Moonwalking To Oblivion Without A Billionaire Sponsor: What's A Blogger To Do?

The early death of Michael Jackson has triggered some powerful memories, very few of which have anything to do with Jackson or his sudden demise. Nonetheless, let me take you back 25 years...

In the summer of 1984, Michael Jackson was on his "Victory Tour", moonwalking his way through cuts from "Thriller" in his first public performances after he "set his hair on fire for Pepsi" in late January of that year.

I had spent the early months of '84 trying to piece together the remnants of a jazzy-punky rock band which had finally gelled after months of preparation, played a fantastic set on New Year's Eve, and then imploded -- in my own living room, on the same weekend when Michael's hair was burning.

In our case, the fragments which were not mortally wounded in the implosion eventually reunited, wrote some new material, and played in public together again just a few times before a second implosion. And one of those performances fell on a hot and humid Saturday night almost exactly 25 years ago, a night when Michael Jackson was in town.

Were we crazy to play opposite such a huge concert? Not at all. None of the people who went to see Michael Jackson could be bothered with us, and none of the people who came to see us could be bothered with moonwalking or "Thriller" or any of the other very popular, totally inane artefacts of the little dude who somehow became "The King of Pop".

Forgive me if a bit of disrespect is showing. I will not for a moment deny that Michael Jackson was a fantastic singer, especially as a youngster, or that we would have been very lucky to have such a talented vocalist in our band.

On the other hand, I remain convinced that we made a good move by scheduling a gig when his fans were elsewhere. Our music was direct and honest, often too raw but never too polished, not commercially marketed or even amenable to such treatment. Michael could not have said this of his material, in 1984 or at any stage of his long and very successful career.

We once wrote a song that (among other things) made fun of him. But he never mentioned us. So there's another point of asymmetry.

On the Monday morning after our simultaneous concerts, while I was returning the PA gear we'd rented from a local music store, I heard this on the radio: Scalpers had been getting more for a pair of tickets to see Michael Jackson than it cost us to stage our entire show.

He drew about a hundred thousand fans. We might have drawn a hundred. And we didn't even play well that night. I remember being disappointed about that.

But on the other hand, the people who came to see us that night, the people who came to hear us, the people who came with their eyes and ears open ... they got something they couldn't have found on the Victory Tour, or anywhere else, for that matter. Some of them still talk about that show -- in complimentary terms! It wouldn't have mattered whether we played well or not. What we were doing -- what we were trying to do -- appealed to a few people, maybe one in a thousand, maybe less. But it touched them in a much deeper way than the "King of Pop" -- or anything "pop" -- could have done.

There's a lesson in all this, or a moral to the story, and I'm still not sure what it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it helps to explain why my blog readership never seems to grow, no matter how much or how well I write; neither does it seem to shrink, no matter how rarely I post and no matter what I choose to write about.

What you get here is direct and honest, often too raw but never too polished, not commercially marketed or even amenable to such treatment. It's no wonder so few people are interested. But you can't get it -- or anything similar -- anywhere else.

Maybe it's no big deal, but I got thinking of all this when I heard of Jackson's death, and it all came back to me again when I read this piece from Scholars and Rogues, and even more especially when I considered an earlier, related piece there which deals with a pointed political question: Why don't progressive billionaires fund progressive bloggers (in much the same way that conservative billionaires fund conservative bloggers)?

I would argue that such funding is neither to be expected nor to be welcomed. I would argue that there's no such thing as a progressive billionaire, although there are a few billionaires who might pretend to be leaders and/or funders of a "progressive" opposition.

The earlier S&R post -- "Devil, meet Deep Blue Sea: how much should progressives spend reaching out to progressives?" -- quotes Jane Hamsher of FiredogLake, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, and John Aravosis of AmericaBlog, all of whom are upset that major Democratic organizations are asking for (and receiving) their support, but aren't supporting them in any tangible way, not even by advertising on their sites.

It may be pointed out that those who obtain support for free have no incentive to pay for it.

Much more importantly, in my view, the sites in question share a common approach to all the most important issues: they bury them if they can't ignore them altogether. This tendency is unfortunately prevalent at all high-traffic "progressive" websites, including the one where I used to volunteer my services.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder and chief director of censorship at DailyKos, was trained by the CIA and makes no bones about the fact that posters who entertain conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 are not welcome at his site.

The other sites mentioned above are a bit less pointed and a touch more subtle but they are nevertheless written by and for people who are not much interested in certain very inconvenient facts: facts about 9/11 in particular; facts about bogus terrorism in general; facts about how the entire "global war on terror" (or whatever Obama wants us to call it this week) is based on a fictional view of history and our role in it; facts about how the Democrats have been complicit in selling both the fictional history and the endless, limitless war it entails.

Would I want to see these sites better funded? Would I want to see them drawing even larger audiences? Would I want their reporting even more constrained by vague doubts about what the billionaire sponsor might think? Dare I even hint of the possibility of explicit instructions from such a sponsor? Or, conversely, can anyone imagine a billionaire-sponsored website without an explicit list of instructions?

An alliance between faux-progressive billionaires and faux-progressive bloggers would be a powerful way to destroy any hope of a meaningful political opposition arising in 21st-century America. But then again, there's no need to destroy things that don't exist.

And that's why it won't happen. There's no need for it. And it wouldn't matter anyway, because 99% of all Americans surveyed have already said ... that given the choice ... they'd prefer moonwalking!

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Robert Scheer: Still Gatekeeping After All These Years

Once or twice in the recent past, I have written about a new journalistic style that's becoming more and more apparent in post-democratic America, one which although it may look dissident, is apparently acceptable in certain mainstream publications.

In this new post-democratic style, a reporter may point out any number of damning news or historical items, provided that he ties them together with a narrative thread which makes no sense at all. In this post we see how a master does it.

Robert Scheer [photo] makes a lot of sense in some passages of a recent piece published by the San Francisco Chronicle:

[...] What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George W. Bush's pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.

Lockheed-Martin, the nation's top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 22 percent respectively. Boeing's profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division, but Boeing's military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks. As Newsweek International put it in August: "Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor's stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing's share prices had tripled over the past five years while Raytheon's had doubled."

Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first President Bush and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were severely cutting the military budget for high ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer existent Soviet military. Sure they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.

Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a "shock and awe" showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. [...] Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein's army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.

Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so called "war on terror," a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from hi-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand. As Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: "With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings, or naval fleets - the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces ... It does not require half-a-trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces."

That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in Bush's 2008 budget requests. Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of Mujahedeen terrorists, once our "freedom fighters" in that earlier Afghanistan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War.

"The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government's discretionary budget," writes Lawrence J. Korb, "surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense .... And much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower."

[...] The taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11. [...]

What's wrong with that? Not much! I can quibble over a few points, and I'll do so in a moment, but first things first... The piece is called "War industry regains command", which is a regular laugh riot, considering that the piece denies the basic (i.e. false-flag) reality of the event that put the war industry back in command.

How so? Here are the paragraphs I edited:

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden weren't on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, then he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George W. Bush's pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
...

Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9/11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a "shock and awe" showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9/11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation's history. The bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 box knives, but Bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein's army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.
...

Thanks to bin Laden and Bush's exploitation of "war on terror" hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9/11; they should give bin Laden his cut.

Robert Scheer doesn't give any indication that he understands how much global terrorism is rooted in despair and directed against occupying armies. Armies cannot defeat this tactic, nor can special forces. Only a tactical retreat can make this sort of terrorism go away.

And Robert Scheer doesn't even hint at something many of my regular readers already know: that much of the remaining terrorism is funded, motivated and directed by state-sponsored agencies, overt or clandestine. Not only that, but the leading state in this regard is not Iran -- it's the USA! That's right! We're number one! Number one at something! Number one by a mile! Number one with a bullet -- or a bomb!

