured my curocity over the past decade. The pattern has been more or less steady, thinking I’ve figured it out, but always with a doubt of one thing or another. Then a light bulb goes off, and I realize something I was pretty sure about suddenly makes more sense if I view it from a different perspective. I really have come to be quite sure the 757-size plane impacting at very high speed satisfies most of the constraints. The latest eye-opener for me is when I realized the “C-Ring” hole had to be caused by a high-inertia fuel-metal conglomeration smashing through the wall structure. I say this as a byproduct of my pursuit for the truth. It has nothing to do with any strategy about which theory would be easier to sell to the public.
“The latest eye-opener for me is when I realized the “C-Ring” hole had to be caused by a high-inertia fuel-metal conglomeration smashing through the wall structure.” ~Dwain Deets
Really, you’re convinced this is the only way to make a hole in a wall?
How about this way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wptjeH7sO9c
A “Rapid Wall Breaching Kit” – a shaped charge specifically designed to make big round holes in brick walls.
Sure looks like a good imitation of the C Ring hole to me.
I don’t claim to know for a fact this is what was used, but it is high on my list of possibilities.
The “high-inertia fuel-metal conglomeration”, not so much.
And props to you Craig, for another well written and rational article.
Of course, Hadmatter, there are other ways to make the hole. But making it this way satisfies a number of problems. (1) For some time, I have wondered what could have happened to the fuel load. I’m assuming here there was only fuel in the belly tank, as the wings (empty?) didn’t break through the Pentagon “E-Ring.” (2) There is a considerable mess of aircraft parts (looking like they had suffered a battering) just beyond the “C-Ring” hole. (3) The hole lines up with what looks to be an entry hole in the “E-Ring,” assuming the angle of impact is as the Pentagon Building Performance Report lays out.
That comment from ‘dan80161’ was from me, Dwain Deets. Somehow, my password got entered in my username slot.
I imagine you’ll be changing your password…
Won’t do any good to change my password. WordPress will just show the newest, and call it my username.
I believe I can change it on my end.
Please do.
So that’s done. But I don’t know how you can avoid the name going up wrong initially.
I’m okay with that. Thanks for doing what you can.
“(1) For some time, I have wondered what could have happened to the fuel load” ~DDeets
Well, that is the crux of the problem many have with your analysis. It presupposes the plane actually hit the building notwithstanding all the contradictary evidence that says it could not have caused the observed damage, and therefore had to have flown over.
Your conclusion relys on a number of assumptions, some explicit as you cite above and others implicit. You apparently assume it was possible for the “high-inertia fuel-metal conglomeration” to somehow go around the half-dozen or so columns directly in its path in front of the C-Ring wall punch out section without damaging them and meet up again to create the hole. You assume not only that the plane struck the building, but struck it at the 42º angle described in the Pentagon Building Performance Report. By implication you also must also assume the plane approached the building from the one and only direction it could have to line up with the E-Ring and C-Ring holes; on the SOC flight path. To do this you have to disregard not only all the NOC witnesses interviewed by CIT, whose testimony as to where the aircraft entered the Pentagon basin makes the SOC path impossible, but also the conclusions of this detailed analysis of the Building Performance Report put out back in 2004:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/sy-k/pentagon/asce_en.htm
As to what happened to the fuel load, the most logical conclusion based on eyewitness testimony as to how the plane approached the Pentagon, is it remained in the fuel tanks as the aircraft flew away.
The NOC approach is incompatible with a plane impact with the Pentagon as described by the government. It’s impossible. That’s all we need to show to prove the government story is false. Somebody has some esplainin to do.
The rapid wall breaching kit video posted above is simply to show that there are possible explanations as to how the C-Ring hole could have been formed other than speculation about a bolis of jet fuel and debris surging through the building. The RWBK is not inconsistent with eye-witness testimony. It doesn’t require all the NOC witnesses be ignored or dismissed as confused as to what they are certain they saw.
The NOC eye-witness evidence, coupled with the technical work done by Pilots for 9/11 Truth, is some of the strongest evidence of elements within the government involvment in the 9/11 operation. That’s why it is such a mystery (or perhaps not) as to why so many so called “truthers” are so determined to dismiss and cover it up.
Quote Hadmatter, “You apparently assume it was possible for the “high-inertia fuel-metal conglomeration” to somehow go around the half-dozen or so columns directly in its path in front of the C-Ring wall punch out section without damaging them and meet up again to create the hole.”
Response: This “fuel-metal conglomeration” would flow as if it were a fluid, much like air flowing over a wing. It would obey the laws of fluid-dynamics and flow around the columns directly in its path.
Maybe so, but why would all the material converge to a single exit hole. Entropy/stochasticity would encourage the material to diverge, diffuse, dissipate in multiple directions.
Quoting Enuf Al Reddy: why would all the material converge to a single exit hole?
Response: I would think the heavier material, such as the engine cores, fell out. The only material that is involved is that which made it through the “E-Ring” entry hole. The wings, for example make it through that relatively small hole. I guess linear inertia is the overall answer. That would be a very short period of time, traveling nominally at 400 mph from “E-Ring” to “C-Ring.”
Correction to my reply to Enuf Al Reddy. I should have said the wings, for example, couldn’t make it through that relatively small hole.
Hadmatter quote: “you also must also assume the plane approached the building from the one and only direction it could have to line up with the E-Ring and C-Ring holes; on the SOC flight path. To do this you have to disregard not only all the NOC witnesses interviewed by CIT, whose testimony as to where the aircraft entered the Pentagon basin makes the SOC path impossible”
Response: Correct, I had to disregard the NOC witnesses. As I originally had accepted the NOC witnesses, I was troubled with the necessity to also accept the idea of an overflight of the Pentagon. As the years went on, I became unwilling to accept an overflight with no convincing reports of people observing such overflight, I finally decided the NOC witnesses seemed less and less credible as a whole. Some of them remember things differently in their oral histories taken closer in time to the 9/11/01 event.
A friend of mine from JFK research wrote me long ago that a trucker buddy of his had been right in front of the Pentagon on 9/11 and had watched a large commercial carrier approach and then fly over the building. My friend was perplexed, because his buddy still insisted that a plane had hit the building. I tried to get his friend on the air, but he declined. I told him that witnesses who get their stories on the record are safer. He was found two weeks later dead in an abandoned building. So there have been witnesses, at least some of whom, like Barry Jennings in WTC-7, have been taken out. Their testimony is no longer available. They both seem to have got it right.
Wow! Very sad. I hope there are a fair number of people still around who know things, but haven’t shared them.
“I finally decided the NOC witnesses seemed less and less credible as a whole. Some of them remember things differently in their oral histories taken closer in time to the 9/11/01 event.” D.Deets/ReduceCO2!
Apart from Lloyde England, could you give examples of which of the NOC witnesses materially changed their testimony between their initial interviews and the time CIT spoke with them? Are you saying they contradicted their earlier statements, or is it just that they elaborated more details later on when specifically quesioned by CIT about where they saw the plane approach the Pentagon?
Also, with regards to this statment, “As the years went on, I became unwilling to accept an overflight with no convincing reports of people observing such overflight”, are you saying there are reports, but they aren’t convincing, or that there are no reports at all?
The one fly away witness CIT did manage to find and interview, Roosevelt Roberts, would to this day believe the plane he saw on the east side of the Pentagon seconds after the explosion on the west side was a second aircraft had he not spoken with CIT. I don’t find it inconceivable many people in the area who may have seen the low flying plane after the explosion would have assumed the same thing after learning about the one that “crashed” into the building. Not everyone follows these 9/11 research blogs and websites. Why would they think any different today? There would have been nothing particularly significant about a low flying aircraft that close to Reagan Nat’l Airport other than the fact it was exceptionally low and not on a normal flight path. But with the drama going on in NYC at that very moment, and news of a nation wide ground stop it’s unlikely many people would have connected the dots unless they had actually witnessed the approach and the plane subsequently flying away.
I believe it’s also a fact that to this day the FBI has refused to release the Arlington VA 911 calls from that morning to the public. Maybe some people did notice the plane and did their civic duty of calling in what they saw.
Anyway, if you could point out which witnesses contradicted their earlier statements and how, I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Hadmatter quote: Apart from Lloyd England, could you give examples of which of the NOC witnesses materially changed their testimony between their initial interviews and the time CIT spoke with them?
Response: Sg. Chadwick Brooks. Library of Congress. Nov. 25, 2001. “saw the hijacked plane clip lampposts and nose dive into the Pentagon.”
Sg. William Lagasse. Pentagon 9/11 Police Interviews. Sep. 11, 2002. “Plane was 80 ft. above going 400 MPH.” “Vortex off the wing sort of pushed me into the car.” [could see] “windows, blinds had been pulled down” (I consider him unreliable based on his final comment, as the plane was over his head.)
Terry Morin. A webpage (http://remember911.albertarose.org/survivor_pentagonwitness.htm) on which he states his name at the bottom, and the date ‘September 2001’ “As the aircraft approached the Pentagon, I saw a minor flash (later found out that the aircraft had sheared off a portion of a highway light pole down on Hwy 110). As the aircraft flew ever lower I started to lose sight of the actual airframe as a row of trees to the Northeast of the FOB blocked my view. I could now only see the tail of the aircraft.
“I believe I saw the tail dip slightly to the right indicating a minor turn in that direction. The tail was barely visible when I saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon. There was a large explosion noise and the low frequency sound echo that comes with this type of sound. “
These aren’t necessarily changes in what they said, but rather their main points. CIT discounted the importance of what they said, or said they really didn’t see what they said they did.
At the same time I was loosing confidence in these CIT witnesses, I was learning new things pertaining to the physical evidence. Such as:
1. The hole in the “E-Ring” wall was wide enough have been caused by the highly dense part of a 757, that is, the span between the engine cores and including the heave undercarriage.
2. There was a frantic effort to make the new Wedge 1 Pentagon wall hardened to a much higher standard. This change in specifications came right after Bush/Cheney came into office. I can not imagine this was unrelated to the planning that had to be underway for the 9/11 events.
With all due respect, Dwain, these citations don’t seem very compelling to justify the dismissal of these three witnesses, let alone all NOC witnesses interviewed by CIT,
Chadwick Brooks –
Response: Sg. Chadwick Brooks. Library of Congress. Nov. 25, 2001. “saw the hijacked plane clip lampposts and nose dive into the Pentagon.”
This quote says nothing about where he saw the plane. That’s the issue. This hardly trumps his drawing of the aircraft path on the CIT photo on the north side of the CITGO.
As noted by apparent ANC maintenance worker and Pentagon witness Omar Campo(s), the plane came in so low “it moved the trees”. Whether jet wash or tip vortices, the plane passing created enough disturbance to shake the trees. It’s not inconceivable it shook lamp posts, too. It could easily be Brooks saw something like that and later the downed poles and assumed that’s what he saw.
Terry Morin –
Here’s another clip from the link you provided:
(FOB = Navy Annex)
Approximately 10 steps out from between Wings 4 and 5, I was making a gentle right turn towards the security check-in building just above Wing 4 when I became aware of something unusual. I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking about at that moment, but I started to hear an increasingly loud rumbling behind me and to my left. As I turned to my left, I immediately realized the noise was bouncing off the 4-story structure that was Wing 5.
[snip]
The aircraft was essentially right over the top of me and the outer portion of the FOB (flight path parallel the outer edge of the FOB). Everything was shaking and vibrating, including the ground. I estimate that the aircraft was no more than 100 feet above me (30 to 50 feet above the FOB) in a slight nose down attitude. The plane had a silver body with red and blue stripes down the fuselage. I believed at the time that it belonged to American Airlines, but I couldn’t be sure. It looked like a 737 and I so reported to authorities.
He says here he was approximately 10 ft inside the space between the 4th and 5th wings of the Navy Annex when the plane flew “essentially right over the top” of him.
That’s a problem for your impact theory. As you are well aware, there is one, and only one flight path that aligns with the downed light poles at hwy 27 and the E-Ring and C-Ring holes. At this point that flight path is approximately 400 ft south of where Terry Morin says the plane passed over the top of him. This close to the Pentagon, and traveling however fast it was (over 500mph according to the official story) there was no way for this plane to get on to the required SOC flight path to line up with the damage trail. His positioning of the plane over the Annex is confirmed by multiple witnesses, including Ed Paik, who drew the plane’s flight path passing over the Annex starting at its SW corner heading towards Morin, and Albert Hemphill who, from his position in his office at the 8th wing facing the Pentagon, described the plane coming into his view “over his right shoulder” and coming right over the top of the Annex. He subsequently described the plane as passing over the CITGO gas station, maybe a little more towards the ANC (north) side of the station.
[snip]
Also, from your citation:
As the aircraft approached the Pentagon, I saw a minor flash (later found out that the aircraft had sheared off a portion of a highway light pole down on Hwy 110). As the aircraft flew ever lower I started to lose sight of the actual airframe as a row of trees to the Northeast of the FOB blocked my view. I could now only see the tail of the aircraft.
I believe I saw the tail dip slightly to the right indicating a minor turn in that direction. The tail was barely visible when I saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon.
Terry Morin did not have a view of the impact point or the light poles. He saw a flash, nothing more. Someone told him light poles had been downed. He did not see a light pole get hit by the plane. Here’s the approximate view Morrin had of the Pentagon:
http://s659.photobucket.com/user/buckwheat_bucket/media/ingersolnavyannex-2.jpg.html
The Pentagon sits at the bottom of a hill from the Annex. The only visible part is the rooftop and part of the top floor.
Which is interesting. He says he saw the tail as the explosion occurred. The Pentagon is 77 ft tall, and the top of a B757 tail 44 ft tall. The Building Performance Report says the plane slid in between the 1st and 2nd floor. How high did that plane have to be for him to have been able to see the tail when the explosion occurred?
William Laggasse –
There is no question Laggasse was under the north canopy of the CITGO when the plane passed by. That fact is confirmed by security camera video. That’s the issue, where he was, not whether he was knocked into his car by wing tip vortex. The video shows, for whatever reason, he dove into his car when the plane passed by. But that’s not relevant to whether or not he saws the plane on the north side of the CITGO.
His position under the north canopy means he could have only had a clear view of the plane if it passed on the north side of the CITGO. Had the plane passed on the south side of the station, as required by your impact theory, his view of a path south of the station would have been blocked by the canopy and office area.
I find nothing in your citations that any of these witnesses changed their story between the time they first discussed them and when they spoke with Craig Ranke.
Per your instance I spend more time defending my position to not rely on the CIT witnesses, I don’t choose to waste anymore of my time on that. The physical evidence at the Pentagon consistent with a large airplane high speed impact is more than enough to convince me the flyover hypothesis is totally lacking in credibility.
Not a chance, Dwain. No large plane–and most certainly not a Boeing 757–hit the Pentagon. As I have repeatedly explained, the “official narrative” has it approaching an acute north/east angle at over 500 mph barely skimming the ground and taking out a series of lampposts. But it is not even aerodynamically possible for that plane at that speed to get less than 60-80′ of the ground.
The hole in the E-ring is almost perfectly symmetrical and could not have been caused by parts of the aircraft hitting it at the angle alleged. It had “Punch out” spray-painted beside and where we have reports of the smell of cordite from witnesses. Had it been caused by something like a landing gear, for example, then it would have been asymmetrical. Surely you know better.
The witnesses to the flyover are far more convincing than the flimsy arguments you posit here. Take a look at the official hit point: there is now massive pile of debris from a 100-ton aluminum airliner; no wings, no tail, no bodies, no seats, no luggage. Not even the engines, which are virtually indestructible, were recovered (though I gather in the meanwhile they have “turned up”)!
