The Znewz1 blog

What Novak didn't say

2007-08-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

Let's be clear: Bob Novak had every right to publish Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
As he correctly asserts, her identity bore on an important political story: her husband Joseph Wilson's CIA connection.

Yet, in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness, the septuagenarian makes it appear that, as a journalist, he can dish it out, but as a subject of a news controversy, he can't take it. Clearly he is bitter at how he was treated by his peers with respect to Plame. His account focuses on his specific role and rarely mentions the names of other journalists also ensnared in the controversy, excepting those who wrote what he considers to be inaccurate reports about him.

Novak makes a strong case for the theory that the ultraleft whipped up the Plame controversy as a means of attacking Bush, who had been hell on plugging leaks.

So I have to wonder, why does he join the ultraleft and others in ignoring Bush's impeachable behavior in the Plame probe. Either Bush and Cheney committed perjury about secetly declassifying Plame's identity or they kept silent and allowed a special prosecutor probe for no other reason than to spare themselves political embarrassment prior to the 2004 election. A woman was jailed for three months while they dummied up.

Now why doesn't Novak feel outraged at Bush and Cheney for doing so much damage to freedom of the press by their unseemly silence? Isn't he bothered by the fact that Bush and Cheney stayed silent while journalists were pressured to reveal sources, with one going to prison, but then opened up at the last minute when it appeared that Cheney might face indictment? He joins ex-spook chief Tenet in publishing a memoir that conspiratorially ignores a point so dangerous to the bad guys.

A previous draft of this post misspelled Novak.

America's economy in hands of wingnuts
Any business in America can now have its secret transactions and dealings examined by faceless security people, who need only say that they think someone in another country -- who might be linked to terrorists -- might somehow be connected to the business. Thank you Comrades, for a wonderful new security tool, pushed through by a sinister cabal of those posing as persons on the right and left wings.

That follows Bush's recent signing of an executive order giving the Treasury Department the right to -- without warning and due process of law -- seize the assets of any American or any American business if there is somehow a whiff of association with people who might be violent. Got that?

Putin or the Chinese politburo would be proud.

Bush and Cheney have turned out to be wolves wearing "pro-business" clothing. If placating the oligarchs who run greedy cartels is pro-business, then America is in real trouble.

Bush and Cheney have managed to divert the defense resources of America into what should have been a strategically minor matter (dealing with terrorists) and away from the threat of communism, which still exists while at the same time driving up the price of oil as a result of a bad war and reviving Russia's superpower ambitions.
Oil-rich Russia has now resumed daily long-range bomber sorties, as had been the custom of the old Soviet Union, which KGB veteran Putin tends to glorify.

In fact, the mix of economic capitalism and political KGBism or communism found in Russia and China is nothing new. Lenin instituted such measures in the 1920s in his New Economic Policy, which was eventually scrapped by Stalin's collectivizations.

No wonder the markets are jittery. Why should anyone have confidence with radicals in the White House?

Blog goes blank during debate
An email debate among scientists and academics was occurring when a curious thing happened. Google's spam patrol blanked out the related site Kryptograff.blogspot.com which included a summary of the NIST's secnario for 9/11. So the interested parties could not refer to it.

The last I looked, there was nothing on that blog that looked like spam. However, this account has been plagued with a number of morphing bugs, which Google apparently refuses to acknowledge or correct.

On the 911science blog, posts have been deleting themselves without my permission. In one case, I took the precaution of making a mirror page of one post. The last time Google shut down one of these blogs, they left the read privilege. This time, the read privilege has been denied also. Result: a useful summary was taken out of circulation during an important debate.

Experts can't verify key 9/11 experiment

2007-08-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

Citing public safety and other concerns, the NIST is preventing outside experts from reviewing an important 9/11 computer simulation.

Please see details at

http://911science.blogspot.com

Hacker cover stories

2007-08-15T07:55:00.001-07:00

The hacking of this blog -- despite my changes of password, terminal and geographic location -- notionally might not be the work of a government agency.

According to Bruce Schneier in his latest Cryptogram (available on the net), commercial security systems are generally very poor, as is demonstrated by the pathetic security record of computer voting machines.

One would think however that Google's security system would be top-shelf. But perhaps not. Or perhaps someone is tracking my movements so closely as to be able to use keyboard detectors when I change passwords and locations or is otherwise able to exploit security holes specific to a particular location.

Still, I suspect that the hackers are very likely cut-outs for a government unit of some kind. Do you really suppose that the 9/11 traitors are twiddling their thumbs while their adversaries are calling attention to the holes in their story?

So why did Google's techies claim that a bug wasn't at work here? Their letter made it appear that the fault was apparently mine. That's SOP when a government operation is compromised: blame the target.

So maybe they didn't actually check the blog, but simply saw a copy of a letter I sent to a media colleague. A fast reading of that email could have led them to that erroneous conclusion. Yet, all it would have taken was one click to reach the URL so they could see for themselves.

Or, maybe they were covering for someone by making it seem that I was deliberately switching the Hindi transliteration function on and off to create the appearance of a bug.

The latest wrinkle: when I hit "publish," an error banner appears saying the post can't be published, though there are no highlights marking specific errors, such as bad html tags. So I am forced quite frequently to hit publish twice. I read this as a statement from the hackers: You can't get rid of us; more games are in store.

Not a bug, Blogger techies say

2007-08-14T07:46:00.001-07:00

The headline malfunction has been fixed. Blogger techies told me in an email yesterday that the problem was that I had apparently inadvertently enabled the Hindi transliteration function.

Low and behold, I checked and saw that that option had been enabled.

But this is a transparent cover story. For one thing, the transliteration bug has morphed over time. In its latest version, only part of the headline would transliterate, nothing else.

The email from Blogger arrived about the same time that media interest in the matter became known to me.

However, I expect that other "bugs" will occur that seem to signal a politically significant message.

ब्ब्ब x

2007-08-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

As you see, the headline function remains unrepaired.

Despite a number of emails, no response has been received from either Google's tech team or its legal department regarding what may well be security agency interference in this site.

विल्ड-एयेद कोन्स्पिराच्य theory

2007-08-10T09:26:00.001-07:00

Here's a wild-eyed conspiracy theory: Google can wash its hands of responsibility for the hacking of this blog now that Bush has signed a new, extended warrantless wiretap law.

The law was needed, according to N.Y. Times sources, because telecommunications companies, fearful of lawsuits, were balking at cooperating with some NSA demands. The details of the extension were, of course, kept under wraps.

Well, you say, what's a blog got to do with email communication? Google has changed its policy to require that every blog be linked to an existing email address, whether Google's Gmail or other. This blog's password is identical to my Gmail password, at Google's insistence.

So, if the feds demand the password for my Gmail account, then they also have the password for this blog. Once the interceptions are authorized, Google lawyers can then argue that any hacking is not Google's responsibility. Think the Bush-Cheney crowd wouldn't stoop to morphing a nettlesome critic into a "terrorist-linked" threat? Even now, numerous political activists are denied, without due process of law, their right to fly, though it is absurd in 99 percent of cases to view them as terror-tied.

I have contacted Google's tech team three or four times about the hacking but no response has been received and the latest bug remains unfixed. I did mention in one letter that I suspected that this blog was being hacked for political reasons and that the hackers seem to getting past Google's firewalls and into its main system. I say this because I keep shifting my passwords, computer terminals and geographic locations, but the hacking continues.

As luck would have it, shortly after I wrote that first letter to Google, the notorious bill was railroaded through Congress and hastily signed by Bush.

Now you may say that hacking blogs is not the same as scanning email. Yes, but don't forget, there are no warrants. And if one suspects such a dirty trick, there is the recent appellate decision tossing out a lawsuit by journalists and lawyers who had reason to believe they had been targets of warrantless NSA wiretaps. The government just applied catch 22: We are not allowed to win. One can't prove one's case without seeing the evidence and one can't see the evidence unless one proves one's case.