The Pentagon has a very sophisticated and thoroughly immoral strategy of infiltrating and provoking "terrorist groups" in order to create pretexts under which to attack those groups or the countries that harbor them. Innocent people get killed in the attacks that our intelligence units foment, and they do this in order to "create" -- and then "fight" the terrorists. In other words, it's the intelligence and special forces that we have to be afraid of!

And even though he comes this close to making the story make sense, Robert Scheer manages to cast all his excellent reporting into a deep hole with some masterful spin, through which he draws a cover over a massive array of crimes.

Do you see how it works?

By sneering at "the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet", Scheer distances himself from the basic point of his tale, and that apparently makes everything else all right -- by which I mean he gets his fiction published in the mainstream press.

Is it outrageous to call this reporting "fiction"? I don't think so, because rather than laying out the facts and pointing out the obvious connections -- or even just laying out the facts and not making any connections -- Scheer actively denies the one element of the story which would make all the others fit into place.

But he can't avoid doing that, not if he wants to stay employed as a journalist, not in post-democratic America.

In other words: military spending has run wild since 9/11, and much of the money is being spent on weapons systems that would never be useful against terrorism. And it's ok for Robert Scheer to say this, just as long as he doesn't point out that these weapons systems could be (and in some cases are being) used in a multitude of other ways, including foreign conquest and suppression of domestic dissent ...

... but even more importantly, he can say this as long as he doesn't say or do anything that might undermine the bogus official story of 9/11. Because if Robert Scheer starts talking about any of the reasonable alternative theories, his readers will see very clearly that all this spending, this conquest, this militarization, this mass murder abroad and suppression at home; all this is going according to plan.

The plotters weren't even very secretive about what they were planning. How did they do it? They explained that as well. They needed a "catastrophic and catalyzing event" ... and they sure got one! That made all their plans possible. How convenient.

So ... is it "inane" to argue that they did it? They had the means. They had the motive. They had the opportunity. And they aren't the type to sit around and wait for "good" things to happen.

When it did happen, they weren't surprised in the least. Find the people who took 9/11 in stride and you'll find some of the perpetrators.

Find the people who were dancing on 9/11 and you'll find some more.

Start finding these people, start putting all the pieces together, and suddenly the great military boondoggle makes perfect sense -- as the result of a hoax!

But Robert Scheer can't explain any of this to his readers. Nor, apparently, does he want to. Instead he sneers at those who know more than he does -- or more than he is willing to say. He does it right off the top, and in such an offhand manner that the rest of his piece, which could have been quite powerful, carries no weight at all.

Say what you will, this ain't Gatekeeping 101. It's an art form, albeit the slimiest of arts, and Robert Scheer is a past master. He first came to my attention when he was editing Ramparts, and the toxic truth that needed to be hidden was the evidence of multiple shooters in the JFK assassination. Ramparts, for crying out loud! Refusing to publish evidence of multiple gunmen! Why should Ramparts be so cautious? Better yet, why should Robert Scheer be editing Ramparts?? Or in other words...

Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Robert Scheer isn't on the payroll of an intelligence agency, then he deserves to be.

It's not an academic point. At stake is the legitimacy of a war which has killed at least a million people so far and which seems poised to go on for another fifty years. Also at stake is the fate of the administration which launched that war, and those who have done their dirty work for them. In other words, if the war is based on a pack of lies, then the people who have been telling those lies have an awful lot of blood on their hands.

Why don't you e-mail Robert Scheer at [email protected] and tell him what you think of his column?

Over The Top: The March Of The Berlet Brigade

As if the Kennebunkport Warning hadn't already generated enough pointless stupidity, a newly minted "political cartoon" that's been posted at Rense dot Com has added a new twist and opened up another big can of wiggly worms. Here's the cartoon:


It shows Cosmos, Michael Wolsey, Arabesque and Jenny Sparks, marching in lockstep behind Chip Berlet, carrying a poison pen, a banner advertising the Ford Foundation's money, and marching orders from the FBI (the latter being read by Jenny Sparks, portrayed as the wicked witch of the west).

They're marching toward a castle bearing the name "Kennebunkport Warning" and flying the twin flags of "9/11 Truth" and "Stop War".

The implications couldn't be plainer. The artist is saying "These people are all taking money from the Ford Foundation, working under instructions from the FBI, and spreading vicious lies to undermine the Kennebunkport Warning, in order to prevent the unification of the peace and 9/11-truth movements."

The cartoon echoes charges made recently by Webster Tarpley, who has been under fire for making such allegations against all these people, without showing much evidence to support these charges.

Personally, I support neither the charges nor the cartoon. I have no problem seeing Chip Berlet as a shill for the Ford Foundation. But all those other people? I always argue against guilt-by-association. So I'm not buying it this time, either.

But having said that, I must also say this:

I find it very curious that some of the same people who are most upset at Tarpley, and precisely because of these unsubstantiated charges, were positively apologetic toward Cindy Sheehan and her group, after they made equally unsubstantiated and possibly even more damning charges of their own.

I am not saying Tarpley has done nothing wrong. I am saying he is not the only one who has done something wrong. And I am also pointing out that when Tarpley does something wrong, there's hell to pay, but when others do something wrong, such is not usually the case.

For example: Webster Tarpley is lambasted always and everywhere for having been associated with Lyndon Larouche. Tarpley says the relationship ended -- unhappily -- ten years ago, and he has repudiated Larouche in the bluntest of terms, but this doesn't seem to matter much to some people.

Meanwhile, Ann Wright, a former high-ranking military officer and a former high-ranking diplomat, now sits at the right hand of Cindy Sheehan, and appears to be the silent spider in the middle of the Kennebunkport web. But nobody ever points out that Col. Wright has worked for both the Pentagon and the State Department. You could spend a long time hunting for a repudiation by Ann Wright of her former employers, and in fact I have done so without result, but this doesn't seem to matter much either.

Why? Because Cindy Sheehan and Ann Wright are trustworthy; they have credibility. And Webster Tarpley and anyone who ever associated with him or with Lyndon Larouche are dubious at best; they have no credibility. Therefore, supporting Cindy Sheehan is good for the movement; and supporting Webster Tarpley is bad for the movement.

So if Cindy Sheehan makes an obvious bad move, we hear nothing of it, unless somebody spends days digging. But if Webster Tarpley makes a bad move -- obvious or not -- this is seen as front-page news in some quarters, and the beginning of a story that could go on for days.

In light of this tendency, and in view of the fact that posting this cartoon was a bad move, I feel quite safe in predicting that we have not yet heard the last of this story.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing, in the long run, because a lot of truth remains buried under the Kennebunkport rubble. But I can't help thinking there must be a better way to bring it to the surface.

Birthday Tribute To A Dead Or Living Legend -- Osama bin Laden Turns Fifty

You know you've arrived when even your "enemies" celebrate your birthday. And the IHT has obliged with a 50th birthday celebration for Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden was born 50 years ago Saturday, and although he has not been heard from for months, his friends in the Taliban are certain that he is not dead.

"He is alive, I am 100 percent sure," a Taliban spokesman, Hayatullah Khan, said in an interview. He said senior leaders were in touch with bin Laden, reinforcing a widely held view that he is hiding near the rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Khan said special prayers were offered by Taliban fighters in camps in Afghanistan to mark bin Laden's birth on March 10, 1957, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabian.

"We prayed that Allah may give him 200 years to live," Khan said by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. "When we woke up today, we offered collective and long prayers for him because he is a great mujahid."

Oh yeah, man, he's still alive, even though nobody has seen him in a long time, man! Oh yeah, man, he's still alive and he's gonna live to be 200. Oh yeah, man, I heard it on my sattelite phone! Oh yeah, man. Because you'll believe anything!