You cannot be this gullible. There wasn’t even any aircraft debris for the first 30 or so minutes. It only began showing up later, where I suspect it was dropped from the C-130 circling the area. The most conspicuous piece, which came from a Boeing 757, has been traced back to a crash near Cali, Colombia, in 1995. Look at the totality of the evidence, which leaves no doubt about it:
“The Real Deal Ep #100: The 9/11 Crash Sites with Major General Albert Stubblebine”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65H8XbrQHBg
Jim,
Your views on flying high speed close to the ground make sense if it were a manually-flown commercial airliner. It wasn’t.
Your views on the C-Ring hole (assuming your E-Ring was a typo) make sense if you don’t consider the the wall being the first full blockage of a high-inertia traveling fuel/metal conglomeration. The metal parts were seen to be broken airplane parts just beyond the hole. I call it a conglomeration, but there is a technical term used by physicists. But this powerful traveling force did occur.
The North-Path witnesses are convincing if you don’t accept their witness statements saying they saw the plane impact. Discounting these comments is what I would call confirmation bias.
There wasn’t any aircraft debris the first 30 minutes if you are only considering debris that look like they came from a conventional airplane accident. But when the high-speed airplane hits a hardened wall, the debris doesn’t look like conventional airplane accidents.
Some of us have been around the block before. Your modus operandi is a bit too obvious.
Thanks, Hadmatter.
Dwain, pursuing the truth is what we all must do. I would never suggest otherwise. I was not saying we have to pick theories to “sell,” I was talking about approaching newcomers with the lies of the official story as being the best way to plant seeds of doubt. Don’t you agree with that in principle?
Certainly, Craig. But I am not suggesting a scenario anywhere close to the official story. This, I am saying, was a deception on the grandest scale. Nothing like an operational airliner flown by a novice hijacker. No, this was a rigged airplane, probably with no persons on board, crashing at high speed into a hardened wall, and making it through. But not looking like it did!
I believe Craig’s article was an accurate description of the 2 Dwain Deets lectured I attended in Ventura in ’10 and ’11. The second one was some sort of pseudo scientific method based on a 9 innings theory that “proves” how the buildings were destroyed by some secret unknown powerful source. It was a room full of 911 truth novices, many who had never even heard of Building 7. When I asked him during the lecture why he was not simply focusing on explaining why the official story is false, and making some points to prove it, he told me something along the lines of it’s a given, and now is the time to discuss the method of destruction. He was visibly irritated with me and avoided my questions the rest of the interactive lecture. I spoke to several people after who commended me for my question, and were confused about the whole purpose of his presentation. Thanks Craig, for making my point in a far more eloquent manner than I ever could.
And yet you, like Wayne Coste and the Chandler group, still focus much more on why you think an impact took place than on what you don’t believe in the official story. Why? Why not focus on elaborating on the details behind the list you just gave us?
Craig, What I don’t believe of the official story is that a novice pilot flew that extremely difficult flight path, or even that an airplane in commercial service flown manually impacted horizontally so close to the ground. I then ask myself, if not that, then what? My answer, in fact the only answer that makes sense is that professionals did it. “Did it” means designed the overall approach, and then carried it out. Furthermore, I think the professional team carrying out the “airplane puzzle” coordinated with the team doing the upgrade to Wedge 1 of the Pentagon.
And yet you, like Wayne Coste, choose to spend most of your Pentagon time reinforcing a plane impact instead of telling us how they “did it” and how this contradicts the official story.
Quoting Craig: “And yet you, like Wayne Coste, choose to spend most of your Pentagon time reinforcing a plane impact instead of telling us how they “did it” and how this contradicts the official story.”
Response: I could care less whether it is supporting or not supporting the official story. It is about seeking the truth. In this case, it happens to align with one aspect of the official story, but completely contradicts the part of the official story about a novice pilot flying an impossible maneuver for a novice.
Yes, but you still spend more time telling us about the part that happens to align with the official story than the part that doesn’t.
So? That’s just the way it turns out. It is the truth that counts, and that is what I am seeking.
All good points, Craig. It’s important to keep the Truth alive, and wake up as many people as possible so they don’t sleepwalk thru life, join the Army, etc. Sadly, I see no avenue for actually bringing the perpetrators to justice, or righting the wrongs that persist as a result of 9/11, most prominently the never-ending war OF terror. But maybe someday, with people like you speaking and publishing Truth, a way out of the post-9/11 insanity will emerge, and Truth will prevail. One can only hope, and do what he or she can in the meantime.
I don’t know how I got so crosswise with wordpress. First they show my user name as dan80161, the next time they show it as reduceCO2. The first one of those is what I thought was my password. The second on is my second attempt to get my password correct. Let’s see what the system shows as my username this time.
The problem is that the 9/11 Truth movement IS infested by agents of disinformation. There can be no doubt about it. After dealing for more than 25 years with the JFK research community, I came to the conclusion that 50% of those involved were working the other side. “No, Jim”, said Gordon Duff, “It’s 90%!” And with his extensive history with the CIA, Gordon would know.
Consider your observation, “Truther Jon Gold takes this to an extreme when he says we should stay away from controlled demolition of the towers and accept that there were real hijackers and that a real 757 hit the Pentagon.” When you have positions like this in blatant contradiction with the available evidence, you have to consider that this guy is NOT a “9/11 Truther”. It’s absurd.
OF COURSE the Twin Towers were brought down in a “demolition under control”. It was not one of the classic “controlled demolitions”, like WTC-7, where all the floors came down at the same time and there was a pile of debris equal to about 12% of the original (or about 5.5 floors). They were blown apart from the top down and converted into millions of cubic yards of very fine dust.
The conversion into very fine dust is a signature of the use of nukes. The USGS dust studies confirmed the presents of elements that, in their quantities and correlations, confirmed that it had been done with mini or micro nukes. The medical maladies of first responders and residents has been comparable to the effects at Chernobyl, which no one disputes was a nuclear meltdown.
The idea that a real Boeing 757 could have hit the Pentagon at the speed of over 500 mph is not just fantastic but aerodynamically impossible. I solicited an article from an aeronautical engineer, who explained why it would have been impossible for that plane at that speed to get closer than 60 or even 80 feet of the ground, where 80 is higher than the Pentagon is tall. Please get real!
The laws of nature, including laws of physics, of engineering and of aerodynamics cannot be violated and cannot be changed. Accounts that violate them cannot be true. They are physically impossible. And when you have proof of the use of nukes, unless you can “explain it away”, you are rationally obligated to accept that conclusion, in the tentative and fallible fashion of science.
Which means that, with the acquisition of new evidence or alternative hypotheses, you may be rationally obliged to reject conclusions you previously accepted, to accept conclusions you previously rejected and leave others in suspense. I fault Judy Wood for not revising her ‘non-theory” of the use of directed energy weapons in the face of the USGS dust study evidence. Not good!
And when “Niels Harrit, one of the authors of the research paper, “Active thermitic material discovered in dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” told me in an interview that while nanothermite was used, it was not the primary cause of the destruction of the buildings”, but A&E911 offers no explanation of that “primary cause”, you know that something is wrong.
Neither A&E911 nor Judy Wood will address who was responsible and why, where their theories of how it was done are both obviously inadequate. And the proof that none of the 9/11 airplanes actually crashed on 9/11 is simply overwhelming. Those who harbor doubts really should watch “The Real Deal Ep #100 The 9/11 Crash Sites” Major General Albert Stubblebine (USA, ret.).
The Winter Garden evidence, where a 300 ton assembly was blown upward at a 45* angle for 600 feet outward, demonstrates an effect that could not have been caused by jet fuel, ordinary explosives or DEWs. It thus becomes a litmus test, which, as Don Fox observes, is “Where nanothermite and DEW theories Go to Die”. This is not rocket science but elementary logic.
Resorting to lowest common denominator methods are guaranteed to stalemate real progress. I have proposed using AMERICA NUKED ON 9/11 (2016), to serve as a target book for criticism and debate, but no one has taken up the idea or even endorsed it. That, in my opinion, speaks volumes about the state of 9/11 research, which has been deliberately stalemated by the state.
Why should we settle for half-truths or inadequate theories? The application of logic, of critical thinking and of scientific reasoning has already solved the who, the how and the why. But those Craig cites here–apart from David Ray Griffin–appear to have dug into their positions and are unwilling to open their minds. The answers are out there. It’s not that difficult to sort all this out.
James Henry Fetzer, regarding your “aerodynamically impossible’ comment about Boeing 757, I am assuming the plane was rigged. That is, it was not an airliner in commercial service. A plane can be rigged to overcome ground affect, if that is the project objective. Fore and after water tanks can be mounted in the cabin, with the ability to pump the water from one tank to another. These is a means to controlling the center of gravity, and by situating the center of gravity in relationship to the aerodynamic center, the amount of force on the the pitch control column, such that ground affect can be minimized.
Now, with this kind of rigging, the plane obviously does not fit the Official Story narrative.
It not only wasn’t “rigged”, it wasn’t even in the air. Gerard Holmgren was the first to observe that neither Flight 11 nor Flight 77 was scheduled for flight that day (according to BTS statistics). The original records have been changed in an obvious and incomplete fashion, which shows on their face, that they were not authentic. Planes that were not in the air on 9/11 did not crash on 9/11.
But I appreciate your ingenuity in attempting to find a logically possible (not self-contradictory) alternative that would keep SOME PLANE in the air at the Pentagon. The absence of debris for the first 40-45 minutes or so, poses another obstacle for you to overcome. You can give it a go. But why not watch “The Real Deal Ep #100” and critique what Gen. Stubblebine and I conclude?
He was in charge of all US signals and photographic intelligence, by the way. And he not only agreed with me but offered additional reasons why I was right–none of the official 9/11 planes crashed on 9/11. I would appreciate having your criticism. That is how we can pursue the truth about 9/11: through the exercise of scientific reasoning and rational debate over the evidence!
James Henry Fetzer, firstly, the WordPress system is screwed up. It is giving as my user name ‘reduceCO2!,’ but that is my password. My name is Dwain Deets. I make no claim it was Flight 77. Yes, SOME PLANE is as good a descriptor as any for the plane I talk about. A very fast plane striking a hardened wall should leave very few recognizable debris. Most of the debris made it through the E-Ring hole, even though it was smaller than most general public would expect, Even airplane accident investigators, or even Gen. Stubblebine prior to them being properly briefed.
Mr. Fetzer, This is a link to the presentation to which you refer, correct? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65H8XbrQHBg
Yes. Another worth viewing is “The Real Deal Ep #103: 9/11 Who was responsible and why”.
Jim, I’ve never said that we should not study or explore any possible explanation for what happened. But my point is that we will have more success introducing new people to 9/11 truth by showing them what is false in the official story. I understand that you don’t agree. Please keep in mind (everyone reading this) that this article is not an invitation to debate the science of the towers’ destruction, which has been done on this blog at great length. I want to keep this discussion on the topic of how we can reach newcomers by showing how the official story is wrong.
No serious person who has studied the case believes the “official narrative”, not even the co-chairs of The 9/11 Commission. The 19 hijacker story is a joke. No one takes it seriously. Our problem is resolving the conflicts between us, which requires rational discussion and debate, not focusing on the “official narrative”, no substantial aspect of which can withstand critical scrutiny.
Mr. Fetzer. When Craig says newcomers, and you reply with “No serious person who has studied the case believes the “official narrative””, clearly you missed the point of the essay.
Thanks, Dale. I get it! Craig does terrific work. But I believe the way to introduced newcomers is via videos that lay out some of the most important evidence, such as “The Real Deal Ep #100” and “The Real Deal Ep #103”. I also presented the keynote address for Alex Jones’ American Scholars Conference (June 2006), which makes a decent intro. And check out 911scholars.org. “Loose Change” is also good (although flawed) and other work he cites. But video presentations are going to be the best way to capture the attention of the new generation, which doesn’t read.
I have been researching since 2006. Familiar with a high percentage of good info out there. When I can’t even get open minded liberal folk to watch 9-11 The New Pearl Harbor, which clearly and simply points out the lies without making any conjecture whatsoever, I see the debate regarding EXACTLY how they lied and what really happened, as secondary in relevance. Until people accept they were lied to, there is no reason explain every theoretical detail. Now for seasoned folks like me, who are unknown and simply lurkers to people like you and Craig, investigating those theories makes perfect sense. I’ll check out the Real Deal sometime soon.
Thanks
This notification just arrived in my mailbox, whose timing is virtually exquisite:
From Mark Windows, who hosts the video show, “Windows on the World”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAXmie-plnA&feature=youtu.be
banjo234 20 hours ago:
Heinz Pommer appears to have nailed the issue of how WTCs 1 & 2 were demolished.
1) The OFFICIAL record of the chemicals in the dust and
2) The strange extreme rusting of cars and steel beams near the towers
(characteristic of nuclear reactions) proves the nuclear event took place as described.
Case closed. Well done, Mark.
This is a very important interview that everybody,
not just 9/11 Truthers, should watch.
Hi, I just want to ask you if you are aquainted with Dimitri Khalezov explanation of 911? He is an expert on nuclear explosions, a former commissioned officer of the so-called “military unit 46179”, otherwise known as “the Special Control Service” of the 12th Chief Directorate of the Defense Ministry of the USSR.
I always thought the nuke theory was too fantastic up to the point I listened to his extensive interview and elaborate explanation of 911:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUnjbCxhXh4&t=93s
Yes, of course. The catch is that he proposes 150kt nukes under all three–WTC-1, WTC-2 and WTC-7–which were clearly demolished in different ways. WTC-7 appears to be (what I refer to as) a “classic controlled demolition”, with all the floors falling at the same time, none blowing apart, leaving a pile of debris equal to about 12% of the hight of the original (or about 5.5 floors).
WTC-1 and WTC-2 are blowing apart from the top down and being converted into millions of cubic yards of very find dust, leaving no pile of debris in their footprints. Khalezov’s hypothesis would have the buildings destroyed from the bottom up, not top down, and would have looked very different. Dennis Cimino has attempted to reconcile his theory with that of mini/micro nukes.
Check out “9/11: A World Swirling in a Volcano of Lies”, which is included in AMERICA NUKED: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/01/911-a-world-swirling-in-a-volcano-of-lies/ The idea is that, having blown the building from the top down and enveloped it in falling debris, a big nuke of the kind he proposes could have been used to finish the job beneath an umbrella of dust/debris.
Let me know what you think. Khalezov cannot be right about WTC-7, as I see it, but he might have a partial solution for completing the destruction of the Twin Towers, whose foundations were massive and the steel was 6″ thick. (Of course, it became progressively thinner higher up the construction of the buildings.) Check it out and let me know what you think. Good question.
I have put in the 5 hours that one needs to watch this video in full. I have a lot of concerns about some of the narrative Dimitri subscribes to in regards to the who and why of the “attack”. His explanation of how the US govt was not acting, but rather reacting to a threat when they ordered the initiation of the demo scheme assumes absence of foreknowledge, which is not supported by the actions of “the usual suspects” before, during or after the event. His story about having had certain things confirmed by first a Mossad and then an FBI agent also require a lot more scrutiny than what the interviewer exercises.
However, on the technical side, I find his explanation for how all three towers came down more sensible, more credible and more probable than any other “theory” floating out there. And explains more aspects of the destruction and the aftermath (in fact, it explains all of the physical and visual evidence) than any other explanation.
Another refreshing angle he brings to his argument is the notion of multiple tiers of lies having been fed to different groups and tiers of people as reasoning or an incentive to participate in the cover up in a compartmentalized fashion. At the same time, this also means that he could have easily been fed some version of the deception as to why the towers were demolished, and by whom. Nonetheless, his version of the “why” does not cast a shadow onto his knowledge of the physical aspects in my opinion.
