9/11 @ 20: It Could Have Been So Much Worse!

Fortunately, the collapse of the twin towers
was "an ordinary thing to have happened".
If it were unusual for skyscrapers to
collapse in this way, some troubling
questions might have been raised.

For those who were alive on September 11th, 2001, the events of the day seemed horrible beyond measure. But with the sober perspective that comes from two decades of hindsight, we're bound to admit that things could have turned out much worse, in countless ways.

For instance, even though only two of the seven buildings that made up the World Trade Center complex were hit by airplanes, all seven suffered heavily. Early media attention focused on the "collapse" of Buildings 1 and 2. And later we learned that Building 7 had also "collapsed". But until recently, only a few dedicated researchers were aware that Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6 were also destroyed on the same day. Nowadays, thanks to the exceedingly free flow of information that we currently enjoy, most people know all about this.

And in light of these facts, we must accept an unpleasant truth: Rogue airliners can do infinitely more damage than we previously thought. To be honest, we ought to be grateful that the impacts of those two airplanes hitting those two buildings didn't destroy all of Wall Street, or most of Manhattan, or half of New York State, or a significant portion of the Eastern Seaboard. We're lucky that none of these things happened, because clearly if they had, we would be in much worse shape than we are now.

Inside Account To Detail Zelikow's Conflict Of Interest In 9/11 Commission

The 9/11 Whitewash Commission was so fragrant that even the pseudo-alternative media are having a bash at it, but without showing any sign of understanding what they're doing. Thus Max Holland writes:

In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission ...

Wow! Is that possible?

Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow [photo], engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Holy flippin' surprise, Batman! No kiddin'? Aw jeez!

In what’s termed an “investigation of the investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book’s critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission’s executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place -- and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

I'm in shock!! How are you? Still breathing? Conflicts of interest? Seriously?? If you're still with us, here are some of the oh-so-shocking details which have recently come to Max's attention:

Kean and Hamilton appreciated that Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National Security Council (NSC) during the presidency of Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German reunification. The commission co-chairmen also knew of Zelikow’s October 2001 appointment to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest, among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?”

No, no, that's the wrong question, Max!

The proper question at this point is: Who would be better to lead the investigation?

From the White House point of view, Zelikow was perfect. And the sequence of events which led him to the position was Rovian.

Unindicted war criminal deluxe Henry Kissinger was the first man named to run the Whitewash. But questions were asked after Kissinger refused to divulge his list of clients; when one of the 9/11 widows asked him specifically whether he had any clients from Saudi Arabia named bin Laden, Kissinger suddenly decided to resign. And while the pro-truth, anti-conflict-of-interest crowd was congratulating one another, Zelikow slipped in the back door and steered the Whitewash safely home.

Karen Heitkotter, the commission’s executive secretary, was taken aback on June 23, 2003 when she answered the telephone for Zelikow at 4:40 PM and heard a voice intone, “This is Karl Rove. I’m looking for Philip.” Heitkotter knew that Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all contact with senior officials in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, she gave Zelikow’s cell phone number to Rove.

Well, that's one way to help them cut off all contact! Excellent work, Karen.

The next day there was another call from Rove at 11:35 AM. Subsequently, Zelikow would claim that these calls pertained to his “old job” at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

My heart is racing now, boys. Does Max Holland pin 'em?

The full extent of Zelikow’s involvement with the incumbent administration only became evident within the commission on October 8, 2003, almost halfway into the panel’s term. Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’ call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that he be questioned under oath about his activities. General counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview, brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed -- his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine -- were mentioned in the résumé. Zelikow blandly asserted to Marcus that he did not see “any of this as a major conflict of interest.” Marcus’s conclusion was that Zelikow “should never have been hired” as executive director. But the only upshot from these shocking disclosures was that Zelikow was involuntarily recused from that part of the investigation which involved the presidential transition, and barred from participating in subsequent interviews of senior Bush administration officials.

Presumably when Max Holland says

his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine

he's talking about "Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy", written in 1998 by Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch and Philip D. Zelikow for "Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century", ironically "a project of the John F. Kennedy School of Government", not so ironically at Harvard University.

Christopher Bollyn points out the mentality behind the report, as revealed in an article the three authors wrote for

Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they laid out what changes would need to be made within the U.S. government in the wake of "catastrophic terrorism," which is also the title of the article.

The "Catastrophic Terrorism" article, written by Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch, and Philip D. Zelikow, appeared in the last issue of Foreign Affairs in 1998. It begins with the strange subtitle "Imagining the Transforming Event," as if what was actually desired by the authors was a transformation of the U.S. government and the way Americans live.

The authors of the article, like Netanyahu, do not even mention the political causes of terrorism. Understanding the causes of terrorism in an effort to prevent it does not even occur to them. No, these three architects are busy "imagining the transforming event" - and how to respond to it.

This article is clearly an architectural level document. It is meant to explain what should be done in the event of the catastrophic terror attack its authors are "imagining." For this reason, the authors deserve to be investigated to see what kind of relationship they might have to those who carried out the false flag terror attacks of 9/11.

Interesting, isn't it? The section of the "Catastrophic Terrorism" report called "Imagining the Transforming Event" begins with a few vital definitions, which can be seen in retrospect to have taken over:

We find terrorism when individuals or groups, rather than governments, seek to attain their objectives by means of the terror induced by violent attacks upon civilians. When governments openly attack others, we call it war, to be judged or dealt with according to the laws of war. When governments act in concert with private individuals or groups, the United States government may call it war, or state-sponsored terrorism, and retaliate against both the individuals and the governments.

There you go. Governments acting openly can't do "terrorism". Only groups and individuals can do that. But if they act in concert with a government, then the United States government may call it state-sponsored terrorism and retaliate against everybody! Nice stuff, Phil.

In the same section we read:

Long part of Hollywood’s and Tom Clancy’s repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism is a real possibility.

So let's see now ... is this confirmation of my thoughts on the day of the catastrophic attack?