It's not just the International Herald Tribune. Even Democracy Now! did a big hairy deal on Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, in which Amy Goodman interviewed the famously-unknown so-good-as-to-be-unpublishable truth-telling journalist Robert Fisk in honor of Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's 50th birthday. Fisk, the intrepid truth-teller, said he hadn't seen Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden since 1997. Oh yeah, man!

But

The United States fears that Al Qaeda, terrorism network he founded is rebuilding its base in Pakistani tribal lands and has forged ties with affiliates in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The key words of that sentence come right at the beginning. The United States fears! And it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden is alive or dead; and it doesn't really matter whether Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden founded al-Q'aeda or whether it was the CIA who did that, and it doesn't really matter whether its true what they say, that al-Q'aeda doesn't exist; and in fact it doesn't really matter whether any of the things we fear are real or not, because the basic reality now -- in the so-called "post-9/11 world" -- the world supposedly brought upon us by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden -- is that reality doesn't matter anymore -- at all! And fear is everything.

We waste hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't even have and we waste thousands of young lives that should have been put to better purposes -- and we do it in order to kill hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people (whom we can now call terrorists, if we like) -- and to consign their nation's most precious natural resource to foreigners of our choosing!

And it's all because we're afraid. And we're afraid because we were attacked by Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden! Oh yeah, man!

Bin Laden is revered by some, reviled by others, as the symbolic leader of a global jihad against the United States, an effort that had its seeds in the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

Um ... unless it has its seeds in the arming and financing of Muslim guerrilas by a succession of American administrations beginning with Jimmy Carter, who was taking advice from Zbignew Brezhinsky. They recognized a chance to help an enemy of an enemy and they did so. Take that, Soviets! The enemies of our enemy were armed to the hilt by Ronald Reagan and betrayed by George Herbert Walker Bush. Oops! All of a sudden we had a bit of a problem!

Or did we? Nafeez Ahmed, who has been doing serious research on the topic for years, has come to the conclusion that al-Q'aeda is a covert operations instrument of western intelligence agencies.

And other credible evidence suggests that al-Q'aeda doesn't even exist. So it could be -- especially when it comes to North American operations -- that al-Q'aeda is more often a scapegoat than a villian.

In other words, perhaps Emmanuel Goldstein's Osama bin Laden's "terrorism network" is not quite the problem it's sometimes made out to be:

It resulted in the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed more than 3,000 people and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

That's the official story, but unless somebody can convince me that Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden scheduled all the war games and put the explosives in the towers, I'm not very likely to believe much that appears in the mainstream media about Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden and his so-called Holy War against America.

Should I?

The Taliban were ousted from power by U.S. forces in late 2001 after their leaders refused to surrender bin Laden. At first, President George W. Bush sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan, scouring the deserts and mountains for bin Laden, offered a $25 million reward and said he should be captured "dead or alive."

But after the effort failed and Bush turned his sights on Iraq, he said capturing bin Laden was "not important," and eventually the CIA even disbanded its unit that tried to find him.

Which speaks for itself, I think.

And so, without further ado ... [drum roll, please!] ...

On behalf of all our friends and protectors, who keep us safe from the scary scary fears they just happen to provide, a rousing Happy 50th Birthday to Emmanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden, wherever you may be buried.

Love and Kisses,
The M-I-C

Prison Planet Calls Out "Progressive Bloggers"

In a powerful article posted Thursday, Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet calls out the BBC, the rest of the mainstream media, Digg dot com, and so-called progressive bloggers in general.

You can click the link to read about the first three; here's what Paul says about the bloggers:

Kudos goes to Wonkette for covering the Building 7 story, but almost every other so-called "progressive" website has been mute. Crooks and Liars, one of the biggest liberal blogs on the web, today spotlights a story about lesbian koala bears. On Tuesday night they led with a gossip puff piece about Mitt Romney's hair. How can these gatekeepers claim to represent "alternative media" when they stuff this kind of crap down our throats on a daily basis, while ignoring massive stories like the WTC 7 fiasco?

Shucks, Paul; you caught me. I didn't say anything about the BBC/WTC7 fiasco myself. But I was busy, telling a different 9/11 story, the day it broke! ;-)

BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Continues

LOOKOUT AGAIN!

Here comes another load of manure from the BBC!

We wondered what kind of documentary the BBC was making about 9/11, and it's becoming clearer by the day. Guy Smith, producer of the upcoming BBC "Conspiracy Files" episode on 9/11, laid the groundwork in a piece called "We're all conspiracy theorists at heart" which was published by the BBC on Friday. In that piece, Smith claims conspiracy theories persist because people are natural story-tellers who instinctively look for elaborate tales to describe events beyond their control. Your nearly frozen correspondent replied with "BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins". I urge you to read both pieces if you have any doubts about our respective positions, or motivations.

On Saturday the BBC laid the next layer of infrastructure for its coming propaganda barrage, under the curiously misleading headline: Q&A: What really happened

In BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins, I half-jokingly claimed the upcoming documentary would be "nothing more nor less than Popular Mechanics on skates". Imagine my surprise, then, to see the current BBC offering taking the same approach used by PM.

The BBC purports to explain the events of 9/11 by asking and answering 10 questions, and I will deal with each of them, briefly or otherwise, below. But first let's talk about why this approach -- the attempted "debunking" of selected "conspiracy theories" -- is an unsatisfactory approach to the problem.

The Madness In The Method

The common approach taken by both BBC and Popular Mechanics consists of a series of vignettes. In each one, they pick out an anomaly between the official story and the available evidence of what really happened, they detail one possible explanation for that anomaly (which both BBC and Popular Mechanics helpfully refer to as a "conspiracy theory"), and then they allegedly debunk the "conspiracy theory" using one means or another.

It's a three-step process and it's vulnerable to corruption at every step. We'll talk about this more below. But here I want to mention a very important limitation on the method. Even if this approach were carried out with rigorous logic, even if no corruption were allowed at any stage of the process, it would still prove unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

[1] There's a vast difference between proving that a so-called "conspiracy theorist" is wrong on a given point and proving that the official story is right on that point.

Here's a concrete example: I happen to disagree with Alex Jones, Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery on key points and yet I still do not believe the official story. So nobody -- not Guy Smith, not anybody else -- is going to make me believe the official story by pointing out places where Alex or Jim or Dylan has allegedly gone astray. In other words, even if all these so-called "conspiracy theorists" are "wrong", and even if BBC demolishes all of them, that still doesn't prove that the official story is correct.

And for that matter, even the use of the term "conspiracy theorist" is overloaded with spin, because the official story -- the story that Guy Smith is trying to protect -- talks of at least 20 people -- Osama bin Laden and 19 hijackers. Anyone who believes that those 20 people conspired to pull off this enormous crime is also, by definition, a "conspiracy theorist". And anyone who believes they did it without conspiring -- that they just happened to work together without any prior planning or communication -- is flat-out crazy.

To be blunt about it, anyone who thinks the attacks of 9/11 could have been done without a conspiracy is crazier than anything Alex Jones and Jim Fetzer and Dylan Avery and Guy Smith have ever said all combined.

[2] Even if the BBC's answers to all 10 questions were sound and solid, their sum total would barely begin to explain the differences between the attacks of 9/11 and the official version of same, because the number of unanswered questions about 9/11 runs into the hundreds.

Therefore the selection of 10 key questions in effect amounts to a ruling that all the hundreds of others are beyond the pale, and this is the necessary first step in the ongoing propaganda campaign to get you to believe lies about what really happened.

First they get you thinking it all boils down to 10 easy questions, and then they lie to you about the questions -- and then they lie to you about the answers, and kaboom! ... or should I say "Zzzzz" ... you're sound asleep!

