In a recent interview for a radio show called 9/11 Free Fall (already off to a great start), Jeremy Sagan—the younger son of Sagan senior and his first wife, fellow scientist Lynn Margulis—went off on all us closed-minded sheeple. In response to a prompt asking when he first “woke up,” Sagan remarks:

Well, on first seeing it—anyone seeing it can see that there’s something suspicious about it. I think it was New Year’s 2002, I was at a friend’s house, and they were saying Bush could never do something like this because he was incompetent. But in retrospect, now that I think about it, it’s true. I don’t think Bush could really do it, but that’s why they had him skirted off into Florida, to get him a little bit out of the way. In retrospect, you look at that and its obvious it was a controlled demolition.
Obvious indeed. But what evidence does Sagan, a computer programmer, have to support these supposedly manifest claims? Little more than the usual inside job truther fare, saying, “I think the visual evidence is the most compelling. You have molten steel coming out of the building. Obivously, also the evidence of thermite is very compelling. The other thing I should say, if you look at building 7, the way everything was known before it happened. And the way it was reported in the media before it happened, that doesn’t happen. You know?”

In the latter case, Sagan is referring to an aspect in the “controlled demolition” conspiracy that asserts some people had prior knowledge that the buildings were about to fall. This idea is supposedly supported by the fact that a BBC reporter announced the building at 7 WTC’s collapse 20 minutes before it actually happened. Of course, the BBC reporter referred to it as a “very honest mistake,” and news stations have a rich and vibrant history of getting facts very, very wrong in high stress situations.

Perhaps even more surprising than Jeremy Sagan aligning with the paranoid ranters of the world is the fact that, apparently, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. No, not Carl Sagan (dear god not Carl Sagan). We’re talking about his mother. Yes, Lynn Margulis, Jeremy Sagan’s mommy dearest herself was also a crusader for 9/11 Truth.

CONTINUED

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For the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, the mainstream media has offered an unprecedented level of apparent bias against reasonable people invested in justice for the victims of 9/11. The majority of articles below imply that “truthers” are driven by a fear of chaos and uncertainty to draw comfort from misdirected rage. Most of the articles make sweeping generalization about those involved while others are outright insulting.

The post 10th Anniversary 9/11 Truth Hit Piece Roundup appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Cyberspace is the perfect place for this contradiction to thrive, for it is both “the Petri dish for paranoids” and also the home of Snopes and other scam trackers. Wikipedia is a battleground between conspiracy hounds and the thousands of amateur sleuths who aspire to do at least as good a job as the fact-checkers at conventional encyclopedias (whether they do so is a matter of considerable debate, including within Wikipedia itself). The Internet is full of bunkum and debunk ’em. Like matter and anti-matter, they should cancel each other out. But the relationship more aptly resembles that between bacteria and antibiotics. Develop an effective tuberculosis vaccine, and the TB bacterium will develop a stronger resistant strain. The American body politic, weakened by successive waves of government lies, media oversights, and the relentless repetition of demagogues, is susceptible to these highly infectious theories.

Most toxic of all perhaps are the myths generated by 9/11. Over the years, I’ve received lots of letters about 9/11 and why it was an inside job. One recent letter insisted that Osama bin Laden was not behind the 2001 attacks, that an Israeli firm in the Twin Towers “received a fax warning them about the 911 attack that would come in a few hours” (which presumably allowed it to warn Israelis and/or Jews to evacuate the building), and that it was not a plane that struck the Pentagon on that fateful day.

Although bin Laden initially denied responsibility, an overwhelming amount of evidence surfaced that linked al Qaeda to the attacks (including, of course, bin Laden himself eventually claiming responsibility). As for the Israeli firm, Odigo, it did receive such a warning, but it was an instant message, not a fax. The message arrived at its office in Israel, did not identify the location of the attack, and was hostile rather than friendly. It in no way demonstrates that the firm, which didn’t even have offices in the Twin Towers to evacuate, was part of a U.S.-Israeli plot to bring down the buildings. As for Flight 77, there were lots of eyewitness reports of its crash into the Pentagon in addition to calls made by people on board. And where exactly did the flight go if not into the Pentagon? I could go on — about the misrepresentations of the size of the hole in the Pentagon, other hoaxes involving advanced warnings of 9/11, and all the other fanciful theories about who was behind the attacks.