Well, you couldn't ask for more, in my opinion.

Speaking of Tom Clancy, I heard part of an interview with him on the radio on the day of 9/11. The interviewer asked "Do you think this would have happened if Al Gore were President?"

Clancy replied, "God forbid if Al Gore were President."

But I digress. Not good during a digression. (At least I'm not regressing.)

Zelikow et. al. again:

An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.

Christopher Bollyn quotes a passage (same link) from an article for Foreign Affairs, in which the same three authors wrote:

The bombings in East Africa killed hundreds. A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it.

Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after.

The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.

As Bollyn points out:

With amazing prescience the authors were right about all eight things they said "might" happen as a result of an attack of "catastrophic terrorism" like Pearl Harbor.

The authors go on to recommend specifically what the U.S. government should do in the wake of such an event of "catastrophic terrorism," which they concluded is "an eminent threat."

Back to the paper, where Zelikow almost seems prescient about national policy in other ways as well:

The greatest danger may arise if the threat falls into one of the crevasses in our government’s field of overlapping jurisdictions, such as the divide between terrorism that is "foreign" or "domestic;" or terrorism that has "state" or "non-state" sponsors; or terrorism that is classified as a problem for "law enforcement" or one of "national security." The law enforcement/national security divide is especially significant, carved deeply into the topography of American government.

The divide between "law enforcement" and "national security" was carved deeply into the topography of American government for a very good reason, and only the utterly coincidental occurrence of a catastrophic attack with "state" or "non-state" sponsors (whatever that means) was required to remove that divide. Now we have "lawfare", a merger of the forces of law enforcement with the forces of warfare. America declares war on its own people. I'll have more on this in an upcoming essay -- or maybe a series of them.

Zelikow and friends are almost funny when they write:

The threat of catastrophic terrorism typifies the new sort of security problem the United States must confront in the post Cold War world. It is transnational, defying ready classification as foreign or domestic, either in origin, participants, or materials. As the World Trade Center incident demonstrated, one group can combine U.S. citizens with resident aliens and foreign nationals, operating in and out of American territory over long periods of time.

If the World Trade Center incident they refer to (the 1993 bombing) demonstrated anything, it's that we shouldn't trust our government's counter-terror units.

That bombing was an inside job, too. The FBI had "the terrorist cell" infiltrated from a very early stage. The FBI agent suggested bombing the WTC. The agent taught the "terrorists" how to build a bomb. How would they get the bomb to the WTC? The terrorists didn't know, so the agent suggested renting a van. The terrorists didn't know how to drive, so the agent gave one of them driving lessons. Then came the fatal day.

They put the bomb in the van and drove to the parking ramp under the WTC. The agent snuck around a corner and pulled out his cell phone. Calling the office, he said, "The bomb is in place. Come arrest them." But his supervisor told him, "Get out of there! The bomb has to go off!"

The agent was astonished. What? His boss told him, "We have to have an explosion to guarantee a conviction." So he ran. And the bomb exploded. And it was all the terrorists' fault.

But I digress. I'd give you a link to the 1993 info, except I heard it on the radio. I heard an interview with that agent on the radio. I'm sorry to say I forget his name. Didn't realize at the time how important it was going to be.

Man, that was some confused dude. He thought he'd been there to thwart them. At the last moment he found out his job had been to assist them! Hmmm.

What? Oh no, no parallels here, officer!

Most of the Zelikow paper is ostensibly about measures that could be taken in an attempt to prevent catastrophic terrorism; those measures are being taken even as you read this sentence.

As Zelikow wrote:

When this threat becomes clear the President must be in a position to activate extraordinary capabilities.

One way of looking at the history of false-flag attacks on the WTC is like this: the 1993 bombing didn't make the threat clear. The 2001 attacks did.

And now -- as if that were not enough -- more from Max Holland:

[When] Bob Kerrey replaced disgruntled ex-Senator Max Cleland on the panel, the former Nebraska senator became astounded once he understood Zelikow’s obvious conflicts-of-interest and his very limited recusal. Kerrey could not understand how Kean and Hamilton had ever agreed to put Zelikow in charge. “Look Tom,” Kerrey told Kean, “either he goes or I go.” But Kean persuaded Kerrey to drop his ultimatum.

And there's more: Zelikow asked his secretary not to keep a record of his incoming calls. Then he started using his cell phone for his calls to the White House. He violated the limited terms of his limited recusal.

You could read it all, and you probably should. But be prepared for some horse droppings near the end:

Shenon’s [...] account of the commission’s inner workings promises to achieve what none of the crackpot conspiracy theorists have managed to do so far: put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute.

Right. By revealing hidden details that the crackpot conspiracy theorists already know about, this hot-shot New York Times reporter will be able to do what? Will he finally reveal the hidden details that the crackpot conspiracy theorists already know about?? and put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute that way?

I'm starting to lose track of the number of places where I've seen the same pattern in post-democratic American journalism. The authors seem free to lay out any number of dots, each utterly incriminating, but they invariably leave some dots out, and they always connect the dots that they do have -- or frame them, as in this case -- with a bogus narrative.

Post-democratic American journalism at its finest, friends. Yuck.

Still ... what was Phil Zelikow doing anywhere near that Commission, let alone "serving" as executive director of it? What was he doing talking to Karl Rove? What was he doing talking to the White House? What was he doing interfering with the investigation into his role in the "transition"?

He was doing his job, that's what!

Bollyn again:

Philip David Zelikow is all over 9/11, its aftermath, and the subsequent wars in the Middle East. Three years after warning of "catastrophic terrorism," Zelikow became the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, the appointed government whitewash which utterly failed to address the key questions and evidence of the terror attacks of 9/11.

Zelikow, from Houston, served on President George W. Bush's transition team in 2001. After Bush took office, Zelikow was named to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and served on the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, which produced the extremely flawed Help America Vote Act of 2002.