1: Could the US Air Force have prevented the attacks?

This is certainly a good question and answering it in the "politically correct" manner requires serious obfuscation, so it's surprising to see it first. However, if the BBC is going to lie to you through all 10 questions, it doesn't really matter which comes first, so they may as well dive in the deep end.

Well, let's go with them:

To sceptics of the official account of 9/11, the idea of 19 fundamentalists hijacking commercial airliners and outsmarting the world's most advanced air defence system seems simply incredible.

Some 9/11 conspiracy theories argue that the US Air Force should have succeeded in intercepting at least some of the hijacked planes, and that someone, therefore, must have prevented them from doing so.

The official version - 9-11 Commission Report - holds that on the morning of 11 September, 2001 a major defence training exercise was taking place.

What an understatement! What was taking place was the most heavily concentrated set of training exercises ever scheduled!

The BBC can roll out any number of explanations as to why these exercises were sufficient to derail the air defense in the Northeastern US that day, but they don't dare approach the next logical question: Who scheduled those wargames?

Did Osama bin Laden send key components of the US Air Force to places like Alaska and Greenland that day? And if not, who did?

BBC quotes Popular Mechanics reporter David Coburn pushing the "incompetence" theory, which simply doesn't wash in the face of so much deliberately sown confusion, and then deals with an issue that's been hanging over the "official investigation" for quite some time:

Following the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report it emerged that the Commissioners were concerned they might have been deliberately misled by the military about the timeline of their response to events on the day.

Suspicions of a cover up by the military were recently addressed by a report from the Pentagon Inspector General.

The report found that there had been no deliberate attempt to mislead the 9/11 Commission, and that the discrepancies in their testimony to the Commission were the result of "a lack of capabilities and thoroughness" within the military.

The next logical question should be: Why is the Pentagon investigating whether the US military colluded in the coverup of 9/11?

But instead the BBC allows the suspects the final word on this issue. It's a ploy we'll see again and again.

Did anybody at the BBC notice that their link to the 9/11 Commission report is broken? (I've fixed it in the quoted passage.)

2: Were the Twin Towers deliberately demolished by explosives?

Of course they were. Anybody watching on TV knew that right away. But the official story doesn't account for Osama bin Laden getting access to the WTC in order to plant explosives there, so now we have to have all these transparent lies.

Was it a "pancake collapse" or a "progressive collapse" or in fact what kind of collapse was it? The official story has changed, but not the official wording.

All the talk about "why the towers collapsed" is absurd because the clear and visible fact -- perhaps the most notable fact of the day -- is that the towers didn't collapse at all; they disintegrated!

BBC prefers to obfuscate these very inconvenient facts in the following manner:

After 9/11, investigations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) determined that the collapse of the Twin Towers was due to the impact of the planes and the large quantities of exploding jet fuel released into the buildings.

Those questioning this account point to the lateral puffs of smoke that emerged from the towers just ahead of their collapse. Could these be explosive devices planted as part of a conspiracy?

They also argue that jet fuel, which has a far lower burning temperature than the melting point of steel, is unlikely to have weakened the steel supporting framework sufficient to prompt the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Jet fuel burns at 800 degrees Celsius whereas temperatures must reach 1,500 degrees Celsius for steel to melt.

Those questioning this account raise a lot of other questions as well, such as why so many firemen and emergency workers testified to hearing bombs going off all around them just before the towers fell, or why the steel beams appear to have been cut rather than having buckled, and why there was molten steel in the basements of the towers so long after the "collapse". But the BBC is not prepared to admit these questions, much less deal with them. Instead, we get a rehash of the official line (which still makes no sense!)

The explanation for the puffs of smoke offered by the authors of the Popular Mechanics study is that as the floors crashed down of top of one another, a pressure wave forced dust and smoke out of the windows.

As for the fuel temperature - the official explanation holds that whilst steel does indeed melt at 1,500 degrees Celsius, it loses half its strength at a much lower temperature of 650 degrees Celsius.

The fuel might not have melted the steel columns, but it weakened the structure, and especially the trusses that supported each floor, to the point that they could no longer support the weight on the building.

So BBC supports the "truss failure" theory. The supports couldn't hold up the floors.

Unfortunately this "explanation" is hugely at variance with the evidence.

If trusses had failed the floors may have come tumbling down but the steel exterior walls and the central steel columns would have been left standing, or at worst would have fallen over, or buckled and fallen partway over, or at any rate the result would have been very different than what we saw that day. The NIST report says the steel buckled but doesn't provide any photos of buckled steel. In some photos of WTC damage the steel appears to be cut. And then there's the issue of molten steel in the basements, or the reports of "rescue workers" working at Ground Zero having to change their boots all the time, because the soles were melting. How could a truss collapse generate that much heat? And why do we have eyewitness reports of underground explosions in the towers before the planes hit?

The BBC doesn't go near any of these questions either. They just pick one detail they like (the puffs of smoke coming from the buildings) and they work that detail into the official story in one way or another (i.e. the puffs of smoke were compressed dust and smoke being squeezed out of the buildings by the collapse) and they move on to the next narrowly framed question, as if the entire issue were settled.

It's a ploy we'll see again and again. But in the meantime ...

Here's a good way for you to evaluate the "steel weakened and buckled" theory at your own convenience: Go out and start your car. Watch what happens when burning fuel heats the steel around it -- in this case the steel is your engine block. Let it run for a while and you'll find that your engine block actually buckles -- because the heat from the burning fuel is so intense that, even though it's not hot enough to melt the steel, it's hot enough to weaken the steel, and this combined with the intense pressures in your engine, make the steel of the engine block lose its strength and buckle. And that's why you can't drive your car for long distances, because the heat from the burning fuel weakens the steel and your engine sags and the next thing you know it loses its compression.

You see this happening to other people all the time, don't you? Cars and trucks broken down by the side of the highway, no longer able to move because their engine blocks are so deformed from the heat of the burning fuel... You see them every day, do you not?

No? Well ... Maybe I'd better go back and check my facts, then!

3: Was WTC7 deliberately demolished by explosives?

Well, yes, it appears it was. In the last week we've had an emergency worker speak out and say yes, bombs were going off, yes, we had a twenty-minute warning to evacuate, and yes, it was what it looked like -- a controlled demolition.

He was using an alias and saying he'd lost his job because he spoke the truth and within a few days other emergency workers started talking and saying "yes, he's right, that's what happened" ... So what does the BBC have?

In the afternoon of 11 September 2001, World Trade Centre Building 7, a 47 storey office block close by the Twin Towers collapsed without even being hit by the planes.

The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties and with so much else happening that day, its collapse was barely reported.

That's another understatement. And it's something skeptics find a bit sinister!

WTC 7 was home to local offices of the CIA, Department of Defense, the United States Secret Service and the city's Office of Emergency Management, among others.

Sceptics of the official account, including those at Scholars for 9/11 Truth argue that the building was deliberately destroyed in a controlled demolition, perhaps in order to conceal important information about a pre-9/11 plot by the authorities.

Some even argue that the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania was intended to crash into Building 7.

The collapse of WTC has been investigated by FEMA. Their interim report found that when the North Tower collapsed, debris crashed into Building 7.

This was the likely cause of fires which quickly took hold. The sprinkler system did not work effectively because the water main in Vesey Street had been knocked out when the Twin Towers came down.

With the intense fires burning unabated, the steel structure supporting the building was fatally weakened. But the FEMA investigators conceded that this hypothesis had a low probability of occurring.

Say again?? "This hypothesis had a low probability" and yet it's being offered as an official explanation? Or is it?

In their final report, due to be published later in 2007, FEMA is expected to back its original hypothesis substantially - the collapse of WTC7 was accidental, not deliberate.

