Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Next: Pathetic Fail #2: Abby Ohlheiser, the Washington Post, and Facebook

Sam Kestenbaum,
Accessory after the Fact
[source: The Forward]

Number 3 : Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward, for "Progressive Brooklyn Space Won’t Dump ‘Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Nut’," "9/11 Anniversary Sparks New Wave of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories," "The Jewish Left Needs To Call Out Real Anti-Semites Like Christopher Bollyn," and "9/11 Conspiracy Theorist Chris Bollyn Blames Terror Attack on ‘Zionist War Agenda’ in Brooklyn Speech"

In the three previous installments, we have seen examples of accessories after the fact trying to attack 9/11 Truth by addition, so to speak. They have been adding their voices (and their nonsense) to the public arena, using different tactical approaches:

Robert Bridge wrote as if the official story of 9/11 were obviously true and had never been seriously challenged, for readers who know better, and got called on it, repeatedly.

Jack Holmes attacked 9/11 Truth on the evidence, claiming to "disprove" the "conspiracy theories," but proving only that he had nothing credible to offer.

Matt Kwong tried to explain why so many people are still concerned about 9/11 Truth without even considering the possibility that the official story might be false. Since this required him to ignore significant and relevant evidence, including some which he himself presented, the result was unconvincing, to put it mildly.

Now we turn to accessories after the fact using a different strategy, attacking 9/11 Truth by subtraction. Rather than adding their voices to the discussion, they're using their voices to try and prevent other voices from speaking. Or: they can't compete with 9/11 Truth, so they're trying to suppress it.

In this installment, we will consider an attack which was intended to prevent an independent researcher from speaking in a public space, by inciting so much opposition that the space hosting the event would be forced to cancel it.

The space is called Brooklyn Commons, the researcher is Christopher Bollyn, and the accessories after the fact were connected with the Jewish newspaper, "The Forward."

On September 7, Sam Kestenbaum wrote:

A progressive gathering space in Brooklyn is sticking by its decision, despite widespread condemnation, to host a talk by a conspiracy theorist who has blamed Israel and Jews for the 9-11 attacks on their 15th anniversary.

Melissa Ennen, founder of Brooklyn Commons, wrote in a statement released Tuesday afternoon that the Commons was not “designed to be a cozy cocoon for intramural debate among leftists. From the beginning my goal has been to foster discussion among disparate groups across a wide political spectrum.”

Ennen noted that since launching in 2010, the Commons has rented space to Tea Partiers, anti-union corporations and elected officials who supported wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While “progressive organizations dominate the calendar,” Ennen wrote, “the Commons is available for rental by other groups.”

In case you're not aware, Christopher Bollyn is not only "a conspiracy theorist who has blamed Israel and Jews for the 9-11 attacks." He's also been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a "prominent voice in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories," and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "a raging anti-Semite."

Poster advertising Bollyn in NYC, 2016
[source: Twitter via Noah Shachtman]

Why are Bollyn and his conspiracy theories anti-Semitic? Because he alleges

a “Zionist Jewish” plot to induce America into the War on Terror so that their “cabal” can expand its global power

according to Daniel Sieradsky of jewschool.com.

On what evidence does Bollyn base his allegations? That's what all these people were trying to prevent him from talking about!

The first attempt didn't produce the desired result, so Sam Kestenbaum tried again the next day with "9/11 Anniversary Sparks New Wave of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories," which follows the pattern of ad-hominem attack established in the previous article, but packages it in a more concise way.

Meanwhile, Naomi Dann chipped in with "The Jewish Left Needs To Call Out Real Anti-Semites Like Christopher Bollyn," in which she writes

It’s heartening that there have been so many calls from progressive organizations and leaders calling for the cancellation of the event, and extremely disappointing to see that the Commons has refused to cancel it.

Having said this, she goes on to explain how we can tell the difference between "anti-Zionism," which the Jewish Left allegedly tolerates, and "real anti-Semitism," which Jews of all political leanings are urged to fight at every turn.

The distinction, according to Naomi Dann, can be understood this way:

There should be a clear line between criticizing the policies, actions and even ideology of the state of Israel, and criticizing the Jewish people or religion.

Thus: One may criticize Israel's policies, the actions that flow from those policies, and the ideology that gives rise to both, because such criticism is merely "anti-Zionism."

But no one may criticize the people who promote that ideology, establish those policies, or carry out those actions; nor may anyone criticize the religion that gives rise to the ideology behind the policies, because such criticism is "real anti-Semitism."

If this is not immediately clear to you, then you're probably reading it correctly. I think it means I can say the Palestinians are being viciously abused, provided that I don't identify the abusers or mention the grounds on which the abusers attempt to justify their vicious behavior.

Naomi Dann,
Accessory after the Fact
[Source: Jewish Voice of Peace]

If I have that wrong, perhaps the Jewish Left needs to work harder to change the narrative being imposed from above, as it were. Naomi Dann explains:

For us to expect others to understand that distinction, our communal leaders also have to stop acting as if any criticism of the state is an attack on our people.

because

It does not help us fight truly dangerous anti-Semitic narratives when the state of Israel claims to represent all of us Jews, nor when American Jewish organizations use the power that they have to silence criticism of the state.

I am impressed by the depth to which Naomi Dann seems unaware of the contradiction: she's complaining about what happens "when American Jewish organizations use the power that they have to silence criticism of the state" of Israel, while urging American Jewish organizations to use their power for that very purpose. So in effect Naomi Dann is saying, "It doesn't help us when we do what we're trying to do, but it's essential that we do it anyway."

Perhaps I could help Naomi Dann to find a way out of her self-imposed maze, by suggesting that when "the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews," it may not be especially motivated by a desire to "help" the American Jewish Left "fight truly dangerous anti-Semitic narratives."

To me it seems more likely that the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews because in this way it can coerce the American Jewish Left into fighting against anti-Zionist narratives.

In other words, as I see it, many Jews who claim to oppose Israel's policies and actions are nonetheless pressed into service as human shields, and active shields at that, trying to stifle anything -- a news report, a opinion piece, a public speaking engagement, or whatever -- that might reflect badly on Israel, for fear that the anger that might be generated by widespread knowledge of Israel's policies and actions might fuel a wave of general anti-Semitism. I believe this because they keep saying it. And I think this coercion comes about precisely because "the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews."

To make a long, pathetic story short: They didn't manage to get the event in Brooklyn canceled, although similar pressure did result in the cancellation of Bollyn's invitation to speak at Busboys and Poets Café in Washington, according to Daniel Sieradsky.

As it turned out, Bollyn's presentation at Brooklyn Commons was attended by only about two dozen people, some of whom came to disrupt the event, as Sam Kestenbaum was pleased to report from the scene.

So one must ask: How many people did the Forward and its friends scare away? Any? And what would they have accomplished had they managed to get the event canceled, other than depriving two dozen people of the opportunity to listen to Bollyn for a couple of hours?

Instead, Sam Kestenbaum and the Forward gave Bollyn publicity he could not have bought, linked to an online PDF of his book, "Solving 9/11: The Deception That Changed The World," and provided a platform for his assertion that

“The ‘false flag’ terrorism of 9–11 is a monstrous Jewish-Zionist crime of our time [...] The true culprits of this heinous crime are clearly being protected by a gang of like-minded Jewish Zionists in the highest positions of the U.S. government.”

As far as I can tell, nobody is trying to refute Bollyn's allegations, though many are trying to prevent his voice from being heard. And it's clear that refuting his allegations would be more convincing than trying to prevent him from speaking. So we can infer that they would refute him if they could, and they're trying to prevent him from telling us what he knows because they can't dispute what he has to say.