The political point of the most recent hack attack on this blog is, I believe, to counter my point that the invisible government is slipping in its control of public debate because the blogosphere is commandeering wedge issues left uncovered by the invisible government's media allies and pawns. How to scotch that dangerous thought? Stick an obvious bug on the blog, and see that it doesn't get fixed.

Also, I've noticed that once a clandestine operation is authorized, it keeps going on its own inertia, whether or not it still makes sense or whether there is a degree of public attention. Recall that the NSA is essentially a military operation.

Aug. 12 note: Yesterday's New York Times gave an account of how the bill zithered past worried Democrats. Democrat Jay Rockefeller, Senate intelligence panel chairman and a "liberal" oligarch, set the bill in motion. Supposedly, Rockefeller made a terrible political miscalculation because it was the expansive GOP bill that passed, rather than the Democrat bill. On the other hand, the invisible government of oligarchs and spooks is well satisfied.

The Democratic bill would not have given telecom companies -- nearly all of which are extensively interlocked with the Rockefeller crew in a tangled skein of business relationships -- near blanket immunity from lawsuits over protection of privacy from improper government access. However, even the Democratic bill would have given these firms, including Google, strong protection against such lawsuits.

टेस्ट

2007-08-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

Headline function remains unfixed.
Last week I sent the Blogger tech team an explanation concerning this bug, but have received no response.

टेस्ट

2007-08-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Headline function remains unfixed.

नेव post

2007-07-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

Well, Blogger has unblocked me but left the bug intact.

Temporarily, I will post on http://Znewz1alternate.blogspot.com

At that site is a post about Gordon Brown's new counter-terror plan, signaling a major shift in emphasis away from the Bush plan.

ब्रेकिंग थे taboo

2007-07-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Breaking the taboo
Cool people aren't supposed to suggest that 9/11 was an inside job. A howling brigade of smear artists and name callers has had a deterrent effect on the breaking of that taboo, despite the fact that such a large chunk of the public and numerous people with scientific backgrounds believe a conspiracy occurred.

According to presidential aspirant Fred Thompson, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi are actually aiding the enemy by blurring the line between prewar intelligence problems and the issue of 9/11 conspiracy. So, taking Thompson at face value, the Democrats are finding a way to break the taboo. For background, see http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/19/thompson-reid/

If Thompson is attacking Reid and Pelosi for implying 9/11 treason, then 9/11 treason has become an open political issue. Obviously, the corporate media don't want to notice that point. But they will. Because politicians like Thompson are acutely aware of the way the blogosphere is running rings around the establishment media on critical wedge issues.

One Democratic congressman who recently broke the taboo is Keith Ellison, a black Muslim and former member of the Nation of Islam. OK, so he's not typical of the U.S. Congress. He's easy to blow off because he'll be taken for a radical by many. But it's the allegedly marginal voices that are often the forerunners when a taboo is beginning to fail.

Ellison told an atheist rights group in Minnesota earlier this month that the 9/11 attacks were "almost like the Reichstag fire; kind of reminds me of that" and pointed out that the Nazis had seized absolute power based on the claim that the communists had been behind it. Ellison said Vice President Dick Cheney's refusal to answer congressional questions was the "very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship."

The congressman avoided saying that he believed 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush bunch. "You know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box, dismiss you."

In fact, a Google search shows scores of blogs dedicated to vicious attacks on Ellison as a wingnut conspiracy theorist; his reticence didn't work because many of the bloggers weren't overly interested in logic. For the original article, go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk and search Keith Ellison.

Most of the attack blogs made a big issue of Ellison's religion. I'd just like to point out that feminist Naomi Wolf, a Jew, and GOP insider Vic Gold, who I am guessing is Jewish, made exactly the same point. Please see my posts on Wolf and Gold by searching Reichstag and insider.

मिर्रोर ऎंड archive

2007-07-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

Suggestion: mirror and archive

You may wish to have one of my blog or other pages available for reference some day. Don't count on any search engine being reliable, however.

For example, my article about what police actually saw inside the twin towers on 9/11 is rapidly nicked off search engines after showing up briefly. So, you might be wise to mirror

9/11 blasts still echo in tangled files
http://911science.blogspot.com

and to make your own archival copy.

Same with some of my other stuff.

No telling what might happen in the current explosive political climate.

रिवर्स मिदास touch

2007-07-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Murdoch's reverse Midas touch in U.S. print

Murdoch has a way of killing the geese that lay the golden eggs in American print media. In recent years, he's a glittering success because of Fox TV and because his newspapers do well overseas.

But in America, all his attempts at print media have been monetary black holes. He went on a U.S. newspaper and magazine-buying spree back in the 80's and went effectively bankrupt, though Citibank laid off his debt and bailed him out. Yet he was required to sell off virtually all his U.S. print properties.

He knows the razmataz, but profit has always eluded him in the U.S. print market. His principle current print holding, the New York Post, has for decades been a notorious profit sponge subsidized by News Corp's other operations. In fact, the Post is a reason for Dow Jones investors to beware Murdochian methods. He won't give up a money loser to maximize profit if it doesn't suit his personal proclivities.

So, based on Murdoch's print media record, the great Dow Jones takeover is likely to be followed by a ruinous longer term slide in Dow Jones value.

हो हम?

2007-07-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

Ho hum?

Back in January 2002, I pointed out Bush's use of the "signing statement" gimmick as a method of deploying a line-item veto. Bush was striving to spare the CIA realistic legislative oversight despite congressional outrage over the intelligence lapses leading up to 9/11.

Bush uses de facto line-item veto
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nfold/bushfiat.html

Since that post, the signing statement issue has burgeoned into a major point of contention, with constitutional lawyers similarly homing in on the practice and with Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., conducting a Senate investigation of the practice, which is plainly a threat to congressional authority under the Constitution.

In April 2006, the Boston Globe reported that Bush had gone on to use this device to undermine hundreds of laws.

Purportedly, fewer than 700 people have viewed my essay. Maybe I was merely a voice crying in the wilderness. Ho hum...

Even so, the evidence gathered by Byrd could easily be used in articles of impeachment. Only the political will is lacking, not the evidence.

वी गेट around

2007-07-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

We get around

Post on Feingold censure resolution is immediately prior to this post.

Despite all sorts of interference, Znewz1 gets around.

Our posts and news reports have been showing up regularly on a variety of interesting web sites for a while now, and my ad hoc opinion is that this tendency has grown noticeably as the White House's political position declines.

Now, it remains true that all too often pages referring to Znewz1 stay on Google and other search engines only for short times before vanishing into oblivion. The pages don't get a lower priority, unless by "lower" you mean "zero."

Why so? Clearly, the invisible government is trying to bolster a false impression that Znewz1 and Conant are highly isolated and have little impact. The more seemingly isolated a voice is politically, the easier that voice is to ignore (at least on the surface). Also, the isolation factor helps reinforce intimidation. Others worry about being too plainspoken about 9/11 or surveillance of journalists on the the theory that persons such as myself are "roped off" and "getting nowhere."

However, if we don't simply think about what a "Znewz1" search turns up today, but about what it has turned up over the past few years, and particularly over the past few months, then we might realize that all sorts of people have no problem interconnecting with Znewz1 and Conant. They are not intimidated.

So let's not succumb to the carefully crafted illusion that Americans fear to respond to some of the things we say here. Yes, quite a few Americans have been keeping their heads down. But, on the flipside, there is an increasing renewal of confidence in the First Amendment right to to interact with Conant and quote him at will, whether positively or negatively.

