Firstly, taken from Jack Riddlers quote in another thread ( thanks Jack ) ;
The blame belongs with a media establishment and culture that locks up a selection of "9/11 truth" figures into a zoo for entertainment viewing, but never actually examines the events and history of September 11th itself. They don't even read the official reports! Some of them condemn US torture, and then turn around and endorse a 9/11 Commission Report based largely on testimony derived from that torture. Such have no standing to deride others as naive.
Paul Thompson, Sibel Edmonds, the Jersey Girls, 911 Press for Truth, Nafeez Ahmed, P.D. Scott, Mike Ruppert, Anthony Shaeffer, Kevin Fenton, and (in a very conditional way) Richard Clarke: these are scholars and sources who are giving pieces of the real history and well-considered insights. They are all in their own way very well-known names, and real journalists would have no trouble finding them. It no more matters that Alex Jones or Charlie Sheen or DR Griffin might be more famous (today!) as "9/11 truth leaders" than it would matter that Oprah is a better known spokesperson on a given medical issue than an actual doctor.
Back when the biggest names in 9/11 skepticism were more credible than Griffin and the Joneses, the way people like Ruppert were treated by the media was no different than what is dished out today: The same boilerplate broad-stroke mockery, the same refusal to look at the events and history.
Real journalists would look beyond "American Idol" and seek out the cutting-edge music, in this case meaning: They would seek out the actual scholarship, they would cover the 9/11 Timeline and the Family Steering Committee, they would know what's actually in the 9/11 Commission Report and JICI and the IG reports. They would know about Blee and Alec Station and Midhar/Hazmi and Abudussattar Shaikh and Bayoumi and UBLU and CIA surveillance of the Hamburg Cell in the 1990s and the AWOL chain of command on the day and the "don't follow the money" dictum of the CR and the missing 28 pages of the JICI and the wargames of the day. They would know the evidence of foreknowledge, foreplanning and foreign warnings, the air-defense timeline contradictions between the various agencies and the bizarre 3-minute shifting of the Flight 93 crash by the CR and the CR conflicts of interest and very much else besides.
They would also have a clue about the history of covert operations and provide no preemptive excuses, like the false dichotomy between incompetence and criminality, as though the two don't usually go together. They would hardly regard the thesis of criminality in the US government as an "extraordinary" claim, or demand evidence from the Loose Change boys. They would track down the stories and look for answers from those who are accountable: not from celebrities, or from fabulists of hypotheses on the radio, but from people who actually were present and in charge on the day and in the weeks and months prior, and the ones who were charged with investigating the events afterward.
I could leave it at that, but out of respect for those in the UK who are still trying to make some noise regarding the ongoing miscarriage of justice that is 9/11, I include, for starters the contents of an e-mail in my inbox today;
We are laying it on heavier than usual this week as the media blitzes us all with wall to wall 9/11 grief for the 3,000.
But not for the 100,000++ dead in Iraq, or the uncounted in Afghanistan, or the recently estimated 50,000 in Libya.
Wake up to your morning Radio 4 or New York Times smell the racism. Or switch off and read the news they do not have room for.
Look out for our major Deep Politics London conference on October 15, details to follow in another few days.
Many will take the view that Richard Clarke's bombshell is a limited hangout although it is not clear why they would feel the need for this at this stage. In any case this is a big retreat for the official story. RI911 is primarily a campaigning, not an investigative setup so whatever the motive this is very good news for us.
Sincerely,
Reinvestigate 911 team
1. Richard Clarke bombshell blanked by mainstream media
The biggest 9/11 bombshell in recent years has barely attracted any attention from the mainstream media. White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, the man in charge of all intelligence gathering in Washington prior to 9/11, has gone public after agonising for years: he can see no legitimate reason why the CIA failed to tell him they knew there were Al Qaeda terrorists active in America in the runup to the 9/11 attacks.
(continued at the end)
2. The 9/11 Gravy Train
Failure can be very profitable if you are a senior politician in the US. Rudy Giuliani Mayor of New York at the time of 9/11 made far more out of the attacks than his father made in a life time as a minor mafia enforcer. Many other 9/11 losers cum winners are detailed in a long and eye watering report in the New York magazine Village Voice.