All that said, I am not here to argue for or against his presentation and claims, but just to ask why his information and story did not receive any more attention than it has, and why no researcher seems to have bothered to look into it. Or, have they?
You could review Steven E. Jones’ response to the mini-nuke hypothesis. You can review it here:
http://www.journalof911studies.com/letters/a/Hard-Evidence-Rebudiates-the-Hypothesis-that-Mini-Nukes-were-used-on-the-wtc-towers-by-steven-jones.pdf
Also you can review further refutation of the mini-nuke hypothesis here:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/theories/nuclear.html
and here:
http://alienscientist.com/mininukes.html
and here, in a specific analysis/debunking of Khalezov’s claims:
http://911blogger.com/news/2011-01-16/150kt-nukes-demolished-wtc-debunking-dimitri-khalezovs-ridiculous-claims
And where does Steven Jones, who endorses the nanothermite hypothesis, deal with the USGS dust studies, which disclosed the presence of a host of elements (Barium, Strontium, Lithium, Lanthanum, Tritium and more) in quantities and correlations that are distinctive of the use of nukes? The nanothermite hypothesis is ridiculous and has been refuted again and again, unlike the feeble rebuttals to the mini and micro nuke hypothesis.
The buildings were blown apart from the top down; they were converted in millions of cubic yards of very fine dust; and there was no massive pile of debris in their footprints when it was over. You are misusing the word “refutation”, because an hypothesis has only been “refuted” when it has been shown to be false based upon premises that are true. As I explained long ago, Steven does not even understand the scientific method:
“On the Manipulation of the 9/11 Research Community”
http://twilightpines.com/images/themanipulationofthe911community.pdf
Attacks on Dimitri, moreover, are straw men, because his theory (of 150kt nukes taking out all three of the buiildings) cannot be sustained. But Dennis Cimino has explained how his theory can be reconciled with the use of mini or micro nukes to create an umbrella of falling debris beneath which the task of demolishing the Twin Towers could have taken place using a large nuke conceal beneath the canopy. This is a plausible hypothesis, but not Dimitri’s original.
If you want to be taken seriously, then you need to deal with the strongest versions of the hypothesis, not weaker versions that are easier to attack. I have no patience for the nanothermite crowd, which has been telling us for years that, even nanothermite does not have the explosive power to blow the buildings apart, it could have been combined with explosives that could have done the job. But we are never told what those would have been:
“9/11: A World Swirling within a Volcano of Lies”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/01/911-a-world-swirling-in-a-volcano-of-lies/
And when you hear someone like Jones claim that conventional explosives could have been used along with nanothermite, don’t be taken in. Conventional explosives would have left a pile of debris equal to about 12% of the original 110 stories (or about 13.5 floors of debris). It wasn’t there. And that means the nanothermite sniffers can’t explain the phenomena, even though you would (by implication) have us believe that they have. Your arguments are seriously flawed and the sources you cite are simply not credible. There are no defensible alternatives.
Craig:
Thanks for a very good article about the need to create a unified 9/11 Truth movement using the best explanation. You laid out some very compelling arguments- many many of which I have made myself.
I am troubled, however, by your statement, “Over the past year and a half, he (Coste — me] has made a number of presentations on the monthly call in support of elements of the Pentagon official narrative—none of which is remotely credible in my view.”
I find this to be fascinating. For example, my presentation last August to the Monthly 9/11 and other Deep State Crimes Teleconference shows very clearly that there is an opening in the facade of the 1st floor is about 100 feet (90 feet if you consider column 9AA to be end of the opening because it is connected to the top and the bottom while the wall is gone). The hanging structure at column 16, and 17 – as you agree – do not connect to the floor and are severed.
http://hopeoutloud.org/pentagon/size-of-opening-in-pentagon.pdf
Just last month, I described the tree at Column 16 (a relatively large one) that was severed and the trunk was kicked north about 100 feet along the Pentagon wall. Photos of the firefighting clearly show branches of this tree at the north end of the opening. The trunk is also visible. In some photos of the clean-up, the trunk is seen cut and a ten-foot limbed section is seen.
http://hopeoutloud.org/pentagon/911_MonthlyConference_Tree_at_Column_16.pdf
The movement of the tree trunk northward argues against the north-of-citgo flight path at the tree would not have been kicked to the north.
I welcome you and others to review the physical damage.
Because of the concerns many people have raised about the five-photo security camera sequence and the Flight Data Recorder, I don’t use them. Instead I look at the physical damage. Everything in the damage is consistent with a large momentum impact. Nothing in the record of damage supports the alternative explanations (pre-planted explosives only, dropped bombs, criuse missile).
I don’t do this for ego, I do it because I am an engineer – and I have looked at the damage. Please review the collection of slides at:
http://hopeoutloud.org/pentagon
Wayne,
I’m glad you liked the thrust of the article, although I was pretty sure you wouldn’t like the part where I mentioned you. In any event, thank you for reading and commenting. It is useful to the discussion because you are one of the guiltiest parties of what I describe. You’ve given numerous presentations to the teleconference trying to convince us of the validity of major points in the Pentagon official story. You rarely if ever focus on elements of that official story that you don’t believe.
You have also followed that course on both the 9/11 Truth Outreach and 9/11 Truth Action Project web sites. For example, you wrote a piece last year in which you state as a fact that some dark pixels seen in the Citgo video are in fact a shadow of the plane passing overhead on the official flight path. I don’t know what the dark flicker is, but it certainly does not look like a plane shadow. But your headline states flatly that this is what it is. This strikes me as not entirely honest, because the fact is that you don’t really know what it is; you are speculating. You also state that the flash of light that follows is the explosion caused by an impact. It looks more to me like a truck quickly illuminated its brake lights. Not long enough to represent an explosion of jet fuel, in my opinion.
We can always have that discussion, but you really should change your false headline and article to reflect the fact that you are speculating. You’re entitled to do so, but you should be up front with readers about that.
As to the points you raise:
1) The size of the opening: obviously way we describe the size of the ground floor opening depends on what we mean by “opening.” You think that if a column is severed at the bottom, then it does not interrupt the opening. I don’t agree. It’s still there. The uninterrupted opening (wall destroyed and no columns) is about 50 feet wide. To call it a 100-foot contiguous opening is playing games with facts. But either way, the opening is not anywhere close to being big enough to explain the complete absence of large wreckage outside. It is clear that had a 757 actually hit the Pentagon we would have seen large pieces of the tail section and wings. But they are entirely absent. And, no, they are not in “confetti” form on the lawn. Based on your last presentation, it is clear that you also have a different definition of the word “large” than I do, as you describe the famous piece of “fuselage” on the Pentagon lawn as being a large piece of debris.
2) The video: I’m glad you join me in finding the government video to be problematic. One wonders why falsified video would be needed if a real 757 had crashed. In your comment, you come as close to disputing the official story as I can remember you doing. But you still stop short.
3) The severed tree: (sounds like a new Hardy Boys mystery) I’m afraid I found nothing of value in your most recent presentation, and I seriously doubt that you persuaded even one listener on the teleconference. It’s just more speculation. You write: “The movement of the tree trunk northward argues against the north-of-citgo flight path at the tree would not have been kicked to the north.” Well, no one that I know of is arguing an impact from a north of Citgo path. In fact, this is impossible because there is no damage path other than the official one (created by explosives, I contend). As you know, I don’t believe the plane crashed at all so your point is moot. There are more problems with the tree theory than I wish to go into here, but let me state one: given that the tree stump looks to be five or six feet high (a guess based on its relation to the wire spools), how could the right engine hit the top of the generator trailer (which I believe you agree with) and within a fraction of a section drop such that the right wing could hit the tree where it was severed (which is what you said you thought had happened when I questioned you on the call)? And how could this not have caused the engine to gouge the lawn or hit some of the spools?
Let me conclude with this question: why do you never seem to investigate and present any arguments challenging the official story at the Pentagon?
Craig:
Again thanks for your reply.
Let me begin by addressing your last question:
“why do you never seem to investigate and present any arguments challenging the official story at the Pentagon?” and “You rarely if ever focus on elements of that official story that you don’t believe.”
My reply to this is: why go over things in my presentation on the 9/11 Monthly conference call that we should agree with. I suppose I could begin each presentation with points that should be obvious that we agree such as:
1. Norman Mineta’s testimony clearly shows that there was to be no interference with the approaching aircraft (e.g inside job),
2. Rumsfeld prediction that the Pentagon was a target in the minutes before the impact clearly suggest foreknowledge and malicious intent (and no warning given to occupants — e.g inside job),
3. That the two remaining fighters were sent out over the Atlantic ocean instead of the direction of the approaching aircraft (e.g inside job)
4. Honi Honjour could not have been the active pilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon (e.g inside job)
5. That Ted Olsen’s phone call with the wife Barbara newver too plac based on the evidence of the Moussaoui trial (e.g inside job) .
6. … and much more
If that is the boilerplate that would make you happy so that you will pay attention to the rest of the presentation, I’ll be glad to add it.
——
Regarding the CITGO video article, the key point substantiating the statement that the dual shadow marks (middle section of the shadow was obscured by the large shrub) was that Sgt Lagasse stopped fueling his vehicle, got in his vehicle and left for the the Pentagon within 15 seconds.
Source: https://www.911tap.org/evidence/what-about-the-pentagon/809-what-about-the-pentagon/630-pentagon-plane-approach-captured-on-video
“Sgt. William Lagasse of the Department Protective Services Police at the Pentagon was refueling his police vehicle at pump 2 which is located in the northwest corner of the north bay. His movements between the vehicle and the gas pump were captured by the security camera and recorded in the video labeled “Dual Pump Side.” In a November 2001 Library of Congress interview he states that while he was refilling his vehicle’s tank, he was standing outside the vehicle’s open driver-side door and he saw “an American Airlines 757 fly approximately 100 feet above the ground level and maybe 60 feet in front of [him].” He estimated the speed to be around 400 miles per hour.
After the plane passed him, he saw the aircraft impact into the side of the Pentagon. He describes seeing the tail rotate slightly as it went into the building. He Immediately stopped refueling his vehicle, got into his car, backed out of the station and headed to the Pentagon where he spent the rest of the day. According to his account he left the CITGO station approximately 15 seconds after the plane impact. This is verified by the sequences of frames captured by the security video”
Even if the reflected fireball flash can be explained by some other phenomenon, the key fact is that the shadow passes — and Lagasse is gone within 15 seconds. This is very strong evidence that the dark spots were the passing aircraft. No other vehicles on the road made similar video phenomena.
——–
Regarding the size of the hole, you seem to be claiming that the remnants of column 16 (or as some have suggested the hanging floor slab near column 16) defines the boundary of the opening on the first floor. Slides 42-53 look at this column remnant from multiple perspectives and it is clearly disconnected from the lower end which would suggest that the wing would have had the ability to push it and travel under the displaced column remnant. Please review slides 42-53:
http://hopeoutloud.org/pentagon/size-of-opening-in-pentagon.pdf
——–
Regarding the security cam video: I don’t explicitly consider it untrustworthy. However, it does have may detractors which make its use problematic. Consequently, I just prefer to focus on the physical damage and debris to assess whether the damage was caused by 1) a large momentum (plane) impact, 2) a single cruise missile (or similar type missile), 3) explosives alone (or bombs) or something else. So far the damage can be best explained by a large plane impact.
———
Regarding the severed tree stump, why should I even address your comments when you have already made up your mind by stating, “As you know, I don’t believe the plane crashed at all so your point is moot.” I invite you to once again look at the presentation about the tree at column 16:
http://hopeoutloud.org/pentagon/911_MonthlyConference_Tree_at_Column_16.pdf
Because of your closing question about the wire spools, I will leave you with this homework assignment (or question if you already know the answer):
1) How far from the Pentagon wall were the wire spools that you are concerned about, and
2) What was the angle of descent of the plane whose right engine hit the upper part of the diesel trailer and left engine gouged the retaining wall after passing about Route 27 and clipping the light poles?
I’m sure that you will have an answer for me in the morning.
-Wayne
Wayne,
Your answer regarding the “shadow” is just more speculation on your part. You assume because of the timing that this dark glitch was a shadow. You have nothing beyond that. You essentially admit that you assume it is the plane and yet your headline states it as a fact. Is this honest? I’ll leave that to other readers to make their own determination.
I don’t take homework assignments, Wayne, when the burden of proof is on you. You ask me about the angle of descent of a plane that I don’t think hit the building at all. So it is you who should answer that question in support of your latest speculation.
I am troubled by your “boilerplate” comment. It strikes me as dismissive of a very fair statement. You think you can support most of the official story at the Pentagon, over and over and over, and then pay lip service to opposing that story by throwing in Hani Hanjour and Norman Mineta? You miss my point entirely. Is it deliberate?
Your purpose appears to me to be to undermine every challenge to the official story that you can even when you have nothing more than a guess. How anyone could think that this is helpful to the efforts of the Truth Movement is beyond me.
Craig
Great article, with a great chore philosophy, Craig. We do not need to know the truth, let alone prove the truth, since we are 100% certain that the lie is a lie.
That said… Is it just me, or does it sadden anyone else here that these pages, irrespective of the subject and argument of the article they respectively start with, are a bit like the sand on the beach? No matter what you write on them, or no matter how beautiful a castle you build on them during low tide, the beach looks exactly the same as before after the tide and the waves come in and do their job.
You have the consistence of a Bernie Sanders, Craig. (That, of course, is intended as a high compliment indeed.) You’ve been reiterating these principles for years now but it’s great to have them all wrapped up into a “package.”
I haven’t written a guest article here in nearly 4 years, but the last one I authored called out Kevin Ryan’s book for stating we should accept as much of the official story as possible. Here is my shameless plug for it:
https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-kevin-ryan-paradox-the-way-to-show-the-911-official-story-is-false-is-by-accepting-as-much-of-it-as-possible/
Of course, if ANY parts of the “official narrative” of 9/11 ARE true, we will accept them. But what we have been told about the 19 hijackers, the phone calls, the planes, the crashes, destruction of the Twin Towers and of WTC-7 have all proven to be FALSE. Which parts, exactly, are you and Kevin Ryan proposing that we ought to accept? How much have you thought this through?
I don’t think Adam is saying that. He’s just pointing that Ryan is saying it.
Ahhhh. Good. Thanks. Yes, I agree with Adam. Something is not right with Kevin Ryan.
Adam,
You really think positively about Bernie Sanders? He’s complicit trash, in my book. Why didn’t he stand up for himself while Hillary was stealing the nomination? Because he is a willing pawn in the game. https://willyloman.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/bernie-sanders-a-neocon-in-sheepdogs-clothing-backs-syrian-regime-change-whether-you-admit-it-or-not/
I really do think positively about Bernie Sanders, because… urgh. Too tired. Maybe in more serious depth tomorrow. The Reader’s Digest version is that while he’s not perfect, he’s the first politician in my life whose candidacy inspired me, to the point of even contributing money to his campaign. Unlike some politicians, whose positions change based on which direction the winds blow, Bernie has remained consistent for decades, just has Craig has on 9/11 for years. I leave you with this. ‘Nite!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU3NKvvxcSs
I would like to add a little postscript: I was slightly hesitant to mention the man’s name, simply because I knew it might serve as an “invitation” to steer the direction of the comments to discuss/debate the merits of the senator and potentially derail the comments thread into a rancor fest (I’m not saying that you, Dennis, would be guilty of this, but paid trolls etc could certainly carry out that assignment). My experience this past year or two, is that general politics, especially the 2016 election, as well as arguments about other “conspiracy theories” outside of 9/11, are two powerful forces that, whether or not by design, serve to divide and splinter what remains of the active 9/11 truth community.