It's a logical conclusion, and easy to reach, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least two dozen readers, finding the Forward's coverage on the Internet and intrigued by the hallmarks of a coverup, did a bit of exploring, downloaded Bollyn's book, and did some reading at his website, to which Naomi Dann linked.

So what is the net gain to the Forward? to Sam Kestenbaum? To Naomi Dann?

On one hand, they've demonstrated to their "communal leaders" that they can be trusted to stand and fight on command.

On the other hand, they've demonstrated to the rest of us that (1) they're highly motivated by fear of a hypothetical future in which some of the consequences of 9/11 might be borne by innocent people who happen to share the same religion as the perpetrators, but (2) they have no problem with a real present in which the horrible actual consequences of 9/11 are borne by innocent people who happen to share the same religion as the scapegoats!

Christopher Bollyn [source: The Forward]

I recall a presentation several years ago in which Christopher Bollyn said he never had a problem with Israel, even lived there for a while; and never had a problem with Jews either, until he started investigating explosions in the WTC, at which point he started getting pressure from Jewish groups. At first he wondered why Jewish groups, in particular, would try to keep him from looking into the destruction of the towers. But the more he dug, the more Israeli connections he found, and the less he wondered.

That's Bollyn's story, as I remember it, and you may choose to believe it or not. It sounds loopy, but I had a similar experience. I never had any problem with Jews either, until I started blogging about evidence of explosions in the WTC, at which point I started getting pressure from other bloggers and readers who identified themselves as Jewish. It was this pressure which prompted me to entertain, for the first time, the possibility that the people who were talking about Israeli complicity in 9/11 might know what they were talking about.

So it seems to me that if they're trying to suppress the facts, drawing attention to the people who are trying to disseminate those facts is a losing strategy. On the other hand, they can't very well anger their "communal leaders" by not trying it.

In any case, it was a total fail. They didn't get the event canceled, they gave a "raging anti-Semite" a moment in the anti-Semitic sun, and they revealed themselves and their followers to be transparent hypocrites.

Sorry, Sam! You lose! Your pathetic attack failed, and you wound up using your platform to publicize the very allegations you were trying to suppress.

Sorry, Naomi! You lose, too! You're trapped behind the imaginary line you're trying to draw, but so caught up in your own contradictions that you don't even realize it.

And sorry, Forward! You're the biggest loser in the story, and the most hypocritical, too. As an alert reader pointed out in a comment:

The Dancing Israeli stories is a curious side bar to 911, turns out they were Mossad agents working for a Mossad front, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J. The details of which can be found in a Forward article dated March 15 2002 written by Marc Perelman

There's boundless irony here, as the paper is busted on the strength of its own reporting. Shockingly, the piece referred to in the comment is no longer available at the Forward website, but the Wayback Machine hasn't forgotten that Marc Perelman wrote, and the Forward published, the following:

Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth
Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage

By MARC PERELMAN
FORWARD STAFF

Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned. [...]

In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel. [...]

According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.

After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.

However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11." [...]

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.

However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.

In addition to their strange behavior and their Middle Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background.

And so on. I've omitted Marc Perelman's most obvious attempts to spin the story in an innocent direction, just as Marc Perelman described the men as "acting strangely" rather than admitting that they attracted attention to themselves by dancing, exchanging high-fives, flicking their lighters, and photographing one another against the backdrop of the burning towers.

Marc Perelman's story hints that the behavior of these five men was probably innocent and misinterpreted, and he repeated the same claim in a subsequent interview. But if that were true, they would never have been noticed, let alone arrested. Plenty of people were acting strangely that day. But the others weren't dancing, high-fiving, flicking their lighters, or taking souvenir photos.

Another reader remembered that after being released on the pretense that they knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks,

Your freaking Mossad agents went on Israel live TV and said "our purpose was to document the event" wtf is everyone suppose to think of that?

wtf indeed! If you think he's kidding, watch this short video.

Here's what I think of it:

The story of the five dancing Israelis is the tip of the iceberg called "Israeli complicity."

You can click here to read about that iceberg. But I can't tell you any more about it myself -- because, as I've been saying:

The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Next: Pathetic Fail #2: Abby Ohlheiser, the Washington Post, and Facebook

Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire
Next: Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward

Matt Kwong,
Accessory after the Fact
[source: CBC]

Number 4 : Matt Kwong and the CBC, for "Why the '9/11 Truth' movement endures 15 years later"

As we saw in the previous installment, when Jack Holmes tried to prove the Truthers wrong on all major points and failed dismally, a head-on, evidence-based attack on 9/11 Truth is sub-optimal strategy. In this episode, we we turn to an accessory after the fact who set himself a much different task, but failed anyway.

Presumably because he's too smart to attack the Truth Movement from the front, Matt Kwong of the CBC comes at it from the rear. Rather than taking on the evidence, which did no good at all for Jack Holmes, Matt Kwong turns to time-honored journalistic tactics: smear and innuendo, woven together with sleight-of-hand that would have made a magician drool if it had worked.

The result is not merely a pathetic fail but a nasty one -- a transparently ugly smear against the people who want to know the truth about 9/11, and especially against Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son Bobby that day.

Bob McIlvaine has been trying to find out what happened to Bobby, and trying to get people to care about what happened to all of us, for the past 15 years. To those of us who have followed the story, Bob McIlvaine is something of a role model -- because he didn't believe the lies he was told, and he didn't cower when he was told to sit down and shut up, and he's been waging an uphill battle for a long time, and he hasn't quit.

If Bobby McIlvaine had died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country, and Bob had spent 15 years trying to find out what happened to him, Bob would be seen as a heroic figure. A paperback writer would churn out a vapid tribute to his dogged persistence and his enduring love for his son, and we would see the result in drugstores.

But because of where, and when, and how Bobby McIlvaine died, Bob's efforts cannot be praised, only denigrated. This is how far we have fallen.

Under the bizarre sub-heading "Father of 9/11 victim reconciles unconventional beliefs with grief," Matt Kwong writes:

Robert McIlvaine knows better than to talk, unsolicited, about the research he pores over at home in Oreland, Pa. [...] it's the circumstances around the attacks — specifically, McIlvaine's beliefs about precisely how the world-altering event unfolded — that he's cautious to discuss. [...] "My wife doesn't take me out; doesn't go with me anymore because she's afraid I'll bring it up with friends," he says. [...] "No one wants to talk about it," McIlvaine says. "It's like you have leprosy."

... and so on. But there's a mystery. If no one wants to talk about it, why are people still talking about it?

National Security adviser Condoleezza
Rice responds to a question during
testimony before the 9/11 Commission
in the Hart Senate office building
in Washington on April 8, 2004.
(Larry Downing/Reuters) [source: CBC]

There must be a reason. What could it be? ... Well, maybe it's the Internet!

Fifteen years later, the devastating attack on America that coincided with the nascent internet age continues to spawn discussions hosted in forums that speculate about the moon landing, the Hollow Earth hypothesis and the JFK assassination.

Here we go! This is called red herring and guilt by association, a truly journalistic combination of logical fallacies to provide just the right context for what comes next -- the few relevant details we will ever get from Matt Kwong:

The official account says McIlvaine's eldest son [...] was [...] on the 106th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower.

McIlvaine suspects otherwise. Based on injuries his son sustained, including to his face and chest, he maintains Bobby was killed by an explosion, possibly before the plane crash. As Bobby was among the first 10 bodies found, he says, McIlvaine believes his son was in the tower's lobby.

"If he was on the 106th floor, he wouldn't have been found so quickly."

I think Bob's kidding himself. In my view, if Bobby was on the 106th floor, he probably wouldn't have been found at all!