The “9/11 truthers” are as resistant to rebuttal as the right-wing “birthers.” They both draw strength from their deep-seated distrust of government and the mass media. They believe not in Occam’s Razor, which argues for building a case on the fewest new assumptions, but in Occam’s Hairball, a partially digested lump of every new assumption that has stuck in their craw.

Long before the Internet, historian Richard Hofstadter warned of the “paranoid style” that periodically grips the American body politic and directs the crowd’s fury at Masons or Jesuits or Jews or Communists. In his recently updated book on conspiracy theories, legal scholar Mark Fenster takes a more benign view. Such theories reflect populist suspicion about the concentration of economic and political power, a suspicion “that can have violent, racist, and antidemocratic effects (as well as salutary and democracy-enhancing ones) on the political and social order, but a strain that is neither independent from nor necessarily threatening to the country’s political institutions or political culture.”

I agree that conspiracy theories do not threaten the status quo, for they usually distract attention from more serious and systemic problems (for instance, bridges and highways and buildings are collapsing all over the United States because of the defunding of infrastructure, and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth focus all their energies on explaining how an exploding plane could never make the Twin Towers collapse?). And yes, before you prepare your flaming emails, some conspiracies turn out to have a basis in fact (the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, or the right-wing mobilization to bring down Bill Clinton).

The danger of conspiracy theories lies not so much in whether they are right or wrong but in how they erode our democratic institutions. Instead of democratizing the state, conspiracy theorists tend toward a libertarian downsizing of government; instead of breaking the corporate control of the media, conspiracy theorists create their own dogmatic blogs and websites. Conspiracies sap our will, for who except Jesus or Keanu Reaves can stand up to The Matrix? In fact, conspiracies are the exception to the rule of big institutions, which err on the side of incompetence more often than not. Conspiracies overstate the power of the powerful. As the Iran-Contra affair demonstrated, even authentic conspiracies are fairly inept.

I fear that conspiracies have become the only way for us to organize the unruly flow of information that assaults us daily. We create all-encompassing, quasi-religious explanations to make sense of the supernova of our post-modern experience.

The post The Bunkum of John Feffer appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

AMONG THE TRUTHERS
By Jonathan Kay
Harper Collins

On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning in the National Post, convinced him of “”the extraordinary professionalism of the police patrolling Toronto this week.” The city was intact: tourists thronged Yonge Street, a band played on the corner. He toodled west along Queen, where he found a line of police staring down protestors. But: “There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw.”

Er, not so much.

We know now, of course, that the police were engaged in widespread brutality and violations of civil liberties all over Toronto that day. But Jonathan Kay didn’t see any of it and, so, of course, the police acted with “extraordinary professionalism.” Or perhaps he would argue that a little head-bashing and snatch-and-grabbery is not really violence, as in, you know, violence, and the police and state agree with him, and so that is that.

We don’t really know what Kay was thinking in the wake of the G20, as he didn’t blog much about it after that, except to call Toronto a “city of wimps.”

And so we come to Mr. Kay’s latest item of “reporting,” a book titled Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. All the tropes evidenced in his G20 coverage are present here, too: perception peddled as reality, ad hominens, and a firm conviction that anyone who sees things differently than he does must be a nut. Kay, Managing Editor of Comment at the Post, bills himself on his twitter feed as an “Engineer-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-book-writing-guy.” But while he is indubitably a journalist and a book-writing-guy, he is not a reporter; he is an editorialist, and remains so here.