OK, Adam, thanks for the replies. Let’s just say we disagree about Sanders, and leave it at that.
It was the sabotaging of Bernie Sander’s campaign by the DNC that led Seth Rich, who was its IT guy, to become disillusioned and share its email treasure-trove with Craig Murray, an intel analyst, UK Ambassador and friend of Julian Assange, with Julian, who published them. Seth of course paid for it with his life, being shot multiple times in the back in apparent retaliation. Both Murray and Assange have explained they knew the leaker and he was not Russian, where the whole “Russian hacking” meme was fabricated by Robbie Mook and John Podesta to explain away Hillary’s loss within 24 hours of her concession speech, as the new book, SHATTERED, by two investigative journalists, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (maybe the only ones left in America), who were following the campaign from the inside for its duration, have now reported.
Bernie inspired many of us, where his non-interventionist foreign policy paralleled that of Trump (who has now wandered off the reservation and appears to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Zio-cons) and his domestic policies were (in my view) far superior. Sources report that as many as 13 primaries that Bernie won were given to Hillary, instead. He was very critical of her and of Trump during the campaign, but when she emerged with the nomination, dutifully supported her. It is ironic that, while Bernie acknowledges that he is Jewish and Trump does not, Miles Mathis has done a study of Trump’s background and he appears to be our first Jewish president. The reservations about Bernie, I believe, derive from his not “staring the course” by supporting her. Some of us believe that, had he run as an independent, Bernie might just possibly have won.
Most of you will already know most of what I have laid out here, thought I also suspect that you may not have caught up with SHATTERED. I do several shows a week where I address issues like these and therefore spend more time that I would prefer following political developments. In relation to “conspiracy theories”, I agree with Michael Moore who, when asked if he believed in conspiracy theories, replied, “Only those that are true!” The situation, alas, is that many of the most influential events of our time — from JFK to 9/11 to Sandy Hook to the Boston bombing —
are examples of what Paul Craig Roberts refers to as “orchestrated events” when he asks, “Are we living in a false reality of orchestrated events?” The answer, alas, turns out to be “Yes!” And a lot of us here are doing our best to expose the most important among them (apart from JFK).
I’m currently reading “Shattered” on my Kindle. Very good.
Bernie certainly seemed sincere and he was pretty consistent, at least on social and economic issues. I’m not so sure about his position on war. Thanks for putting this video in here. It was good to see Bernie over the years.
If a similar video were made with Hillary throughout the decades, it would sound like she is arguing with herself.
Yes, it would. I’d like to see that too just for a laugh. Trump’s inconsistencies happen right before our eyes. No need for a video to show those to me, although they might be beneficial for some who don’t somehow notice them.
Here’s another perspective on Bernie, this coming from a political activist and hard core Bernie Sanders supporter who put in money and hundreds of hours on his campaign. Her attitude has changed since then.
Meet Debbie aka “The Sane Progressive”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWHCNDxYdLU
As Willy Loman says, she’s passionate, she’s pissed, and she’s mostly right. And for what it’s worth, she’s also a 9/11 truther.
Interesting. I have always found Debbie so very difficult to watch and listen to. She is simply too f***ing shrill and anti-charismatic. She turns me off, totally. Hopefully others are turned into her because the substance of her message is true, as I have learned by bearing thru this horrific screeching video.
OK, yeah, agreed–Bernie won the primary. But WTF did he do about the vote rigging? Nothing. Thus, he was a complicit piece of trash in the vote rigging process, by not standing up.
This piece of trash, Bernie Sanders (BS), in the same league with Obama.
I agree with Debbie, there is no trusting the voting machines.
I did not know that BS was going around lying his ass off about Russian election interference, Syria, and the false flag chemical weapons attacks. OK Debbie, will take your word on that. In any event, agreed: BS is truly a piece of garbage.
LOL re Bernie has “never even responded” to Debbie about the vote rigging, Debbie, did you actually expect a response? BS’s role was to be Sheepdog Sanders, there to lure the deluded (false) left (who never paid attention to 9/11) into the Killary Clinton camp.
“He (BS) is the main ingredient in keeping [the deluded left] people in line.” LOL. Yes. He is much less than that. BS is trash.
So sorry that Debbie is so shrill. Does anyone listen to her? Her shrillness is horrific. But as to the substance of what she is saying, I agree.
Debbie wants BS to answer her petition? Dream on, Debbie, dream on.
Screech on, Debbie. Screech on.
In sum: Agreed about BS, and all else Debbie says. Fight on, Debbie. Fight on! Yes, BS betrayed you. Not me…saw it coming from the outset. BS is BS: always was, always will be, and always will remain the same.
Nice rant.
Good post.
Thanks,
–D
It’s called divide and rule……
The truth can never come out …it would destroy America the UK the entire war on terror coalition the world economy…..The truth would do more damage create more havoc death and displacement than the post 9/11 17 years….
Horrific that it is that we will continue to live in the shadow of this lIe of all known time…..itself initiating lie upon lie in false flags that are eagerly accepted by the media and its blind followers…
It is thought……
Fiat justicia rust caelum.
Hear you, however…..In effect cutting off the proverbial nose to spite the proverbial face….then leaping from proverbial frying pan into proverbial fire…..73 years on this planet in the realization that life is too short to fight all the battles for truth honesty…… is your man or the world he currently lives in any better for it.?….nope! but will he continue….yup! for however long is remaining albeit fruitless the liars and their political agenda will live on ad infinitum…….see “The Writer” when, if ever, it gets published ………
It would seem there are plenty of facts to support the basic idea that the official story is not true. If we could just stick to the facts and leave the theories out of the discussion, perhaps newcomers would not be put off. We could allow them to do their own research and let them come up with their own theories, if they’re so inclined. If asked, we could give hints about what some people believe. My interest isn’t so much in what might have happened as why it happened.
Although it sounds reasonable on its face, a set of facts–no matter how imposing–with no story (or narrative) tying them together doesn’t impress Americans, who want to know WHO and WHY such extraordinary actions would be taken by the government. That’s why his video, “Operation Terror” by Art Olivier, has more impact than videos of Building 7: it explains WHY something like what really did happen would have happened in promoting a political agenda. With no theory, we have no story to weave the data together, just an assortment of facts, some far more interesting than others, no doubt; but without a narrative, none of it has much power to impress the public.
You may be right, but I prefer to weave facts and theories together in my own way as I gather them. I don’t care for being beaten over the head with someone else’s proposed narrative, especially when it doesn’t make sense to me. I may or may not be typical, but I think it’s a pretty personal thing how one approaches such a problem.
Some purposely choose to ignore issues that feel “too big” to them and just hope everything works out. The only way to reach these people is to wait until they begin to ask questions, which may or may not happen. Some have done minimal research and talked to a few people, but don’t understand the bigger picture or how 9/11 relates to most everything that’s happened since. Some get their egos twisted out of shape, attaching to one or another technical theory while not seeming interested in the “why.” Some still believe every bit of the official story. Some listen to most everything, at least for awhile, and work out in their own minds whether a certain point of view or piece of information adds anything to the big picture for them or not. I’m not sure that thinking of people as “the public” is really helpful. I think you can only reach one individual at a time and each has a unique perspective.
So many people are doing great work, such as yourself and Craig and many, many others, contributing to the information base at some cost and risk to themselves. We’re not finished yet. I believe many more will come around in their own time. These efforts are not in vain.
Good thoughts. I agree that we have to win one mind at a time–and that there is no “one size” that fits all. Thanks for the response, which I appreciate.
I’ve read a couple of books recently that have changed my mind about the best way to persuade people to my point of view. The books have nothing to do with politics; they are “Compelling People” and “We Learn Nothing.”
There is a long chapter in “We Learn Nothing” about the author’s reaction when his friend Ken becomes a peak oil activist. The author (Tim Kreider) acknowledges that Ken is sincere, Ken is more intelligent than himself, and Ken has done a vast amount of research into the subject. Yet, Tim says, he really can’t be bothered to do all this research himself, and Ken has become annoyingly obsessed with peak oil, so Tim starts avoiding Ken and the friendship eventually ends. Tim sums is up by saying that many political choices have more to do with who we like than who is right.
A chapter in “Compelling People” makes the same exact point. Most people are not won over with evidence, they are won over because they like you and see you as being “one of us.” Examining evidence is hard work but they can make a snap judgement about you in ten seconds, and that may be all the time they care to give to the topic.
Most of humanity is not as intellectual as this site’s readers and we shouldn’t naively assume that folks with an IQ below 100 (which is after all half the population) are going to do the research that all of us have done.
Maybe we need to start acting more like salesmen than academics.
I don’t believe in coercion. Intellectual or not, each individual has the right and responsibility to come to his or her own conclusions. Coercion is a slippery slope.
Umm, speculator247, are you replying to me? I didn’t say anything about coercion.
Ever heard “you catch more flies with honey?”
The upshot of what I wrote above is that truthers would do well to ponder that phrase the next time they are trying to get someone to consider their point of view.
You mentioned a chapter titled, “Compelling People.” The only real difference between compelling and coercion is timing, and coercion is a little bit less forceful than compelling. I don’t see any “honey” here. It’s psychological manipulation.
Ah, I see where the confusion arose. “Compelling” in the book title is an adjective, not a verb gerund. The verb means to force someone, the adjective does not.
adjective: compelling
evoking interest, attention, or admiration in a powerfully irresistible way.
“his eyes were strangely compelling”
synonyms: enthralling, captivating, gripping, riveting, spellbinding, mesmerizing, absorbing, irresistible
“a compelling performance”
antonyms: boring
not able to be refuted; inspiring conviction.
“compelling evidence”
synonyms: convincing, persuasive, cogent, irresistible, powerful, strong, weighty, plausible, credible, sound, valid, telling, conclusive, irrefutable, unanswerable
“a compelling argument”
antonyms: weak
not able to be resisted; overwhelming.
“the temptation to give up was compelling”
Yes.
Sorry Sheila, I misunderstood the way “Compelling” was intended. But the approach you speak of still seems manipulative.
For the most part, I’ve given up trying to persuade people re: what really happened on 9/11. If the topic comes up, i have a 60-90 second overview on what went down in NY, DC, and PA that i can get into using an effective sardonic tone, a la George Carlin.
As I see it, the whole 9/11 inside job aspect is so obvious, that if one takes a look and can’t see it for what it is, then there is something seriously wrong with that person, and it’s not up to me (any longer) to try and “fix” them.
on a lighter note, re: “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” as my old pappy used to say (me borrowing form “Maverick,” there) “You can catch even more flies with a load of horse manure, so what does that prove?” Nevertheless, I agree with Sheila that it’s better to not go the “vinegar” (or horse manure) route when trying to educate people about 9/11.
My opinion of humanity as a whole has taken a dive since finding out about 9/11 and finding out that most others are too cowardly to face it. I honestly would not have predicted that my fellow humans would be so overwhelmingly gutless. I thought most people were similar to me. Although it was a shock to go from blissfully believing the official story to MIHOP in just 48 hours, it never once occurred to me to pretend that the facts were not the facts.
Oh, Robert Parry, wherefore art thou?
Parry is the mainstream media story shredder el supremo, especially nowadays with him exposing MSM lies told about Russia, Syria, Ukraine, the election, Israel, the CIA and more. To a recent Parry posting about how we are so heavily blanketed by so many lies from so many quarters we don’t know whom to trust I added this to the comment section.
“IMHO I can’t fully trust any writer who, when laying out example after example of the establishment’s perfidy, doesn’t mention the lies of the official 9/11 story.”
Parry doesn’t touch 9/11 except to say how 9/11, the official version, was a pretext for war in Iraq, never that the event itself was a false flag to create this pretext. On the plus side, my remarks about how I think 9/11 was an inside job have never been censored from his comment section and I think many of Parry’s readers are truthers.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/30/the-existential-question-of-who-to-trust/
If Paul Craig Roberts didn’t drop 9/11 truth bombs from time to time I probably wouldn’t follow his writings, especially when he lauds Reagan and Kissinger as he does. But Roberts gets how 9/11 is a lie and that lefties and righties and Bernie Sanders, too, need to hear this message. Craig McKee is right here in that the least we can do is to simply try and show how if just one element of the OCT is a lie then the whole story is a lie and a treasonous crime.
But, what Parry does show so cogently is how so many other hard truths are systematically quashed. But Parry seems unflappable in his anti-9/11 truth stance. To quote our current president, “Sad.”
Just a friendly FYI. “Wherefore” is Shakespearean for “why,” not “where.”
She’s saying “Romeo, Romeo, why are you Romeo?” Meaning, why must her lover be a member of the opposing family? Why couldn’t he be from another family? Life would be easier that way. She’s not saying “Romeo, where are you hiding?”
Ah, but thou dost forget the classic punchline “I’m under the porch, bitch!”
Hah!!!
One of the oddest articles I have encounter by Robert Parry was entitled, “The 9/11 Truth Parlor Game”, to which I replied with, “9/11 Truth is No Parlor Game”, http://www.globalresearch.ca/9-11-truth-is-no-parlor-game/22923. And to my astonishment, Kevin Ryan entered the fray on the side of Robert Parry with “Why Robert Parry is Right about 9/11 Truth”, http://911truthnews.com/why-robert-parry-is-right-about-911-truth/ in which he attempted to savage me for sticking up for 9/11 Truth! It remains one of the most bizarre articles I have ever encountered, not just in relation to 9/11 Truth but other issues far beyond his ken, as I would explain in detail in my response, “The Misadventures of Kevin Ryan”, http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2011/02/misadventures-of-kevin-ryan.html, which I would subsequently publish in an expanded version as “The Debate over 9/11 Truth: Kevin Ryan vs. Jim Fetzer”, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/01/the-debate-over-911-truth-kevin-ryan-vs-jim-fetzer/. To this day, I cannot imagine what inspired Kevin Ryan to come after me, especially when he did not understand what he was talking about (either literally or figuratively)! I am now apprehensive that many in the 9/11 Truth movement believed what he wrote and that he may have had some influence in getting 9/11 Truth off the rails. I would be glad for any light that any of you can shed, because anyone who believed what he wrote would have been massively misled.
The ongoing challenge has been how to expand the number of people who are awake, not just to the many false flags, 9/11 being perhaps the most prominent of the last generation, but to endemic, systematic, formalized, bought and paid for, political, military and media dishonesty and censorship, in conjunction with widespread institutional ‘more-or-less’ corruption, especially at the leadership level.
Ironically, the Trump election phenomenon, featuring a gifted con artist who actually says many sensible things and has promoted many sensible policies, may have moved the cultural yardsticks/paradigm into new more fertile ‘truth seeking’ territory. His “fake news” meme, even as he does his own bit to promulgate fake news, generated a lot of public applause/approval. This genie’s after effects may be hard to completely put back into the bottle of gullibility. And some of the support for Trump, much of it tentative, hopeful, was based on his election campaign display of’anti-political-normalcy’, by blurting out real but forbidden thoughts, like ‘we’ve a mess of the Middle East’. I think anyone placing a high value on an old virtue – integrity – longs for people prominent in politics willing to broach the real world. Sanders’ support comes from a somewhat similar cultural longing: someone at least occasionally willing to call a spade a spade.
I think there is a general growing awareness that we have been exposed since birth to an Indispensable to the System and hugely effective and idsorienting system of manipulation, of lies and misdirection and censorship, If I am correct in this growing awareness, it is imo a good trend.
In relation to the 9/11 false flag, one important point, imo, that ought to be presented in conjunction with whatever else is presented, is the uses that 9/11 was put to: In brief, prominently but not exclusively, mass murdering wars of aggression abroad and police state measures at home. In other words, whatever else is saId, much evil can be located as flowing from 9/11.