अस्सौल्ट ओं फ्री press

2007-07-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

Assault on freedom

(The garbled head is from an unfixed Blogger bug. See comments on previous posts.)

If Sen. Russ Feingold has his way, Bush and Cheney will face a vote of censure for deceptions in promoting the Iraq war and for the "greatest assault on our Constitution in American history."

Citing widespread sentiment in favor of impeachment, Feingold told Meet the Press that he would introduce the resolution within a few days as an alternative to an impeachment process. The senator, citing the NSA warrantless wiretap program, said he believes Bush and Cheney had committed impeachable offenses but that his resolution was a more "moderate" course of action than impeachment.

Feingold also said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had been very deceptive with Congress and might be included in the censure resolution, particularly with respect to his role in the Patriot Act and the U.S. attorney firings.

Feingold serves in the Senate, but articles of impeachment must be drawn up in the House. Rather than unsettle the aspirations of the Democratic presidential candidates, Democrats have thus far shied away from impeachment.

Feingold said nothing about whether he would introduce a clause reprimanding Bush and Cheney for either committing perjury about Bush covertly declassifying CIA Officer Plame's identity in 2003 or for waiting until the very last moment in 2006 to tell either the attorney general or the special prosecutor that Bush had declassified Plame's identity. Obviously, too much focus on that point might rapidly trigger articles of impeachment.

Neither did Feingold mention 9/11 in his proposed resolution, though one could easily relate a massive assault on the Constitution to a stab in America's back that day. Serious public officials must know by now that the evidence is overwhelming that treason occurred that day and that Bush and Cheney abetted the coverup or, if not, are so wildly incompetent as to require impeachment.

Feingold's problem of course is that a deal has been done in the inner sanctums of power to stonewall the 9/11 treason issue and protect the traitors, traitors who are far more dangerous to America than all the Islamist extremists combined. The corporate media are in the hands of a few who have shaken hands with hell on that point. Can or will Feingold overcome these devils? Let's see what gets into the resolution.

**************
I tried to respond to Feingold's article on Op Ed News, which has a "contact the author" option, but got back an "email not sent -- failed" notice.

ओउत्रगे ओवर बीबीसी swindles

2007-07-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Outrage over BBC swindles

The BBC is on the carpet over the practice of deceiving audiences, the latest instance being a group of children's shows and game shows with fake winners.

A BBC internal probe found that the deception of audiences was a very serious problem and a number of editors have been suspended from their duties. The scandal was triggered when the BBC was forced to apologize for asserting that the Queen had stormed out of a photo shoot.

The BBC's problem of editorial integrity appears to be very deep.

Back in February, top BBC Editor Richard Porter lamely blew off an embarrassing video showing BBC reporter Jane Standley announcing that World Trade Center 7 had collapsed while viewers could see it over her shoulder in the background. Porter was embarrassed that the BBC's hatchet job on 9/11 conspiracy (focusing on the trivia and silly stuff) had been brought into such sharp relief by that video. A copy was on YouTube some weeks back, though the video had been yanked off Google, presumably at the BBC's request.

Porter said the BBC had -- not because of conspiracy -- lost all its original videotapes from that period and so was unable to authenticate the video. He wouldn't say what Standley's reaction to the video clip was. Nor did he say there would be an internal inquiry. He allowed that he had spoken to her and that she could not recall exactly what she'd said. Still, why not tell the public her specific reaction to the video -- did she think it authentic?

Neither did Porter say that a BBC news broadcast would deal with this matter. The last word seems to have been on his low-profile blog.

Porter said that even if the video clip were authentic, plainly Standley had simply made a mistake. But this doesn't sound like journalistic objectivity. Yes, perhaps Standley or an aide made a simple error: They were told 20 minutes in advance that the building was coming down and misheard that as the building having fallen.

So this leads to the question of who on the scene knew the building was about to collapse swiftly and completely. This kind of information should be available to the public. But by blowing off the matter, Porter tried to save the journalistic face of the 9/11 conspiracy hatchet job, rather than to behave objectively. Porter was a journalist with a propaganda mission.

Here is another point that Porter didn't think rather curious. Five minutes before WTC7 fell, the BBC lost the feed and Standley went off the air. Certainly would have been difficult had the building collapsed on air while she was explaining that it had already collapsed.

The BBC's lack of integrity in the 9/11 matter seems to be part of a pattern that apparently has emerged after the mass exodus spurred by the "sexed up" report dispute.

आ दोव्न्सिदे ऑफ़ कोम्पुल्सोर्य voting

2007-07-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

A downside of compulsory voting

One downside of compulsory voting in a democracy is the obvious point that even the least informed people have their opinion weighed. People who make no effort to vote are unlikely to know much about public affairs.

But there may be another downside, especially for a parliamentary democracy: the ruling elite can use statistical methods to such precision as to be able to read the election outcomes with uncanny ability. This tool would be especially helpful in timing a parliamentary election, as long as the lag time weren't too great.

Consider that the Gallup poll is forced to use a complicated, weighted sampling system in order to predict U.S. election outcomes. Otherwise, people who are unlikely to vote would count the same as those who are likely, and a serious bias could be introduced into the experiment.

The consequence is that the Gallup error rate swings quite widely by comparison with a standard error for simple random samples of the same size as used by Gallup. That's the best Gallup can do. Simple random sampling is believed to introduce bias. So all this is why political pollsters are not terribly good at calling a fairly close race. Hence, ruling elites find life much more difficult and predicting a winner is much more chancey. Presumably that fact helps democracy.

Yet, in a democracy where voting is compulsory, simple random sampling of adults is likely to predict the winner with painfully exact accuracy -- barring some unforeseen wild card -- even in fairly tight races. This means that political control is far easier for the few to manage. Bad for democracy.

शिफ्तिंग विन्ड्स

2007-07-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Shifting winds

Is the diplomatic dustup between Britain and Russia mere theater, or are real consequences likely?

The new prime minister, Gordon Brown, is not wedded to Tony Blair's foreign policies, as was made clear when the Independent published a report on Blair's discussions with Rupert Murdoch during the run-up to the Iraq war. The day after Blair stepped down, the government granted a freedom of information request for details on this matter. As the Independent reported, the day after each huddle, the Murdoch press cut loose with vitriolic attacks against opponents of Blair's policies, such as French leader Jacques Chirac.

So we must consider that Brown is not terribly interested in being friendly with Murdoch, despite his stranglehold on much of the British media. Perhaps we'll see a parliamentary move to curtail press oligarchs such as Murdoch. If war propagandist Conrad Black can fall, so might Murdoch. My estimate of the Black matter was that, once his link-up with the neocons became well known, elements of the British establishment decided to take action.

BTW, Seth Lipsky, editor of the neocon-leaning New York Sun, has published an extensive apologia for his friend and ally Black in that paper. Plainly, Lipsky hopes that Black will be cleared on appeal and, like neocon Scooter Libby, also escape the clutches of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

So back to the British-Russian contretemps. Could relations get extremely bad and stay that way? I'd say yes.

After all, we're not talking about a routine murder, but about the assassination of a well-known person under the political protection of the British government. Worse, we're talking about a hit that showed a terrorist's mentality: no regard for human life as the radioactive material was tracked all over London. Yet the Russians refuse to allow a realistic investigation by the British or turn over a suspect, who has the protection of Putin's "KGB" apparatus.

Does anyone recall the Soviet KGB's proclivity for sponsoring terrorists?

So Russia is saying that Britain will no longer benefit from Russia's help in countering terrorism.

Recall that 9/11 occurred soon after a wave of Moscow apartment house bombings that the Kremlin claimed were the work of Chechnyan Islamic terrorists. But Litvinenko, the man who was murdered by radioactive material, is among those who said the bombings were the work of Putin's assassins. Like Putin and the murder suspect, Litvinenko was a KGB insider.