This is supposed to explain anything? This is supposed to make those questions go away?

The two propaganda techniques we see at play here are [1] pretending that the questions which have drawn replies have been answered, and [2] pretending that the questions that haven't been answered don't exist. Sneaky debating tricks. Underhanded but not evil.

This is a pattern which you may see change very soon.

Note the links in this passage. The BBC link to the FEMA interim report leads to "page not found". How convenient. Or how sloppy. Either way, BBC looks ... well, I'm sorry but I can't bring myself to say it. But I have fixed the link in the quoted passage.

4: Were Jews forewarned about the attacks?

The headline alone gives me hives. We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, here's the BBC's take on this aspect of the story:

Shortly after the attacks a rumour started in the Middle East and spread around the world which claimed that 4,000 Jewish employees at the World Trade Centre had not turned up for work on 11 September. Were they warned to stay away?

One conspiracy theory suggests that 9/11 was an Israeli plot to discredit the Arab world; another that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, found out about the attacks beforehand and warned the Jewish community in New York.

The rumour started after the Jerusalem Post reported that roughly 4,000 Israelis were believed to be living or working in New York and Washington.

Crucially it did not say they were dead or missing - just people in the immediate areas of the attacks who might have been affected.

This report was picked up by Arabic media outlets, including Al Manar, the Beirut satellite TV station linked to the Islamic militant group Hezbollah.

Al Manar TV added a spin to the story. It reported that 4,000 Israelis working at the World Trade Centre had not shown up for work on 9/11. As the anti-Semitic rumour spread, the details became embellished - like in a game of Chinese whispers.

According to official figures, of the 2,749 victims of the World Trade Centre attacks, 2,071 were occupants of the buildings.

Research by The Conspiracy Files shows that of these 2,071 victims, 119 were confirmed Jewish and a further 72 were believed to be Jewish.

This would make a total of 191 - or 9.2% of victims. This figure is broadly in line with the 9.7% of New York's commuting population which is believed to be Jewish.

This is a straw-man attack of the highest order, and it requires delicate surgery to take it apart.

First of all there may have been a report in the Jerusalem Post saying Jews had been forewarned of the attacks; if so it would clearly be to everyone's benefit to hide that report as quickly as possible. You will notice the BBC has linked to the Jerusalem Post website and the Al Manar website rather than to the two reports in question. Why?

If I wanted to refer you to a particular news report, I would point you to the article I wanted you to read, rather than the publisher's website. Unless I didn't really have anything...

But that's a minor point. Everything we've just read from the BBC about this story could be perfectly true. And yet...

Yesterday Guy Smith wrote that he has spent nine months researching, and today we find out that he doesn't have a link to the Jerusalem Post report he claims started the whole story. If I had spent nine months researching I think I would have come back with a link.

And the use of this one anecdote to dismiss all claims about foreknowledge is not very convincing. In fact, of all the stories I heard shortly after 9/11, this one wasn't even among them. The stories I heard had to do with Israelis, not Jews, and I know there's a lot of overlap, but the two groups are not identical by any means.

The most dramatic story circulating shortly after 9/11 said that employees of the Israeli company Odigo had received text messages early on the morning of 9/11, warning them of the impending attacks. The BBC has done nothing to ease my mind about this story.

But even more chilling are the stories about alleged Israeli foreknowledge that weren't circulating shortly after 9/11. And the BBC hasn't even tried to deal with them!

By speaking of "Jews" rather than "Israelis", the BBC follows in the Popular Mechanics tradition and muddies the waters considerably.

After framing it as a story involving "the Jews", supporters of the official story often move on to play the "anti-Semitism" card, and pretty soon after that the "Holocaust-denial" card, and even though these cards are quite irrelevant, they do derail an awful lot of discussions. The last time I checked, there was nothing anti-Semitic about wanting to know who attacked your country, and there was no hint of Holocaust-denial in asking whether certain highly-placed Israelis knew about the attacks before they happened.

The Odigo story is only one example. Far more serious, in my view, is the story from NYC about the three Israelis who were seen celebrating the attacks by exchanging high-fives, holding up their lighters as if at a rock concert, frolicking for their cameras against the backdrop of the burning towers. These men were later arrested along with two other Israelis; the five were held for 71 days during which they repeatedly failed lie detector tests. Eventually they were released and whisked home, but not before it was established that two of the five were agents of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.

Why would Mossad agents be cheering the burning towers?

According to Christopher Ketcham:

After the first plane hit, no one really thought that this was a terrorist attack. I mean, most people thought -- and I was there, you know, on the Brooklyn waterfront watching this whole thing. Everyone thought it was an accident. These guys, when they were interrogated by FBI, told them that -- essentially said that they immediately knew it was a terrorist attack. And they actually told the FBI that the reason they were celebrating was because the attacks would be beneficial to Israel, that it was, quote, “a good thing for Israel” -- that's according to the FBI spokesman who spoke on the record about this -- and that it would bring sympathy for Israel's political agenda in the Middle East.

And there you have it in a nutshell. Israel's political agenda in the Middle East, is, of course, a euphemism, but we can't fault Christopher Ketcham, who has brought so much of this story into the light.

9/11 works to enable Israel's military agenda in the Middle East, and that's what this is about -- not the Jewish people of New York City, who comprise nine point something percent of the population and suffered nine point something percent of the deaths. This is not about them at all, nor is it about anti-Semitism nor Holocaust denial, nor any of the other charges that get thrown at 9/11 skeptics with nauseating regularity.

In fact -- come along with me here for a moment and let's think like a conspirator, shall we? -- if 9/11 was an Israeli black op, a warning to the Jewish workers of NYC would have defeated the purpose. If the plotters hoped to generate sympathy for Israel, and planned to do it by killing a huge number of people, surely they would have realized that if there were no Jewish victims, this might reflect badly on Israel and could cause a backlash rather than an increase in sympathy. So they wouldn't have done it that way. If they did it at all.

5: Did a commercial airline hit the Pentagon?

What difference does it make? Some people think a commercial airliner did hit the Pentagon, but they still don't believe the official story. Some think that whatever hit the Pentagon couldn't have been a commercial airliner, and of course none of them believe the official story.

Some people on each side of the argument think the entire issue has been inflamed by disinformation that's been deliberately injected in order to split the 9/11 truth movement into hostile bickering camps. Whether or not that was the intention, the existence of this split is used by some official conspiracy apologists to discredit all who ask questions about 9/11.

For its part, the BBC says:

At 09:37 on 11 September, the Pentagon, headquarters of the American military, was rocked by a huge explosion.

According to the official account American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the building, killing all passengers on board and 125 military personnel and civilians on the ground.

But some people argue that AA 77 could not have hit the building, as there is little visible wreckage, and the hole in the wall caused by the impact is too small to have been inflicted by a Boeing 757 airliner.

The first photographs taken before the front wall of the Pentagon collapsed show the hole appears to be some 18-20 feet across at its narrowest point.

Conspiracy theories argue that a remote controlled drone or missile struck the Pentagon.

The official explanation is that the fuselage - which is 12 feet wide - punctured the building, but the two engines and the wings largely broke up on impact.

US Defense Department photographs taken shortly after the attack show fragments of aircraft wreckage, some with the distinctive American Airlines livery.

The black box recorders and engine parts were found amongst the wreckage, and many eyewitnesses described seeing the plane hit the building.

Engineers and computer scientists at the Rosen Centre for Advanced computing at Purdue University, Indiana have built a computer model to recreate the crash.

Their research suggests that it was the exploding jet fuel which caused the worst damage inside the Pentagon.

None of this proves anything to me; most telling of all in my estimation is that the BBC chose to link to the US military multimedia site -- rather than to any specific photographs -- on the phrase "US Defense Department photographs". It's as if they're saying:

Photographs proving our point exist -- find them if you can!