But that's not the real issue. The real issue is the condition of Bobby's body. "Injuries [...] to his face and chest" hardly qualifies as an accurate description of the wounds.

Matt Kwong doesn't give you enough details to help you understand this aspect of the story. But if you do some research to supplement his so-called journalism, you can learn quite a bit, fairly easily.

According to McIlvaine, the wounds described by the doctor indicated that his son had been hit by flying glass from some kind of massive blast. Bobby’s face was damaged beyond recognition, he had lacerations all over his chest from flying glass, and he had post-mortem burns. In fact, the blast was strong enough to literally blow Bobby out of his laced shoes (they were not on the body when it was brought to the morgue).

“My final summation is that he was walking into the building, and before he got into the building there was a huge explosion, and of course the force of it just threw him back into the open area,” McIlvaine says. “That’s why he was picked up so quickly, because the EMTs came down there so quickly. Someone had gotten him out of there and to the morgue before the towers came down.”

In other words, Bob has good reason to think Bobby was not killed by fire at the top of the tower, but by blast and flying glass at its base. And if Bob thinks these were the result of a massive explosion? Well, what else could it have been?

Matt Kwong could have told you this; anyone familiar with the stories of the 9/11 families could have done the same. Bob's been speaking in public for a long time, and his story about Bobby -- unlike the official narrative -- hasn't changed. He certainly wouldn't have been reluctant to tell Matt Kwong why he thinks what he thinks.

But Matt Kwong can't (or won't) tell you all this. And the reason is simple: If you focus on two things -- what Bob knows about his son's death, and the official explanation behind the attacks -- you can't help seeing the basic contradiction: How could Bobby have been killed by an explosion if there were no explosions?

What did Bob McIlvaine do about it? According to Matt Kwong, he waited to see what the government would say, thus:

McIlvaine attended the 9/11 Commission [but] he left angry and dissatisfied by testimony from then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

(Curiously (or not!), several paragraphs before mentioning Condoleezza Rice, the CBC inserted a photo of Miss Rice herself, looking cool and comfortable as she testified before the Commission. The photo, the caption, and the placement combine to create a subtle hint that Bob's got his nose out of joint for nothing. I've included the photo and CBC's caption verbatim, several paragraphs before mentioning it, to give you a subtle hint of what CBC is doing.)

But Matt Kwong doesn't tell you about Miss Rice's testimony. And he certainly wouldn't want you to see a video of her being questioned. Matt Kwong won't show you video evidence of the other family members who were outraged at the hearings, either.

But I digress. Here's Matt Kwong again:

McIlvaine began to dig on his own for answers online, watching web documentaries such as Dylan Avery's 9/11 truth staple, Loose Change, as well as reading more American history.

And this was the dangerous, slippery part. By daring to educate himself, Bob McIlvaine put himself in danger of becoming what's called a "conspiracy theorist," of the noxious variety known as "9/11 Truther."

To help you "understand" what happened to Bob, Matt Kwong takes you on a journey to the land of conspiracy theory research. But he weaves the McIlvaine story through the travelogue, making things very confusing. (I didn't say the confusion was deliberate.)

In this piece, I have shuffled the order somewhat, separating Bob McIlvaine's story (which we've been reading) from the conspiracy theory research (to which we now turn).

Here's Matt Kwong:

"People who are more personally distrustful tend to buy into conspiracy theories more," says Mike Wood, a Canadian lecturer at the University of Winchester in England specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories.

If anything, Americans seem more distrustful of their government than in a long time. [...]

Wood says those suspicious of the government also tend to be more aware of "actual historical conspiracies, where the government did something shady." [...]

Research also shows conspiracy theories tend to reach peaks around "times of uncertainty," according to Wood. In the case of something as extraordinary as a 9/11, an event resulting in thousands of lost lives, a massive reshaping of the iconic New York skyline and two wars, he says the conventional narrative may be tough to swallow.

It certainly is. And there's nothing wrong with this analysis as far as it goes. But where does it go?

Matt Kwong again:

Some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11. And so, alternative explanations filled the vacuum, says Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [...]

Dave Thomas may be Skeptical, but I fear he's not quite skeptical enough!

It may be true that "Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11," and it may be true that "alternative explanations filled the vacuum," but there's no causal connection here, because there's a link missing.

As the attack was unfolding, and in the immediate aftermath, there was no vacuum. There was an avalanche. No matter where you turned, the news kept talking about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and Afghanistan, and the country was ready to go to war before the dust had settled. The vacuum came later, when more and more people began to see through the lies that comprise the official story. That's when "alternative explanations filled the vacuum."

As time went on, we learned more and more about the official story, and the more you know about it, the less credible it is, so the number of people who questioned it -- or rejected it outright -- grew. Some people started reading American history, just like Bob did. And what they learned was shocking ... until all the pieces started to click into place. And suddenly, the nonsensical official story made perfect sense to them, once they saw it as an elaborate deception rather than a series of unprecedented failures.

Had the official story been credible, none of this would have happened. If the story had been even halfway believable, most of us would have been happy to believe it and get on with other things. But that didn't happen.

I can explain what did happen in a parable. Think of this mystery as a "connect-the-dots" puzzle. From the day of the attack (or earlier in some cases), we started taking note of important dots, and wondering what they could mean. As the official story became clearer, we looked at how the dots were being arranged, and how they were being connected, and how many of the dots weren't being connected at all, and we started to wonder. But when we realized how many of the dots had been erased, we stopped wondering, because we knew those dots didn't erase themselves.

So it's far more accurate to say the vacuum was caused by the holes in the official story.

The fact that "some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11" doesn't make any difference at all.

But Matt Kwong can't tell you that. Instead -- if we want to follow his story -- we have to think backwards.

Backward thinking regarding 9/11 shows up in many guises. For instance, as I showed in the previous installment, the 9/11 Commission was set up to run backward. They decided who committed the crime, and then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether it could be used to support their predetermined conclusions. Then they put together a narrative that was supposed to tie all the evidence together. But there was a problem with some of the evidence, namely: the evidence they decided not to consider. And the problem is: We know about that evidence, and it undermines their story. So their solution is: the facts must be suppressed. And now the defenders of the official story claim not only that there were no explosions, but also that there was no evidence of explosions!

This claim is clearly false. The New York Times published an oral history of 9/11, compiled by the NYFD, in which more than 100 first responders described bombs in the towers, or gave other evidence that can only be explained by explosions. Numerous other eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the day and later, described the explosions they experienced. There are videos in which we can see and hear explosions going off in the buildings. Mainstream media reports on the day of the attacks contained many mentions of explosions. And the whole world watched the towers exploding on television, over and over and over -- for two weeks! But according to defenders of the official story, none of this happened -- even though much of it, including the NYT oral history, is freely available online.

And the reason why they claim none of this happened is because the official story-tellers couldn't figure out a way to explain how al Qaeda could have planted explosives in the towers. Their line of backward thinking ran: al Qaeda did it; al Qaeda could not have planted explosives in the towers; therefore there were no explosives in the towers.

Similarly, we have a whole new field of academic research now, in which Conspiracy Theories are studied as a sociological or psychological phenomenon. Bright, well-educated people, who really ought to be doing productive work, are now paid to track conspiracy theories, to watch how they grow and spread, and to explain, if they can, why people believe them.

But explaining this is more difficult than I've indicated, because they have to explain them in a politically acceptable way. That is to say: they cannot ever consider the possibility that some "conspiracy theories" may be more credible than the corresponding official stories.

This consideration is essential, in my analysis, because of the fact that so many official stories are impossible. In each of these cases, all conspiracy theories are more credible than the official story, even if they are only marginally plausible. But no academic researcher can say this; they have to pretend that the official stories are all true.