If you think all these disparate coincidences are connected somehow, you're a wacko conspiracy theorist. Welcome aboard!

Beyond The Mirror -- The 9/11 Funhouse, Part IV

In this series, I've been discussing some of the most transparently false arguments concerning 9/11 and the Global War On Terror that are still in circulation (starting here, then parts one, two and three). In this installment, a few fallacies concerning the so-called "conspiracy theorists" who say "9/11 was an inside job": more personal forms of attack, and a more personal defense.

Conspiracy Theorists Need Something To Believe In

Like all good propaganda, the most enduring lies about 9/11 are difficult to disentangle. One of the most complex is the one that says:

The people who see a conspiracy behind 9/11 are basically paranoid conspiracy theorists who see conspiracies everywhere. They can't accept the fact that the world is chaotic -- they need to believe unseen forces are at work behind everything happening around them. These people would have seen a conspiracy behind 9/11 no matter what they saw, no matter what they were told, no matter what actually happened.

This is difficult to refute because there's a grain of truth to it. There are people who see unseen forces behind everything. But I'm not one of them.

I have no need to believe unseen forces are at work, anywhere. I would be quite content to believe that everybody was playing by the same rules, just like in checkers or something, and get on with it. But I seem to be driven by a more powerful force -- a need to make sense of the world.

I'm an empiricist: I grew up reading Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes and absorbing wisdom such as "It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts." Even now, I have no interest in simply theorizing about things; I want to see the details. I'm not the type to fix the intelligence around the policy. I want to base the policy on a coherent analysis of the intelligence.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time thinking about the famous line from Holmes that runs: "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." As a student I specialized in math and science. For fun I played chess and music. Later on I taught math. Now I program computers for a living.

All these activities keep me thinking about what is true and what is false. They've taught me to eliminate the impossible and to accept the truth, no matter how improbable it might seem. And it's become a vital life-skill. In prior days, my math had to be solid or the college would have booted me out. Nowadays, my code has to be solid or my clients will go elsewhere. When the day comes that I can't separate the true from the false, I'm out of a job. I've always known that.

So in a very hand-to-mouth sense, I need to believe in the truth -- both on a low level (my code is good; this math is right; that move is solid; this note is correct) and on higher levels as well (I know my kids are lying to me if their explanation doesn't fit the facts, and the same goes for clients and students and the television and the internet and everything else).

I'm happy if a story holds together. I'm happy if something is true. And it doesn't matter to me whether the truth is expressed as Bach or The Clash, whether it's beautiful architecture or witty graffiti, whether it's the sort of chess Bobby Fischer used to play, or Capablanca before him, or Paul Morphy before either of them! ... or Gauss or Newton or my favorite math teachers, or any of the other people who see how things work and describe them in ways that make sense.

And that's why I can't believe the official story of 9/11. It's not that I'm a conspiracy theorist by nature. It's just that the official story doesn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense on the day it happened, it's made even less sense as the years have gone by, and that's why I don't believe it.

I don't expect geopolitics to make sense in the way that Bach or Morphy did. I understand that we have a multitude of players, playing under multiple sets of rules -- or not playing under any rules at all! -- moving at the same time, deliberately cutting across one another's plans, and leaving a mess in their wake. I don't expect that wake to be simple, or easily untangled.

In other words, I might buy the story if there were only one or two incredible details. I would probably be satisfied with the idea that the attack was complex and bound to leave a few "loose ends", even if those "loose ends" were absolutely bizarre ... if there were only a few "loose ends" left over.

But it's not just a few loose ends. It's massive contradictions, clear evidence of lying, conflict of interest all over the place, advance warnings ignored, investigations shut down, evidence destroyed, official stories changed -- and changed again! -- and much more besides, including magical violation of the laws of physics.

For a single example of this magic in action, consider the "collapse" of the South Tower. As shown in the photos, the top third of the building broke off and started to topple over.

Part of it extended beyond the perimeter of the building, as we can clearly see.

If it had been a gravity-driven event, with no explosives involved, we would expect at least part of this block to continue falling, since there is no tower beneath it -- nothing to crush it but thin air. It should have landed in the street, or on an adjacent building. Instead this part of the tower turned to dust before it ever hit the ground. All because of gravity? Sorry! That can't happen in real life.

In other words, there's not necessarily anything wrong with me, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with anyone who agrees with me; there's something wrong with the story we've been told.

That's why I'm a "conspiracy theorist".

And I resent the constant media push to question my sanity, and that of others like me -- from people who won't even examine the facts of the case because they're so busy attacking those who do so. Some very well-known writers have lost all my respect for this very reason (and if I were less of a gentleman I might mention names such as Alexander Cockburn, George Monbiot, and Gwynne Dyer).

Conspiracy Theorists Find Their Bizarre Theories Comforting

Just in case it's not obvious yet, I don't speak for anybody but myself. I'm not a member of any 9/11-related organization, I don't hang at any 9/11-related websites, I'm not in any formal alliance with any group or individual. I do correspond with a few people who I support in various ways, and a few other people who help me too, but I have never discussed any of this with any of them. So I don't know what they think about it. I only know what I think.

I don't find any comfort in the belief that American democracy is over. I don't find any comfort in knowing that my country is fighting multiple wars based on gigantic and deliberately-crafted lies; that it has killed and/or maimed and/or rendered homeless millions and millions of people, in "revenge" for what amounts to nothing more than a bit of political "street theater".

There are already billions of people suffering through every day of their lives, dying from easily preventable diseases, starving to death, all kinds of horrible things going on in a world that's got enough natural cruelty to last a lifetime, without my country -- the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen -- dropping bombs on people while they sleep, kidnapping them and taking them away to be tortured, destroying their hospitals, cutting off their water and electricity, and poisoning their landscape with depleted uranium -- all to separate them from their oil.

Anyone who has a heart and a moment to think about these things can see that there is nothing even remotely comforting about any of this -- nothing whatsoever. And I am more than a little bit offended by this particular transparently false argument about 9/11.