I should mention that I am referred to in passing in the book, which identifies me, bizarrely, as a “poet.” (I have worked in theatre and journalism for some 35 years, but the last poem I wrote, other than this piece of doggerel, was in high school.) It also lumps me in with the rest of its specimens as a “Truther,” which is more arguable, though I don’t identify myself as such, not only because the term is subject to the sort of mish-mashing Kay gives it here, but because it strikes me as pompous (kind of like calling oneself a “pro-lifer”). In any event, if I am a Truther, I’m a pretty bad one: I don’t think George Bush or Dick Cheney or anyone in the White House hatched the plot, I do think an airplane flew into the Pentagon, I’m agnostic about what brought down World Trade Centers 1 and 2 (though not so much 7), I regard Alex Jones as a highly unreliable (if entertaining) source of information, and I think Ron Paul would be a disaster as president. If the Truther movement issued membership cards, I’d probably be required to turn mine in.

I also wrote for the National Post for 11 years (including a piece with Jonathan Kay as editor). It was their itchy-trigger-finger syndrome when, in a book review, I alluded to the suspicious stock trading that preceded 9/11, that caused me to stop doing so.

What I certainly am is a sceptic — about the official version of 9/11 as well as much else I am told, whether by government or others who have a stake in a story. That, to me, is what is involved in being a journalist. But Jonathan Kay tells us that too much of that sort of thing can get out of hand. “Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone,” he writes, in the sermonly conclusion to his book — “that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect.”

One thing that can be said for Among the Truthers — it certainly transcends “mere intellect.”

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their bona fides before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Kay never addresses the arguments of his interlocutors, because, he tells us late in the book, a New York City editor warned him that “Debunking books don’t sell.” Instead, he refers the reader to various of those books, and sites. This is defensible on editorial grounds; were he to get into his own reasons for rejecting 9/11 Truth theories, the book would be even weightier than it is. But it is also a convenience; it means Kay never has to address what he calls the “anomalies” in the official story of that day. We never learn why his interviewees are so head-shakingly wrong — they just are.

He does, though, fall back on some of the easier explanations for why so-called conspiracism has thrived since the Kennedy assassination: the world is too complex, conspiracy believers can’t deal with its chaos, and so they develop over-arching narratives to make its unpredictability more palatable. All of which is nonsense; the notion that one could take comfort from the idea that Kennedy was killed by a cabal, still unidentified to this day, or that somebody blew up the World Trade Centre towers (and got away with it), is sillier even than the most exotic conspiracy theories. But there’s more where that came from. Kay is a proponent of the “If I Write It, Maybe It’ll Become True” school of prose. As I got deeper into his book, with its explanation that conspiracism is the result of “middle-aged ennui” (or that, as an alleged “poet,” my day job requires me to “weave a self-invented reality”; I wish), I began to find Among the Truthers as ludicrously entertaining as any Alex Jones broadcast.

Kay does offer an interesting history of conspiracy movements (though this leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge that some are legitimate; again, we never find out what makes one plot real and another not). And he is right that, for some adherents, 9/11 Truth evolves into a kind of religion. The comfort believers find in it, however, comes not from a simplifying explanation of the world, but from a group of shared verities, repeated over and over in incantatory fashion. Mind you, this could also describe the editorial pages of the National Post.

Less harmless than Kay’s pop-psychologizing is his zeal to eradicate ideas other than his own. Having concluded that “any effort to engage committed theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time” — because, of course, they refuse to come around to his way of seeing things — he offers, in his final chapter, a proposal to shame them out of their wrong-thinking, by “applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades.” What he has in mind are first-year university courses using an “anticonspiracist curriculum” to teach students “to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought.” In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, kill their young.