So all their research has to run backward. They can't connect cause and effect in the logical way, so they do it in reverse. And this is how they get the idea that we believe conspiracy theories because we don't trust the government.

To be sure, some researchers will grant that we don't trust the government because we know more about the government than those who do trust it. But they can't admit that what separates conspiracy theorists from the people around us is our greater knowledge of topics such as history and government!

Instead they claim that we believe conspiracy theories because we don't trust the government, when in fact the opposite is true: We don't believe the official stories because they are clearly false. And this is why we believe conspiracy theories, and this is also why we don't trust the government.

But this is a path which accessories after the fact dare not tread.

Instead Matt Kwong continues this way:

Distrust in authority "plays into this rejection of the reigning or orthodox narrative of some subject," says Syracuse University professor emeritus of political science Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy.

"We want stories and narratives that make sense of the world," Barkun says. "The idea that such an event like the sudden destruction of landmark buildings like the World Trade Center could be caused by 19 nobodies belonging to an organization that almost no Americans had ever heard of, living in ragged encampments in Afghanistan, simply, I think, made no sense to some people."

It made no sense to a lot of people!

Some of them went on with their lives and didn't think about it anymore. What could they do about it? So why should they worry about it? What's so mysterious about that?

The rest of us did worry about it. We didn't just get on with our lives, because we could see that something fundamental had changed, in a truly awful way, based on a story which couldn't possibly be true. It bothered us, and we thought we lived in a democracy, because we've been taught that we have some influence in the political process, so we got active. What's so mysterious about that?

But NO! NO, NO, NO! We are definitely not going there! We'll go sideways instead, with Matt Kwong:

Researchers who study conspiracy theorists point to the dismissal of an official "lone nobody" conclusion on 9/11 as sharing similarities to the continued obsession with the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963.

It's a diversion and a red herring, and the word "obsession" is a smear, but in sad fact, the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks display many similarities, some of which are relevant enough to discuss here.

For serious researchers, the main point of interesting similarity is not that "Oswald was a nobody" and "Nobody had ever heard of al Qaeda," although these curious facts may have piqued some interest for some of them at one time. Personally, I've never given either of these ideas any thought at all, except when I've stumbled over them in propaganda pieces.

The main point for me, and for many other serious researchers, is this: neither Oswald nor al Qaeda could possibly have done what they are alleged to have done.

Does this matter? YES! As Webster Tarpley keeps reminding us, we always need to ask: Did they have the physical and technical capabilities to cause the observed effects? And the answers, in the cases of JFK and 9/11, are clearly "NO!"

Why? The sight on "Oswald's rifle" was out of alignment. The FBI fired it for testing, and their expert marksmen couldn't hit any targets with it. So they adjusted the sight and tested it again. But Oswald, who was not a marksman at all, was said to have caused 7 wounds with 3 shots, firing at a moving target, all in 6 seconds, with that rifle, before the sight was adjusted.

Oswald's pistol was in even worse shape. It wouldn't fire at all because the firing pin was bent. So the pistol was disassembled, the firing pin was straightened, and the pistol was reassembled so that it could be tested. But Oswald was said to have killed Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, with that pistol, before it was repaired.

This information came into the public domain through the Warren Commission itself. So the facts themselves can hardly be disputed, and therefore the accessories after the fact would prefer us to ignore them. Otherwise the situation would be too clear.

We don't have problems with the story because "Oswald was a nobody." We would have been much more reluctant to accept the story if we'd been told that JFK was killed by somebody famous -- like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. On the contrary: aside from the obvious tampering with evidence, we have problems with the official story because Oswald lacked the physical and technical means to commit the crimes for which he was accused.

With 9/11, we have the same pattern, and the primary illustration is this: al Qaeda could not have put explosives in the towers, so the official story doesn't try to explain how they did; instead it pretends there were no explosives in the towers at all.

How do we know al Qaeda couldn't have put explosives in the towers? We have two main ways of knowing this. First, according to defenders of the official story, nobody could have put explosives in the towers. It would have taken too long, somebody would have noticed, and so on. Presumably this logic applies equally, or especially, to nasty-looking foreigners who have no reason to be in the towers at all. And second, if al Qaeda could have put explosives in the towers, then the official story-tellers would admit the presence of explosives and blame them on al Qaeda, which would be much easier than trying to suppress all the evidence of explosives, if only it could be done at all.

But that's not the only impossibility in the story. The alleged hijackers had no idea how to fly a jumbo jet -- according to their instructors, they could barely fly a Cessna -- and yet they were said to have performed low-altitude maneuvers that the best pilots in the country couldn't match, at speeds which would have been far beyond the capabilities of the aircraft.

The terrorists had no way of disabling America's security systems, from airport surveillance videos right up to the US Air Force. But they are said to evaded every defense along the way.

And no magician has ever made a jumbo jet disappear into a field, leaving only a 20-foot wide hole and no wreckage. But that's what the plane in Shanksville is supposed to have done.

The list of impossibilities goes on and on. But we don't have to examine all of them to see the same pattern that we saw in the JFK case.

It doesn't matter whether anybody had ever heard of al Qaeda. We don't buy the official story because the alleged hijackers lacked the physical and technical means to cause the effects for which they were blamed.

In other words: we know both official stories are false because the events they describe not physically possible.

So why should we believe them? According to Matt Kwong, the answer lies in Popular Mechanics.

Despite an exhaustive 2005 special report by Popular Mechanics debunking 9/11 theories, polls still show a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account.

As I mentioned in the previous post, no "report" in such a format could be anything but cursory and shallow.

The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then "debunk" it with a "telling quote" from an "expert source."

It's a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it's all predicated on the notion that "denied" means the same as "debunked."

But in PM's case, the format was the strongest part of the "report." The so-called "evidence" presented by PM wasn't even weak -- it was ludicrous.

Thus, contrary to Matt Kwong's assertion, the "report" from Popular Mechanics was neither "special" nor "exhaustive," and because they can't give us anything more convincing, and because nobody else even wants to try, it may be time to consider the possibility that "a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account" because it's simply not true!

But Matt Kwong won't go in that direction. He's going this way instead:

For his part, McIlvaine doesn't care about the Truther movement one way or the other, or about the many articles and investigations that have debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories.

He remains convinced about his own narrative.

"I feel good about what I've done. My wife's happy about it, my [other] son's happy about it. I still go to bed," he says. "And I'll say I did what I did for Bobby."

Bob McIlvaine is tired of being lied to, he's tired of being belittled and betrayed, and he doesn't care what anybody thinks anymore -- all of which is entirely understandable in my view, given what he's experienced.

Matt Kwong paints him as a stubborn crackpot who started wondering why his son's body was found so soon, fell into a hole called the Internet, and wound up believing the craziest nonsense -- and he leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps: the 9/11 truth movement endures because it's made up of stubborn crackpots who started out asking simple questions and fell into the same hole.

That may be true in some instances, but for me personally it's despicable slander. I know the official story is false because so many of its features are physically impossible. I don't care how many accessories after the fact call me crazy. And I am not one in a million -- I am one of many millions!

This is why the 9/11 Truth movement endures.

We're smart enough to spot an obvious lie, even though we've heard it a thousand times. And we're brave enough to say so.

If that makes us stubborn crackpots, so be it. Like it or not, that's the reason we haven't gone away. And we're not going away anytime soon.

Sorry, Matt! You lose! You had all the pieces in your hand and you couldn't -- or wouldn't -- put them together.

Sorry, CBC. You lose, too! There will be a special place in Heaven for any mainstream news organization that's brave enough to treat this issue with the integrity it deserves. But so far we have none.