This video seems to put the question of what hit the Pentagon to rest — at least for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zze32ZEjt30
Haven’t you watched any of my videos about 9/11? Virtually all of them explain that the frames we have from the Pentagon you accept are dubious from scratch, including the wrong date/time stamps and the image of a flying object that is too small to be a Boeing 757. I asked Jack White, a colleague from JFK research, to size the image of a Boeing 757 to the tail of the flying object in the frame marked “plane” from the Pentagon. It was twice as large as what the frames show, where more recent research suggests that it is a Global Hawk firing a missile into the building:
“The Real Deal Ep #205: Raising ‘The Smoke Curtain’ on the Pentagon with Dennis Cimino”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZNZ5Pfpo_0
I wasn’t sure who you were replying to, but I’ll respond anyway. I have seen lots of videos, including many of yours, and I read a lot of things, including some things that people label as “facts.” I don’t believe everything I hear, and I don’t know about time stamps, etc., I’ve never been to the Pentagon so I don’t know if this is even a video done at the Pentagon. But it does appear to me, from what I can tell, that this is some sort of missile being shot at this building and seems to hit the building at the correct height to have created the damage at the Pentagon scene. It’s practically impossible to trust anything 100%, but this makes sense to me.
I will watch this video when I get a chance. I’d like to listen to your radio show and watch your videos more often. When does your show come on?
Well, I have “The Raw Deal” T/Th from 8-10 PM/ET on renseradio.com (where you can LISTEN LIVE) and the archives are available; and “The Conspiracy Guy”, from 9-10 PM/ET on PRN.fm, the archives for which are at conspiracyguy.podbean.com. I tape “Truth vs. NEW$” on Mondays, which is usually posted on YouTube the same day. Thanks for asking.
Craig,
Thanks for this thoughtful essay. On the whole, I find myself in agreement with many of the particulars you address. However, there are some areas where I shall respectfully disagree with, or perhaps better, challenge some of your conclusions.
Whilst I agree with you that the attempt by the named parties to foreclose the Pentagon debates in favor of a presumed consensus around a large plane impact is premature and problematic, and indeed smacks of manipulation, I think there is an opposite tendency of which you yourself show evidence (though unfortunately you are far from being the Lone Ranger in this regard), and I would like to discuss this at length. We could call the premature consensus error the Scylla, and this other, opposite (in my view) error, the Charybdis, between which the ship of a unified 9/11 Truth Movement must sail if it is not to run aground.
Before discussing it, a preliminary look at disinformation is in order. It is well understood that disinformation, at least, effective disinformation, is never 100% false. Rather, it is an admixture of truth and falsity, or inclusion and deliberate omission, or genuine facts out of context… whatever. In fact, it may be argued that the most effective disinformation contains the most truth, analogous to a bitter pill with a heavy sugar coating. Now let’s create a hypothetical situation: two “truthers” regard an official story as false (as disinformation). Truther A says: “I believe the official story is 80% correct.” Truther B begs to differ: “No, it is only 50% correct.” Question: Is Truther B more of a truther than Truther A? It seems to me, Craig, as I read your interchanges with Wayne Coste, and indeed, your subheading to this article, that you hold a prejudice in favor of the person who most disagrees with the official story, and a very evident suspicion of those who hold a position that refutes less of the official story, or attempts to confirm any part of it. Again, I don’t mean to single you out on this score, but you’re a good case in point.
It seems to me that your underlying hypothesis is this: the more parts of the official story we challenge, the better for the truth movement, and the more impact we’ll have on outsiders. The best of all possible worlds would be to be able to argue that every shred of the official story is a pack of lies. Therefore, anyone who argues in favor of some aspect of the official story is disloyal to our cause, and weakens our movement’s effort to smash the official story into smithereens by exposing its utter falsehood. The only problem with this approach is that it is wishful thinking, and not science.
This brings us back to the theme of your article, which is about how to best approach those outside our movement in a convincing way. I think it’s very important in the first place to distinguish between our “inner” behavior and our “outer” message. Every other scientific discipline likewise does not inform laymen of its internal disputes, but puts forth the existing consensus in the scientific community as if it were received wisdom. Only when one becomes part of that community does one learn about its internal controversies. I hasten to interject my opinion that the robust internal debate in the 9/11 Truth community is a sign of our movement’s health, not its disintegration. And so it is for any other discipline. But if we approach our differences with any kind of presumption that certain kinds of results are to be preferred over others, for whatever reason, then we have politicized our approach, and in fact contaminated it. Academia is littered with examples of this: for example, the drug studies paid for by Big Pharma. It’s a very slippery slope. Either you are interested in “just the facts, ma’am,” or you have an agenda…there is no in-between. So this really comes down to the question of whether the 9/11 truth movement represents a scientific discipline, or merely a political propaganda outlet. Again, one must choose. But I will argue in that in the long run, our ability to influence the public will depend much more on whether we credibly assume the former mantle, as opposed to the latter.
Now, you write, parenthetically, that you “ find it a shame that the 9/11 Consensus Panel does not achieve the dissection of the official story that Griffin’s own books so effectively do.” But I would argue that the Consensus Panel, whatever criticism it may merit, serves a different purpose quite relevant to this discussion. The Consensus Panel helps define what we may call a minimalist approach to 9/11 truth. Unlike author Griffin, who may boldly address issues that are considered controversial, the purpose of the consensus panel is to identify issues that are considered to be “settled,” or non-controversial within our movement. It helps provide a litmus test of sorts when we are considering whether a particular theory is touching on a matter that is tangential, or whether it encroaches on core understandings of the movement. If the latter, then (and only then) we might agree that it should be regarded with some suspicion, unless, of course, it happened to be accompanied by a plethora of compelling evidence (highly unlikely). But the obverse holds true as well: so long as a theory does not challenge these core understandings, it should not automatically be regarded with suspicion even if it purports to confirm other aspects of the official story. This means, then, assuming the good faith of all contenders in the theoretical arena who are not addressing these core understandings and who willingly confirm them. In other words, everything not nailed down by the consensus panel may be regarded as “up for grabs” by those who accept the consensus panel’s existing conclusions. It is my opinion that anyone meeting these criteria should be presumed to be acting in good faith, and not the other way around.
It is ironic too, wouldn’t you say, that whilst your piece admonishes us to refrain from debating some of these matters in the interest of outreach, that this comments section is filled with such debate. LOL, how can it be otherwise? Anything unsettled will continue to surface until it is settled, and that is a healthy tendency.
Anyway, I’ll leave off for now, and await your response.
Peace,
Ken
Ken, Just for the record, which aspects of THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT do you regard as true?
(1) the allegation that 19 Islamic terrorists hijacked for commercial carriers and committed these deeds?
(2) the alleged phone calls from the planes at speeds and altitudes that would have made it impossible?
(3) that Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville?
(4) that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon?
(5) that Flight 11 hit the North Tower?
(6) that Flight 175 hit the South Tower?
(7) that the buildings were brought down by the intense heat from the jet fuel in each of the buildings?
(8) that WTC-7 was brought down by fires, once again, rather than as a classic controlled demolition?
(9) that the 9/11 Commission was set up to investigate and expose the truth to the American people?
This is a nine-point sampler. Each appears to be provably false. Which of them do you regard as true?
Of course, THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT did not even mention WTC-7. But I want to cover all the bases. Thanks.
there was a follow-up report re WTC 7.
Of course. But it was not even mentioned in THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (2004).
The ‘secret demolition’, or shall we say embarrassing or shall we say illuminating Building 7 demolition, has in my experience been the single most effective means by which gullible people are motivated to actually begin to use their own brains re 9/11.
First, upon entering into the subject, a common response might be “there was no third skyscraper collapse on 9/11. When assurance is given that such an event absolutely did occur, then the recipient of the new information is faced with evident fact of being ignorant re 9/11, and furthermore, that there is evident public manipulation going on.
If someone can be motivated to watch the WTC-7 demolition, ‘mere’ common sense may kick in and they find that they are observing indeed a demolition. If they are of scientific bent, then the speed of collapse, and the good old law of conservation of energy, and the nature of steel, among other things, forbids an explanation that is magical, like Merlin waved his wand and the BBC, oops, reported on his magnificant wand waving ahead of Merlin’s feat.
Those with some political savvy, having learned that WTC 7’s demise, as Fetzer notes. was not deemed worthy of mention in the 9/11 official ommissions report, will smell a gigantic stinking rat.
But proceeding from my above previous missive, if the 9/11 matter is relegated to an academic or scientific bloodless exercise, you may very well achieve very large numbers of people who understand that 9/11 was a false flag and that the official story was a pack of lies, and then who go on munching their cheezies demurely while the world continues its pathological trajectory, and some important part of that trajectory fueled by 9/11.
The real crux of the matter is that 9/11 was treasonous mass murder at home, and led to mass murder and destruction abroad; this statement combines fact and science, but of a most important kind. For if people do not understand the main implications and outcomes and meaning of an event, all the clever intellectual gymnastics in the world pertaining to minutae will not save us.
After 9/11, I’ll share two memorable communications: one was with a twenty some year old Mennonite, blue collar background, grounded in reality, steel and wood, who watched no tv and read no newspaper, but told me he had been told by a trucker that the skyscrapers in New York had been blown up, and that the government was lying. The trucker had told him that the buildings were well built, with steel skeltetons all the way up. The young Mennonite needed to know no more, but he did ask me: “Why do you think they did it?” ‘They’ meaning the government. A brilliant question, imo.
The second memorable conversation was with a prominent Canadian journalist, who I asked: Is there any chance your media organization will do some realistic journalism on 9/11. The response I got was roughly this: it’s too big and too scary for us to take on.
So I don’t think the problem is essentially one of some particular technique that could be applied to this or that or any other piece of pathological public manipulation, but whether our society can expand the normalcy – make these the cultural default position as it were – of integrity and courage and common sense. As long as there are vast armies of people out there who are still willing to lie and self-censor for a living, or live in a fairy tale, we got a big problem in the nuclear age.
It took them some time to fabricate a scenario re WTC 7. Give them credit for coming forth with an absurd hypothesis that satisfied the sleeping sheep.
James,
I’ve reviewed what I wrote above and cannot find a single reference to the 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 in it. Your question thus perplexes me. Why should I wish to defend it?
Peace,
Ken
“Hannity & Colmes” originally featured me in late June 2006, just before I presented the keynote address for The American Scholars Conference hosted by Alex Jones. I knew no plane had hit the Pentagon, where I introduced Norman Mineta’s testimony during the show, and that no plane had crashed in Shanksville, but at the time I still believed real planes had hit the Twin Towers.
Here’s my first appearance on “Hannity & Colmes”, where Ollie North was subbing for Hannity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on2AAxW8w40
Here’s the second, where Sean was back in the saddle but I got Mineta’s story out once again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGWYyKNTPEc
Since I was adamantly opposed to (what I then regarded as a fantasy) the idea that Flight 11 and Flight 175 had not hit the North and South Towers, respectively, Olddickeastman’s account is a complete fabrication. I don’t know what to say about him, except that he seems obsessed with his own conclusions and wholly unwilling to address new evidence or alternative hypotheses.
Craig, I was attempting to reply to Ken about his suggestion we should keep as much of THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT as we can, which is either trivial or false. Most of its claims are provably untrue and those that are true are trivial. I don’t know what he did not understand about my comment on his post. We want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, including whatever the government may have claimed about 9/11 that should turn out to be true. That is obvious.
James,
Once again I respectfully request that you quote from me before putting words in my mouth. To repeat, I have not mentioned the 9/11 Commission Report AT ALL!
Kindly retract this ridiculous assertion or cite the text by me it refers to. Thanks.
✌ Ken
Just for the record, were you not proposing that we support as much of the government’s official account as we can? and isn’t THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (2004) the government’s official account? I must have missed something here. Wasn’t that the point of your suggestion? That we need to ACCEPT as much as we can of what we have been TOLD by our own government?
To all who have been following this interchange, here is what has transpired thus far:
James Fetzer, in response to my critique of this article by Craig McKee, asked me how much of the 9/11 Commission Report I agree with.
I replied that i was perplexed by his question as i hadn’t even mentioned the Report in my post, and asked him to explain why he asked it.
He then, oddly, addressed his explanation to Craig, referring once again to a suggestion he claimed I made in my post that the 9/11 Truth movement should accept as much of the 9/11 Commission’s report as possible. Of course, I had made no suggestion of the sort.
After reading this clear prevarication, I requested that he retract it, as I had clearly written no such statement.
His reply insisted that i must put myself on the record! But the record is already there! My post above is available for anyone to read, and it makes no mention of the 9/11 Commission report nor, obviously, does it advocate for its acceptance. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Fetzer then goes on to refer once again to this “suggestion” (which I have not made and which I twice denied making) as though it were an unchallenged fact, rather than his own fabrication.
Anyone who’s heard of the old lawyers’ saw “when are you going to stop beating your wife?” will understand what is happening here. Irony of ironies, Mr. Fetzer often boasts that he teaches college students to avoid rhetorical tricks and logical errors. Yet here he demonstrates an utter lack of good faith in honorably responding to what at this point i can only assume to be his deliberate misrepresentation of what i clearly wrote. Perhaps he is demonstrating to his students how these tricks are used — I don’t pretend to know his purposes — but I do not have time for this. He is welcome to continue his bombast in my absence, but please understand that my lack of any further response on this thread is an expression of my exasperation with this man’s utter disingenuousness. A mind, as they say, is a terrible thing to waste!
Peace,
Ken Freeland
Ken missed that I had inadvertently REPOSTED a comment with two videos (of appearances on “Hannity & Colmes” that I had just posted toward the bottom of the thread. I was suggesting to Craig (but did not spell it out explicitly) that that had been a mistake. Ken Freeland, whom I have heretofore regarded as a sensible and intelligent fellow, seems to have fallen apart at this point.
As I read his comment to Craig, he was suggesting that we ought to respect the parts of the 9/11 report (that is to say, of the official narrative we have been given by our government, primarily in the form of THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (2004)), claiming he did not mention the report by name. But that hardly matters, since he seems to think its truthful parts are deserving of respect.
Now I have been attempting to elicit from him EXACTLY WHICH PARTS he thinks are deserving of respect–in other words, which parts of the official government account does he still think are true! I would that thought that was apparent, when I listed the key elements of the official story and asked him which he thinks are true. I therefore repeat that request. Ken, which are true?
Ken, you seem to be suggesting that Craig would approve of someone arguing that the official story is wrong in ways for which there is no evidence. In your scenario, someone who maintained that towers blew up on 9/10 in Montana, not 9/11 in NY, would get greater respect from Craig, because he “rejects more of the official story.”
No, of course not, and you know it. Since there is no evidence that 9/11 actually took place on 9/10, a person claiming that is not a better truther. The better truther is the one, like Craig, who follows the evidence where it leads.
Yet there are those who would like to be considered truthers, who devote most of their time to proving how the official story is correct. One must wonder about their motivations.
Sheila,
That’s a great example of attacking a strawman. But for a realistic example, just consider Craig’s assigning “guilt” to Wayne in his comments above for Wayne’s presentations which reinforce (only) one aspect of the official story. There’s no need to argue ad absurdum when there are real, practical examples like this to draw from.
Peace,
Ken
Wayne reinforces only one aspect of the official story? He has defended numerous aspects unless you want to group them under the subject heading, “What happened with the plane at the Pentagon.” In fact, when have you seen him challenge the official story? He will mention Hanjour and three or four other things if you specifically ask him. But otherwise, not a word.