Well, okay. Sounds like an interesting course. Of course, the problem is that if it were taught in any way other than Jonathan Kay, dreamer-upper, envisions — if, say, discussion as to the merits as well as the vagaries of the 9/11 Truth movement were allowed — then Jonathan Kay, National Post writer, would no doubt take off after it. Kay got his start on this beat when, as he reminds us, he discovered that a Liberal candidate in the 2008 federal election had six years earlier reported on some of the findings of various independent researchers into 9/11. He immediately employed the Post in a successful campaign to have her turfed as a candidate. More recently he’s been trying to work the same voodoo on a student at the University of Lethbridge. For all that Kay affects to be really, really interested in 9/11 Truth as a sociological movement, and to really, really want to understand its actors, Among the Truthers is of a piece with his daily journalism. He isn’t out to understand them; he’s out for their scalps.

Six months after the G20, Jonathan Kay had a bit of a rethink. “A few weeks ago,” he wrote in his Post blog, “I thought the police response to the G20 protests was yesterday’s news — and I never really reconsidered the opinion I formed at the time of the event, based on what I saw with my own eyes.” But then the Toronto Star got on the case of Adam Nobody, the G20 peaceful protestor tackled and beaten by cops, and lo-and-behold: “. . . it’s now clear that there was some thuggish police behavior that that went on.”

“Thuggish.” So it’s a start.

We can hope that someday some mainstream publication gets on the case of 9/11, thus allowing Jonathan Kay to reconsider that also. We can hope, as he approaches midlife ennui, that he decides it’s okay after all to have heretical thoughts — or, at least, to let others have them. We can hope that he learns to use YouTube. Meantime, we can be reasonably sure Among the Truthers will have little impact, except to buttress the beliefs of the orthodox in the same way he claims (quite rightly) that the outpourings of the Truth movement reinforce its gnosticism. It’s a Battle of the Bibles, whether Kay accepts their equivalency or not, and, Brother, it’s not going to be settled in my lifetime.

But while debunking books may not succeed, neither do books that aren’t better at peddling their hortatory wares than this one. I would have liked to read an insightful study of conspiracy movements. Among the Truthers, on the other hand, is a failed salvo, that might just as well have been titled The Protocols of All Those People Who Make Me Think Twice.

The post The Protocols of Jonathan Kay appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Kay’s book is half reportage and half evidence. Both halves demonstrate that mistrust in institutions—which aren’t doing the best job of running things right now—is driving a wave of conspiracy-mongering. To a man, the leading 9/11 Truthers that Kay interviews say that they found their obsession because they didn’t trust the government and they sought out information from some samizdat source. …

Look at the 9/11 conspiracy. Some of Kay’s sources have tenuous connections to reality. Most of them got interested in the conspiracy because something else seemed … wrong. As Kay points out, “Trutherism” didn’t really take off until 2003, when it was clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If you were already inclined to think that George W. Bush had been unfairly put into office in 2000, if you had read the Project for a New American Century’s letters from the end of the Clinton years, well, this was enough to drive you nuts.

The post David Weigel Reviews "Among The Truthers" appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

In a weird alignment of planets, this week in the news, at home and at work I’ve been plagued by conspiracy theorists determined to convince me, once again, that George Bush, Zionists or even the Vatican were responsible for the September 11 attacks.

In general, I consider conspiracy theories the rabid fantasies of lonely blokes who failed at university and have spent the rest of their lives trying to prove they’re smarter than everyone who passed.

And since many of them are, unlike me, smart enough to retain and regurgitate precise (albeit selective) scientific detail, it makes me a pretty soft target for their rants. Therefore, in preparation for my next 9/11 nut job assault, I’ve been working on an official response.

I don’t know if you’ve checked, but there are significantly more websites dedicated to conspiracy theories than to the mainstream point of view. In fact my 15-year-old got half way through a history assignment on September 11 before her confused cries for help alerted us to the fact she was reading the wrong stuff.

I know if you’re a conspiracy theorist you’re mad at me now for not letting my daughter read everything and draw her own conclusions. Honestly, I was just saving her the time.

With a nod to the animated series South Park, in short, there are three reasons I don’t think George Bush, The Pope or even the CIA did it – love, logistics and dibber-dobbers.