6: Can CCTV footage prove what happened at the Pentagon?

BBC says:

Conspiracy theorists argue that the Pentagon, America's military headquarters, was not hit by a commercial airplane.

They say the initial hole in the outer wall is too small and there is no evidence of visible wreckage. Instead they believe the Pentagon was hit by something smaller, such as an unmanned drone or a cruise missile.

For Professor Jim Fetzer, of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, the evidence is clear-cut. "Whatever hit the building was not a Boeing 757," he told The Conspiracy Files. "Anyone that tells you a Boeing 757 hit the building is saying something that is probably false, that cannot possibly be true."

The Pentagon and the FBI have released some footage taken from CCTV cameras in the vicinity of the Pentagon.

Judicial Watch.

Some of that footage - from the nearby CITGO petrol station and the Doubletree Hotel - does not shed any light on what hit the building.

Frames taken from two cameras at a car park in front of the Pentagon appear to show the silver nose cone and tail fin of a Boeing 757 moments before the explosion, but the footage is of very poor quality and not conclusive.

The FBI will not confirm whether or not it holds other security camera footage of the attack. Its lack of openness has fuelled further conspiracy theories.

There are many reports that security cameras at the nearby Sheraton Hotel captured images of the attack, but the hotel manager told The Conspiracy Files that none of their cameras were pointing in the direction of the Pentagon and no such footage exists.

The Conspiracy Files interviewed rescue workers who said they clearly identified wreckage from a passenger jet in and around the building. And photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and shown in the documentary, identify parts of a Boeing 757 including a piece of fuselage with the distinctive livery of American Airlines.

And what difference does this make? No matter what hit the Pentagon, the official story is still patently false.

A better question might be: Why did the FBI confiscate all the videotapes from all the area cameras that might have been able to show us what happened? You'd think if they were really interested in catching the terrorists they'd have better things to do than intimidating employees at the local gas stations.

And if you stop to see what they have at Judicial Watch you may find yourself shaking your head in astonishment that anything so vague could be considered evidence of anything.

7: Did a military transport plane control the attack on the Pentagon?

Again it doesn't matter -- and that makes three questions in a row here of the wedge-driver variety.

According to the BBC:

As the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 approached Washington DC, a military transport C-130 aircraft took off from Andrews Air Force Base, en route to Minnesota.

Conspiracy theories suggest that the C-130 may have been controlling the attack that morning as part of a secret government plot, or even fired a missile which downed the Boeing.

The C-130's pilot, Lt Colonel Steve O'Brien, tells a different story. He told The Conspiracy Files that he and his crew were alerted by Air Traffic control to the presence of an unidentified jet approaching the capital.

O'Brien describes seeing a Boeing passenger jet with the distinctive silver and red colours of American Airlines crossing their flight path in an unusually steep bank.

His first reaction was that the aircraft was in trouble and trying to make an emergency landing at the nearby Reagan National Airport. Moments later the Boeing crashed into the Pentagon.

Lt Colonel O'Brien points out the C-130 is not capable of carrying missiles.

This is a wild tale and makes no difference to anything. It amounts to an allegation by the BBC that some unnamed conspiracy theorists are wrong on this point. But so what? I knew 9/11 was a black op long before I heard this story about a C-130.

On the other hand, if you were trying to think of 10 relatively safe questions to ask and answer, the question about the C-130 would be far more appealing than questions about foreknowledge or obstruction of justice, to name but two sorely neglected areas of great concern.

8: Was United 93 shot down?

Here's another question that really doesn't matter.

I was watching the events unfold on television and I knew it was a false flag attack while flight 93 was still in the air. Whatever happened with that flight was not going to make the official story -- as told so far -- any more believable.

Quoth the BBC:

United Airlines 93 was the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, and the only one not to reach its target.

The official account of the day, as told in the 9/11 Commission Report holds that Flight 93 crashed into open ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, apparently as passengers tried to seize back the controls from the hijackers. But 9/11 conspiracy theorists are suspicious of this account.

Some argue that substantial wreckage from the aircraft was found at Indian Lake, a reported 6 miles from the crash site in Shanksville. If this would true, it would lend weight to the theory that the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air after being hit by a missile.

Leading conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones of infowars.com argues that planes generally leave a small debris field when they crash, and that this is not compatible with reports of wreckage found further afield from Shanksville.

The reports of wreckage at Indian Lake were accurate in so far as small, light fragments of insulation material and paper from United 93 were found by residents at the lake, having blown there from the crash site on the prevailing wind.

However, the distance between the two locations was misreported in some accounts. In fact, in a straight line, Indian Lake is just over a mile from the crash site. The road between the two locations takes a roundabout route of 6.9 miles - accounting for the erroneous reports.

Also, the fragments of debris which were found at Indian Lake were downwind of the crash site and east of the plane's flight path. Had United 93 started to disintegrate in mid-air, wreckage would have fallen below the flight path - to the west of Shanksville.

Wally Miller, the local coroner at Somerset, Pennsylvania is at the centre of another debate about the crash of United 93. In his film Loose Change, Dylan Avery quotes Miller as saying: "I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes because there were no bodies there."

However, interviewed for The Conspiracy Files, Wally Miller says he was misquoted.

"I said that I stopped being a coroner after about 20 minutes because it was perfectly clear what the manner of death was going to be.

"It was a plane crash, but yet it was a homicide because terrorists had hijacked the plane and killed the passengers."

He says it is technically correct that there were no complete bodies at the crash site, but the recovery operation found many body parts and DNA to identify all the passengers and crew on board.

So here the BBC's claim amounts to saying that Alex Jones was wrong about how far-scattered the debris from Flight 93 was, and Dylan Avery used a quote from Wally Miller who later said he was misquoted. And these two claims of the BBC may very well be true. But even if they are true, so what?

The "crash site" still doesn't look like a crash site, the stories of cellphone calls being made from high altitude didn't make any sense, and we have all sorts of reasons to believe the official story is full of holes (if not full of lies, or something even more aromatic!) on this point, even if Alex and Dylan are both wrong!

And that's not to say that they are wrong. I don't know. It's possible Wally Miller was misquoted. It's also possible Wally Miller changed his tune after speaking a bit too freely. If that's what happened, it wouldn't be the first time a key witness in a key story had changed his tune. Perhaps a shady character drew up alongside Wally Miller one day and alerted him to the fact that he had spoken too freely. It wouldn't be the first time for that, either.

The BBC's link to infowars.com doesn't work, but I've fixed it for you. ;-)

9: Did United 93 crash?

Here's another side of the previous question. But this time it's framed in such a way as to discredit Loose Change specifically. Loose Change has become increasingly popular lately, especially in Britain, and as the defenders of the official story see it, Loose Change needs all the discrediting it can get.

Here the BBC says:

Photographs taken at the crash site near Shanksville show a small crater and fragments of clearly identifiable aircraft wreckage along with personal possessions from some of those on board.

But the size of the crater and the absence of large pieces of wreckage have led some to question whether UA93 actually crashed there at all. This question is examined at the following website:

Killtown: Hunt the Boeing II

Dylan Avery, director of the hugely popular internet film Loose Change, argues that Flight 93 landed elsewhere, with the passengers abducted as part of an elaborate government plot.

Loose Change

Avery's film quotes reports from a local TV station in Ohio saying that two planes had landed at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport because of a bomb threat. Avery suggests that one of these was Flight 93.

In fact, there was one plane diverted to Cleveland that morning, with a suspected bomb on board.

But this was a different flight: Delta Airlines Flight 89, which had been proceeding along the same westward air corridor as United 93. In the chaos of that morning, Air Traffic Control had confused the two flights and ordered the Delta to land.