Craig,
You wrote: Wayne reinforces only one aspect of the official story? He has defended numerous aspects unless you want to group them under the subject heading, “What happened with the plane at the Pentagon.”
My reply: Of course I do. All of Wayne’s work you are referring to can be subsumed under this heading, that a large plae crashed at the Pentagon, which is, to repeat, only ONE aspect of the official story.
You wrote: In fact, when have you seen him challenge the official story? He will mention Hanjour and three or four other things if you specifically ask him. But otherwise, not a word.
My reply: Craig, none of us spends much time INTERNALLY doing that… because we take it for granted that one another share the same rejection of the official account. Do you suppose, for instance, that Wayne holds the belief that the WTC buildings collapsed due to fire? Why then would he ever have been invited to board of AE911Truth? That makes no sense! The official story is a many-splendored thing. On this one issue, you and Wayne take opposite sides, but on the rest, YOU AGREE! If you are serious about wanting to unify the Truth movement, you could start by always bearing in mind our common ground before focusing on our differences…
✌ Ken
Ken,
I must confess that I am feeling increasingly frustrated with your stance on this. Maybe I need to get away from the discussion for a while. But before I do…
To my question about how often you see Coste challenge the official story, you write:
Really? Internally we don’t spend time opposing the official story? That’s not my experience at all. I think it is much more disturbing when certain people focus exclusively on giving support to the official story over and over and over – internally and externally (I know, not ALL of the official story). You seem to think that as long as someone is on the record as not believing fires brought down the towers than they can endlessly push the official story elsewhere.
And then:
It would make no sense if I had even remotely suggest this. But I didn’t. So I struggle to figure out why you felt the need to make this point. You did the same on the 9/11 and Other Deep State Crimes list serve when you responded to this comment from me: “Wayne and the Chandler group rarely talk about the parts of the story they don’t think stand up to scrutiny, but they do focus exhaustively on the parts they do think fit the official story.”
And you responded:
All I can say to that is, yes, I know. I never said anything to the contrary.
Finally:
This really pissed me off. Focusing on our differences? The article is about coming together to focus on what we find false in the official story. That is what I am advocating. This is what I believe is an ideal way for us to set aside our differences. That’s what the whole article was about. Who is actually responsible for dividing the movement over the Pentagon? It’s not the majority who understand that the evidence does not support a large plane impact. Coste and a small group of others want us to toss a huge chunk of our best evidence in the garbage because they want to claim that wings and tail sections and engines can just disappear after an impact. And round exit holes can be made by some kind of “slurry” of jet fuel and plane slices. And so forth…
Ken, you are the one who tried to generalize from that one specific example (Craig being critical of Wayne’s campaign to sell us on a crash at the Pentagram with fanciful “evidence”) to a sweeping statement to Craig that “you hold a prejudice in favor of the person who most disagrees with the official story, and a very evident suspicion of those who hold a position that refutes less of the official story.”
When I point out how absurd your generalization is, you cry foul and scurry back to that one specific example of Wayne trying to shove a key part of the official story down our throats, despite no evidence.
Perhaps you should just admit that your generalization was a failed attempt to make Craig’s position look ridiculous.
Ken, I find your comment captures my own thinking, from the beginning to the end. As a member of the consensus panel, I can reflect on the differences between that setting, and this Truth and Shadows comments section. I would not think of proposing an iffy topic to the panel, for it would be a waist of every panel-member’s time. I think you say it well when you call it “settled” issues.
Ken,
Thank you for the challenge, but I think you have misunderstood the meaning of my article.
First of all, you have drawn a false and unfair equivalence between what I say and the statements by Coste, Jenkins, Chandler and the rest. You refer to my position as an “error” opposite (and equivalent?) to the problematic claims of the other side. You minimize their attempt to convince the movement that a consensus is forming behind their view by calling it “premature.” I call it dishonest since no such consensus exists in support of their claims.
I am describing people who defend the official story at every turn. Year after year. Paper after paper. PowerPoint after PowerPoint. They never seem to make presentations about how the official story (at least at the Pentagon) is wrong. They appear to have an agenda that does not involve advancing the Truth Movement.
I am also not pleased by the implication that the Truth Movement must sail past my error (and those of Chandler and company) to avoid running aground. I am trying to expose the counterproductive nature of the position this small group is taking and its seemingly tireless efforts to support essential elements of the official story. I don’t think that what I’ve said (as opposed to what has been misunderstood) is an error.
You write:
“It seems to me, Craig, as I read your interchanges with Wayne Coste, and indeed, your subheading to this article, that you hold a prejudice in favor of the person who most disagrees with the official story, and a very evident suspicion of those who hold a position that refutes less of the official story, or attempts to confirm any part of it.”
This is false. Nothing I have ever stated indicates that I prefer the most extreme claims that are furthest from the official story. I do become suspicious when a truther spends ALL THE TIME they devote to a particular aspect of 9/11 telling us why most of that part of the official story is true – particularly when this is not supported by the evidence. In this article, I have tried to argue that we as a movement must look at what is FALSE in the story and communicate this to the world. It’s about what we emphasize. Of course, some parts of the official story are true. It’s not about who claims more of the story is false, it’s about whether we focus on what’s false or whether we attempt instead to convince others – while failing to explain crucial physical evidence – that most of the story is true. That’s what these people are doing with respect to the Pentagon.
You write:
“It seems to me that your underlying hypothesis is this: the more parts of the official story we challenge, the better for the truth movement, and the more impact we’ll have on outsiders.”
No, I don’t agree that this is my hypothesis. Rather, it is this: The more attention we draw to the lies of the official story, the better for the truth movement…
As to the subhead. (“We must also resist those in our movement who want us to accept more and more of the official account”) This refers to the very people we are criticizing. I’m talking about those who continually seek to expand the amount of the official story that we all accept as being true. If they’ve got the goods, then so be it. But as you know from hearing my views in the past in two debates and many discussions, I am more than happy to explain WHY these people are wrong both in the evidence and in where they are putting their focus.
You write:
“It is ironic too, wouldn’t you say, that whilst your piece admonishes us to refrain from debating some of these matters in the interest of outreach, that this comments section is filled with such debate.”
Certainly, there is potential for irony if readers engage in fighting over the very issues that I recommend we not fight against. But I don’t think I ever said we should not debate the validity of our claims. I have done so hundreds of times! I am saying that we have to show the public that we have extremely strong evidence that contradicts the official story and proves it to be a web of lies.
Craig
Craig,
As my time is limited, and this imbroglio is taking up more and more of it, I am going to reply to only one part of your response which I think helps get to the crux of our disagreement.
You write: “I am also not pleased by the implication that the Truth Movement must sail past my error (and those of Chandler and company) to avoid running aground. I am trying to expose the counterproductive nature of the position this small group is taking and its seemingly tireless efforts to support essential elements of the official story. I don’t think that what I’ve said (as opposed to what has been misunderstood) is an error.”
it is obvious to me that we have entirely different understanding of the meaning of term “elements of the official story.” In my understanding of the term, your statement is false. But apparently you have a different definition in mind, so let’s explore that….it may be that we are dealing here with a semantic difference.
As I see it, the claim that a large plane crashed at the Pentagon is an element of the official story. Indeed, we could reasonably argue that it is a sub-element…that the “element” is that Flight 77, under the control of hijacker Hani Hanjour, crashed into the Pentagon, after a series of superlative avionic maneuvers. The Consensus Panel has broken off one sub-element of this, the Hani Hanjour part, and labeled it incredible. To my knowledge, none of these researchers you have named who advocate the large-plane hypothesis suggests that this plane was under the control of Hanjour, and indeed, all explicitly deny that this could have been the case. If I am mistaken here, I’m sure you’ll correct me. So in my view, these individuals are proposing that this one sub-element, the large-plane crash, be conceded to the official story, whilst explicitly denying other sub-elements. I am not aware that any of them has ever proposed adoption of any other elements of the official story, but your statement above suggests that they have. I am open to your proof of this.
Perhaps it would be useful, if time-consuming, to map out all the particular elements of the official story so that we can assess whether or not these particular researchers are truly “tirelessly seeking to support (other) essential elements” of it. I see no evidence of this, but again, am open to your documentation of such development.
Peace,
Ken
Ken,
Yes, the confusion is over semantics. I think you know what I mean by element. You’ve heard me repeat my position many, many times. You know where I stand, do you not? If you wish to excuse the relentless and often dishonest propaganda campaign of support for “this one sub-element” of the official story by these researchers, then I imagine there is little I can say that you will find persuasive.
Is it not true that this group has spent a huge amount of time in recent years on the Pentagon (the issue that Chander and Cole told the rest of us to abandon because it’s a dead end)? Have they not produced numerous “scholarly papers” on the subject totaling hundreds of pages? And is it not true that almost all of the material they have produced argues for the validity of hundreds of sub-elements (or sub-sub-elements) of the official story while almost none challenges the official story?
You call this “conceding a sub-element” of the official while explicitly denying others as if they just allow for a small part of the story. The Pentagon is a huge part of this deception because if we can show that a plane didn’t crash then we have proven that 9/11 was an inside job. This is why it is so important. But this crowd is using spin to manipulate the movement into thinking that they have won the argument already. They tell us that the very people who brought us controlled demolition have “turned their attention” to the Pentagon to show us why it really was the site of a plane crash, just like the government and media told us.
And what position on the evidence do they offer in support of their “impact” claim? The same one you’ll find in the 9/11 Commission Report and Popular Mechanics. And the fact that they toss in “Hani Hanjour didn’t fly the plane” does not make up for that.
Craig
Craig,
Whether these researchers believe a large plane impacted the Pentagon or not, so long as they maintain it could not have been Flight 77 under the control of Hani Hanjour, which in my observation they all explicitly do, then are still refuting the official story, even if not in the same way you do. An explicit rejection of the official story is no less such despite such permutations.
✌ Ken
Ken,
You keep arguing with points I am not making. What you are not getting is that these “researchers” claim to disbelieve parts of the Pentagon official story, and yet they almost never talk about what is wrong with the story. They just tell us in one goddamn BS paper after another about all the things in the official story that they want us to believe are true.
That’s what my article is stating. Don’t you see this?
What if someone claimed that everything about the official story is true except the names of the hijackers. Yes, they were Muslim terrorists assigned by Osama bin Laden, but the identities and national origins given by the FBI are not correct. Would that person be as much of an opponent of the official story as you? And if he spent all his time writing papers pushing the idea that these men were Muslim terrorists (once in a while throwing in that the identities aren’t correct), would you consider him to be a member of the 9/11 Truth Movement? Would you say this his rejection of the official story is “no less such” than yours or mine despite “such permutations”?
You are making excuses for this small group, and I do not understand why.
Craig, What I also do not understand is that, when the case against a Boeing 757(or any other large plane) having hit the Pentagon has been laid out in spades in multiple presentations that have been linked to this discussion (including “The Real Deal Ep #100 The 9/11 Crash Sites” and “The Real Deal Ep #205 Raising ‘The Smoke Curtain on the Pentagon’, which are detailed, through and meticulous–and leave no doubt about it!–we continued to hear babbling about “the plane at the Pentagon” when NO PLANE HIT THE PENTAGON! You have made the case well and that Ken continues to harp about a point long since settled only raises questions about him.
I find it troubling when anyone in the Truth Movement pushes that position.
Craig,
Which questions are you referring to that I address that you do not raise? You don’t mention any, so how can I reply to that assertion?
As to what you’ve written to me above, in reply to your hypothetical:
“What if someone claimed that everything about the official story is true except the names of the hijackers. Yes, they were Muslim terrorists assigned by Osama bin Laden, but the identities and national origins given by the FBI are not correct. Would that person be as much of an opponent of the official story as you? And if he spent all his time writing papers pushing the idea that these men were Muslim terrorists (once in a while throwing in that the identities aren’t correct), would you consider him to be a member of the 9/11 Truth Movement? Would you say this his rejection of the official story is “no less such” than yours or mine despite “such permutations”?”
I think you know that my answer is a flat “no.” And why would that be? Because the difference between such an individual’s claims and the ESSENCE of the government’s claims is trivial.
But you then go on to say, as if this example were somehow relevant:
“You are making excuses for this small group, and I do not understand why.”
This is an apples and oranges comparison. The individuals who we are considering here, who happen to support this Pentagon-large-plane hypothesis, ALSO hold to the consensus view of many other points of 9/11 Truth that are not trivially but PROFOUNDLY challenging to the government’s version. Here are just a few: That the WTC buildings were not brought down by planes or fires, but by controlled demolition. That whatever destroyed the Pentagon, it could not have been Flight 77 under the control of Hani Hanjour. We could add to this ALL of the other points agreed to by the Consensus Panel. Are differences with the official story such as these trivial? No, they mark those who profess them as members of the 9/11 truth movement, ipso facto. So if they wish to entertain a hypothesis that in SOME way agrees with the official story on some other particular matter, well, that’s their privilege. In my view, they have an uphill battle to persuade the 9/11 Truth community that their hypothesis is as scientific as they claim, but if it seems to them that the evidence best supports this conclusion, then what else are they to do but continue to argue it until either they succeed in convincing the rest of us, or are themselves convinced that some other hypothesis better fits the evidence?
And once more, as you do not seem to grasp this point, the reason they spend effort on this rather than on these other points where we all agree is because the latter are not considered controversial or questionable, by them OR the rest of the truth community, so what would be the point?
Peace,
Ken
Ken,
What I am saying is that you seem to be continually making the case that the researchers I’m talking about don’t believe the bulk of the official story. I never said they did. I get it. They subscribe to positions that are totally incompatible with the official story. This does not mean they are not doing real damage to our efforts in how they seek to create doubt about some of our best and most important evidence. They use weak arguments that the perpetrators must be delighted to hear us having to deal with.
I have failed in multiple attempts to explain my position to you. Perhaps this is my fault; perhaps it is yours. I thought you had heard me make my case enough times that you would understand the thrust of it and why I object to those who take a key part of the 9/11 event and push point after point of the official story. Yes, that’s what they are doing. The fact that they endorse controlled demolition is no consolation whatsoever. David Chandler’s presentation was almost entirely comprised of support for points in the official narrative. He made a brief mention of the plane being remote controlled but then went right back to telling us about how the plane engine trimmed a tree.
You conclude your comment with the very point that I am objecting to most strenuously.
You write:
What else are they to do but continue to argue it? Yes, indeed, this is what they will do. Forever. They will never vary from this position. And some who don’t pay attention will drift to their position because they are impressed by name recognition and truther “celebrities” and claims about “the scientific method.” They are producing spin and manipulation. They will never be convinced of a different opinion. We have a decade of experience to tell us this. I am suggesting that some people are doing this not to advocate for a genuinely held position that they think will help our cause but rather to damage the movement. They’ve already had some successes with this.
You don’t seem to see that when a truther spends all their time arguing for points in the Pentagon official story and virtually none opposing it, then we have a problem. You seem to be sure that everyone’s motives are pure. I am not.
The individuals who planned, carried out and “got away with” the 9/11 false flag, the greatest criminal lie of the 21st century, have been fully operational since 2001, and only God knows the full measure of harm they’ve continued inflicting on innocent men, women and children around the Earth.
Remember this when dealing with the frustration, disappointment and anguish over the continuing concealment of this massively important event – and while searching for inspiration to powerfully persist in the battle to expose the truth.
Peace.
re: “only God knows the full measure of harm they’ve continued inflicting on innocent men, women and children around the Earth.” What God is that who knows?
Excellent point.
It only takes one significant 911 incident to be proven to be an intentional lie for the whole official story to be discredited. Tho “logic” of the official story is contingent on everything being interconnected. If the crash in Shanksville is bogus, it destroys the whole media propaganda, and shows a plan of deceit from hour 1. If the 19 were never on board, same thing. Pick any of dozens of lies, prove they are lies, and the whole thing falls apart.