Truth Movement websites, as they’re known, routinely claim there were no terrorists on board any of the 9/11 flights. Apparently the pilots were either stooges or, in the case of the World Trade Centre crashes, the planes were military jets guided remotely into the buildings with no passengers on board. The phone calls from supposed loved ones were faked and the actual passenger jets that went missing on the day were shot down over the ocean.

The heart of the conspiracy theory stems from how the buildings collapsed. In particular, that an aviation fuel fire is incapable of melting steel, that the buildings collapsed upon themselves and that a third building, not hit by a hijacked plane also collapsed. There’s plenty more, by the way, but this will do for now. Based on those propositions, the truth movement contends all three buildings were imploded in a “controlled demolition” using explosives planted at some earlier time.

They also claim the Pentagon was not hit by an airliner but by a guided missile and the fourth airliner, United 93, was shot down en route to the capital because the passengers threatened to land it successfully thus exposing the plot.

To accept any of it, you have to believe there are thousands of people connected to the US government evil and brilliant enough to co-ordinate such a complex plan, without one person ever dobbing. Keep in mind that the group had to train or invent 19 fake hijackers, complete with elaborate background stories and send them to flying schools across the country to ensure there was someone to blame following the event.

Imagine the paperwork. No matter how rotten you think the US administration is there must be some good people in there. And surely they’d be looking for paperwork on every new recruit, every planning meeting, request for flight times, aircraft requisition, talent fee, mislaid guided missile or flying student conveniently made disappear. And don’t get me started on the overtime it would have taken for the bomb squad to wire up the twin towers.

It’s not only ridiculous to suggest there were hundreds of civil servants willing to cold heartedly slaughter thousands of their countrymen, it’s deeply offensive. And just quietly, you know how all of your friends have stopped arguing about your whack job theories? I promise you, it’s not assent, they’re just bored.

It’s not only ridiculous to suggest there were hundreds of civil servants willing to cold heartedly slaughter thousands of their countrymen, it’s deeply offensive.

The post Radio Host Caroline Hutchinson Proves She's No Journalist appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren’t so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.

However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. And it cannot be dismissed because it reflects a gulf in politics and perception, especially between the West and many Muslims.

“That theory might be true,” said Ugur Tezer, a 48-year-old businessman who sells floor tiles in the Turkish capital, Ankara. “When I first heard about the attack I thought, ‘Osama,’ but then I thought the U.S. might have done it to suppress the rise of Muslims.”

Compassion for the United States swept the globe right after the attacks, but conspiracy theories were circulating even then. It wasn’t al-Qaida, they said, but the United States or Israel that downed the towers. Weeks after the strikes, at the United Nations, President George W. Bush urged the world not to tolerate “outrageous conspiracy theories” that deflected blame from the culprits.

However, the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided fodder for the damning claim that the U.S. killed its own citizens, supposedly to justify military action in the Middle East and to protect Israel. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey – all among the most moderate nations in the Islamic world – said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks.

Two years later, a poll of 17 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project, found majorities in nine of them believed al-Qaida was behind the attacks. However, the U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.

Those who say the attacks might have been an “inside job” usually share antipathy toward the U.S. government, and often a maverick sensibility. Besides Ahmadinejad, high-profile doubters include Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Former Minnesota governor and pro wrestler Jesse Ventura has questioned the official account. Conspiracy theorists have heckled former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Americans during speeches.

Controversy over U.S. actions and policies, including the widely discredited assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, reinforced the perceptions of conspiracy theorists. Iranians dug deeper into history, recalling the U.S.-backed coup in their country in 1953.

“Initially, I was doubtful about the conspiracy theories. But after seeing the events in later years, I don’t have any doubt that it was their own operation to find a pretext to hit Muslim countries,” said Shaikh Mushtaq Ahmed, a 58-year-old operations manager in a bank in Pakistan. “It’s not a strange thing that they staged something like this in their own country to achieve a big objective.”