In any case: Matt Kwong and CBC, you both stand clearly and willingly on the wrong side of a mass-murderous lie, and an obvious one at that. May God have mercy upon your souls.

On the other hand, Congratulations! You've made my list!

As I've been saying:

The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire
Next: Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward

Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT
Next: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC

Jack Holmes,
Accessory after the Fact
[source: Daily Beast]

Number 5 : Jack Holmes and Esquire, for "Disproving 9 of the Biggest 9/11 Conspiracy Theories"

We continue our review of pathetic propaganda disasters with a piece from Jack Holmes and Esquire. It begins with one of the niftiest bits of verbal gymnastics I have seen in a long time. Get a load of this:

An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn't make sense.

There's magic in them there words, and it's powerful magic, too.

You don't believe me? Read it again, without the magic:

An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. For some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings doesn't make sense.

Now read it again, the original text this time, with emphasis on the magical words:

An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn't make sense.

I can't disagree with Jack Holmes when he says, "An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation." This is clearly true. Who could disagree?

And I can't argue against the statement that "for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners [...] and use them [...] to destroy [...] massive buildings doesn't make sense." This is clearly true as well.

So we have two statements that nobody could deny, strung together and twisted with the words "but" and "still" to create the implication that the official explanation should make sense to everybody because it's extraordinary, as was the attack. And that makes no sense on the face of it.

The attack was extraordinary in many ways. It was certainly extraordinary in scale and ferocity. It was also an extraordinarily brazen attack, and one that would be, under normal conditions, extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.

The official explanation is extraordinary in many ways as well. It arrived with extraordinarily promptness; we "knew" Osama bin Laden was behind the attack before it was even over, and we "knew" the twin towers had "collapsed" due to "damage from aircraft impact and the resulting fires" almost as quickly. It was also extraordinarily flexible; we got three very different stories about why the Air Force didn't stop those "400-ton missiles" which were on course to "destroy massive buildings." But above all, the official explanation is extraordinarily implausible, in more ways than Jack Holmes cares to admit.

But many readers won't take the time to think this through, and there's the magic. If you don't think too much about the magical opening passage, it all looks true, but if you pay attention to the magic words, you can see that Jack Holmes is kicking off his attempt to "disprove" the "conspiracy theories" by sneakily implying that the official explanation should satisfy everyone because the attack and the explanation were both extraordinary -- i.e. because the attack was extraordinarily unlikely and the explanation is extraordinarily implausible.

This is as twisted as anyone could hope for, because in the world of sane people, an extraordinary event requires an extraordinarily credible explanation.

Unexpected: The top of the South Tower turns
to dust as explosives pulverize the steel and
concrete below the damaged zone. This was
called a "collapse." [source: Esquire]

If a scientist sees something unexpected in an experiment, and a colleague offers a loopy explanation, the scientist doesn't say, "Well that must be it, then. It's a weird explanation, but it was a weird event, so you must be right!" On the contrary: The stranger the event, the more plausible, the more thorough, and the better supported the explanation must be, otherwise nobody will believe it. But we're not supposed to think this way about 9/11, according to Jack Holmes.

The rest of his "appetizer" is not quite so magical, so I want to focus on the "main course," so to speak. Jack Holmes has written a catchy and provocative headline, and it made me wonder: How will he "disprove 9 of the biggest 9/11 conspiracy theories"?

Jack Holmes says he will do it through the use of evidence:

Below are nine of the most prominent theories, as well as the evidence explaining why they simply don't add up.

"Aha!" I thought. "Now we're getting somewhere. Most defenders of the official story run away from evidence as fast as they can. They want to talk about other things. But this is better. Or at least, this promises to be better."

And what's the evidence? What evidence does Jack Holmes have? The answer is ... a rehash of Popular Mechanics!

Jack Holmes not only copies the format used by Popular Mechanics in its infamous "Debunking 9/11" fiasco, he also quotes freely from it.

The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then "debunk" it with a "telling quote" from an "expert source."

It's a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it's all predicated on the notion that "denied" means the same as "debunked." In other words, if Jack Holmes can find one "expert" who says X is false, then X is false and that's the end of the discussion. The one statement settles the matter and closes the case forever, no matter how much or how little sense it makes, no matter how much or how little evidence supports it.

For example:

THE HOLES WERE SIMPLY TOO SMALL

The theory: The two holes in the Pentagon after the attack—75 and 12 feet wide—were too small to have been carved by a 125-foot-wide jet. Some theories have concluded the attack was actually carried out with a satellite-guided missile.

The debunk: "A crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building," says Popular Mechanics, citing Mete Sozen, a structural engineering expert at Purdue University. One wing hit the ground, while the other was torn off by the force of impact. "What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to liquid than a solid mass." The 12-foot hole was punched through by the plane's landing gear.

There are multiple obvious problems with this attempted refutation.

If "one wing hit the ground," why are there no scars on the lawn? Why is there no broken-off wing? What happened to the fuel in the wing? If "one wing hit the ground," even if that wing magically bounced through the hole and into the Pentagon, even if all the fuel that was in the wing burned in a great fireball that nobody saw or reported, we should still see a large patch of black where the grass used to be green. This is what's always left behind when there's been a fire. So what happened to it this time?

And if the other wing "was torn off by the force of impact," where did it go? Mete Sozen isn't saying, and we can probably take that as a hint that he doesn't know.

As for the rest of the plane, are we supposed to believe it "almost" melted, rather than crumpling and breaking up, as all the other planes that have ever crashed have done?

And even if the force of the impact caused the plane to "almost" melt, how did all that "almost" molten metal get through the hole?

It's all very mysterious; nothing like this has ever happened before or since; the explanation is literally incredible, and Mete Sozen has a long track record of telling obvious lies about 9/11.

He explained the "collapse" of the twin towers by talking about fire heating the steel until "the steel goes away." He demonstrated the plane crashing into the Pentagon using a computer simulation which shows the plane's engines disappearing on impact.

How was this computer simulation built? One can only imagine: "What happened to the engines?" "Nobody knows. We can't find any sign of engine damage in the building." "Well, can't we make up something the Truthers might believe?" "Probably not." "Well, then, just get rid of the engines! Make them go away!"

Maybe the words are not quite verbatim, but this is clearly the level of integrity that we're dealing with here. Mete Sozen is one of the most infamous accessories after the fact, reviled by anyone who has studied the issue. Why should we believe him this time? Especially when his "explanation" makes no sense.

This is a representative sample of Jack Holmes' work, both the style of presentation and the "depth" of research. It's a lame enough fail to make my short list all on its own, but there are eight more lame fails with it. 

Here's another example, possibly even a better one:

INSIDER TRADING

The theory: In the days leading up to September 11, a large volume of American and United Airlines stock was traded—and in many cases shorted, or bet against—by people who had prior knowledge of the attacks.

The debunk: Bloomberg Trade Book data did show much higher than normal put option volume (people betting against the stock of American and United) in the weeks and days leading up to the attacks, Snopes reports, including a volume 100 times above average on the Thursday before. However, the 9/11 Commission found no evidence those trades were the result of prior knowledge. For example, "a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent" of the put options on United's parent company on September 6, according to the report, while "much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9."

As that's a government report, the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced.

Quoting the 9/11 Commission to prove the official story is like quoting the Bible to prove that Jesus was born of a virgin. It's convincing for those who already believe it, but it doesn't do anything for the skeptics except confirm their opinion. Surely any other source, any other evidence, would be more convincing. And Jack Holmes knows this. That's why he says, "that's a government report, [so] the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced." So why does he offer nothing else? Because he's got nothing else to offer. That's why!

