Catch-9/11

It's a Catch-9/11

My newest "effort" is finished, and it turned out so awful that I've decided to post it elsewhere.

I hope you won't look at it, but here's the link anyway:

Catch-9/11

Seriously:

This is by far the worst thing I've ever written and that's why I'm so anxious to share it with YOU!

I hope you'll HATE it! And I hope you won't share it with either of your friends because I hope they'll hate it too!

Inside the Bush Spin-and-Noise Machine: Using a Terror Threat to Unite the Party around the President

This is a lightly edited excerpt from a post I wrote in August, 2006.

~~~

Let's take a ride inside the Republican Spin-And-Noise Machine, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times:

In Wake of News, a Plan: Uniting Party and President

One week ago, President Bush and his political aides were facing the most daunting election-year landscape of his presidency.

Their party was splintered over Mr. Bush’s proposed immigration overhaul and uncertain about the political effect of violence in Iraq. Even with the White House working to bring Republicans together behind the president’s agenda, several candidates were making public shows of establishing their distance from him and his sagging approval ratings.

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

Did you catch that? NYT said "alleged terror plot". Does that tell us something important? Is this article going to give us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Well, not exactly. But watch this: If you read between the lines, you can see the whole gory plan laid bare -- from one end to the other.

Echoes of Kennebunkport

"The Kennebunkport Warning"

Welcome to the Table of Contents for my coverage of the "Kennebunkport Warning" Fiasco, which transpired in 2007.

Prelude: August 13, 2007:
Throw Up And Go To Sleep: Why There Are No Paranoid Lunatic Conspiracy Theorists

Chapter 1: August 31, 2007:
Kennebunkport Warning: Hoax Shreds 'Credibility' Of Hoaxers -- But Who Are The Hoaxers?

Chapter 2: September 2, 2007:
Dissident Dissent: Paranoid Lunatics Vs. Conspiracy Theorists, Again!

Chapter 3: September 3, 2007:
Cheney Doesn't Need To Attack In USA With WMD This Summer

Chapter 4: September 4, 2007:
The Kennebunkport Train Wreck: Leadership? What Leadership?

Chapter 5: September 22, 2007:
Anyone Who Ever Had A Heart: The Kennebunkport Warning Revisited

Chapter 6: September 26, 2007:
Over The Top: The March Of The Berlet Brigade

Laurie Dobson

Chapter 7: October 12, 2007:
I Like Laurie: Dobson For Senate In Maine

Chapter 8: October 28, 2007:
The Height Of Hypocrisy? Or Maybe Not Yet??

Chapter 9: December 12, 2007:
Laurie Dobson: 'We Must Not Shirk Our Responsibility'

There is no other place or time ... It is in us and it is we who must do this and the time is now.

Some Fishin' Accomplished: Life Sentences For Three Convicted "Liquid Bombers"

Tanvir Hussain

Tanvir Hussain, Assad Sarwar and Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the three so-called "liquid bombers" whom the British criminal justice system managed to convict on September 7, 2009, were sentenced to life a week later, with no chance of parole for 32, 36 and 40 years, respectively.

Only the least skeptical among us could fail to note the coincidence by which the convictions and sentences were both handed down within a few days of the eighth anniversary of the "terror attacks" that the "transatlantic airline bombing plot" was said to rival.

Immediately after the convictions were announced, the tone of the story shifted in an entirely predictable and globally uniform manner. Which is to say that the convictions and sentences have moved the story of the "liquid bombers" from the realm of bizarre terrorist fiction to the nearby realm of bizarre officially sanctioned government propaganda terrorist fiction.

A cynical observer could be forgiven for assuming that this long-awaited transition would be sufficient to bring this astonishingly odd story to a close. But such does not appear to be the case.

A Hole Too Deep

As my regular readers both know, I've been reading (and commenting on) a three-part series called "The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11", which has been published by CovertAction Magazine.

The series, by Ben Howard, Aaron Good and Peter Dale Scott, began with two installments which appear to have been written by all three authors working together, and ended with a three-part conclusion which was certainly written by the three authors separately. And that's why we have three different conclusions to assess.

This post examines the second conclusion in the third installment of the series. It's called "Cutting Through the Parapolitical Fog of 9/11" and it was written by Aaron Good. CovertAction says:

Aaron Good is Editor at Large for CovertAction Magazine.

His revised doctoral dissertation, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is to be published by Skyhorse in the spring of 2022.

You can follow Aaron on Twitter: @Aaron_Good_

The first conclusion, by Ben Howard, set the bar. Will the second conclusion will reach it? or surpass it? No other result seems possible.

One Out Of Three Ain't Good

The third installment of "The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11", a three-part series by Ben Howard, Aaron Good, and Peter Dale Scott, has been posted at CovertAction Magazine, and it starts with a note from the editors:

[Because this series has been the result of a collaboration among three writers with extensive knowledge about 9/11, U.S. hegemony, and the commonly suppressed aspects of our system of governance, our authors decided to take a different approach with Part 3. Rather than present one consensus conclusion, they present here three separate concluding sections—one from each author. We hope this format takes full advantage of the unique perspectives that each have to offer.]

The series started out well, and I praised the first installment without any reservations. The second installment turned out to be surprisingly dismal, to be blunt, and it raised the question, "What's going on here?"