In March, an editorial in The Washington Post harshly criticized Yukihisa Fujita, a lawmaker with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, for saying in an interview that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were alive and that shadowy forces with advance information about the plot played the stock market for profit. Fujita said the article contained factual errors.

The record shows that al-Qaida agents on a suicide mission hijacked four American passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. The evidence is immense: witness accounts, audio recordings, video and photographic documentation, exhaustive investigations and claims of responsibility by al-Qaida.

Yet every fact and official assertion only feeds into alternative views that become amplified on the Internet, some tinged with anti-Semitism because of the close U.S.-Israeli alliance. They theorize that a knowing U.S. government stood by as the plot unfolded, or that controlled demolitions destroyed the Twin Towers, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile.

“All this, of course, would require hundreds if not thousands of people to be in on the plot. It speaks volumes for the determination to believe something,” said David Aaronovitch, the British author of “Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History.”

“This kind of theory really does have a big impact in the Middle East,” he said. “It gets in the way of thinking seriously about the problems in the area and what should be done.”

A U.S. State Department website devotes space to debunking conspiracy theories about Sept. 11, in the apparent belief that the allegations must be addressed forcefully rather than dismissed out of hand as the ruminations of a fringe group.

“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas,” the site says.

Tod Fletcher of Petaluma, California, has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, a retired theology professor, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president’s comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government.

“It seems like it’s the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States,” Fletcher said.

The post 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Rife In Muslim World appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Though the 9/11 evidence pointed to Bush’s incompetence in ignoring warnings and failing to stop al-Qaeda’s terrorist operation, some American leftists felt that it wasn’t enough to convince the people that Bush was simply a bonehead. The feeling was that Bush had so bamboozled the people that they needed to be shocked out of their trances by something bigger.

So, this small group brushed aside the evidence-backed narrative of Bush’s incompetence and even a competing interpretation of that factual framework, claiming that Bush had “let 9/11 happen.” Instead, this group insisted that the only way to wake up America was to make a case that Bush “made it happen,” that he was behind the 9/11 attacks.

To accomplish this feat, these activists, who became known as “9/11 truthers,” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they indeed had done it. The “truthers” then cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line.

The “truthers” even recycled many of the Right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence. These sleight-of-hand techniques obscured the glaring fact that not a single witness has emerged to describe the alleged “inside job,” either the supposed “controlled demolition” of the Twin Towers or the alleged “missile” attack on the Pentagon.

Some supporters of the “inside-job” theory may have simply been destabilized by all the years of right-wing disinformation. Reality and real evidence may have lost all currency, replaced by a deep and understandable distrust of the nation’s leaders and the news media.

Other “truthers” whom I’ve talked with view their anti-Bush propaganda campaign as a success because it injected some doubts among the American people about Bush. One told me that this was the only attack line against Bush that had gained any “traction.”

The post Robert Parry Decoupling From Reality appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Meaning: “That guy shouldn’t be allowed within 10 miles of Ground Zero,” the conservative broadcaster insisted during a recent episode of The O’Reilly Factor.

Perhaps O’Reilly should try explaining that to the 45 percent of Americans, according to a 2006 Zogby International poll sponsored by 9/11 activists, who say a new investigation into the events is called for; or the 42 percent of Americans who said they believe the government is covering something up; or, the 49 percent of New York City residents who agreed in 2004 that U.S. officials “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.”

By his own words, the Fox News personality appears to be suggesting that Americans, particularly Muslims, who doubt the official 9/11 story be banned from Ground Zero.

O’Reilly’s bizarre comment was made in the process of taking another swing at the New York City imam who plans to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks from the former World Trade Center site. The host’s latest approach to smearing Feisal Abdul Rauf, who worked with the FBI on counter-terrorism issues after 9/11, is guilt-by-association. In this case, the man O’Reilly has saddled with the flaming tire of “radical Islam” is Faiz Khan, M.D.