Conspiracy Theorists Hate America

This is possibly the biggest red herring there ever was. It's also a conflation of endless very different entities into a single ball of nonsense.

I've loved most of the American people I've ever met, most of the American landscape I've ever seen, too many individuals and places and things to mention, and let's not forget the principles on which the country was founded. I hate the violence; I hate the pollution; I hate the propaganda; I hate the endless war against the rest of the world; I hate the relentless glorification of rich idiots and serial killers; I hate the marginalization of the poor and the demonization of the gentle; I hate the racism and the intolerance and the hatred; I hate the national leadership of both major parties. Does this mean I hate America? Not at all -- and what if it did?

There are plenty of things to love about America, and plenty of things to hate. The truth or falsehood of the official 9/11 story doesn't depend on any of them.

Conspiracy Theorists Blame Bush For 9/11 Because They Hate Him

This is a reversal of cause and effect. Conspiracy theorists blame Bush because they can see so many ways in which he deserves to be blamed.

His reaction to the attack was inappropriate, every step of the way. He sat in the classroom and listened to the kids read the story about the goat, even though he knew the country was under attack. What sort of commander in chief is this?

Then he declared endless limitless war against the rest of the world. What sort of a statesman would do that?

Bush resisted any official investigation for as long as possible. Then when he was forced to empower one, he assigned the monstrous war criminal Henry Kissinger to run it. Kissinger had to resign to avoid the exposure of a blatant conflict of interest. He realized this when he was asked whether he had any Saudi Arabian clients named "Bin Laden".

So then Philip Zelikow was handed the assignment. He had previously written a book with Condoleeza Rice. He had also written a treatise on catastrophic terror and the political uses to which it could be put. He's a specialist in public myth-making. Bush put him in charge of the investigation.

When his turn came, Bush refused to testify in public, or under oath, or without Dick Cheney at his side. Bush and Cheney refused to allow any records of their "testimony" to be kept. All this was designed to make us trust them?

Then we found out that before 9/11, Bush ignored counter-terrorism officials who tried to warn him about the coming attack. We found out that investigations into certain families and certain countries had been systematically shut down. We found out that members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to leave the country in the immediate wake of the attacks. We found out that the Bush family and the Bin Laden family have done business together for a long time. We found out a lot more, too, that traces directly to the president, and his father.

Conspiracy theorists hate George Bush because of all this. They didn't make all this up in order to support some baseless, irrational, pre-determined hatred of him.

This deliberate reversal of cause and effect is so transparent; it's more an assault on the fabric of reality than on the "inside job" argument.

In other words, "If you'll believe this, you'll believe anything!"

And that's exactly what they're hoping for.

Zelikow: CIA Withheld Tapes, Impeded 9/11 Investigation: Yeah, Right!!

The pot calls the kettle black, as the New York Times says a study of 9/11 commission documents indicates that the CIA impeded the investigation by failing to share videotapes of certain interrogations...

... and this is crucial because...

... if the commission had seen videotapes of two guys getting waterboarded and one of them implicating two of our key allies in the "global war on terrorism"...

... then the commission would have done a full investigation rather than a whitewash...

... and the criminals who foisted this ugly reality upon us would be hanging from the ceilings of tiny cages right now...

... rather than enjoying the fruits of their deception ...

... unless the relevant sections of the commission's report got redacted!!

Perhaps even more crucial, this revelation gives the whitewashers some much-needed cover: Now they can blame the Agency for impeding the investigation!

And that's why the "9/11 Panel Report" mentioned in the headline was written by Philip Zelikow, who personally orchestrated the whitewash.

Strangely (or not!), the NYT dipsy-doodles around the main story-line, which comes out like this:

A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

And so on. This bit was particularly rich:

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.

Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter.

Yeah, sure! Pressure on the Bush administration!

That's a good one!!

See also: Connecting The 9/11 Dots: Dead Cutouts, Destroyed Tapes, And The Hidden Assumption That Poisons Everything

VIDEO: Peter Dale Scott: Canada, Left Gatekeepers and Zelikow

Six years ago today, it was obvious to me that the voices coming out of my television did not match the pictures.

The mismatch was also obvious to Peter Dale Scott.

VIDEO: Zelikow

Two short videos highlight the man who led the 9/11 Commission's "investigation".

Throw Up And Go To Sleep: Why There Are No Paranoid Lunatic Conspiracy Theorists

On one hand you've got this "election integrity" thing -- not a "coalition" or a "movement" but an illness, a dementia, really: all these paranoid lunatics who say our elections aren't free and fair just because they're run on machines that give the voter no way to verify that his vote was counted correctly, without leaving a paper trail, only totals tabulated by secret software that can easily be hacked, and because millions of people are illegally prevented from voting, and millions of other votes aren't even counted, and blah blah blah.

Look, I'm sorry but I can't listen to it anymore; it puts me to sleep.

On the other hand you've got these "9/11 truth" conspiracy theorists who say "the twin towers didn't collapse, they disintegrated" and "the NIST report calls itself a whitewash with its 'low probability of occurrence' nonsense" and "the FBI has no evidence implicating Osama bin Laden in the attacks of 9/11" and all sorts of other cheap-shots against the victims and their families. How disgraceful can you get?

Then they turn around and ask hateful and irrelevant questions like "Why did the President just sit there and listen to those kids read?" and "Where was the Air Force when all this was happening?" and they just go on and on and on. It's been going on for almost six years now and I can't listen to another word of it.

How could anyone be so unpatriotic? Can you imagine? It makes me want to throw up.

You would think, if you were inclined to think at all, that these two rabid and radical nut-bar fringe groups would fit together, so to speak. In other words, you would expect to see a lot of paranoid lunatic conspiracy theorists. But you don't, or at least I don't.

Look at this:



The text at the bottom may be hard to read: it says

DEMAND: Impeachment & Treason Trials | End The War | Restore The Bill Of Rights | A New 9/11 Investigation

Quite a laundry list, don't you think? We could talk about this insanity for a long time. But here's the key question: Do you see anything here about elections?