The Voice's investigators have traced the personal fortunes made both by those who failed on 9/11 (about USD 20M in the case of Giuliani) as well as the assorted thieves and charlatans who got in on the act afterwards: foundations that pay more to their directors than they ever disbursed, firefighters whose heroic stories change with each well paid lecture, and a memorial park run as a private business with items rescued from Ground Zero up for sale with no questions asked. If Osama bin Laden, a billionaire, had filled his alleged hideout with these trophies, it seems no-one would care much in the 9/11 industry.
The Voice could have added the radiation laden airport body scanners that have made so much money for Michael Chertoff, the man who blocked the FBI's investigations prior to 9/11. Chertoff was rewarded with the Homeland Security job just in time to oversee the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Oh well, it's only money.
3. When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed
According to the New Statesman magazine in London, David Ray Griffin, who has just brought out a book on 9/11, is one of the top 50 people on the planet. However this is because he is incredibly dangerous as the leading 9/11 "conspiracy theorist", It's sad to see a once respected investigative journal using media shorthand for someone making allegations they have not got time to investigate or their proprietor is not happy about. To use a more apt cliche the Staggers is suffering from a bad case of "dog in the manger" or "shooting the messenger".
There are however journalists who still have time to think for themselves and write independently. This is what Paul Craig Roberts, formerly assistant secretary of the treasury and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal has to say about DRG's new book 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed:
“In this, his tenth book on 9/11 and its consequences, David Ray Griffin continues to report the facts and marshal the evidence that the mainstream media continue to ignore. Having previously demolished the official 9/11 story, Griffin now explains how the government got away with its crime against democracy.”
Economist John B. Cobb, Jr adds: “Anyone who has actually studied Griffin's writings on 9/11 knows that the evidence against the truth of the official account is overwhelming. It is not surprising that the mainstream response has been to ridicule and ignore rather than to engage in reasoned discussion. What is disappointing is that leading liberals and responsible journalists have joined in by affirming ideas that contradict basic science and condescendingly rejecting solid research without examining it. In this book, Griffin describes the behavior of these journalists and attempts, in a remarkably charitable spirit, to understand it.”
4. International 9/11 Hearings in Toronto will be webcast and start this week
A decade after the events of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the immediate deaths of nearly 3,000 people on American soil, countless victims from toxic dust, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, international hearings on this pivotal event begin in Toronto this week.
Sponsored by the International Center for 9/11 Studies, the first four days of these hearings will take place at Toronto's Ryerson University between September 8 and 11, 2011. During these proceedings, various expert witnesses will present evidence into the case, to be assessed by a range of eminent experts including Ferdinando Imposimato, Honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy. In a press release picked up by Reuters and cnbc among many other mainstream agencies the organisers say:
"The events of September 11 provided a pretext for a War on Terror that has led to military invasions and occupations, and attacks upon civil and human rights throughout the world. The credibility of the official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, carried out by the U.S. Government between 2003 and 2005, has been questioned by millions of citizens in the United States and abroad, including victim family members, expert witnesses and international legal experts.
"To date, open and transparent judicial hearings to question the official evidence provided by the U.S. Government have never taken place in the United States or abroad. Similarly, no perpetrators of the events of September 11 have ever been brought to justice on American soil.
"A group of international citizens has therefore undertaken to privately fund and cause these independent hearings to take place. Because of the global ramifications of the events of 9/11, the initiators of this inquest have opted to select an international location outside of the United States for these hearings to proceed. The city of Toronto, Canada was chosen as an ideal "international" location because of its proximity to New York, Washington and Shanksville (the crime scenes)."
For more information go to torontohearings.org
5. WTC Building 7 Campaign Hits Mainstream in New York, Europe
9/11 sceptics feel that the fate of WTC Building 7 is crucial to understanding 9/11, but even so most of the public have never heard of it, especially those who rely on the mainstream media for their information. The building fell into its own footprint in a spectacular and quite symmetric way. This bizarre event was predicted by the authorities and indeed the BBC reported it BEFORE it happened. Can anyone smell explosives and a controlled demolition? Not the official investigators who failed to investigate the possibility but eventually admitted that the building collapsed at freefall speed.