So who had a motive to pull off 9/11? Yes, of course, neocon insiders had a motive. But what of the Cheka (the generic name for Russian security forces)?

Of the 3,000 persons murdered on 9/11, scores were Britons working at a British bank. So clearly 9/11 is not merely an American affair. Perhaps Brown won't mind terribly if the British security authorities redo their investigation into 9/11, this time ignoring potential political problems, such as the desire of Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem to keep the focus entirely on al Qaeda and Islamic wildmen.

2007-07-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

A candidate for Ripley's
Have you read The Bible Code or other material of that type, whereby supposed hidden messages are found by compiling every nth letter? Lo, and behold, many strange messages show up.

The Bible Code even cited a statistical analysis -- which has drawn sharp criticism -- purporting to show a strong degree of nonrandomness in the messages. Perhaps later I will put a Code probability discussion on my to-do list, right under my pledge to write something about taboos and surveillance realpolitik.

I recently ran across something else which spilled out of the weird controversies file:

The pontiff's tiara or mitre allegedly spells out 666 in Roman numerals. Not true, as Catholic defenders meticulously document on the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarius_Filii_Dei

However, what is true is that the pontifical claims to worldly power were for centuries largely based on the Donation of Constantine, a brazen forgery, which does contain the phrase "Vicarius Filii Dei," meaning the vicar (representative) of the Son of God.

The numerology is done this way:

Only Latin letters that are also Roman numerals are considered, other letters counting zero. V and U both represent 5, since v and u are interchangeable in the old writing.

Hence:


V = 5      F = 0     D = 500
I = 1      I = 1     E = 0
C = 100    L = 50    I = 1
A = 0      I = 1
R = 0      I = 1     
I = 1           
U = 5
S = 0

It should be obvious that if one follows these rules for a sufficiently large random sample of three-letter Latin names, a certain percentage will show up correlated to 666, even though most of these other word sets will not be remotely mystical or spiritual.

Also, though we cannot be sure what that number may represent in the very last days, scholars are reasonably certain that John the Evangelist was writing of Neron Caesar (Nero), whose name is correlated to the number 666. The use of code was necessary in the face of the consequences of impugning the name of Caesar.

But, if one suspends probabilistic considerations, it still seems curious that a counterfeit pontifical claim to global power bears a title with that number.

2007-07-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Pope: Salvation occurring in Protestant churches

The headline writing function is still down though the problem has morphed somewhat, so I am improvising. See posts below for more details.

The New York Times and Associated Press reports on the pope's statement about Catholic church primacy omitted an important detail. I don't suspect the writers of being unprofessional. I suspect that they simply did not see the meaningfulness and news value of the overlooked point.

The Pope's assessment of Protestant churches as "defective" is pretty much a technicality of a type common to many religious establishments: our church/way etc. is the "authorized" version. Yet, here's the important point: the pope explicitly stated that God is using Protestant churches to effect individual salvation.

This makes sense, in that Jesus said that he had not lost anyone given him by the Father, in that Jesus said he would be with "you always, even until the end of the age," in that Paul the apostle said that "all who call upon the name of the LORD shall be saved" and he clearly meant Jesus, which means "The LORD (Yahweh) saves."

Wouldn't it be nice if the Shia and the Sunni could see that real Christianity is long past the stage of putting people to death for divergent views (though many nominal/cultural Christians have not absorbed that idea)?

You can read the actual statement at

http://212.77.1.245/news/press/vis/dinamiche/a0-en.htm

If link is uncooperative, Google Holy See news and proceed from there.

2007-07-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

Did Bush authorize secret takeovers of web sites?

Though independent bloggers are posing severe problems for the control freaks, that doesn't mean those with control-itis are napping. After all, they're control freaks. They can't nap, lest they lose control.

I have a theory. At Cheney's behest, Bush signed a secret national security order granting the FBI, Pentagon intelligence agency or CIA the right to take technical control of any web site deemed to be "terrorist-related."

A few lawmakers were given a vague idea about the program and are still staying quiet about it because the New York Times hasn't blown the whistle.

The server, such as Google, would get a secret order requiring the keys to the site be turned over to the feds, who would then be in control of the site in all its details. The servers would be forbidden to inform the site users of the federal takeover of controls.

The rationale would be that in the war on terror, sometimes terrorist messages must be blocked from going on the net. However, the actuality would be that sites disliked by feds would face all sorts of unwarranted disruptions (witness the FBI's routine misuse of national security letters in order to bypass judicial watchfulness over constitutional safeguards).

Recall the NSA warrantless interception of phone calls and email. What better way to intercept email than to require the server to turn over keys to the account? And while in control of the account, what might an invisible fed do? If feeling capricious, or wanting to "send a message," such a fed might easily play games with the account that go beyond interception of specific messages.

No? You may not recall that top officials of the Swiss financial data transmission organization lodged protests with the U.S. government over one spook's misuse of privileged information in the covert "terrorist surveillance program" by the CIA and Treasury Dept.

However, such secret technical controls don't easily translate into a stranglehold on free speech and political discourse. They can be used to disrupt some writers. But excessive use will flare up into a major issue.

That point is underscored by Attorney General Gonzales facing renewed congressional skepticism, this time about his claim that no documented civil liberties abuses had shown up as a result of Patriot Act "national security" activities, even though he had been sent an FBI report tabulating improper use of national security letters.

Coming soon: Breaking taboos about surveillance.

2007-07-09T17:05:00.000-07:00

BIG MEDIA LOSING POLITICAL STRANGLEHOLD II
Independent bloggers fill vacuum left by old-style news firms

White House spokesman Tony Snow shot down a New York Times story that the White House was in fevered discussions over countering Iraq pullout pressures with a plan for a gradual withdrawal.

But, Snow didn't deny that the discussions are taking place nor their content, from what I can tell. Rather, he said that the troop surge has only been an interim measure anyway and that drawdowns could always be made for military, but never, oh never political reasons.

Even so, the frenzied discussions are obviously a result of fear of Republican defections and the political mechanics needed to avert a GOP stampede. Otherwise, why would Gates have postponed his Latin American trip?

The White House problem is that not even Snow's ex-employer, Fox News, can turn the trick for the hawks. Murdoch is edging toward "moderation" while the Times is throwing down the gauntlet in favor of rapid pullbacks.

All this goes to show that corporate media kingpins can no longer rely on "our thing" to keep certain issues under tight control. Congress and the White House are facing a stark, new reality whereby internet bloggers are filling the news vacuums left by the media coverup system.

Complain as you might about the blogging phenomenon, the fact is that the blogosphere is an open battleground that can spell the difference in many a political contest. Though most people get their "news" from television, it is the politically active who are most involved in political blogging and who provide the cutting edge of grassroots politicking.

2007-07-08T17:46:00.000-07:00

Moving deck chairs on the Titanic

[The post What right to know? appears below with a headline composed of a series of question marks (or, depending on your viewing system, Hindi characters) that are apparently due to a computing glitch. I am still barred from using the headline function, despite a change of system, password and security question.
Blogger reports that it has had problems with posts appearing in Albanian but otherwise reports no bug of the type I have encountered.]

Things are spinning wildly out of control for the invisible system. The hidden overlords are in a real tizzy as to how to keep their empire of evil from foundering on the rocks of Bush's failed war policy.

The corridors of power are awash with fear and uncertainty as hardliners go mushy and the spookocrats weasel and weave, knowing the political vulnerabilities of the security system that was used to push America into war. The economic oligarchs are suddenly at wits end as to how to keep everybody happy. They're huddling with Kissinger, no doubt, but he's got so many deals going, no one knows what his real game is.