Of course not! This "General Strike" nonsense comes from from conspiracy theorists; I know! it makes you sick to your stomach, doesn't it? but hang on! -- just for the sake of discussion, have a look at this:



Look closely. The people who designed these buttons are paranoid lunatics, but they're not conspiracy theorists. You can see that, can't you?

And it's not hard to see because we've come to expect it. But my question today is a harder one:

Why?

Why don't we see "Election Integrity" and "9/11 Truth" in the same place?

I think I know the answer.

~~~

Say what you like about the paranoid lunatics; they're not stupid. At least some of them aren't. They know their paranoid lunacy is not reality so they shy away from anything that might "tarnish" what they call their "credibility". They stick to known facts rather than wild speculation, and rightly so, in my opinion.

In other words it's a known fact that electronic voting machines can be hacked; that's been proven by Ivy League scientists and everything. It's solid. There's no conspiracy theory about it. This is fundamental, and decisive; some would say divisive. In any case, it's completely different from all the ridiculous conspiracy theories about the Islamo-Fascist terrorist attacks of 9/11, 7/7, and so on.

The conspiracy nuts aren't gonna like this, because it blows all their insane theories out of the water, but recently unreleased documents confirm Khalid Sheikh Mohammed scheduled more than a dozen simultaneous US Air Force wargames for the day of 9/11. He did it by cellphone from a cave in Afghanistan using a codebook found by an al-Q'aeda operative on a public bus in Switzerland. The CIA has just confirmed all this based on records from a wireless server they impounded from an internet cafe in the Hindu Kush.

Or at least that's what they say. The actual details of the calls themselves are redacted for national security reasons. But it sounds reasonable to me. I couldn't read the source document, even if it were unclassified -- I haven't got time, and it's probably in Urdu anyway.

More to the point, would the CIA lie about something like this? I don't think so, unless it were a part of an official disinformation campaign, and as I understand it they don't do those anymore, because disinformation campaigns are now categorized as unofficial.

So that's it! And I'm glad it's settled, because it was the only remaining question; by now I think it's pretty well accepted -- even among the most rabid wackos on the frothing fringe of the increasingly gullible conspiracy community -- that Osama bin Laden personally appointed Philip Zelikow to head the independent investigation after Henry Kissinger recused himself to pursue less lucrative but more patriotic service opportunities. So that pretty much settles it, unless I've missed something.

Of course it doesn't really matter whether I've missed anything or not, because the conspiracy theorists will surely come up with something else; they always do. Can you believe it? Next they'll be claiming important events have been reported before they even happened.

But it's all hogwash, demented hogwash from demented conspiratorial minds, and even the paranoid lunatics want nothing to do with them. I wouldn't either.

For their part, the conspiracy theorists are afraid of being associated with paranoid lunatics, and this, too, is perfectly understandable, I think.

If you were a conspiracy theorist trying to drum up popular support for a laundry-list of ridiculous, treasonous demands -- a hard-left pro-terrorist manifesto, as it were -- would you include any word or phrase that fairly screamed out "PARANOID LUNATICS HERE"?

I wouldn't either, and it's a good thing too, because if all the paranoid lunatics and all the conspiracy theorists ever got out in the streets together -- on September 11, 2007, for example -- it just might encourage them to stay a while.

And that would be very bad, both for America and for me personally.

It would be bad for America for many reasons but primarily because it would show the American people how widespread mental illness is in this country, and how common delusional thinking has become. It might also give them dangerous ideas about the power of the government and the consent of the governed and possible relations between the two.

It would also be bad for me personally, because I'm a news-hound. I read several short news articles per week, and I'm afraid if there were a big, long general strike by a coalition of paranoid lunatics and conspiracy theorists, the media would start covering them. And if I have to read about paper ballots and false flag terror one more time, I think I'm gonna throw up and go to sleep.

Normally, I don't like writing about myself and my own personal reactions to things, but in this case it's "fitting and proper", as Abe Lincoln would say ... because what's bad for me personally ... is bad for America!

This is Winter Patriot reporting, from ...
What? My mic is on? [click]

Triple-Spun: Peter Lance's Finely Woven Yarn

[This piece was written in late November, 2006 but has not been posted until now. I apologize for the delay but thought it might still be an interesting supplement to a more recent post.]

Peter Lance has been making a lot of noise lately, doin' the book sale thang and positioning himself in a very peculiar spot, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Why peculiar? Well, for instance, his interview with Amy Goodman started this way:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, lay out this story.

PETER LANCE: Okay. Well, Ali Mohamed was -- the story actually begins 20 years before 9/11 with the murder of Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was actually a member of the radical Egyptian army unit that murdered Sadat. Only, at the time, he escaped investigation because he happened to be at Fort Bragg even then on an officer exchange program.

Three sentences! (Well, four if you count the "Okay." as a sentence.) And my red flag is up already! Ali Mohamed "escaped investigation because he happened to be at Fort Bragg"?? How curious!! I'm always suspicious when a story starts out with a key "coincidence". And Peter Lance is selling a story laced with such "coincidences"; it's The New Coincidence Theorist's Guide to the Official Conspiracy Theory.