Dale, I agree with you. False in part, false in whole. Notice, by the way, that A&E911 has harped on Building 7 for years and years and years. How many converts to 9/11 Truth have they made?
Let 1,000 flowers bloom. Each of us should do what we can in pursuit of 9/11 Truth and hope we or our colleagues will somehow, against all odds, breakthrough the mainstream 9/11 cover up!
Is it realistic to suppose that some government dude, party of , will ever stand up and say “Yes we did it.?……The entire military would be thrown into total havoc, even, if to a man, they believed wanted to believe…… comrades have been lost, maimed, mentally destroyed ,…. which amounts t the same in vain……
Is it realistic to suppose thise clutching the purse strings would allow this admission of compliance in all the perverse events designed, executed to fool persuade the great unwitting that they are under threat 24/7 by terrorists since that draconian September charade…?
Thinking about it…..It is not thought so…..
I’ve had horrible luck convincing friends and online acquaintances to even question 9/11. On another mostly music forum where I have been active for years and am known for my konspiracy kookiness, in a silly thread about trading one member for another I wrote this entry:
“I’d happily trade the lot of you for just one BCBer, just one motherfucker here who agreed with me that 9/11 was an inside job. In a realm where uncanny anomalies are my stock and trade, that BCB has only one truther, yours truly, this is another goddamn anomaly.”
One kind member responded:
“If it’s any consolation, of all the nutty conspiracy theories, 9/11 is one I’d most tend to believe. I haven’t studied it, I must confess, but I was suspicious of it the second I heard about it that morning.”
Hadn’t studied it??? After all the videos and articles McKee’s I’d posted? Good grief.
I’ve had the same experiences. It seems there is a rather large group who really doesn’t care about things unless something happens to them or someone they know personally.
Sheeple.
Falsehoods have been introduced to aid the obstruction of justice by diverting public attention from the many conclusive lines of evidence establishing that 9-11 was a false-flag terrorist operation involving bombs and thermite demolition devices the twin towers and bombs and air-to-ground missile at the Pentagon where the Boeing that came over the Naval Annex and passed north of the gas station towards the Pentagon was not the plane that, passing south of the gas station and the Annex, knocked down some street lamp poles and blew down others, striking a truck and breaking through a chain link fence. Also, after the main crash event there was a second air-to-ground missile which struck the same west wall of the Pentagon but further south, which attack was actually captured on video by a witness in a car who had a camera and was filming after the first event. AGAINST THESE FACTS WE HAVE HAD LOTS OF FALSE THEORIES, NOTABLY THE NO-PLANES-HIT-THE-WTC-TOWERS HOAX HATCHED BY KARL ROVE AND TED OLSEN AT THE WHITE HOUSE WHICH SENT MORGAN REYNOLDS TO JIM FETZER, GERARD HOLMGREN, ROSALEE GRABLE, NICO HAUPT, JOHN LEAR AND EVENTUALLY A HUNDRED OTHERS ARGUING THAT NO PLANES HIT THE WTC AND BEING VERY ABUSIVE AND OFFENSIVE. JAMES FETZER LURED DR. STEVEN JONES, WHO FIRST DISCOVERED THERMITE IN GROUND ZERO DUST AND WHO POINTED OUT THAT IT WAS MOLTEN STEEL THAT CASCADED DOWN FROM THE SOUTH TOWER MINUTES PRIOR TO THE CONTROLLED COLLAPSE OF THAT BUILDING – MOLTEN STEEL EXPLAINED BY THERMITE AND NOT BY JET KEROSENE FUEL, WHICH BY THAT TIME HAD ALL BEEN CONSUMED. FETZER TRICKED JONES INTO FORMING “SCHOLARS FOR 9-11 TRUTH” BUT THEN ALMOST IMMEDIATELY FETZER BEGAN GIVING CREDENCE TO AND SHOWCASING THE NO-PLANES-HIT-THE-WTC JUSTICE-OBSTRUCTION TEAM OF REYNOLDS, HOLMGREN, BAKER, LEAR, GRABLE AND THE OTHERS — DIVERTING FOCUS FROM THE PLANES AND FROM THE THERMITE FINDINGS. FETZER ALSO SHOWCASED JUDY WOOD WITH HER DISINFORMATION STORY THAT THERMITE WAS NOT USED BUT THAT ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE BEAMS WERE USED TO “DUSTIFY” THE TOWERS. FETZER ALSO BROUGHT IN THOSE WHO SAID THE BUIDLINGS WERE BROUGHT DOWN BY “NUKES” AND EVEN, ABSURDLY, BY “NEUTRON BOMBS”. Rove and Olsen knew that if they could put crazy theories in the mix that it would then be easier to discredit the real evidence proving what happened at the Pentagon and the WTC. They succeeded. Fetzer called for me to be blacklisted — I was one of the investigating citizens who convinced David Ray Griffen that the Pentagon event did not happen as reported, him mentioning the photo and witnesses evidence I assembled in his book 9-11 The New Pearl Harbor. So when I pointed out the truth about the no-planes-hit-the-WTC operation Fetzer said much as Craig McKee is saying here, that I was divisive and that we should not criticize each other. Meanwhile the no-planes-hit-the-WTC had hundreds of Youtubes and lots of new lists — and Thomas J Mattingly, doubtless linked with Rove and Olsen, got Fetzer and Reynolds on Fox News and before the National Press Club. This is history that no one is telling. Galen Denzen, Anthony Lawson and many others who went up against the no-planes-hit-the-WTC disinformation are dead now. And by the way, I presented information to the Commission via email and snail mail, but none of it got to the reviewers because Al Falzenberg, Deputy for Communications of the 9-11 Commission .gov directed my findings to investigators of risks to national security and not to the commission for examination. Meanwhile everyone had been sending money to Mike Ruppert who early positioned himself as the leader of 9-11 investigators — and he personally was behind the move to exclude me from all 9-11 conferences, as Carol Brouillet told me — but when the Commission convened Mike Ruppert left the country to get paid big money delivering talks on Big Oil — he was a false champion — and when I said so he threatened to sue me — which I welcomed, but he forgot about. No one wants to sue a man who has the facts, has the evidence and can tell the truth. All you can do with people like me is marginalize us. And so you have never heard of me and therefore you can ignore what I say.
“So when I pointed out the truth about the no-planes-hit-the-WTC operation Fetzer said much as Craig McKee is saying here, that I was divisive and that we should not criticize each other.”
Dick, when did I ever indicate that we should not criticize each other? I think you have misunderstood my point. Or I have misunderstood yours. I just think we should focus on what’s wrong in the official story. Also, where can I see the video you say was shot from a car of a second air-to-ground missile?
This is loopy but a perfect example of efforts to splinter the 9/11 Truth movement. At the time I founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, I did not know the work of Steve Jones, but invited him to be my co-chair at the suggestion of David Ray Griffin. I most certainly did not believe that none of the official 9/11 airplanes had not crashed. I resisted the very idea for more than 1 1/2 years.
Morgan and Judy badgered me to look at the evidence for over 18 months, when I finally took a good look at (what was supposed to be) Flight 175 entering the South Tower. When I reviewed the structure of the building, I discovered that it was physically impossible for any real plane to have passed through the external steel covering. It would have crumpled external to the tower.
I have explained the proof that Flight 93 did not crash in Shanksville; that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon; and that neither Flight 11 nor Flight 175 hit the North or South Towers, respectively. Pilots have proven that Flight 93 was over Champaign-Urbana after it allegedly crashed; and that Flight 175 was over Harrisburg and Pittsburgh long after it supposedly hit the South Tower.
I obtained FAA Registration records showing that the planes used for Flights 93 and 175 were not deregistered (formally taken out of service) until 28 September 2005. So Olddickeastman needs to explain how planes that crashed in Shanksville or hit the South Tower were still in the air four years later. We have had this exchange before. He has lost his way. Further proof:
“The Real Deal Ep #100 The 9/11 Crash Sites with Major General Albert Stubblebine”
https://www.und.edu/org/jfkconference/UNDchapter30.pdf
If he wants to challenge the conclusions that none of the four 9/11 aircraft actually crashed on 9/11, then he should explain what we have wrong and how he knows. It has become a huge waste of time to deal with him, because he is not responsive to logic or evidence. He is a prime example of why the 9/11 Truth movement has been undermined by some of its own supporters.
“Hannity & Colmes” originally featured me in late June 2006, just before I presented the keynote address for The American Scholars Conference hosted by Alex Jones. I knew no plane had hit the Pentagon, where I introduced Norman Mineta’s testimony during the show, and that no plane had crashed in Shanksville, but at the time I still believed real planes had hit the Twin Towers.
Here’s my first appearance on “Hannity & Colmes”, where Ollie North was subbing for Hannity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on2AAxW8w40
Here’s the second, where Sean was back in the saddle but I got Mineta’s story out once again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGWYyKNTPEc
Since I was adamantly opposed to (what I then regarded as a fantasy) the idea that Flight 11 and Flight 175 had not hit the North and South Towers, respectively, Olddickeastman’s account is a complete fabrication. I don’t know what to say about him, except that he seems obsessed with his own conclusions and wholly unwilling to address new evidence or alternative hypotheses.
Ok ok dude….GodamnHotPotata …..”Sorry folks yup we did it as we love America” …..the campaign for truth an overwhelming resounding success………Now What fer crissakes….!?
Is it seen as such a stupid question by all and sundry, what is supposed to happen when, despite being highly unlikely, some government dude stands up to admit 9/11 was home grown?
What will world- wide repercussions be?
Will the world be a better place? can all the war crimes, the distress, the devastation, the displacement of people’s be resolved. Can the destruction caused by the event; the numerous false flags since, reconcile the lot of those affected, those being affected, about to be affected with realisation of the, “Truth” ….!?
Why, it is wondered, not one of you, good well intending people, seemingly, can calmly consider the outcome of what is seen as your rightful indignation at an authority in effect insulting your intelligence with the….. “Official Narrative” of the NY event of eleventh of September 2001.
The contents of Pandora’s box, it may be postulated, will pale into insignificance compared to the outcome of the “Truth”…. How can the world ever hope to heal, post events of last seventeen years, that juggernaut careering ever onward into despair, desolation, slough of despond…!? ..
The unrestrained insanity of the anger, its repercussion at the insidious admission of, “Truth” by authority ….the mind boggles… the like of which, it is posited, will never have been witnessed before in this world.
This man is not suggesting you good people desist from your research, hypothesising, theorising, but he is asking , have/has anyone of you considered the rabid vengeance that would be unleashed through the success of your campaign for the “Truth”…..what then friends!?
Writer: International school master, IGCSE, Geography/Environmental Management/ English.
Paul Craig Roberts often uses the word ‘insouciant’ to describe the American people. In more plain language ‘they don’t care; they are indifferent.” Now let us assume that insouciance is an apt summary word, accurately describing an important part of the cultural situation. Some might also throw in “gullible”, as in easily conned, and also, “massively manipulated from birth”, thus explaining some of the insouciance and gullibility as a form of victimization.
It is also commonplace, especially outside of the United States, to marvel over the sheer ignorance of much of the American people. It is not hard to find goodhearted Americans who will earnestly sign a petition to protest the Canadian ‘practise’ of placing old and nearly expired Canadians onto ice floes, the cultural practise depicted to the tearful petition signer as an inexpensive and thus economically viable but rather heartless and chilly denoument to life, or, say, to protest the grisly annual rhinocerous hunt in Canada. Or to want to bomb some other country into the stone age, based on extreme scant knowledge. Some outside the United States marvel at the near 1000 military bases that the US has around the planet, while maintaining at home a larger prison population than China and India combined, and boasting world class numbers – tens of millions – who are anti-depressant reliant.
This take on the American cultural situation – an insouciant, conned, gullible, manipulated people – who blindly do war abroad and blindly do police state at home, and get depressed a lot – introduces us at least in part to those the ‘9/11 truth movement’ are trying to reach. Actually, a lot of them have been reached, and don’t want to know, or are indifferent, or assign such events to necessity and inevitability, or are way to busy with their life to further ponder such weighty questions.
So here are two answers to a question implied in the headline of this piece: (what is the best strategy for the 9/11 truth movement?)
In terms that a high tech coach potato warrior society can understand, secure the most important truths; build beachheads of sound priority information; resolutely point out the important weaknesses of the enemy, IN EVERY DIRECTION, on every issue of importance. In other words, it is not 9/11 truth that will save us, but a more general and considerate and gutsy honesty. Without the latter, 9/11 truth, at least that part of it that isn’t part of the con, even if gloriously accomplished, will always be just a vulnerable candle in the stifling foul breezes of dishonesty normalized, including regular hurricanes of BS.
The second answer is to stoke the fires of skepticism, of incredulity, of an astute adulthood worthy of the title, to arm people against being a sucker for every petiton and con, for not swallowing every new variation of tainted geo-political bait, and so on. Again, this is a large project, ongoing, never ending. But it is promising.
Is it seen as such a stupid question by all and sundry, what is supposed to happen when, despite being highly unlikely, some government dude stands up to admit 9/11 was home grown?
What will world- wide repercussions be?
Will the world be a better place? can all the war crimes, the distress, the devastation, the displacement of people’s be resolved. Can the destruction caused by the event; the numerous false flags since, reconcile the lot of those affected, those being affected, about to be affected with realisation of the, “Truth” ….!?
Why, it is wondered, not one of you good, well intending people, seemingly, can calmly consider the outcome of what is seen as your rightful indignation at an authority in effect insulting your intelligence with the….. “Official Narrative” of the NY event of eleventh of September 2001.
The contents of Pandora’s box, it may be postulated, will pale into insignificance compared to the outcome of the “Truth”…. How can the world ever hope to heal, post events of last seventeen years, that juggernaut careering ever onward into despair, desolation, slough of despond…!? ..
The unrestrained insanity of the anger, its repercussion at the insidious admission of, “Truth” by authority ….the mind boggles… the like of which, it is posited, will never have been witnessed before in this world.
This man is not suggesting you good people desist from your research, hypothesising, theorising, but he is asking , have/has anyone of you considered the rabid vengeance that would be unleashed through the success of your campaign for the “Truth”…..what then friends!?
Writer: International school master, IGCSE, Geography/Environmental Management/ English.
REPLY
Ok hot potata they admit it was all a scam. The campaign for truth successful, now what ……L
Right on brother….. godamn hot potata…..so they say “yup it was all a scam folks we did it because we love America” …..the campaign for truth a resounding success……Now What …,?
As it’s name suggests, the success of a ‘belief system’, whether of a state, a church, a corporation, military or an empire, heavily depends on its ability to control the minds and realities of their members and/or subjects.
In the US, the programming of minds has been developed in to a science, and vast resources have been allocated to information gathering, perception management, (mal)education, propaganda and social engineering, which are relentlessly administered on to the citizens from cradle to grave. One could easily argue that the US, geographically isolated from the (old) world, provided a perfect cave for its immigrant human resources willing to work hard with no intention to ever leave this bountiful and “free” land. In the 20th century, as technology developed, the walls of the cave showed richer and more realistic images instead of shadows, and this modern day wall was addictively entertaining.
In regards to 9/11, with the exception of English speaking nations like Canada, Australia, UK and commonwealth who enjoy a heavy daily dose of US propaganda, people in the rest of the world who care to, or can afford to think about these things already know with a great deal of certainty what the big picture is, who (in the big sense) perpetrated the “attack”, why, and to what end. Even if they might not know, or even need to know about Citgo station, how wide the hole was, the angle of the clipped light post, or how hot kerosene burns. Yes, it is that darn obvious to most anyone with eyes to see that these towers came down because of something other than a plane crashing in to them. And that obvious to see that it was a false flag.