Again there are multiple problems with the attempted refutation. It may well be true that "95 percent of the put options on United's parent company" were purchased by "a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." But is this a legitimate reason not to investigate the investor? Or is it a hint that al Qaeda may not have been behind the attacks at all? What conceivable ties does this U.S.-based institutional investor have, exactly? How could he have known? What was the object of the trade? Was he gambling millions of dollars on a hunch? We'll never know because the 9/11 Commission wasn't the slightest bit curious about anybody who wasn't obviously and intimately connected with al Qaeda.

And it may be true that "much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9." But in what way does this imply that whoever sent the newsletter on September 9 had no idea what was going to happen on September 11? Here, the Commission doesn't even offer the lame excuse of "no conceivable connection," which suggests the question: Did the author of this newsletter have some conceivable connection with al Qaeda?

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe the suspicion of inside knowledge is ruled out by the fact that the newsletter was faxed, because terrorists don't know how to use fax machines.

It's all so very lame, especially when we know that serious investigators always "follow the money." But in this case it appears they ran away from the money, even by their own account.

In sum, even if it's true, this "explanation" is a pathetic fail because it does nothing to prove or even support the official story, nor does it state or even imply -- let alone prove -- that the investors who bought the suspicious put options had no prior knowledge of the attack.

What it does prove -- whether it be true or false -- is that the so-called "investigation" was set up to run backwards: First they decided who did it, then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether or not it agreed with their predetermined conclusions. This is probably why defenders of the official story accuse "conspiracy theorists" of "cherry-picking evidence." They always accuse us of the very things they themselves are doing.

But there's good reason to believe that the core of this "debunk" is false, because we've had a number of reliable reports indicating that the bulk of the suspicious insider trading was carried out by a German bank closely affiliated with a certain "former" high-ranking CIA officer, which makes ties to al Qaeda slightly less than "inconceivable," does it not?

al Qaeda, you may recall, was allied with the CIA before and after 9/11, but not during, at least according to defenders of the official story.

Again, this "debunk" is sufficiently pathetic to put Jack Holmes on my short list, even if he had not qualified already.

But let's look at one more example. This one shows the same technique, but with a slightly different twist:

THE HIJACKERS ARE STILL ALIVE

The theory: Conspiracists seized on news reports in the immediate aftermath of the attacks—particularly one from the BBC—that reported various hijacker suspects identified by authorities were actually still alive and well. This indicates that the attacks had been carried out by actors with other means.

The debunk: The people who were found to still be alive in those reports were different people with similar or identical names to the hijackers, as other BBC reports showed. "The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names," a subsequent report suggests, adding that both the 9/11 Commission and the FBI are confident they correctly identified the 19 hijackers.

The main problem here concerns the disappearing layers of detail.

The first BBC piece linked by Jack Holmes, which was published in September of 2001, reports on four of the hijackers who survived their martyrdom, beginning with Waleed Al Shehri. It explains that he saw his name and his photograph on the news, along with the name of the flight school he had attended, so he was sure he was the man the FBI had named as a suicide hijacker.

The second BBC piece refers to yet another BBC piece, published in October of 2006, which acknowledges some confusion but certainly does not refute -- or even refer to -- the 2001 story.

In other words, the 2006 piece does not state or even imply that Waleed Al Shehri was the one who was confused. It doesn't even mention Waleed Al Shehri at all. So it's difficult to see how the 2006 story could be used to support the claim made here by Jack Holmes, or by the BBC editors, for that matter.

Crucially, we're still left with the mystery of how "different people with similar or identical names" could have posed for identical photographs and attended the same flight school.

But once again, it's a case where the refutation doesn't have to be thorough, plausible, or credible in any way. A "denial" is as good as a "debunking" as far as Jack Holmes is concerned. And why?

The BBC article that supposedly settles the question also says:

There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial. [...]

The evidence is not being judged in a court of law. It only needs to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion.

As Dr. David Ray Griffin says, "The evidence wasn't good enough to go to court, but it was good enough to go to war!"

And it looks as if the BBC itself was (and still is) trying "to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion," which is totally more important than petty insignificant details like getting a credible account of what happened, and who did it, and why -- or seeing that the perpetrators are brought to justice. But as far as Jack Holmes can see, the FBI's word is gold, even if it took them five years to not find any direct evidence implicating the mastermind who was fingered on the very morning of the attack.

And the BBC's word is gold too, and so is the unnamed subsequent report. Nobody can say, "Wait a minute! What about the photograph? What about the flight school? You're positing one of the craziest coincidences ever, without even a shred of evidence." That would be too journalistic, apparently. Too confrontational. Insufficiently dedicated to persuading governments around the world, and to a lesser extent carrying public opinion.

Jack Holmes gives us six more bullet points, but there's no point grinding through them all. This is America, right? Three strikes and you're out!

Sorry, Jack! You lose! If this is the best you can do, maybe you ought to find something else to write about -- at least until you learn to do your own research.

Sorry, Esquire! You lose, too! Maybe this drivel is good enough for guys who are mostly thinking about how much their next suit is gonna cost, but for real people who are really connected to the real world ... no! sorry! That's a big sad fail!

I said at the top that Jack Holmes' magical implication "makes no sense on the face of it." But then again, maybe it does make sense, if you consider that it's coming from a bright young man who knows where his next meal is coming from, if not his next suit. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, Jackie Boy! Don't rock the boat! We need more young men like yourself, clever and clueless and eager to peddle transparent lies in support of our indefensible fiction!

It's an extraordinarily pathetic fail, if you ask me. It's almost as if Jack Holmes were a closet Truther, putting out the weakest nonsense he could find, trying to lead his readers to the obvious logical leap -- since this is the best evidence that can be marshaled in defense of the official story, the story must be 100% phony -- without running the risk of saying so in plain English. 

But in the final analysis, there's no evidence to support this line of thinking, and therefore no good reason to believe it. I think we have to assume that Jack Holmes meant what he said and said what he meant. In other words, I don't think he's a cowardly Truther. I think he's a pathetic Liar.

As I've been saying:

The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT
Next: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC

Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Next: Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire

Robert Bridge,
Accessory after the Fact
[source: RT]

Number 6 : Robert Bridge and RT, for "Is America heading for another 9/11 disaster by ignoring lessons of history?"

We begin our review of pathetic 9/11 propaganda fails with a full-spectrum coverup disaster from Robert Bridge and our "friends" in Moscow. Robert Bridge's article starts like this:

As the world pauses to remember the September 11 attacks on the United States, which killed some 3,000 people, the threat of another catastrophic act of terrorism seems all too plausible, both at home and abroad.

The watershed events of 9/11, aside from dragging the American people into a never-ending ‘War on Terror’, demonstrated how simple it is for a motley crew of terrorists to unleash pandemonium with the crudest weapons and methods. And with al-Qaeda’s deranged country cousins, Islamic State, now calling for lone wolf attacks against Western soft targets, the lesson is worth repeating.

And so on. On and on and on -- as if the official story of 9/11 were not only true, but so obviously true that it had never been seriously challenged.

To its credit, RT hosts comments from readers, and the most-liked comments rise to the top of the list, which begins:

Most RT readers won't swallow this author's narrative; sorry. 911 was planned and executed by the 'establishment' controlled elite military and other specialists. The evidence is abundant, including the ensuing police state and excuse for perpetual wars to drain infinite monies from all the worlds citizens via tax dollars flowing to the weapons and 'security' industries. Nobody is fooled anymore.

Other popular comments include:

Ignoring the lessons? What lessons? Everything was done by design

and:

what a load of rubbish... 9/11 'pushed' the united snakes into war?? In your dreams.. It was set up by Cheney and Bush and Saud to do exactly that..