Lance's story follows the "al Qaeda spy named Ali Mohamed" who "penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI..." (which sets off more red flags for me -- anyone else?) and points out a number of times when Mohamed could have been stopped, pinning the blame squarely on ... Patrick Fitzgerald!

Jason Leopold is into it:

Triple Cross presents no conspiracy theory. It's a 489-page thriller. And it's all true. Lance, a five-time Emmy award-winning reporter and former ABC News correspondent, sticks closely to the facts.

Larry Johnson is not:

Peter’s venom spewed at Patrick Fitzgerald is particularly crazy. Consider the following claim by Lance:

How was it that Fitzgerald, the man Vanity Fair described as the bin Laden "brain," possessing "scary smart" intelligence, had not connected the dots and ordered the same kind of "perch" or "plant" to watch Sphinx that the Bureau had used against Gotti?

Well, for starters, prosecutors in the United States are not like prosecutors in France. Fitzgerald and other junior prosecutors do not have the luxury of waking up each morning and deciding on their own to follow a hunch. Moreover, they normally don’t direct Federal investigations. The investigative part is handled by FBI agents who run field offices. They collect evidence until they have a case put together that enables them to secure an indictment or an arrest warrant and then the prosecutor gets involved. Once again, Peter misses a basic fact that anyone who has watched Law and Order already knows.

Lance doesn't think much of Johnson's criticism:

Larry Johnson is a joke, okay? ... Larry Johnson has had an animus against me personally for years. ... Larry Johnson’s upset because I’ve named him in my book as an example of how the feds failed on the road to 9/11.

Rory O'Connor doesn't seem to know what to make of Lance's story:

What if I told you that a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle operated with impunity within the United States for years before Sept. 11? That despite being an ardent and avowed jihadi, he managed to become a naturalized citizen, join the U.S. Army, get posted to the Special Warfare Center where Green Berets and Delta Force train, and work with both the CIA and the FBI? And all the while, he was a top al Qaeda operative, hosting the organization's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, when he traveled to the United States in the 1990s to raise money, and training both bin Laden's personal bodyguard and radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center?

Would you take it as evidence that our so-called intelligence community was abjectly incompetent and dysfunctional in the months and years before 9/11? Or would you see it as further proof that the powers-that-be were the powers behind 9/11, either "making it happen on purpose?" Or alternately: "letting it happen on purpose?"

Personally, I've been wondering what to think on a number of levels, while watching some of the people I normally read as they react to Lance and his story, and pondering...

Now, as it turns out, Jack Cashill may have a vital key in his pocket:

Almost no one in the mainstream media will utter the words "TWA Flight 800." This includes several prominent terrorist experts, who deeply distrust the government's mechanical explanation for the plane's demise but who are understandably reluctant to go public. Kudos to "Triple Cross" author Peter Lance for breaking this taboo. He risks his career in so doing.
...
Although Lance pushes the mainstream media to their limits, he has largely stayed within their pale. This I understand, especially on the subject of TWA Flight 800. To mention the word "missile" in that context is to risk losing a TV presence.

But which way does the key turn?

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- Peter Lance has bitten off more than he can safely chew. In other words, if he connects the dots in the way that the connections would seem to point, his story is too dangerous to tell. So he does the safe thing -- the only thing that will allow his story to see the light of day. He points out all the dots but rather than connecting them in the way that seems most natural, he connects them in a way that seems most politically acceptable.

There's political danger in the story, to be sure, and Peter Lance perhaps -- just perhaps -- walks right up to the line when he talks about "the al-Q'aeda spy who penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI". By which I mean, he would probably lose his job if he saw the same events in a slightly different light, if for instance he saw Ali Mohamed as CIA's al-Q'aeda liasion. But then ...

What if Peter Lance began to notice the weaknesses in his model -- the model in which 9/11 was allowed to happen strictly through incompetence? What if Peter Lance finally began to see something more sinister in the data he's been collecting lo these many years? Would he lose his job if he spoke freely about such things? Maybe more to the point, would he believe that speaking out would put him in personal danger -- or might cost him his job?

So ... is Peter Lance speaking to us in code? Is he saying: "Look: Here are the dots. You know how the connections look? Well that's what they are. But I work for a major establishment presence and I've got kids to feed. So listen. Ali Mohamed [wink] infiltrated the CIA! Yeah! and he [wink] infiltrated the FBI too! Yeah! because they were [wink] incompetent!"

I'm just wondering, because it sure looks like more than incompetence to me.

I mean, could Osama bin Laden schedule wargames that took the most of the air cover away from the Eastern Seaboard?

Could Ali Mohamed turn off the Pentagon's anti-aircraft defenses that morning?

Could Blind Shiek Bellbottom call Air Force One and rattle off top-secret "national security" codewords?

Did Ali Mohamed's plans for the demolition of the World Trade Center include thermate, nukes, or both?

How did the Blind Shiek manage to ensure that the testimony of witnesses such as Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley would be brushed aside in favor of more appealing lies?

Did Ali Mohamed arrange for Philip Zelikow -- a man who was required to testify before the 9/11 Commission -- to become the executive director of that very Commission?

Was it the Blind Shiek who made sure George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice were permitted to testify in closed session, without swearing any oath, and that no notes of these sessions could be retained?

In other words, did Osama bin Laden change the parade route?