Defense Secretary Gates, the longtime CIA careerist, has called off a Latin America trip in order to participate in frenzied discussions about the mushrooming political crisis spawned by the war's continuation and by the fact that politicians see that the traditional media system can no longer hold back the rage of a swindled people. The New York Times, sensing the astonishing and rapid change in the national realpolitik, is urgently calling for a pullback of U.S. forces to Kurdish territory.

And, adding another incendiary to the mix, Cindy Sheehan says she'll challenge Pelosi for her House seat unless Pelosi begins impeachment proceedings against Bush. Pelosi may find that she needs to take that threat seriously.

Of course, the real issue for Bush, Cheney and the spookocrats is how to keep the Titanic sufficiently above water so that the real bad beastie -- 9/11 treason -- doesn't slither into the public discourse. Such an eventuality may seem highly unlikely today, but with the political situation at a crisis point, the probability may not be remote at all.

And crisis is the correct word to describe Bush's war predicament, because, roughly translated, the word means "damned if you do and damned if you don't."

वहत राईट तो क्नोव?

2007-07-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

The reason for the question marks (or possibly Hindi characters depending on what system you're viewing from) is that the headline function went down on this account, printing out question marks (or Hindi characters) in place of letters. I am at this point unable to erase the question marks.

The glitch may be payback for the previous post, which is about a headline that clandestine control freaks surely don't welcome. Their "message" is, as usual, to imply some sort of monolithic control, which, if they actually had it, they'd use to shut my writings off entirely. I was thinking of referring this matter to a U.S. attorney, but, we all know what that outcome would be.

Other weird stuff: I am usually forced to fill out the pattern recognition window twice when I wish to publish a post on this blog, though there is no way I got the letters wrong the first time in most instances. Similarly, when I try to log into Myspace, the pattern recognition window claims I'm always wrong, and so I can't log in. Other Murdoch sites overseas have become impossible for me to view, putting me into loops that effectively bar access.

The headline glitch occurs both in my personal laptop and in a public library terminal.
I have changed my password and security question, but the glitch remains.
Also, the glitch has magically expanded so that now it isn't possible to write anything at all, not even question marks, in the headline slot.

What right to know?

A federal appeals court in Ohio bounced the ACLU suit over Bush's warrantless wiretapping on grounds that the plaintiffs -- a group of journalists and academics -- were unable to directly prove that they had been eavesdropped on by the feds.

And, by the way, the court is making darn sure that the plaintiffs never will be able to prove illegal actions against them by the Bush bunch. The decision could have been written by Franz Kafka.

You see, the government can do criminal things in secret and, if the cover is blown, they just say you can't prove you were a victim, so you can't check to see if you were a victim. And, they don't need to be held accountable by anyone, thank you.

The court's message is that when government does wrong there may be no legal remedy. And ain't that too bad.

But the fact that these journalists and others can't prove they were under surveillance doesn't mean they don't have strong reason to believe they were under surveillance. Writer A.J. Weberman told me years ago that spooks like to taunt and mock their surveillance targets. So what if you know they're there? You have no standing to sue based on observations that can easily be blown off.

Those who read this blog -- just look at the blog blurb -- know that I have often cited unethical federal clandestine activities with respect to my journalistic work. Some may have wondered why I took no legal measures against the government. The Ohio decision is your answer. When the surveillance system is threatened, you aren't allowed to win. Period.

I don't know, but I'd guess that some of these plaintiffs suspected illegal surveillance because of consequences in their lives that were most explicable by federal wiretapping.

I once had on this site a link to a political activist who gave the real low-down on how government spooks behave with respect to dissenters. These feds obey no rule of law. The law is merely a cover they hide behind. Where's the link? Coincidentally, it vanished one day when all my links were blown out by a Google malfunction. I haven't bothered to try to retrieve it.

Some dissident Americans get put under permanent surveillance. Where's the rule of law in that? We're not talking about terrorists here -- though of course the feds can easily claim some terrorist "link" in order to justify their relentless watchfulness.

The fact is that powerful people -- among them a group of economic oligarchs -- misuse the national security surveillance system as a means of political and economic control. They use the information from eavesdropping to head off moves of people they see as a threat to their personal or ideological position. They also have no compunction about misusing federal power to continually harry people they regard as in their way.

If confronted, they'll blow the matter off, or ignore the charges, or, if necessary, make sure the matter runs into immense legal obstacles. They will rely on the public's tendency to disbelieve such charges, a tendency reinforced by government shills who specialize in dirtying up the truth and by the fact that most people don't draw the attention of federal watchers.

You're free to email me with your responses, or to post comments. But, don't count on your email getting through or me seeing your comment.

Remember the case of reporter John Solomon a couple of years ago. A packet containing an FBI document was mailed to him from the Philippines, but never arrived. The FBI played dumb, but it was eventually revealed the bureau had confiscated the document sent to him by another reporter.

The FBI belatedly claimed that a mail firm employee handling the packet saw the document and quietly passed it on to the bureau. BUT, a more likely explanation is that the bureau was wiretapping Solomon, whose stories posed a political threat to powerful interests, and the feds knew the document was in transit. So they intercepted it in order to block an unwelcome story.

Senate showdown
Another congressional battle over the continuation of the Iraq fiasco is shaping up, reports the New York Times. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to call another antiwar vote, and he sees a win-win position for Democrats. More Republicans are likely to join the antiwar bloc, and if a decisive vote doesn't work this time, Reid can schedule yet another vote as November elections near.

So it seems quite plausible that Congress will in fact force an end to the war in the near future. However, lest we forget, there are powerful hidden forces at work that oppose such a shift. These are the forces that conspired to bring about 9/11 and then use jingoistic propaganda to launch the long-planned war.

These are the forces that altered the results of the 2004 presidential election, which handed Bush a stinging defeat in numerous purported red states. These forces kept a tight grip on the media to prevent them from making an issue of the facts they had in hand.

These are the forces with access to immense congressionally funded clandestine operations that are used to control media, business and politics in America.

So if Reid is serious about a desire to end the pointless harm to our soldiers, he's going to need to be braced for the fact that the Pentagon security forces and CIA are highly motivated to arrange a big and dirty operation to protect the war system and the welfare for defense contractors.

My point: When Congress cuts war funds, it's going to face the problem of black ops funds being used for political, which is to say criminal, purposes rather than counter-terror purposes.

After all, the clandestine security forces strongly resent the headline on the previous post.

Big media losing political stranglehold

2007-07-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

That could well have been the headline on July 3's Wall Street Journal story actually titled "Conservatives find their voice on the web."

What happened to the immigration bill? Well, according to reporters June Kronholz and Amy Schatz, a partnership of conservative radio personalities and conservative bloggers proved instrumental in felling the bill, which was strongly backed by Bush and Kennedy.

Even Washington Post opinion-molder David Broder lamented the bill's defeat, blaming a "particularly vurulent stream of populism" that has "made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion." Broder didn't cite bloggers but he did knock "many talk radio stations" for giving the bill a bum rap.

The conservative bloggers seem to have finally come into their own, showing a powerful presence in the liberal-dominated blogosphere, the Journal writers say -- pointing out that liberal bloggers had forced Democratic presidential candidates to turn down Fox News' offer to host a debate. In fact, much of the antiwar lobbying hasn't been filtered through the traditional media, but has come from net activists.

Lieberman was bounced from the Democratic Party because of that phenomenon. Having big media, with all their craft and clever silences, in his corner did not prevent the sudden upset. In fact, Lieberman's reliance on the traditional means of political control may well have given him a false sense of security. Yes, he went on to win the general election, but nevertheless every Democrat in the country learned that one ignores the blogosphere at one's peril.

I daresay that blog activism had much to do with the bombshell disclosure last year that one-third of Americans thought the government was complicit in 9/11. In fact, there have been screams of outrage from both print and broadcast media about that poll, with bitter denunciations of the net "radicals" who are bypassing the gatekeepers of public reality.