Giving credit where it's due, RT's readers don't aim all the flack at the pathetic Robert Bridge.

Some of it is aimed at elsewhere, and rightly so:

Shame on you RT for publishing such drivel. Better you stay away from 9/11 than publish lies which serve only to undermine your general credibility.

and:

RT is MSM too just with a different agenda so don't expect truth or honest search for the truth.

So the jury is in.

Sorry, Robert. You lose!

Sorry, RT. You lose, too! You can't pretend to be a voice of reason while promoting such obvious garbage. If you want your readers to believe garbage, the garbage needs to be less obvious.

And guess what? Your loyal readers are starting to figure that out. Which is actually kind of funny.

Aha! I get it! The same manure we get back home, but here it comes with wodka, comrade!

As I've been saying:

The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?

Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Next: Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire

Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!! Six Pathetic 9/11 Coverup Fails of 2016

[ source: RT dot com ]

As expected, 2016's "commemoration" of 9/11 included a barrage of failed propaganda from various accessories after the fact, all desperately trying to prop up their favorite indefensible fiction.

This being the 15th such barrage, it came deeper and thicker than any since the 10th, which was deeper and thicker than any since the 5th, so we may not see another extra-large one until 2021, which would be fine by me, to tell you the truth.

And I could be wrong, but I can't remember an annual load of 9/11 propaganda that made the intentions of the propagandists any clearer.

The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?

Your humble blogger is cold to present a six-pack of pathetic face-plants which truly deserve to be immortalized in a more fashionable setting, so they could be celebrated every year at this time:

~~~

For writing as if the official story of 9/11 were obviously true, for readers who know better, and getting called on it, repeatedly:
Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT

For claiming to "disprove" all the major conspiracy theories, while demonstrating how weak the official story really is:
Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire

For trying to explain the longevity of the 9/11 Truth Movement without even considering the possibility that the official story might be false, while describing evidence indicating that it cannot be true:
Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC

For trying to prevent an independent researcher from speaking in a public space:
Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward

For telling the world how and why Facebook misled its users about 9/11:
Pathetic Fail #2: Abby Ohlheiser, the Washington Post, and Facebook

It wasn't all pathetic:
Interlude: Three Encouraging Successes

... to be continued ...

The Facts Of 9/11 Must Be Suppressed

The towers didn't fall down.
They blew up.

One day when I had nothing to do, I tried to watch a video in which John McMurtry tried to explain why the facts of 9/11 are suppressed.

McMurtry speaks in long sequences of long words, in complex paragraphs peppered with academic jargon but no explanation of what these specialized words mean. It's easy to see why they call him "Professor."

The video runs for almost an hour, and I suppose he finally comes to a coherent point, but I can't tell you for sure, because I fell asleep long before the end. But that's probably all right, because I must have needed the sleep.

I don't mean to be harsh on Professor McMurtry, for I admire what he's doing. Too few of our smartest people have said in public what they all must know in private: that the official story of 9/11 is impossible to believe if you know anything at all about it.

It seems to me that the smartest among us, and those with the best educations, ought to be leaders in all realms of thought, especially the search for truth, and certainly including the truth about 9/11. Too many of our best minds have failed us by pretending we already have the truth, when clearly we don't.

I give Professor McMurtry a world of credit for standing up and speaking out. I only wish we could understand what he has to say.

~~~

Why the Facts of 9/11 Must be Suppressed

I have my own notion of why the facts of 9/11 must be suppressed, and I can explain it in five short paragraphs:

(1) The official story of 9/11 has been used to justify drastic military actions by the United States and its allies, actions which have brought death, destruction, and chaos to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and many other countries.

(2) The same story has also been used to justify drastic changes in domestic policy, in the United States and in much of the world. These changes have resulted in the persecution, incarceration, torture, and death of many innocent people, not to mention the erosion of civil rights and the perversion of the democratic process in every nation that once enjoyed these things.

(3) If it were widely and clearly understood that the official story of 9/11 is not only obviously false but a carefully crafted fiction, the military actions described above would be seen as unjustified acts of mass murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity; the policy changes would be seen as acts of treason; the people responsible for these actions might be in danger of accountability; and the new policies themselves might even be in danger of reversal, in which case the people who benefit from these policies might need to find a new way to feed at the public trough.

(4) If the official story were true, the facts of 9/11 would support it, and independent research would confirm it. Therefore the facts would be widely publicized and independent researchers would be encouraged. But none of this is happening, and that's because the facts of 9/11 undermine the official story, and the independent researchers destroy it.