~~~

LINKS:

Peter Lance at Huffington Post, Aug 29:
TRIPLE CROSS: Nat Geo Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story

Rory O'Connor at AlterNet, Nov 15:
The 9/11 Conspiracy of Incompetence

Peter Lance at Huffington Post, Nov 17:
Al Qaeda and The Mob: How the FBI Blew It on 9/11

Jason Leopold at Scoop, Nov 20:
Peter Lance's 9/11 Masterpiece

Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe, Nov 20:
Peter Lance, Criss-Crossed

Jack Cashill at WorldNetDaily, Nov 22:
'Triple Cross' blows TWA 800 wide open

Jack Cashill at WorldNetDaily, Nov 30:
The Path from WTC I to WTC II

Peter Lance with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, Nov 29:
Triple Cross: Journalist Peter Lance on How Bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI - And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him

Webster G. Tarpley: What To Do Next

UPDATED: see below

[Webster G.] Tarpley is a patriot who speaks five languages and is out front on the truth tours, technical analysis and in bringing people into the light concerning the methods of the covert ops, e.g., patsies, moles, etc., as per JFK assassination ad nauseum.

Until we openly teach the power of the mind, and how tractable the average citizen is, we will be vulnerable to various forms of mind control, propaganda and simple advertising manipulation, not to mention personal prejudice. Immature people are generally control-freaks and don't understand liberty for what it really is...rather than the channeled form of "freedom" we now generally experience as the Matrix-type existence. If we don't have control of our minds and have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to be sophists, it's all over...

So pass this everywhere, and get people thinking in terms of effective action, as Tarpley does.

So writes prez_usa_exile, who quotes Webster G. Tarpley

The 9/11 truth movement contributed decisively to the defeat of the pro-Bush forces in the November 2006 election. Bush and Rove intended to terrorize the electorate with the 9/11 fear issue, as they had successfully done in 2002 and 2004, to create an atmosphere conducive to stealing yet another election with vote fraud, vote suppression, and other illegal dirty tricks. But this time, as even some leading Democrats noted, the spell had been broken, and the nightmare vision had lost its hypnotic power. Bush was exposed as the desperate little demagogue behind the curtain. This was the result of five years of agitation and political education carried out by the 9/11 truth movement on the internet, through regional, national, and local conferences, in books and other publications, in battles for academic freedom on campus, and on cable television especially during 2005-6.

The turning point of the election campaign was probably the four telecasts in July-August of the round table of the Alex Jones Los Angeles conference, taped in late June; these broadcasts reportedly garnered the highest ratings in the history of C-SPAN thanks in part to a campaign of call-ins to talk radio by 9/11 truth activists and deflated the racist, militarist, and fascist 9/11 myth in the eyes of a whole stratum of opinion leaders. The Hillary Clinton-Lieberman-Rahm Emmanuel wing of the Democratic Party, by contrast, did everything possible to re-enforce the 9/11 myth and lose the election, and has been attempting ever since to throw away the fruits of victory in the name of "bi-partisan" sellouts.

The United States is now in the throes of a party re-alignment on the model of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. This past election, like 1930 and 1966, was the prelude to and harbinger of a great historical watershed. If the cause of 9/11 truth prevails, the re-alignment can be resolved in a positive direction for the United States and the world. If 9/11 truth is strangled, the re-alignment may well turn out to be a re-alignment into totalitarian fascism. If the Democratic Party attempts to continue the war of civilizations imposed using the 9/11 pretext, it is the Democratic Party which will be destroyed. The new Congress must repudiate the discredited 9/11 commission and re-open the 9/11 question, working to bring the September criminals in the US government to justice.

The Baker-Hamilton commission is an attempt by the US ruling class to continue the Iraq and Afghan wars with different rhetorical packaging, pushing the neocon fascist madmen into the background and attempting to recruit Syria for a US-sponsored Sunni alliance with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt to oppose the Shiite bloc of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi Shiites. Baker-Hamilton ignore the grave danger that the 150,000 US troops in landlocked Iran will have their supply lines cut by insurgents, leading to their encirclement, decimation, and rout. Bush's likely insistence on escalating the Iraq war into an endless bloodbath, while retaining the lunatic victory rhetoric of the neocons and preserving total US subservience to Israel, may well propel part of the ruling class to seek the impeachment of the current regime, or Bush's ouster under the XXV Amendment. Such conflict is the public expression of a contrast within the US-UK ruling class itself between an extremist pro-fascist financier faction identified with George Shultz, and the imperialist grouping represented by James Baker III. The hegemony of either of these groupings spells doom for the United States as the death agony of the US dollar unfolds over the coming months. All indications point to a looming catastrophic worldwide dollar panic as more and more countries refuse to accept the US currency in payment for oil, raw materials, and other exports. The US ruling class will try to save the dollar by means of a regime of genocidal austerity here on the home front. We demand instead that the finance oligarchs pay for the crisis by means of a securities transfer tax (Tobin tax), taxes on the $300 trillion in derivatives held by Wall Street, and other taxes on the parasitical top 2% who have been the beneficiaries of the predatory tax policies of the Bush regime.

Bush-Cheney will necessarily attempt to motivate their policy of endless war and wider war against the will of 80% of the electorate by obsessive and compulsive citation of the lessons of 9/11. In this way they will place 9/11 more than ever before at the center of political conflict. Our ability to further dismantle and discredit the 9/11 myth will be the key to defeating Bush-Cheney and their war regime. By sweeping the 9/11 myth into the garbage can of history, we will destroy Bush's last line of defense. In doing this, the 9/11 truth movement is the only force which can save the United States.

The Democratic rubber-stamping of al Qaeda founder and Iran-contra criminal Robert Gates as Pentagon boss shows that the Democratic Party is strongly inclined to capitulate to Bush. Despite the parliamentary cretinism of Speaker Pelosi, other forces are at work to radicalize the Democrats. Whatever legislation the Democratic Congress may pass is likely to be vetoed by Bush. The one important power the Congress can exercise is that of oversight hearings, using subpoenas to compel testimony and the disclosure of documents by such lawless officials as Gonzalez, Rice, etc. Cheney has already signaled that the administration will refuse to comply, citing the fascist theory of the "unitary executive." This will force the Congress, deprived of any other way of justifying their own existence, to resort to contempt of Congress citations, funding cutoffs (on the model of the Hatfield-McGovern amendment that ended the Vietnam war), and boycotts of Bush's nominees. The resulting constitutional crisis over checks and balances would then set the stage for the impeachment of top officials.

US-led coalitions are facing catastrophic defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the vaunted Israeli army has been mauled by Hezbollah during this past summer's war in southern Lebanon. These events symbolize the death knell of imperialism in the Middle East. Oblivious of this, the Shultz-Cheney faction continues to strive for a new 9/11, a new Gulf of Tonkin, of other provocations which would enable US nuclear attack on Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, or other nations. Since these machinations would most likely be conducted under the cover of exercises and drills, we must maintain our vigilance, including by forcing the new Congress to address the issues of what 9/11 really was and how it could be repeated by the rogue networks in the CIA, Pentagon, etc. We must:

1. Impeach Bush-Cheney and top administrations officials (Gonzalez, Rice, etc.) for 9/11 crimes, starting with the overwhelming prima facie case for misprision of treason. (The Vermont Idea)

2. Deploy 9/11 Truth Squads into New Hampshire, Iowa, and other early primary/caucus states to confront candidates of all parties, challenging them to repudiate the racist, militarist, and fascist official myth of 9/11, re-open the investigations, and bring the actual perpetrators -- the 9/11 September criminals infesting the US government to justice. We reject the warmongers, totalitarians, globalizers, and state terrorists from all parties.