Last year the Remember Building 7 Campaign addressed the media in a way they understand: with paid for advertising and they are asking everyone to donate again. They persuaded 48% of New Yorkers that a genuine investigation was required and achieved favourable coverage on US TV along with the least biased of all the BBC's conspiracy Files episodes. Now the message is going global with coverage on various TV channels including France's M6.
This is only the first of at least a dozen stories that foreign news organizations will be doing on the Remember Building 7 campaign around the 10th Anniversary. With this unprecedented level of media coverage bringing our message to tens of millions of people, combined with the 10th Anniversary Campaign, the Toronto Hearings and the release of 9/11 Explosive Evidence: Experts Speak Out, the 10th Anniversary promises to be a breakthrough moment in the pursuit of a new 9/11 investigation.
6. Swiss Academic Daniel Ganser Breaks Through
Daniel Ganser is a world expert on Operation Gladio. In the less censored 1990's Ganser's work was reflected in features in the BBC, The Guardian and all across Europe with the shocking evidence that NATO had been faking leftist terror cells in places like Italy Turkey and Belgium with the aim of frightening the populace from voting communist. Ganser is now in demand from media outlets for his views on the obvious parallels with 9/11 and writes that he is getting lots of phone calls from Swiss newspapers and will be going to Austria next month for a TV debate on the issue. Their new web site http://www.911untersuchen.ch asks for a new investigation and this demand has also been signed by Swiss members of the parliament. Switzerland and Austria are both outside NATO.
7. New Documentary: Scientists speak out on 9/11
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth release a new feature length documentary this week with cutting-edge 9/11 evidence from more than 50 top experts in their fields -- high-rise architects, structural engineers, physicists, chemical engineers, firefighters, metallurgists, explosives experts, controlled demolition technicians, and more. Each is highly qualified in his/her respective fields. Several have Ph.D's -- including National Medal of Science awardee Lynn Margulis. She, along with the other experts, exposes the fraud of NIST and discusses how the scientific method should have been applied and acknowledges the "overwhelming" evidence of high temperature incendiaries in all dust samples of the WTC. http://www.911ExpertsSpeakOut.org
8. Trust the Eyewitnesses?
When it comes to the attack on the Pentagon, all the official story supporters are adamant: it may not look as if a plane hit the Pentagon but you can trust the eyewitnesses. But there is a problem: a vast number of eyewitnesses in New York including mainstream journalists were sure at the time that they were witnessing not a spontaneous building collapse but a series of explosions. Indeed the FBI in recently released documents was still routinely referring to the WTC "explosions" months later when the idea was seriously taboo in the media.
A new compilation video has collected a huge number of eyewitness testimony while the FBI report can be read here
9. Trust the Pilots?
If the official story on the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7 had to struggle against an initial assumption that the buildings were brought down with explosions, the account of the hijackers had a similar problem. Experts at the heart of the establishment had little doubt: it takes a lot of skill to fly passenger jets as if they were fighters. In the case of the Pentagon the official cctv, released some time later, showed the plane's approach (assuming it was a plane) was at ground level while official experts said it flew at top speed. The only problem: alleged pilot Hani Hanjour had been deemed incompetent and unsafe on a single engined Cessna. Now blogger 911shoestring has assembled a mass of evidence to underline the point: no way could Hani Hanjour have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon, hitting a recently reinforced and almost empty sector. So who did? And could the explanation have anything to do with the top secret anti-hijack exercise the Pentagon was running on the very morning of the attacks?
Richard Clarke Bombshell (contd from start)
The 9/11 Commission confirmed reports from angry FBI officers that, contrary to the impression given in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA were aware that at least two known Al Qaeda suspects were active in the US in the months before 9/11. According to the official account they went on to hijack planes on 9/11. The CIA failed to pass on the information while senior FBI officials ordered their own people to cease investigations they had begun independently. Up to now the official explanation for this "failure" has been missed messages and misunderstandings, in other words the cock-up theory, but Clarke now pronounces it a conspiracy.