In fact, more "new realities" are likely to suddenly appear seemingly out of the blue. Recently, one net writer pointed out that quite a bit has been going on in Congress that is paving the way for a double impeachment, but that the media overlords are playing dumb. An impeachment resolution could suddenly materialize -- with big media only belatedly noticing the dynamics, the writer said. I agree.

So Miller's jailing wasn't excessive?

2007-07-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

What did Libby know and when was he going to tell it? Libby's knowledge of many White House shenanigans may well have been a big factor in Bush's decision to commute the Iraq war hawk's sentence.

Neither Miller nor Cooper posed that kind of a threat to Bush, who -- assuming Bush and Cheney haven't committed perjury -- failed to say that he had declassified Plame's CIA status and that there was no reason to grill reporters about sources.

Bush also permitted the special prosecutor probe to develop into a horrific downturn for press freedom with news organizations threatened with bankruptcy if they failed to comply with the rule of law. These news outfits deserve little sympathy in that they are the ones which have played down, ignored and written around Bush's impeachable behavior. Yet, the precedents affect everyone's press freedom.

Either Bush and Cheney lied about the secret declassification order -- so secret not even the CIA was told -- or Bush and Cheney kept quiet while millions of dollars were spent on a senseless probe that resulted in news people cooling their heals in jail over a crime that these politicos knew never occurred.

When reporters tried to protect Libby, Bush favored the rule of law, and those reporters went to jail. No intervention to keep them out. Bush, if he's not a perjurer, had some responsibility for pushing Libby into perjury, a crime. Even so, it is apparent that the rule of law operates differently for well-connected political operatives than for members of the press.

Goes to show that the special interests who control media have no sense of loyalty toward members of the working press, whether employed by those interests or not. "The system," which so well benefits a few oligarchs, must be protected at any price -- and if that means some of their reporters lose their scalps, well, too bad... Notice that Miller was forced out and other journalists mistreated, but the media corporations do nothing to spotlight the unbelievably bizarre actions of Bush and Cheney.

For the corporate controllers, past and present members of the press are little more than chump wage slaves who ought to know how to weasel better. The fact is that the media corporations would rather their reporters be isolated, disgraced, humiliated, jailed and ruined than to risk rocking the "system." If the special interests can clamp a news lid down even when it hurts their own reporters and press freedom in general, no wonder we see nothing about government complicity in 9/11.

Members of the working press are just dumb grunts in the combat zone, as far as these elitists are concerned. If the newsies are too dumb to know they're cannon fodder, then tough lumps...

Previously, some may have thought that the origin of the media blackout concerning yours truly was possibly non-political in origin. In light of what's happening -- or not happening -- with respect to Miller et al, perhaps a second thought is in order.

One more point: As much as I oppose the Libbycons, the White House consigliere has been shortchanged. Libby deserves a full pardon. After all, Libby would never have been charged had Bush or Cheney spoken up in a timely manner rather than continuing to conceal the alleged declassification order.

GOP damns Bush

2007-06-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

The numbers behind the failure of the Democratic initiative to force an Iraq withdrawal timetable were comparable to those that went into the GOP's severe reprimand of Bush and his Democrat-backed immigration bill.

Political winds are shifting rapidly. The White House, still reeling from GOP Sen. Lugar's call for a troop pullout, got little sympathy in the Senate. Tennessee's freshman GOP Sen. Corker denounced Bush as incompetent and cited a litany of disastrous events, including botched prewar intelligence and the handling of the Katrina catastrophe.

Conservative pundit Dick Morris is urging Bush to save the GOP from a 2008 cataclysm and begin drawing down troop levels. A face-saving move would be for Bush to agree with Sen. Clinton that U.S. troops have done their job but that the Iraqi government has not done its job.

The Iraq war is so contentious it is stirring up local governments, as evidenced by a recent U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution urging a quick troop pullout. The 51-47 vote was close. But, no telling what the vote might be if held next week, as the GOP begins to swing away from Bush on all fronts.

Bush's isolation is complete as Blair steps down and the much less hawkish Brown takes the PM's reins.

All this may be shaping up into the ironic scenario of the Republicans angling to impeach and remove Bush and Cheney quickly before the party suffers any more damage while the Democrats maneuver to keep him in office as the bad guy everybody loves to hate, thus enhancing their 2008 chances.

The one issue that could throw all plans overboard is evidence of 9/11 skullduggery. The political situation is sufficiently fluid that such an expose isn't completely beyond the pale, though it may seem so at the moment.

Theydon'tworkforyou?
I checked the Downing Street web site and Blair's final question time isn't transcribed, nor linked to Theyworkforyou, which permitted the public to comment on parliamentary discussions.

Not sure whether Downing Street is using the PM changeover as a reason to reorganise that option -- and the occasional comments of yours truly -- out of existence, or whether it's just a temporary change. I guess we'll find out when Brown appears at Question Time next week.

Murdoch's friends
Look who's soft-pedaling Murdoch's Dow Jones maneuver. Ben Bradlee, the former Washington Post editor, and Al Neuharth, former chief of USA Today. Neither seems offended by Murdoch's move and are downplaying presumed dire consequences. This contrasts with Gene Roberts, the Philadelphia Inquirer's former star editor, who drew the line and said he would under no circumstances work for Murdoch. (The opinions are to be found in Editor and Publisher online.)

Geeze. It doesn't even bother Bradlee and Neuharth that Murdoch has calculatedly interlocked News Corp. with the official Chinese Communist Party propaganda apparatus...

The gathering storm

2007-06-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

. The White House is invoking "executive privilege" to block documents and testimony about the ouster of eight U.S. attorneys. But Democratic lawmakers appear prepared for a knock-down fight.
. Sen. Byrd is gathering information on Bush's use of "signing statements" as a means of imposing de facto line item vetoes.
. Rep. Kucinich wants the House to impeach Cheney. That initiative gained some credibility when Cheney asserted a claim of "president-of-the-senate privilege" with respect to answering Congressional questions.
. Rep. Conyers is pressing for testimony that might lead to indictments of GOP heavies for election fraud.
. Congress hasn't given up on the apparent misuses of national security powers imposed after 9/11, and a number of lines of inquiry are in process.

Other confrontations of this kind are also kicking around the corridors of power in Washington.

For a full catalogue of political powderkeg issues, visit Dennis Loo's pro-impeachment site (link on sidebar).

Of course, it appears that the Democrats are more interested in weakening Bush than in impeaching him. The Democrats will then have a big edge in the presidential race.
Still, despite the fierce ambitions of Democratic presidential aspirants, there's no telling what might happen. Even supposing the Democrats skillfully raise White House skirts only so high, one gust of political wind could mean all bets are off and impeachment is on.

Lest we forget, the American people are really ticked off about the continuation of this Iraq fiasco. So anything can happen.

Rupert Randolph Murdoch
Murdoch seems poised to grab Dow Jones at a wildly high price. In fact, it's so high that competing business media firms backed away from a bidding war. Their financial advisers evidently cautioned them that Dow Jones would not enhance their profitability sufficiently.

But Murdoch believes he can parlay Dow Jones into a lucrative cable business channel. Yet, some are skeptical. It's true that Fox TV has been a startling phenomenon. Yet, its down in the doldrums. Sure it's making money, but is it making enough to support such a gamble? And that's where the bulk of Murdoch's dough comes from. His other U.S. ventures are losers. In fact, he has never been able to make money with print ventures in America.

Some investment advisers are warning clients to sell News Corp. stock.

And they probably will if the 76-year-old takes up residence with his young Chinese wife in the emperor's palace he's building for them in Beijing.

That nugget was in the Times' second article on "the Murdochracy," which shed much light on how Murdoch had entangled News Corp. into the official communist propaganda apparatus.