(5) Therefore the facts and the independent researchers must both be suppressed. Otherwise the new policies would be in danger, the people who implemented them would be in danger, the people who profit from them would be slightly inconvenienced, and the perpetrators of 9/11 might actually be brought to justice.

~~~

Some Facts of 9/11 that Must Be Suppressed

We now come to the part of the story that cannot be told in an hour, or even six hours.

The following list contains some facts of 9/11 that defenders of the official story wish you didn't know, some questions they wish you wouldn't ask, some thoughts they wish you wouldn't entertain, some conclusions they wish you wouldn't draw ... and some hints that could help you talk yourself out of taking it seriously, which is exactly what they want you to do.

-- It is not unthinkable, unknown, or even uncommon for a government to attack its own people, blame the attack on an enemy, and use the attack as a pretext for a war which would otherwise be considered unjustified. Such an attack is often called a "False Flag" attack, and the trick has been played again and again throughout American History. Fortunately, most Americans are well-enough educated to be virtually unaware of history, so they can't even imagine such a thing. 

-- In 2000, a think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) published a position paper called "Rebuilding America's Defenses," (RAD) which called for enormous and rapid increases in US military spending in order to secure "full spectrum dominance" over the entire world, but noted that "the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor." Of course, having called for a major attack, they sat back and waited to see what would happen.

-- A year later, following the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, several PNAC members, signatories of RAD, occupied key positions in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney as Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wolfowitz as Assistant Secretary of Defense. These men were perfectly positioned to prevent the attacks, if they had wanted to do so. They were also legally obligated to prevent them, whether they wanted to do so or not. But patriotic Americans are smart enough not to know this.

-- In July of 2001, the Italian city of Genoa hosted an international economic summit. The Italian government, fearing a potential terrorist attack, installed anti-aircraft batteries around the city. What could this mean? If your mind was warped, you might think that since no terrorist group has an air force, the Italians must have been worried about terrorists flying hijacked airplanes.

-- During the Genoa summit, President Bush and the rest of the American delegation didn't sleep at the hotel with all the other delegates. They stayed on an aircraft carrier offshore, where anti-aircraft security was even better. If you've had too much to drink, you might assume the Americans were even more worried than the Italians.

-- Less than two months later, Bush and others in his administration claimed to have been caught by surprise, and said no one could have imagined terrorists using a hijacked airplane to attack a building. And you might wonder: if they were so afraid of it in July, why couldn't they imagine it in September? But that's a lunatic thought.

-- According to the official timelines, the FBI knew the names of all 19 hijackers before the FAA knew that 4 airplanes had been hijacked. You might ask yourself how the FBI knew the identity of the hijackers before the FAA knew the planes had been hijacked, but only if you were hallucinating.

-- We have never seen any credible video evidence that any of the 19 hijackers were in any of the airports from which the hijacked flights originated, on the day of the attacks. Shortly after the attacks, FBI agents were reportedly working double-shifts, scanning the airport security videos for signs of the hijackers. But later, we were told no security videos from those airports were available, because their recording systems had failed. If you were unreasonably suspicious, you might wonder whether this was true.

-- Shortly after the FBI identified the dead hijackers, at least six of them contacted major news agencies to say that they were still alive, that they'd had nothing to do with the attacks, and that they were surprised to see their names and faces on the news. The FBI never changed its original list, nor did it acknowledge that its list could not possibly be correct. But fixation on such minor details is a sure sign of mental illness.

-- The World Trade Center complex consisted of seven buildings, and all seven were destroyed on 9/11, although only the Twin Towers (Buildings 1 and 2) made an impact on the news cycle. But it would be silly to think the other 5 buildings were deliberately ignored.

-- The official report of the 9/11 Commission, which claims to be a complete account of the events of the day, fails to mention the destruction of Buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6, which were also never mentioned in any official reports. This is only to be expected, because these buildings were less than 100 stories tall.

-- The 9/11 Commission also failed to mention the destruction of Building 7, which was the subject of a subsequent NIST report. The existence of the NIST report proves beyond any doubt that the 9/11 Commission did not tell us the whole story, although the Commission specifically claimed to have done so. But nobody in his right mind would be concerned about such an irrelevant detail.

-- The destruction of Building 7 was reported by both BBC and CNN, more than twenty minutes before it happened. To this day we have had no credible explanation for how this could have happened. But only a crackpot would expect or require one.

-- The jumbo jet that allegedly hit the Pentagon left a hole much smaller than itself, but immediately after the crash, no airplane parts could be seen outside the building. If you wonder why not, you are seriously deranged.

-- We were told that the plane nearly melted on impact, flowed through the small hole in a semi-liquid state, and wound up inside the building, where none of it was found because it had vaporized. And you might wonder how the plane could have melted, when all the other planes that have ever crashed, in the entire history of aviation, have crumpled and broken apart -- but only if you were unhinged.

-- According to the official story, the hijackers who attacked the Pentagon were identified by DNA analysis of their remains. You might be tempted to ask: What can vaporize an airplane while leaving human DNA intact? But that's a stupid question.

-- After Flight 93 crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the first responders on the scene could find no wreckage, no luggage, and no passengers. But only a fool would ask whether an airplane had crashed there at all.

-- Even though the plane dove so deeply into the Shanksville soil that none of it could be seen by any of the eyewitnesses, a passport and a bandana which belonged to one of the hijackers were recovered from the scene. If you were paranoid, you might wonder whether the passport and the bandana had been planted.

-- The alleged hijacker pilots could barely fly single-engine Cessnas and had no experience in the cockpits of large airliners. And yet they are said to have flown with speed and precision that our most proficient pilots cannot match. If you have no imagination, you might wonder how they did it.

-- All four of the alleged flight paths are dubious, because no jumbo jet can fly at the speeds claimed by the official story (more than 500 miles per hour) except at high altitude. Such speeds are not possible at or near sea level, for planes which are not designed for it. So if you are mentally ill, you might wonder what actually hit the buildings.

-- President Bush and Vice-President Cheney testified before the 9/11 Commission on terms that they themselves set: behind closed doors, together, and not under oath, with no notes or recordings permitted to be kept. Therefore the Commission may have conducted the only criminal investigation in history in which suspects were allowed to stipulate the conditions under which they would cooperate. But you won't allow this thought to cross your mind unless you are profoundly anti-American.

-- The 9/11 Commission was nominally headed by Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton, but it was actually run by Philip Zelikow, a specialist in the creation and maintenance of public myths who came to the attention of the PNAC crowd after publishing a paper about catastrophic terrorism and the political uses to which it could be put. None but the most unbalanced would see anything wrong with this.

-- Zelikow began the investigation with a detailed outline of the final report, with chapter titles, section headings, sub-headings, and even sub-sub-headings. And he did his best to keep his outline secret from the Commission staff, some of whom thought they were engaged in a legitimate investigation. But why should he have shown it around? What good would that have done?

-- When an independent researcher asked why the FBI's Most Wanted list had an entry for Osama bin Laden but did not say that he was wanted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, an FBI spokesman revealed that the FBI has no hard evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks. But hard evidence isn't all it's cracked up to be.

-- You may recall that Afghanistan was bombed, invaded, and occupied for allegedly harboring the mastermind behind the attacks. But you have never seen any evidence supporting the assertion that Osama bin Laden was connected to 9/11. The FBI would happily show you some, if it had any. But it doesn't, so let's not dwell on it.

-- Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified to Congress for more than 3 hours. When she was finished, her testimony was stricken from the record and she was hit with a State Secrets gag order. Years later, she defied that order and revealed facts which had been kept under wraps for too long, including that Osama bin Laden had enjoyed "an intimate relationship" with the CIA until 9/11. She's what you'd call a seriously disgruntled former employee.

-- An extensive body of evidence indicates that explosives were used in the destruction of the World Trade Center. This evidence includes eyewitness testimony, mainstream media news reports, forensic examination of the remaining steel, and videos in which we can see and hear explosions. According to the defenders of official story, none of this evidence exists. Clearly it would be unpatriotic, and very rude, to contradict them.

-- Five of the nine 9/11 Commissioners are on record as saying they didn't get the story right, that they had been lied to, that the Commission had been set up to fail, and so on. And another would-be Commissioner resigned at the outset, calling the Commission "a national disgrace." But only a madman would expect such honest people to believe the story they've been telling.

-- Five young men were seen dancing and celebrating as the attack on the WTC unfolded. They were found, arrested, and interrogated, but ten weeks later, after considerable political and diplomatic pressure, they were released, having failed multiple polygraph tests. If you have no moral compass, you might see something unseemly in this.

-- It turned out that these men were Israelis and some of them were connected to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. After they returned to Israel, they appeared on television and explained that they were in NYC on 9/11 because "our purpose was to document the event." You might think this indicates foreknowledge, but only if you're anti-Semitic.

~~~

This list above is woefully incomplete, and some of the items I have omitted may be more important than any of the items I have included.

There are so many missing items that I wouldn't have time to list them all, even if I tried. And you wouldn't have time to read them all, either.

If I added another 20 or 50 items to the list, it would still only amount to the tip of an iceberg.

Furthermore, it could be argued that each item on my list is itself the tip of an iceberg.

For instance, the story of the five dancing Israelis is the tip of the iceberg called "Israeli complicity." But I would have to be a raving Jew-hater to tell you more about that.

I'd have to be a horrible person to tell you more about any of this, really. But you can click here to read about the most compelling reasons to doubt the official story, or here to read about evidence implicating Israel.

Delusional

At my newest website, "Delusional", I am posting a dismal new series of tedious essays. I hope you won't read them.

Here's the Table of Contents.

These links lead to individual posts:

Preface
Introduction

Part One:
How And Why I Became Delusional
Getting A Handle On Epistemology
Two Conflicting Hypotheses
"Assassination Science" and Dr. James H. Fetzer
Choosing Between Conflicting Hypotheses
Dr. Fetzer On YouTube
Expedience And Delusion
Dr. Fetzer And The Flat Earth
"Funnier Than Robin Williams"
The Mandela Effect
What Happened to "Captain Crunch"?
Who Changed "Field of Dreams"?
The Flat Earth Model
Who Changed the JFK Assassination?
Sunrise, Sunset
Who Moved South America?
"Guess The Number"
Chain Fall Blues
Hans Blix In Iraq
New Wine In Old Bottles
Basic Strategy For "Guess The Number"
Double Bogus When Lit
Hans Blix NOT in Iraq
Solar Geometry On The Flat Earth
Advanced Strategy For "Guess The Number"
"Saddam's Confessions"
Me And My Shadow
What Causes the Mandela Effect?
Binary Search
Triple Bogus When Lit


I will update this page with more links as the series develops.

Your comments are invited.