3. Aggressively lobby the new Congress to re-open 9/11, condemn the discredited Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow commission report, end the Iraq war at once, block the planned attacks on Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela, and ward off new acts of US-UK false flag state sponsored terrorism. We want the Patriot Act repealed, habeas corpus restored, and illegal NSA wiretaps shut down.

4. Prepare now to field slates of 9/11 truth candidates in the 2007 and 2008 elections, with a view to pushing the ongoing party re-alignment towards a positive anti-fascist outcome compatible with human progress.

5. Expand the effort of drill monitoring to deprive the ruling elite of the option of bootlegging new synthetic terror actions under the cover of military exercises and homeland security drills.

6. Call for more whistle blowers and deep throats to come forward with the truth of how 9/11 was a deliberate provocation run through the US military-security bureaucracy. We must identify, denounce, expose, and shut down suspect drills, educating world opinion about how drills are the matrix of state terrorism.

7. Prepare the ground for mass actions, including an open-ended general strike on the model of Spain in March 2004, to fight back against new state terrorist provocations, wider aggressive wars, and attempts to cancel elections or impose martial law.

8. In the context of the ongoing death agony of the US dollar, prepare urgent measures for emergency relief, job creation, re-industrialization, and economic recovery along the lines of the New Deal.

9. Work for the convocation during 2007 of an Independent International Truth Commission of eminent world figures to pass judgment of the US-UK official explanation of the 9/11 events and the neocon war of civilizations deriving from them.

10. The 9/11 truth movement, having largely transcended the artificial and obsolete left-right divide, will continue to work for the convergence of leftists, progressives, conservatives, greens, libertarians, and all persons of good will on the basis of a program of rejection war and dictatorship, and promoting economic recovery. This is a vital contribution to the ongoing party realignment and crisis of the political system.

The emphasis above is mine, and I wonder what you think about all (or any part of) this.

Please speak freely, as usual.

UPDATE: It's happening!!

From the Boston 9/11 Truth Blog:

Announcing an afternoon of TRUTH with Webster Tarpley

Jan 20th, 2006 11AM at the Friends Meeting House,
141 Central Avenue
Dover, NH

Webster Tarpley, noted author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, will lead the day's activities for 9/11 activists, the public and invited guests in an event to create "Truth Squads" which will present a challenging presence to the presidential candidates in New Hampshire.

In his presentation Webster will discuss the current political party realignment and whether this transition will take us towards a new progressive phase or a more fascist and draconian society. As well the political evidence of 9/11 crimes, the dollar collapse, the dangers of a new 9/11 and the impending collapse of US forces in Iraq will be addressed by Mr. Tarpley.

Additional speakers will be added to address the issues of Impeachment and ending the war in Iraq.

Contact:

Peggy Brewster: brewstout@adelphia.net (Seacoast 9-11 Questions)
Jason King: jason@boston911truth.org (Boston 9/11 Truth Committee)

More details to follow at:
http://boston911truth.org

Voice Mail: 617-401-8047
Web: http://boston911truth.org
Email: boston911truth@gmail.com

Anyone close enough to attend?? Have a go at it! You never know what you can do until you try!!

Zelikow Resigns!!

Philip Zelikow, Senior Aide to Rice, Resigns From Post

By HELENE COOPER | NYT | November 28, 2006
...
On Monday, the 52-year-old Mr. Zelikow, after 19 months serving as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s in-house contrarian and advocate for realpolitik in American diplomacy, submitted his resignation, effective Jan. 2.

Another one bites the dust? Or not?? Is this a fish story? This is a big fish!

He said that he would return to the University of Virginia, where he has an endowed chair as a history professor.
...
In his resignation letter, Mr. Zelikow cited “some truly riveting obligations to college bursars” for his children’s tuition and said he would remain available to help the administration where he could.

Yes, of course. You can make a lot more money teaching history at the U of V than working for the Secretary of State! Good thinking!

“I appreciate Philip’s dedicated service in this time of historic change and we will miss his counsel at the State Department,” Ms. Rice said in a statement.

... yes, well ... what else can she say?

Mr. Zelikow and Ms. Rice are co-authors of a book about Germany’s reunification, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft” (Harvard University Press, 1995).

Yes ... and ... let's not forget their respective roles with The 9/11 Whitewash Commission!

The Commission's Executive Director was Philip D. Zelikow
...
Condoleezza Rice - National Security Advisor to the President, [...] avoided testifying under oath

Something tells me this is gonna be the sort of story where the big media accounts all fasten on the wrong details. The NYT says Zelikow is unhappy with the pace of diplomatic progress. I wish I knew what was really behind this move.

David Ray Griffin Says 'The 9/11 Commission Report Is A National Disgrace' -- Is He Crazy?

David Ray Griffin also says of the 9/11 Commission:

It systematically excludes virtually every fact supporting the alternative theory. But given [Philip] Zelikow's role, this should be no surprise to us. Some people have also called it a whitewash. And it is. But this term assumes that the Commission should have investigated the White House: that is, various kinds of evidence suggesting that there was complicity by the White House. But given Zelikow's position, any investigation of the White House would have been carried out by, essentially, the White House itself. A more accurate way to put it was that as the White House's inside man on the commission, Zelikow was in position to make sure that the White House, along with the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and the Justice Department, was not investigated. Once we understand this, we will not be surprised by the Commission's Omissions.

Watch David Ray Griffin in these videos ...

... and tell me: Is he crazy?