Unfortunately for the Fox host, the man he’s attacked is a medical doctor and 9/11 first responder, and someone who has never tried to hide his beliefs about that fateful day.

“O’Reilly was grim-faced as he announced that the subject of his Talking Points Memo was, as he put it, ‘evidence that the ground zero imam is associated with a radical Muslim,'” Newshounds noted. “O’Reilly said, ‘evidence shows’ that fears ‘may now be valid’ the ground zero mosque has ‘radical ties.'”

Rauf has repeatedly described the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. as “suicide bombings” and has not advocated on behalf of a new investigation. He and Dr. Khan worked together at the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), which Khan has since left to focus on his medical career. ASMA and Rauf’s organization, the Cordoba Initiative, are working together on the NYC Islamic community center.

In an essay available online and a video of a speech he gave to a 9/11 truth group, Khan explains that most people around the world assume 9/11 was an “inside job” because of the corrupt nature of many third world governments.

“It’s surprising,” he said to a 2006 gathering of activists in Chicago. “Talk to a cab driver. I’m serious. They will tell you, yes, it’s obvious. Now, this is the reason why it’s obvious: Because in the third world, the sleaze of governance is a lot more transparent. So, people sort-of expect their officials to act in certain ways and they just kinda put up with it and that’s the way it goes. Here [in the U.S.], the glass is a lot thicker. The conditioning is a lot heavier, so that’s something you’ve got to work through.”

In an essay published by the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, Khan, one of the group’s co-founders, explains his views:

The ‘9/11 Truth’ thesis categorically rejects the mainstream thesis and asserts that the prime factor for the success of the criminal mission known as 9/11 did not come from the quarter known as ‘militant Islam’ although the phenomenon known as ‘militant Islamic networks’ may have played a partial role, or even a less than partial role – perhaps the role of patsy and scapegoat.

Moreover, the rise and popularization of so called militant Islamic networks, from these networks’ ideology to actual empowerment, and the linking of this to western corporate driven government covert operations – this relationship is one that needs to be explicitly and loudly proclaimed by Islamic voices.

Let us be clear about our opinion here, as it relates to the phenomenon of “militant Islamic networks”, just in case the infantile minds within the Islamic activist scene confuse our application of intelligence in analyzing “why 9/11” with a denial of the very real need to “clean out our own house”, or confuse a legitimate inquiry into 9/11Truth with an unwillingness to face the “ideological ills found in the Islamic world.” This kind of accusatory self-righteous indignation obstructs clear thinking. Such sentimental nonsense has no place in legitimate discourse.

But does this make him a “radical Muslim,” as O’Reilly suggests? Hardly.

Still, the association between the two men, the Fox host insisted, should be “enough” to get the whole project “tabled” — an assertion that ABC News host George Stephanopoulos took issue with during an interview broadcast Tuesday morning.

“There’s no evidence that Rauf believes anything like that,” he reminded O’Reilly.

Though Khan says he’s since left the so-called truth “movement,” he insists his views of the event have not changed. His opinions about the attacks have been available in the public domain for years, and he’s even publicly signed 9/11 truth petitions.

In the lengthy essay, he clinically dissects the mentality of the general public on 9/11, offering activists advice on how to convey their ideas more effectively. Mid-way through, he addresses his feelings for the nation of which he’s a citizen, saying:

Huge segments of American Muslims came to this country looking to better their lives through opportunities afforded by American society. Thankfully, many have found success. For them, the reality is that the US is the best place on earth in terms of opportunity, and returns on hard work, honesty and obeying rules. They see that the blatant nepotism, corruption, bribery, and cut throatedness necessary to socio-economically ascend in their home-countries was relatively absent here. This is true – and as an American, I am proud of this.

Contacted by Steve Emerson, a reporter whose body of work mainly focuses on militant Islamic networks (and who attacks his source in this case as a “9/11 denier”), Khan attempted to distance himself from the various theories about that day:

“I am not sure what happened on 911, and as I have stated in articles, and other sources you may have come across – the ‘official explanation’ is demonstrably false…since multiple facets of it have been shown to be thus by independent investigators.”