Clarke explicitly rules out the possibility that this was some sort of mistake or incompetence. Much like the senior 911 Commision investigator John Farmer who has concluded that there was a "decision to lie" by the Pentagon, Clarke has concluded that there was a decision by the CIA's Osama Bin Laden station not to tell him and not to tell the FBI. So far Clarke is not saying that the CIA deliberately let 9/11 happen but he is saying that they made a decision the effect of which was to let 9/11 happen.
Key CIA leaders: George "slam dunk" Tenet, Cofer "Blackwater" Black and other unnamed officers at the Osama bin Laden Unit are now a step nearer charges for criminal negligence in the 9/11 attacks. Black is on the record with a false statement to a Congressional investigation claiming the FBI were informed when they were not. A whistleblowing FBI officer on secondment to Black's Osama Bin Laden unit has confirmed Cklarke's conclusion: they were actually ordered not to. The top secret station was based off the premises and its kept from the public and much of the CIA for years.
Tenet has already received a severe reprimand in connection with 9/11 from the CIA's inspector general but the grounds were kept secret and Tenet was given no penalty after threatening to go public with what he knew.
The BBC's Conspiracy Files is so far the only mainstream source in the NATO zone to air Clarke's bombshell even though he became a world famous figure when he told the 9/11 Comission "your country failed you". However the BBC ignored the implications and instead produced a one time CIA analyst aptly named Phillip Mudd who said he knew of no secrets the CIA had ever successfully kept. This is no surprise as Mudd, now a member of Obama's White House team, even if he was trying to tell the truth does not seem to have spent any time in the CIA's key operations section, the one that deals with the secret black ops like torture, killing and running coups.
Clarke's testimony corroborates conclusions made years ago by independent investigators, views which the Conspiracy Files team once sneered at as "conspiracy theories".
Ian Henshall author of 911 The New Evidence comments:
"To their credit the BBC have now aired this incendiary revelation, but they are five years behind the game. I could have taken them through the evidence already available that the 9/11 plot was in effect protected by the Osama Bin laden Unit at the CIA and senior officials at the FBI answering to Bush's neocon political appointee there, Micheal Chertoff. While the CIA stonewalled inquiries, officials ordered the closedown of FBI investigations into the suspected Al Qaeda hijackers without either consulting or reporting to Clarke as they should have done.
"By law, the FBI was the lead agency. No insider should have known more than Richard Clarke about what was going on and he should have been fully informed. He now says he was informed about everything except this. You can argue about the motives but not the effect of these decisions. As 9/11 Chair Thomes Kean stated in an unguarded moment, the attacks "could and should have been prevented".
"A no holds barred investigation back at home was needed, not the invasion of Afghanistan and a fifteen year long war. Instead Blair, Bush and Rice were mendaciously claiming the 9/11 attacks came out of the blue and the CIA said they had lost interest in Afghanistan, keeping the huge Osama bin Laden unit with its 80 officers secret for another two years, when its existence was confirmed in the footnotes of the 911 Commission report.
"Given what we know about Dick Cheney's activities pushing fabricated intelligence in the build up to Iraq, it could be that Tenet and Black had a secret operation reporting directly to Cheney, with the FBI investigators and Clarke shut out. The problem is that the plane tickets for the alleged 9/11 hijackers were purchased in advance so any surveillance should have made it crystal clear some sort of attack was about to take place and when. Contrary to the denials at the time we now know they were very well aware that this attack might involve taking over planes, Bush was warned about this in his CIA briefings. There has been speculation that the CIA illegally subcontracted the surveillance to Israel's Mossad who failed to pass on adequate warnings.
"If you ask the age old question: who benefited, it was all of them. 9/11 was in Netanyahu's words "good for Israel", the CIA got an USD 18 billion budget increase within days and Bush was rescued from political ignominity as the man who stole the 1999 election.
"Sooner or later the global demand for a genuine investigation will be unstoppable. I urge the media in the NATO countries to learn the lessons of the Iraq WMD debacle and start asking tough questions now."