Local TV stations covered a press conference by the local mayor in which he referred to the Delta flight landing because of a suspect bomb, but later amended their stories when it became clear that Delta 89 had not been hijacked.

So what do we have here? A "crash scene" that doesn't look much like a crash scene, and BBC not even attempting to deny it.

Instead they point to an assertion in Loose Change that's been denied. And what can that mean? First, of course, just because something's been denied that doesn't make it false. Look: Two plus Two isn't Four! Do you believe me?

Secondly, even if Dylan Avery is completely wrong on this one, the "crash scene" still doesn't look like a crash scene, and the BBC still doesn't deny it. Click that Killtown link if you don't believe me.

Really. Check out that Killtown link and tell me a commercial airliner crashed in that field. And watch Loose Change sometime if you haven't done so already. It's not perfect but it asks a lot of good questions.

Thanks to BBC for two good links here. ;-)

10: Could the attacks have been prevented?

Here we have an example of a very broad question being addressed as if it were very narrow. The BBC says:

Were there chances to stop the attacks prior to 9/11? If so, was this failure deliberate?

The CIA knew that two al-Qaeda terrorists had entered the United States as early as January 2000. But the CIA never passed on this information to the FBI - so the FBI did not know to look for them.

The two future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar settled in San Diego, where they started to take lessons at a local flying school. They used their real names in official documents and one of them - al-Hazmi - was even listed in the local phonebook.

Had the CIA tipped off the FBI that two known al-Qaeda operatives had travelled to America, it would have been easy to track them down - and possibly the 9/11 attacks could have been thwarted.

But Dale Watson, who led the FBI's investigation of 9/11, told The Conspiracy Files that there was no deliberate CIA plot to keep information from the FBI.

He said: "In large organisations you do have breakdowns in communications at the lower end. There was never any top down orders either by the FBI or the CIA. And anybody that believes that - they're wrong."

Dale Watson might just be telling us a tall tale there. We've heard all sorts of stories about agents in the field starting investigations that could have foiled the plot but who were called off the hunt by their superiors. Perhaps there was never any all-encompassing top-down orders from central headquarters in either the FBI or the CIA. But the right people knew that certain sorts of leads ought not to be investigated! We could talk to Coleen Rowley about that, but we'd do most of the listening!

The story of one instance where the CIA had information that could have led somewhere if only the FBI had known of it (1) doesn't begin to cover the question of whether the attacks could have been prevented, and (2) conveniently places the blame on an intelligence agency the administration has been trying to intimidate and eviscerate for years -- first in the pressure to find intelligence that would support the administration's bid to sell their long-planned war in Iraq, later in a reshuffling that eliminated all serious opposition to the unitary executive, based on the pretext that the CIA had been wrong in their assessment that Iraq did in fact have WMD. Oh what a tangled web these professional mass murderers do weave!

After the attacks, government officials were summoned to give evidence before a Congressional Inquiry set up to investigate the intelligence failure before 9/11.

It seems that the CIA information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar was "lost in the system".

BBC doesn't want to talk about the other things that were lost in the system, or buried by the system, as the case may be.

But at least they're willing to quote Bob Graham.

But Co-chairman Senator Bob Graham told The Conspiracy Files of his frustration at the lack of co-operation from the FBI in that inquiry, and by the government's decision to censor over 30 pages of his report which related to Saudi Arabia.

"Within 9/11 there are too many secrets," he said, "and that withholding of those secrets has eroded public confidence in their government as it relates to their own security."

Interestingly, the BBC has left the last word with a skeptic. And the quote, coming from a US Senator, deserves to be taken seriously.

Within 9/11 there are too many secrets, and the doubts they engender certainly cannot be dispelled by 10 narrow questions.

The Questions They Don't Ask

Some of the questions the BBC doesn't ask are even more interesting than those they do. And perhaps there's a good reason for this.

What about president Bush, sitting there in the classroom doing a deer-in-the-headlights impersonation after being told the country was under attack? If he was a target, why didn't the Secret Service whisk him away? And if he wasn't a target, how could they have known that? And why didn't he do anything? He's Commander-In-Chief, right? Or only during campaign season?

What about the hijackers? How did they get into the country? How did they get their flight training? Why did they seem to be leaving deliberately conspicuous trails? Or do fanatical Muslims usually snort cocaine and pick fights at strip clubs?

What about the bin Laden family? Why were so many members of the alleged ringleader's extended family collected and ushered out of the country so soon after the attacks that the FBI didn't even get a chance to talk to them? And speaking of the FBI, it doesn't list Osama bin Laden as a 9/11 suspect because, it says, it has no hard evidence implicating him.

Why is Sibel Edmonds gagged? She knows things about money, and drugs, and Turkey, which the administration is deathly afraid of. So she's under a State Secrets gag order which prevents her from telling us certain things which we're told would be very detrimental to sensitive diplomatic and business arrangements. I'll say they would! If you take a look at the amount of poppy being grown in Afghanistan and shipped through Turkey you can get a sense of how sensitive it really is!

Why was the steel from the WTC collected as quickly as possible and shipped to China for recycling? Why wasn't the world's greatest-ever crime scene preserved? Why did it take so long for an investigation to be set up? And then why was it run by an administration insider with a specialty in public perception and myth-making?

Don't get me started! There are a zillion and one other unanswered questions, and by not even admitting that those questions are out there, and that we're still waiting for answers, the BBC shows quite clearly that it's not interested in the truth, and hardly interested in supporting the official story, but primarily interested in discrediting those who would question the very absurd official account of that very absurd day.

There's hardly any journalism involved in such an effort. Baby, what a big surprise!

The Method In The Madness

Realistically speaking, it seems crazy to go to air with a case this weak. But circumstances have forced Guy Smith's hand. They've spent money on this. It's been scheduled and advertised for quite a while now. He can't back out at the last minute.

So now it's a question of production. When the propaganda special airs on Sunday night, with all the magic of modern audio/video behind it, spellbound viewers will allow themselves to be put to sleep on the pablum of officially sanctioned lies, with no hint of the tyranny creeping up around them.

But you won't be among them, will you? Nor your friends, nor your families.

I don't usually encourage people to email my articles to others, but if you ever wanted to do something like that, this would be a good time to try it. ;-)

The truth shall set us all free, my friends. But only if we share it!

Foreign Policy's "Terrorism Index" Shines No Light In The Darkness

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy released its second "Terrorism Index", a feature which purports to examine the scale, scope and nature of global terrorism, its threat to America, and America's response to the threat. But in fact it does nothing of the sort; instead it obscures the most important issues of the day, and it does so at great length. If the "Terrorism Index" is intended as serious analysis, it's very weak indeed; but if it's intended as propaganda then it's brilliant.

The report begins by noting that most Americans don't believe we're winning the War on Terror, and almost half don't believe the government has a plan to protect the nation from terrorism:

America’s leaders like to say that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, represented a watershed. After that fateful day, Americans were told, problems that had been allowed to linger -- terrorist sanctuaries, dangerous dictators, and cumbersome government bureaucracies -- would no longer be neglected and left for terrorists to exploit. Yet, more than five years later, Americans are more skeptical than ever that the United States has effectively confronted the threat of terrorism. Barely half believe that their government has a plan to protect them from terrorism. Just six months ago, 55 percent of Americans approved of the way the war on terror was being handled. Today, that number is just 43 percent — lower than at practically any point since the 9/11 attacks.

... and it tries to explain why this is so ...

That skepticism could be easily attributed to dark events in the past six months: a bloody war between Israel and Hezbollah, a plot in Britain to explode liquid bombs aboard airliners bound for the United States, North Korea’s nuclear test, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, and Iraq’s downward slide into deadly sectarian strife. But is the public’s pessimism over the war on terror just a problem of perception? After all, the United States has yet to be attacked again at home — and that could be the most important benchmark of all.