Now we have the answer.

A Revolution In Stupendia

In my previous post, "The Trouble With Stupendia", I explained what I mean by "stupendium" (a "stupendous compendium" but with less compliment and more stupidity). But I failed to mention that its roots are Latin, so of course the plural is "stupendia".

In that post I described the style of stupendium we see most often, but it's not the only style there is, so in this post I will call that style a "bare stupendium". To recap: A bare stupendium

amounts to dumping all the pieces on the table and letting the reader put the puzzle together. Or drawing all the dots but never even hinting at how they should be connected. Too many details, not enough synthesis.

In this post we will explore the landscape of stupendia in more detail, looking for useful ideas which may be hidden away somewhere.

The Trouble With Stupendia

In two recent posts, I've reviewed current articles by Jeremy Kuzmarov on one hand, and Ben Howard, Aaron Good, and Peter Dale Scott on the other. Regarding the latter, "Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?" (reviewed here), I wrote:

I'm sad to say I'm surprised by how shallow it is. ... the authors provide many indications that the "hijackers" were protected by members of "our" "security services" once they arrived in the U.S.

But they never give us any indication that they realize they're talking about patsies. They write as if the patsies had committed the crimes.

By this I meant, among other things, that the towers didn't "collapse" because of impact by airplanes, or fires, or both. They didn't collapse in any but the molecular sense.

For the most part, they turned to toxic dust. The larger (heavier) particles covered the city, several inches deep in places, the smaller (lighter) particles drifted away on the wind, and the mid-size particles hung in the air for days and caused untold death and suffering among first responders and others.

In my view, if we are to make any sense of 9/11 at all, we must accept at least this dollop of obvious-at-the-time (but now suppressed) truth.

Late For The Sky: In Memory Of William Blum

Having been mostly absent for the past five years, I am now learning some of the things you may already know. Among other bad news, I've just found out that William Blum left us on December 9, 2018, at the age of 85.

I was saddened but not surprised by the news. I knew his kidneys were in trouble, and I knew what kidney trouble meant. I lost my father and one of my grandfathers to kidney failure. It's horrible. And I didn't want him to have to endure it. But, as so often happens, my opinion made no difference.

My belated condolences to his friends and family, to those who felt his loss, and those who feel it still.

Noam Chomsky, U.S. Foreign Policy, Propaganda, Syria, International Terrorism, And Grasping At Straws

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine, has recently posted a piece called The U.S. May Have Lost the Military War in Syria, But Has Won the Propaganda War at Home By Portraying its Murderous Invasion as a Moral Crusade, which he opens by claiming that, in the case of Syria, the

propaganda has been so good that [Noam] Chomsky himself at times was taken in by it.

This is the first article I have ever read by Jeremy Kuzmarov, and I couldn't agree less! So we're off to a good start!

In my view, the propaganda regarding Syria has been so obvious and so desperate that it's now much easier than ever to see that Noam Chomsky himself plays a part in it.

It's not easy for everyone, of course. It's not even easy for Jeremy Kuzmarov, who himself has at times been taken in by Chomsky, I would say.

I'm Pretty Sure The CIA Never Tried To Overthrow Any Foreign Governments, But Some People Have Other Ideas

I'm humble to say that my readers and I are unflinchingly patriotic, outrageously smart, and fully aware that the United States would never meddle in the internal affairs of any foreign country, especially a friendly one.

Otherwise, we might be deceived by a new article at Covert Action Magazine which does a superb job of documenting a series of outrageous, deliberate, and mostly successful attempts by the CIA to interfere with the democratically elected governments of two Southern Hemisphere nations which most of the world would consider "friends and allies" of the United States.

The nations to which I refer are Australia and New Zealand, both of which supported Great Britain, the US, and their allies in both World Wars, and suffered horribly in the process.

And the article in question was written by Murray Horton, who provides more than enough links and photographs to make his presentation utterly compelling.

In other words, it is strong enough to convince all but the unflinchingly patriotic, outrageously smart readers who come to this cold blog seeking refuge from the "fake news" which crept in around the edges some time ago, and now has us nearly surrounded.

Murray Horton himself is introduced as "organizer of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA)", "Aotearoa" being the indigenous (Maori) name of the country we would otherwise call "New Zealand". In other words, he's biased!

He's also described as "an advocate of a range of progressive causes for the past four decades", and it's not difficult to imagine that foreign intelligence services meddling in domestic politics may have been one of those causes for most (or even all) of those decades, because the reseach represented here is exhaustive and extremely detailed.

It's just too bad for him that we're all too smart to believe any of it.

"The War Is Over! It's Safe To Go Home Now!"

In the years following my escape from the USA I met some other young expats who were in the same boat as I was. Or at least it looked that way until January of 1973, when a wave of excitement swept through the "young expat community", with everyone saying:

"The war is over! It's safe to go home now!"

But I exaggerate. To be honest, not everyone was saying it. I wasn't saying anything.