Others who’ve called for a new investigation into the attacks include widows who lost husbands during the attacks, WTC employees, police, firefighters and other first responders who escaped before the collapse, architects, engineers, members of the military both current and former, professional pilots and even former intelligence operatives: the vast majority of them, Americans.

“He (Rauf) had to know that we were going to find about this guy, did he not?” O’Reilly rhetorically asked his guest on Monday, “as if Khan had done something really heinous and as if he, O’Reilly, had uncovered the plot of the century,” Newshounds quipped.

Indeed, many who’ve come to question the official recounting of the events cite recent revelations for their skepticism.

For instance: “More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques,” writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem, in The Daily Beast.

“… [Information] derived from the interrogations is central to the Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks,” MSNBC reported in a 2009 post that appears to have been removed from the network’s database. “The analysis also shows – and agency and commission staffers concur – there was a separate, second round of interrogations in early 2004, done specifically to answer new questions from the Commission.

“9/11 Commission staffers say they ‘guessed’ but did not know for certain that harsh techniques had been used, and they were concerned that the techniques had affected the operatives’ credibility. At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being ‘tortured.’ The claims came during their hearings last spring at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”

“Commission executive director Philip Zelikow (later counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) admitted, ‘We were not aware, but we guessed, that things like that were going on. We were wary…we tried to find different sources to enhance our credibility,’” Windrem continued. “(Zelikow testified before the Senate on Wednesday, May 13, that he had argued in a 2005 memo that some of the tactics used on suspected terrorists violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.)”

In his book “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation”, New York Times reporter Philip Shenon indicts Zelikow on his ties with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and his frequent contact with senior Bush political adviser Karl Rove, during what was touted as an independent investigation into the events surrounding the attacks. This seeming conflict of interest, the book says, led Commission staffers not to trust Zelikow.

9/11 Commission member John Lehman went on to tell MSNBC that it was impossible not to go through Karl Rove when documents such as presidential daily briefings were needed. Many Commission members, he said, pressed the White House to provide more information and lift restrictions on a regular basis.

Perhaps paramount above all other critics, Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who led the 9/11 Commission, told the National Press Club in 2006 that he and other members of the investigative body felt their work had been “set up to fail.”

It all seems to leave one wondering who else O’Reilly would like to see banned from Ground Zero.

“In the clip below Bill opens with a hysterical introduction of the issue, demanding that Rauf explain himself and why he didn’t make his association to Khan public,” writes Andrew Steel, blogging for America 20XY. “Bill interviews Roy Locker, who is the managing editor for The Investigative Project on Terrorism– a data-gathering center on Islamic groups. Locker describes Khan’s past speaking engagements in a cautious and somber tone, as if they equated to participating in brutal massacres instead of exercises of free speech. Towards the end of the interview O’Reilly and Locker imply that Rauf’s association with Khan now opens the door to the possibility that the Ground Zero cultural center will become a haven for terrorist activities, thus associating 9/11 Truth itself with terrorism. ”

He concludes: “Though disguised as a new twist to the tired ‘mosque’ controversy, the true aim of O’Reilly’s attack is to isolate those who question the official story of 9/11 by sending out the message that any connection with 9/11 Truthers is not only undesirable, but potentially criminal.”

The post O’Reilly: Muslims That Question 9/11 Could Be Terrorists appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The thing about people who hold beliefs you find unbelievable (in two senses) is that they are in most other respects just like you and your friends.

Like many others, I was aware of these theories and aware too that a significant percentage of Americans (about the same percentage that believes President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya) was at least partly persuaded by them. But on Aug. 15 I got an up-close look at the phenomenon when I attended a meeting of Truthers that just happened to be held in Livingston Manor, a small Catskill town about 20 miles from my house.

The post Stanley Fish Dismisses "Truthers" And Avoids Facts appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.