The sad irony is that those very same people in the world can not manage to come to terms with the fact that their own governments, like most governments of the world sophisticated enough to observe and investigate such an event are also either a party to the conspiracy, or simply complicit by virtue of being silent about it either out of fear, or mutual benefit, or for blackmailing purposes.
Truth seems to be guarded, hidden, distorted, disguised by all for many different reasons. Like the layers of an onion, a different narrative is built and fed to the masses, the involved, the enquiring minds, the governments, the media, the ‘truther’ respectively. As it is often mentioned here and anywhere where critical thinking is exercised, the JFK assassination and the success of its perpetual cover up in the following five and a half decades, clearly demonstrates the efficiency and the sophistication of the scientific and military methods developed to ensure, at any cost, that truth won’t come out until it no longer matters, and until both the perpetrators and the ‘truth seekers’ are long gone and all incriminating evidence and possible whistle blowers are eliminated. This seems to be around 40-50 years at best, or ‘never’ at worst… Sadly, all indications are pointing to the latter in the case of 9/11, in spite of the fact that there is a growing internet generation who have no problem believing that there was a conspiracy, but they will have no power to expose or prove anything. Not to mention that this new generation will most certainly have their own 9/11 to deal with and investigate, whatever horrible lie that one might be, during which they will be subjected to the same deception and cover up tactics that will cause the splintering, the infighting and the like.
With the passing of time, the changing of mindsets, as predictable as the four seasons, what happended , “that” day Could well become acceptable to the masses, as the cause justifies the means….
True Mud. r, and there are probably millions of people who believe this. Getting into any truth can look like and even be a deep dark hole that takes a lot of work and soul searching to get through. Until these people have become curious enough or brave enough, or whatever, to take the plunge, I don’t know that any amount of prodding or pushing will get them there. Usually, pushing causes resistance and that’s why I don’t push anymore.
Nobody out there seems capable of addressing…. the unlikely event…. of some Administrative government official coming out to say:
“Yes everyone of you who has/have been questioning the Official narrative. over the past seventeen years….for narrative it be….the speculation is officially over. We the government of the United States of America , along with other interested parties, perpetrated the, “New Pearl Harbour”, of September the eleventh 2001…….
Perpetrated as it was for reasons pertaining to the credible survival of the United States of America its future agenda as a dominant world power in the ascendancy of others bent on similar pursuits.
“Ok, Now What?”………..
This is sort of what I’ve been wondering about. Even if we were to get 90% of the population to see the truth, then what? Of course, it’s very unlikely that the government will come out and say what really happened and why and prosecute the actual perpetrators. But then, who knows? Maybe once all of the JFK assassination perpetrators have died, the government will release the truth embargo on that subject. I’m just not sure what we can reasonably expect to happen after a majority of the population knows that the government has lied to us for the millionth time.
What would happen if everyone knew the close-door buttons in elevators are dummies and don’t work? What would happen if everyone knew Columbus did not really discover America? What would happen if everyone knew they can be listened to or watched by the CIA? What would happen if the Pope came out and confessed Mary was not a virgin? What would happen if he said there is no God?
Short Answer: Nothing in the long run!
Humans are humans… They will always settle into the same social formation. Many led and controlled by a few, preferring safety and survival to freedom, willing to buy in to lies and dogmas in return for peace of mind.
As long as the close-door buttons are there, humans shall press them. And those who know, those who think, those seeking the truth shall watch them do it… Over and over again… For eternity! (or extinction, whichever comes first)
Well, if they were being completely truthful they would admit that Israel is the main beneficiary of the war on terror.
Thank you, Mr / Ms, Speculator 247 but seemingly your man’s point be missed!….. What do we expect to happen?….following the “unlikely event” of the admission of guilt, that many have been hankering after for seventeen years now. For this man, ……actually since “doing the web sites” of the incident from 2010……. that date being the stimulator after the walk out on Ahmadinejad at the UN Assembly where the ex iranian President posited three scenarios: The Official Account!…. they knew and let it happen!…. they did! it…. Prior to given date then mere curiosity caused the thought, how could the “pilots” have navigated from Boston to New York, with transponders shut down?. being the flame that lit the fuse for this man……….
Craig wrote:
“I also appreciate the approach taken by Massimo Mazzucco in September 11: The New Pearl Harbor in which he looks at flaws in the official story, then the counter arguments by the debunkers, and finally at questions the debunkers must be able to answer about those arguments.”
Massimo’s approach is absolutely right. I am flabbergasted when debunkers/adherents of the official story accuse truthers of lacking critical thinking and cherry picking facts to back up out point of view. A classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. What these people fail to realize is that many of us initially believed the official story. We’ve seen 9/11 from both sides of the fence and were open minded enough to look at evidence and question our preconceived notions.
Ironically, truthers tend to be more familiar with the official story than those who still believe it. The closer you look the more preposterous it becomes.
This is an irony that I have mentioned quite often to people. Those who defend the official story often don’t even know what they are defending.
Indeed. There are doubtless many people who still think that Bin Laden was behind 9/11 (even though the FBI has since stated there isn’t enough evidence) and that planes brought down the twin towers (NIST claims it was fire).
Same applies regarding the Pentagon. Someone asked me if I “BELIEVE” if there were actual planes on 9/11. I said the following & hope this is helpful. –
“I believe on focusing on the obvious like we all should. We’ll all find out at the end anyway about the intricate details. Truth is neither speculation nor opinion. There are plenty of facts that we can all run with…”
“We must face the fact — not waste any more time micro-analyzing the evidence. That’s exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you. They’ll keep you very, very busy and eventually, they’ll wear you down.”
– Vincent J. Salandria to Gaeton Fonzi, 1975
Expose the 9/11 Cover up, and we will expose the MSM’s complicity simultaneously! – A small cabal has complete control of the population’s minds. It’s only a matter of time that we won’t be able to do anything about it. – Help us expose the 9/11 false flag & Humanity Wins… – Banner Up!
Facebook.com/groups/911AwarenessProfilePics
“I believe on focusing on the obvious like we all should. We’ll all find out at the end anyway about the intricate details. Truth is neither speculation nor opinion. There are plenty of facts that we can all run with…” But who, precisely, is going to sort out the “intricate details” if not us? the government? the military? the CIA? the Mossad? They brought us 9/11 and most certainly the perps are not going to spend time sorting things out. The truth is not going to emerge on its own.
Your response to a straightforward question no doubt left the asking party in doubt not just about your knowledge and competence with regard to 9/11 but about the point of the whole movement. I recommend that, if you are asked again, you state that the weight of the evidence suggests none of the alleged 9/11 aircraft actually crashed on 9/11 and that s/he watch “The Real Deal: Ep #100 The 9/11 Crash Sites” with Major General Albert Stubblebine to see the evidence.
To me, it’s simple: If flight 77 really had hit the Pentagon they would have shown us proper video of the impact. Why pass up that golden opportunity to discredit the Truth movement? Remember George Bush’s words “Let us not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories.” No George, let’s encourage them by concealing evidence.
That evidence will be concealed forever.
The Propaganda Team (Chandler, Jenkins, Hoffman and co.) insist that the perps are waiting until the moment that the truth movement becomes mega-viral, i.e. MILLIONS of people in the streets in every city, holding large signs saying, “Show us the videos of the 9/11 Pentagon event!” THEN the perps will “undoubtedly” release a color, hi-res video (perhaps the USDOT I-395 camera) showing the plane hitting the Pentagon…. AND… such a release would put the ultimate fork in the movement’s credibility, thereby negating all the excellent AE WTC work. And because it still might be another decade or half-century before the perps release such a video, we must not set ourselves up for the embarrassing fall, and should therefore assert that Flight 77 did hit the Pentagon. And, by extension, that all the NoC witnesses are mistaken/lying, and that Lloyde England’s account is true.
VOMIT!!!!!!!!
I think that physical impulse is entirely appropriate.
As I sit here with my “morning” coffee (even though it’s high noon on the left coast), I’d like to share a thought I had while running around town yesterday doing my errands.
To bring up Bernie Sanders’ name again, and tie it in with our 9/11 truth cause:
I did indeed find it disappointing that he endorsed Hillary in the general election, after conceding the nomination. I would have MUCH preferred had he called out the DNC’s corruption after the first WikiLeaks revelation about the rigging of the primary. I think if he had not only called it out, but then ran as an independent, perhaps with Jill Stein as his veep, it might have served as further rocket fuel for the popular progressive revolution, and that his candidacy would wipe out both parties like Ventura did at the governor level in Minnesota in 1998.
But Bernie, being a shrewd politician, decided that his chess move would be to endorse Hillary in the name of defeating what he (and I, frankly) perceived as a far greater evil: a Trump presidency.
I was deeply disappointed by his move. But I don’t then make the leap to saying that he’s trash, BS, or a sellout. Even though, admittedly, it was something of a sellout to endorse HRC. It was his chess move, and ultimately I think it dampened the fire somewhat, rather than further igniting it via “unity.”
The parallel that came to me when I was hopping around Seattle yesterday has to do with David Ray Griffin and the Pentagon. Like Sanders, Griffin is a shrewd politician, intra-movement, who makes moves on the chessboard. And I was deeply disappointed in 2011 when he didn’t specifically endorse the Propaganda Team, but did in fact bend over backwards to appease it and insist that the Pentagon brouhaha within the movement was just a question of heated, yet honest, differences of opinion among a cast of entirely well-meaning researchers. And that we should “unite” against the Pentagon’s “Hillary Clinton” of evidence: that it wasn’t flight 77 under Hanjour’s control that hit the Pentagon. (In other words, the tepid position.)
Much as I wish Sanders’ chess move after the primary had been different, I also wished that DRG would, instead of being polite to the Propaganda Team, have raised aloud the hot button issue of whether these folks are cognitive infiltrators posing as 9/11 truthers. But, like Bernie in his worry about “splitting” the progressive vote, Griffin didn’t want to contribute to what he felt was a “split” in the movement.
I think it’s disappointing because those of us who were on the front lines of the Pentagon infowar for much of the past decade, particularly in the comments section at 9/11 Blogger from 2008-2011, know how crafty and duplicitous the Propaganda Team really is. I’m sure a few of us on here remember when Vic Ashley, when speaking of Roosevelt’s testimony about the plane flying away, said in a comment at 9/11 Blogger that Roosevelt was clearly describing the C-130, when in fact Roosevelt said it was a “commercial aircraft” with “jet engines.” This was clearly duplicity on Vic’s part (clearly aimed at people who couldn’t find the time to watch CIT’s material for themselves, but instead take the shortcut and skim the comments of their favorite blog to see what others are saying) and not some innocent “difference of opinion.”
We might also remember 911B moderator Loose Nuke (Erik Larson) trying to spin away Lloyde England’s ‘virtual confession’ as innocuous, in what is surely the Pentagon equivalent of when ‘debunkers’ try to spin Silverstein’s testimony to mean “pulling firefighters from the building.”
In the cases of both Sanders and Griffin, I was disappointed, but not to the point of condemning them as sell-outs or frauds.
Regarding Bernie’s foreign policy: granted, I don’t have the same enthusiasm as I do for his domestic policy. But when he said during the primary that Israel’s response to Hamas was “disproportionate,” he was going further than virtually any other U.S. politician dares. Bernie is Jewish. He was around before WWII. He had relatives who perished in the concentration camps. He must clearly have some cognitive dissonance on the issue of Jews and Israel. He is one of millions whose mind has been conditioned, over the generations, to believe Israel is a force of good, a necessary homeland to escape to in light of the six million who were gassed, soaped and lampshaded.
Going back to the 9/11 Pentagon Propaganda Team. I don’t think that Chandler is a cognitive infiltrator posing as a truther. (A courtesy I can’t extend to Jim Hoffman, Frank Legge and a host of others.) His work on the WTC is the kind of work the perps would not want to see being publicly viewable on the internet. I think that a combination of cognitive dissonance, plus a negative encounter with one of the CIT guys (or close supporters), sadly duped him into taking his position on the Pentagon. He has the same cognitive dissonance on this issue that Jon Gold does with controlled demolition – that even if true, it looks/sounds crazy and turns the public off. (Which is admittedly rather bizarre – he believes, correctly, that the world’s largest controlled demolition in history was a covert, clandestine one and that no one who set it up has come forward… yet light poles being planted on the PentaGrass is too far-fetched.) Bernie thinks too harsh a criticism of Israel will look anti-Jewish, even if it isn’t really; Chandler thinks that asserting a plane flew over the Pentagon (even if correct) rather than into it will make us look like stereotypical conspiracy theorists. (But I think with Chandler the dissonance, combined with personal friendships on the West Coast with people like Jim Hoffman, have caused him to actually believe the plane impacted.)
Of course, my loveseat analysis here (I’m not sitting in an armchair) regarding cognitive dissonance, strategy and chess moves is an analysis that excludes the scenario of any of these people having been given a “talking to” (or worse) behind the scenes, i.e. threats. I realize that this, of course, is a very likely potential ingredient as well.
To affirm my agreement with most of what Adam has written here, I too have been disillusioned with DRG’s reticence about the Pentagon, where there really isn’t a lot of room for doubt about it. See, for example, “Reflections on the Pentagon: A Photographic Review” by Dennis Cimino at http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2015/09/reflections-on-pentagon-911.html
During a recent exchange with David and Elizabeth Woodward, who favor (or are attempting) a consensus approach (which reduces to the lowest common denominator), I observed that they have been unable to agree that the official account of the Pentagon (which has the plane flying at over 500 mph barely skimming the ground cannot possibly be correct.
The violation of the laws of physics and of engineering used to matter to David, but he and she are able to suspend their reason in the face of violations of the laws of aerodynamics! So much for consensus! I do think Adam needs to review the bidding on the Holocaust, however, which cannot have occurred as we have been told. Check out, “The Holocaust Narrative: Politics trumps Science”, at jamesfetzer.blogspot.com. But I like all the rest of this.
I used the words “gassed, soaped and lampshaded” for a reason, which was to inject verbal irony. I’ve been aware of revisionism for a long time now; it’s been about a decade since I first watched David Cole’s tour of Auschwitz and interview with the guide and curator.
Is Grand Central Station the next “terrorist” target?
It is interesting to note that 3 months before 9/11 the WTC complex was privatized – and we know what happened.
Yesterday it was announced that the MTA is considering the privatization of Grand Central Station.
Is it just coincidence that in 3 months the University of Alaska at Fairbanks is scheduled to release a two year comprehensive computer simulation showing that the collapse WTC #7 was not the result of fires or collateral effects but a planned, controlled demolition?
In today’s informed climate of opinion no one believes in “coincidence”.
Craig, I still don’t think a large plane hit from SOC path or flew over from NOC path. I think several other possibilities exist.
I’m curious why you state this “The plane, we’re told, went through three rings of the building and emerged through a hole in the wall of the C ring” which furthers the notion some have that it had to penetrate two E walls, two D walls and two C walls when actually the first and second floors were continuous rooms with only drywall framing divisions from E to the C wall.
I don’t think it furthers that notion at all. It’s a fact that the plane is supposed to have penetrated through three rings of the building.
On your first point, I don’t think there are “several other possibilities.”
extremely well done article, Craig. Thanks.
Thanks, Dan!
Agree with every single word you say in this article, Craig. Thank you. Unfortunately, I do tend to alienate listeners because I’m too in-their-faces about it. It’s wise advice to follow a particular path. Start with the less confronting information first and then proceed.
Yes, and if they won’t listen to the less confronting info, then it’s a waste of time to go on to anything else.