Heard on the Street

2007-06-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

So if Murdoch takes over the Wall Street Journal, does that mean Dow Jones can stop paying taxes?

The New York Times revealed yesterday that Murdoch's battery of financial fast-shuffle artists had managed to make sure Murdoch's News Corp. paid ZERO federal income tax in two of the last four years and not much more for the other two.

Yes, but the firm still faces a tax liability down the road, you say. Well, yes, if his squadrons of high-powered lobbyists and his largesse toward key lawmakers doesn't change things so that he no longer owes the dough.

Murdoch was a big hawk on Iraq. But YOU can pay for the war, thank you.

Murdoch's checkered tax-avoidance career is an international scandal, anyway. He was once in very hot water with the Israeli tax authorities, but he eventually wiggled his way out of serious charges in Israel.

The Kalin cipher

2007-06-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

For those of you interested in cryptology, I have published what I believe is a new and interesting cipher, which I have dubbed the Kalin cipher, on my Kryptograff blog (link on sidebar).

The post is directly under another one, The world of null-H, which is of little interest to most readers, though a few fans of logic, information theory and physics might be intrigued.

Power to the oligarchs

2007-06-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

America is hopping mad at both Bush and the Democrats, if a number of recent polls are to be believed.

NOTE: For a perceptive discussion of these polls, take a look at the Trotskyist web site (see side bar for link). Now anyone knows the Trotskyists have a Marxist political agenda and are as capable of "spin" as Fox News. Even so, some of their news reporting is highly competent, though one must, as with all reporting, take care to watch for political bias.

Americans are disgusted. The Democrats seem unable to halt the war, though that's why they were given power in November. So why aren't the people heeded? As the Trotskyists point out, a tiny oligarchy determines policy, not Congress.

When public opinion changes against the faction in power, that faction does not respect the "will of the people." That faction simply thinks that an opposing power clique has won a battle over opinion. So the war faction thinks: we're not going to permit our opponents to win by controlling opinion, if we can help it. We will just continue on anyway. Such cliques tend to think in terms of being on a winning football team, rather than in terms of right, wrong and the people's inherent right to govern themselves.

But this war group -- partially composed of neocons and a certain brand of Israelophile -- may have bitten off more than it can chew. Take a look at George Will's latest column on one GOP senator's gloomy stance on Iraq. It's clear that the conservative Will is himself gloomy about the GOP's war policy. The troop surge has been ineffective, yet the troops are still there. I've noticed many times over that once the feds launch a major op, neither hell nor highwater will cause it to abort, even when the objective is clearly no longer obtainable.

Tim Russert recently said something to the effect that the natives are restless. The blinders are starting to come off as the people begin to see that their will means nothing to the system. The people are viewed with contempt by the mostly hidden oligarchs. More and more people might begin to identify with "outlaw" journalists such as myself.

Once the people wake up to the fact that the government is controlled by some behind-the-scenes force -- a "council" of oligarchs -- the awareness that 9/11 might very well have been an inside job will spread like wildfire. No telling what might happen then.

The Trotskyists again:Did you wonder why the "progressive" Nation magazine took aim at "paranoid" thinking about 9/11 conspiracy? Take a look at the Trotskyist analysis (link on sidebar) of the magazine's controlling clique. The Nation is an organ of some very powerful "liberal establishment" families, and these families find it convenient not to upset the system applecart (and their financial prospects) by letting "the masses" learn the truth.

That said, I'd like to point out that the Trotskyists themselves have found it convenient to, for the most part, tone down the 9/11 treason issue.

Grabbe corrects Znewz1

2007-06-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

Znewz1 misquoted Crockett Grabbe, an Iowa physics professor who is convinced that three World Trade Center towers were felled by controlled demolition. His correction is found in a comment on the most recent post about Giuliani.
I have removed the offending paraphrase. My apologies to Dr. Grabbe.

Fatal flaws

2007-06-14T16:46:00.000-07:00

A recent Associated Press story told of some studies that show that the death penalty has a strong deterrent effect. Murder rates go down when the death penalty is relatively swift and sure, these statisticians say. Their findings are very disagreeable to death penalty opponents, some of whom quarrel about the statistical methods.

My off-the-cuff response is that capital punishment is quite likely to deter premeditated murder and even some "heat-of-the-moment" homicides. So it seems plausible that such a policy saves lives.

Yet, there is another issue. Is it OK to sacrifice the lives of some innocent persons in order to help spare the lives of others? Some may say that, though capital punishment errors may occur, such miscarriages of justice are relatively rare and that the risk of such error is a necessary societal evil.

Before giving some back-of-the-envelope numbers, a remark: The fact that an error rate is low means, in this case, that the chance that a randomly selected Death Row inmate is innocent is low; that fact does not mean that the chance of an innocent person being executed is low. That chance rises with the number of inmates.

So here goes:

Of 300 persons sentenced to die in Illinois between 1977 and 2000, 13 were exonerated as wrongfully convicted (that is, courts found that a reasonable doubt existed as to each one's guilt; in some cases, there was no doubt at all as to innocence). Of the 300, 12 were executed. [Source: The Death Penalty on Trial by Bill Kurtis, Perseus Books (PublicAffairs unit), 2004.]

In other words, the Illinois error rate was 13/300 = 4.3%. Fearing that there might be more innocent men on Death Row, then-Governor George Ryan pardoned some inmates and commuted the sentences of all the others to life terms. Hopefully the 12 persons who had died since 1977 had all been guilty, Ryan said.

We can get an idea about his concerns by using the Poisson formula, which is applicable to sufficiently large populations. A number near 300 (actually 287 once the 13 exonerated are excluded) can qualify for the Poisson method. What is the probability that none of the 287 is innocent? The probability is simply exp(minus error rate times sample) = exp(-0.043x287) = exp(-12.341) = 4.369 x 10^-6. Turned around, that means that Ryan faced a probability of 99.99999563 percent that Illinois either had since 1977 or would execute someone then on Death Row wrongfully.

Still, the Poisson method can't be used for a small sample size, such as the 12 people executed in Illinois since 1977.

But there is one state that has carried out a sufficient number of executions to warrant use of the Poisson method: Texas executed 154 people between 1995 and 2000, with 39.4% of Death Row inmates put to death in that period. A 4.3% error rate would give an expected value of 6.622. With that number, the probability that no innocent person was executed during George Bush's governorship is less than 1%. Put another way, the likelihood of a wrongful execution is 99.867%. [Source of input data: Bureau of Justice Statistics as cited in The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment by Franklin E. Zimring, Oxford University Press, 2003.]

But suppose Texas doesn't have such a high error rate in capital cases. Somehow it is quite difficult to believe that the Texas justice system is far, far superior to the Illinois system. A lower limit of 1% in Texas seems reasonable. Even so, we have exp(-1.54) = 21.438% probability that no one was wrongly convicted, which is to say a 78.56% probability that Texas executed at least one innocent person during the 5-year interval.

No other state has a comparable number of executions during that period. However, the total number of executions nationwide was 2899 during that five years [Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics in Zimring.] An error rate of 4.3% yields exp(-124.657) = 7.28 x 10^-55, which is a fantastically low number, meaning that the probability no one was wrongly executed is effectively zero. At a 1% error rate, the probability no one was wrongly executed is 2.569 x 10^-13, which is also effectively zero.

That is, it is virtually certain that one or more innocent people were executed in the United States between 1995 and 2000.

You may recall that George Bush was the governor who pushed through the vast speedup in executions in Texas.

Which brings us to the matter of military tribunals for unlawful enemy combatants. What hope is there for a low error rate and no wrongful executions? Hard to say. However, bear in mind that the GOP has made the standards of evidence much lower than the American norm for such captives. When, for example, confessions extracted by dubious means out of the presence of counsel or international observers are admissible evidence one should anticipate that innocent people will be convicted and that some may be executed.