I count seven lies or half-truths in the previous paragraph. And I will get to them in a moment. But first, to be fair, let's see where Foreign Policy is going with this line of thought:

To help determine whether the United States is growing more or less safe, FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress teamed up once again to survey more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts—Republicans and Democrats alike -- in the second FOREIGN POLICY / Center for American Progress Terrorism Index. First launched last June, the Terrorism Index is the only comprehensive, nonpartisan effort to mine the highest echelons of the nation’s foreign-policy establishment for its assessment of how the United States is fighting the Global War on Terror. Its participants include people who have served as secretary of state and national security advisor, senior White House aides, top commanders in the U.S. military, seasoned intelligence officers, and distinguished academics and journalists. Eighty percent of the experts have served in the U.S. government—more than half in the executive branch, 26 percent in the military, and 18 percent in the intelligence community.

Well, there you go. The Terror Index is nonpartisan presumably because it includes donkeys as well as elephants; but if 80 percent have served in the government and the rest are distinguished academics, then it can hardly be impartial, can it?

How many whistleblowers does it include? How many academics on the list would rather tell the truth than remain "distinguished"? How many politicians, generals, intelligence analysts, and so on -- whistleblower or distinguished -- come from outside the United States? How many come from outside the mainstream?

What am I getting at? I am suggesting that had Foreign Policy seen fit to include real outside experts on global terror -- such as Nafeez Ahmed, for example -- their "Terror Index" may have been more useful, because it may have been based on a more sophisticated understanding of the world than the paragraph I set in bold above.

I counted seven lies or half-truths in that paragraph. How many did you spot?

[1] war between Israel and Hezbollah

The lopsidedness of this phrase set my detectors ringing. Why couldn't they say "War between Israel and Lebanon"? Or if lopsidedness is "in" for some reason, why not "War between Likud and Lebanon"? I mean, these people are supposed to be experts in world affairs, right?

And if they really want to understand the role this war plays in our current situation, it would have helped if they had indicated that it was fought based on a lie, and that it was portrayed as a reaction but it was planned years before it started. I keep coming back to the idea that we can't solve a problem until we understand what it is. A reality-based approach, I know, and perhaps not one Foreign Affairs can take at the moment, unfortunately.

[2] a plot in Britain to explode liquid bombs aboard airliners bound for the United States

It's amazing (or is it?) that Foreign Policy can't even manage to come up with the by-now standard phrase: "alleged plot". We know the "plot" as described would have been impossible; the reaction from British authorities was a gross overreaction (if it was a reaction at all). This incident does not illustrate heightened danger from Muslim extremists in any fashion, but it does illustrate very high danger from our governments and so-called "news" media.

[3] North Korea’s nuclear test

We're probably not supposed to remember that it was a mostly-failed test, if it was a nuclear test at all. Initially, none of North Korea's neighbors could find any trace radioactivity. Then the following Monday the US released a report saying one of their sensors had detected increased levels of radioactivity near North Korea the previous week, and the media ran away with headlines like "North Korean Nuclear Test Confirmed" and that was the end of the story, for all intents and purposes.

[4] a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan

Whose fault is that? Who's making all the money from the poppies? And where is that happening? As for the Taliban, do they really represent a threat to anyone in the United States? It would be very difficult to prove they do. But if they do, then the next question becomes: Why are they being protected in Pakistan, supposedly our number one ally in the war on terror?

[5] Iraq’s downward slide into deadly sectarian strife

And whose fault is that? We've known for a long time that the US invaded Iraq on false pretenses, and that "strategic thinkers" in the US "think tank" school of making foreign policy on the sly have been pushing for civil war in Iraq and the dissolution of the country for many years now. We know the US set up death squads in Iraq with the very purpose of instigating "sectarian strife", and recently we've begun to see evidence indicating that the US was also behind the bombing of the Golden Mosque. If there is sectarian strife in Iraq then we put it there. And why would we do such a thing? Primarily, in my opinion, to mask the fact that the primary target (and the primary cause) of the violence in Iraq is the American occupation.

[6] is the public’s pessimism over the war on terror just a problem of perception?

In other words, do we simply need more and better propaganda? The propaganda we get now is pretty good, thanks; and we get enough of it in my opinion. So I would answer NO to this question; I think the public's pessimism over the war on terror has more to do with reality than perception. But thanks for asking.

[7] the United States has yet to be attacked again at home — and that could be the most important benchmark of all.

Or else it could be entirely and deliberately meaningless.

We may not know who was behind the attacks of 9/11 but we certainly know that the official lies we've been given are worthless, or worse than worthless. The attackers had to have inside help, patsies were most certainly framed, identifiable disinformation has been spread around by government agencies and other agencies working for the government, and no legitimate investigation has ever been undertaken.

We know that all these things are true about the 7/7 London bombings as well. Other similarities between the events of 9/11 and the events of 7/7 reveal a commonality of planning, and point away from al-Q'aeda (whatever that is, if it even exists), and toward government insiders. The "government insiders" pointed to belong to many different governments, and they are way inside.

At first blush that seems like too much to swallow, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. This wasn't all done by a postal clerk in Ames, Iowa.

And I know it may sound crazy-scary to some of my readers, but it's not half as crazy-scary as what Sibel Edmonds is trying to tell us, and if she were loony tunes they would certainly let her speak freely. Instead she is heavily gagged and supposedly for national security reasons. In other words, if she were allowed to speak, all sorts of individuals and cabals at the very highest levels would be implicated. That's not me speaking, this is is the official government position: If Sibel Edmonds were allowed to speak freely, significant international business and diplomatic arrangements would be jeopardized.

What does that tell you?

Throw in what we now know about the alleged liquid bombing plot. It was nothing but phony, on any possible level. But it has led to serious consequences: a giant step in the so-called "harmonization" of security arrangements in the EU, a boost in the insane frenzy that pushed the so-called Military Commissions Act through both houses of congress, and airline travel hassles which have all the markings of being made permanent, despite the fact that there was never any demonstrated threat!

Put these things together and give them a stir, and it's no wonder 55% of Americans think we're losing the war on terror.

The other 45% are a tribute to the most enormous propaganda machine ever built; there's no other possible explanation, unless we admit the power of human stupidity, our awesome capacity of being most certain when we are also most ignorant.

We're supposed to be under this great big threat, but we've never even made an effort to secure our borders. We're still pounding on Iraq, even though it's been well documented that our presence there is only inciting more terrorism. And now we're going to spend more time and effort and money -- and blood -- and grief -- pounding on Afghanistan, even though our previous pounding (and the pounding-by-proxy that NATO has been doing for us) haven't made things there any better (and in fact they may now be worse than ever!). So it's tough to see what the other 45% are thinking about.

But at the same time we're finding out more and more clearly that the terror we have to fear comes from inside our own government, that the people supposedly tasked with assuring our national security are far more interested in assuring their own job security, which essentially means the security of the ruling criminal regime, and it looks increasingly likely that the other 45% are not thinking at all -- they've got their heads firmly in the sand (or elsewhere) and they're waiting for all this to go away.

Through this prism it's easy to understand Foreign Policy's contention that the most important benchmark of all may be that we haven't been attacked at home since 9/11.

That's exactly what they're supposed to say. It's the only possible rationale for keeping the criminals in power. It's the only way to keep the protection racket going.

And the terrorists still have their sanctuaries, and our government bureaucracies are still cumbersome, but it's not fair to claim, as some have done, that nothing has changed as the result of 9/11, because we too now live under a dangerous dictator.

And to tell you the truth, our most important benchmark of all seems to be: It's OK because they only did it once!