All the king's scientists...

2007-06-14T07:46:00.000-07:00

A quickie: Saw something about Purdue researchers determining that the twin towers were brought down by a combination of the weight of the fuel and fire.

I haven't seen the Purdue study, so all I can assume is that perhaps the reporter misunderstood the researchers' conclusions. There simply wasn't enough mass (weight) from the plane and its contents to account for such rapid and complete collapses, fire or no fire.

But the news item does show that the NIST study of the collapse of the towers is hardly the final word. There have been a number of attempts to rationalize the government's claims -- thus indicating the scientific work had some holes in it.

A tactical change at Znewz1
Right now, I have more important things to do than play games with government-sponsored hackers, who have many times over demonstrated their contempt for freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom in general.

So, I have decided to curtail Znewz1 emailings and blog posts. Meanwhile, I hope to work on things that eventually will make a significant difference in the fight for American liberty.

'First of all, let's blindfold the Trib staff'

2007-06-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Now that Sam Zell is firmly in control of the Tribune Co., it appears that Tribune editors and reporters are no longer considered competent to determine whether to scan the Znewz1 email circular or not.

A blanket block on Znewz1 seems to have gone into effect at the Tribune.

You may say that the Trib staffers can always read this blog (unless of course the Tribune blocks this url), but the blog and the circular often differ.

Here we have what looks like an ominous turn for professionalism at the Trib. A journalist without the right to make up her or his own mind about what information and-or "propaganda" to scan has lost a sacred piece of journalistic soul. And an owner who enforces that kind of policy shows that he is a news business tyro. Not even Murdoch blocks his journalists from receiving the Znewz1 circular if they wish (hope that's not "famous last words").

Perhaps the Trib defense is that Znewz1 uses an opt-out, rather than an opt-in, system.
But, what else can I do? There is simply too much email interference for an opt-in system to work. Sure, maybe you say that that's just paranoia talking. And I suppose that neither Zell nor anyone on the Trib staff has a clue as to what I mean when I say that Conant is "that guy" caught in a "legal and media limbo." I mean, does Zell believe the version of reality presented in the newspapers? If so, he's not "with it." But if not, he's showing that he favors the system as is, with its tight, if unacknowledged, censorship.

Of course, there is another possibility. A hacker has imposed the block without the Tribune's permission, theorizing that his action would be covered by the ownership change. What hackers have a reason to curtail Conant's interaction with the media? Quite a few special interests would be delighted to jam Znewz1. But, who is the most likely alternate suspect? I would say some federal security agency, hiding of course behind cut-outs, as is the usual practice.

Will these blocked Trib journalists have their read privileges restored? Never happen. What could happen next is some trick or other to make it look like I'm mistaken, paranoid and generally flaky. And yet, these journalists will, without doubt, remain blocked because the control clique just can't tolerate undoing a dirty trick. What I mean is that even if Zell personally orders the blocked read privileges restored, some force that meddles in my internet activity will overrule him.

Welcome to America, 2007 version.

Murdoch Zionists at Dow Jones?

2007-06-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

Some have charged that Murdoch is likely to see to it that the Wall Street Journal will pull punches when it comes to issues of concern to the Chinese communists.

But there is also another worry: Do you suppose that the ruthless neocons who comprise Murdoch's team aren't just aching to get their hands on the Dow Jones financial data system?

You may think that Murdoch will prevent them from misusing their positions to manipulate financial data for both personal and ideological gain. But, all I know is that if I were a business person not affiliated with the Murdoch-Rothschild clique of militant Zionists, I might be quite disturbed.

Even though Dow Jones has competition from Bloomberg and Reuters in providing such data, that competition might not be sufficient to deter a few crafty insiders working for Murdoch from playing all sorts of financial games in furtherance of militant Zionism and for personal reasons.

Who speaks up for Chelsea?

2007-06-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

Chelsea is lucky to be alive, we learn from a new political biography of Hillary Clinton.

Chelsea often stopped for coffee in the shadow of the twin towers in lower Manhattan, but on 9/11 didn't proceed quite that far, according to Her Way by Jeff Gerth and Don van Natta. Still, the young woman was jostled by the crowd fleeing the disaster zone as she ran south toward danger in search of a pay phone to call her mother in Washington. (Dad was in Australia on business.)

It's also clear from the book that immediately after the attacks Hillary seemed to have no inkling that maybe not everything was on the up and up -- though many experts expressed skepticism that the towers could have fallen as claimed.

By now however, both she and Bill ought to be well aware that 9/11 was an inside job and that the killers cared nothing about Chelsea's fate. Chelsea doesn't seem to have been one of those in the know who were tipped to stay out of lower Manhattan that day.

So why doesn't Hillary express outrage? Maybe it's because she and Bill are part of the "politically correct" faction of the left wing that has agreed not to make an issue of the treason conspiracy.

Either that or the senator is in some kind of deep denial, with double-crossing aides keeping her so roped off from reality that she lacks the competence to be a senator, let alone a president.

And, where is Bill's voice here? His daughter could easily have been killed that day, but he mustn't say anything that might trouble the power elite and mess up Hillary's chances, I suppose.

He's almost surely not in denial about 9/11. Nobody ever claimed he was stupid. He just won't tackle these people.

Backwards goes the CIA

2007-06-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

If there were no secret CIA prisons, where was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed held before being transferred to Gitmo?

So when the CIA rejects the Council of Europe report, what does that mean? It's just sound-bite gimmickry.

Note that the CIA did not specifically say that no CIA prisoners had been held in Poland or Romania. And Polish and Romanian officials, being rather embarrassed, seem to be splitting legalistic hairs in order to avoid the charge.

Yet, because of these fake denials, we now have "news" headlines that make it seem as though the secret CIA detention centers are mere ravings of "conspiracy wingnuts."
How fast the truth is redefined...

Yawn...

2007-06-08T08:02:00.000-07:00

I found more funny biz with my emails today. Looks like a muddy-the-waters operation. Since this kind of thing happens all the time, I've decided to kill the previous post. Why should I play the game of my adversaries?

Giuliani's 9/11 record cuts two ways

2007-06-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

While Giuliani hobnobbed with supporters at a posh spot in Brooklyn, protesting 9/11 families targeted his actions on that fateful day and beforehand, according to a local newspaper, the Park Slope (Brooklyn) Record.

Good luck trying to find either the paper or the story on Google.

Family members joined with those who challenge the government's theory of what happened on 9/11.

They were upset at Giuliani for, among other things, "running away" that day and for failing to make sure rescuers had proper equipment. Nothing in the Record story indicated that protesters thought Giuliani had advance knowledge (if he did, why would he have stayed so close by in City Hall?).

Still, the combination of family members angry about 9/11 failures and citizens convinced 9/11 was an act of treason may prove to be a bit of political dynamite that not only affects Giuliani's bid for the presidency but also the bid of national media to control the political dialogue.

9/11 blasts still echo in tangled files

2007-05-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

A report based upon released police files gives details of what cops saw and felt inside and oustide the towers. Please read it at
http://911science.blogspot.com

BTW, the police records detailing the many explosions in the twin towers were made available to the New York Times, CNN and national media in general. But, somehow they missed what was right in front of their noses in black and white. Somehow there wasn't anybody noticing.

UPDATE June 4 02: Sunday's lead in the Tennessean said something close to: "Plot's fatal flaw: jet fuel."

The head was referring to the fact that the miserable little conspiracy to ignite stored jet fuel at John F. Kennedy airport on Long Island would not have yielded a 9/11-scale catastrophe, as the reputed plotters had hoped. An FBI agent told the press that ignited jet fuel could not have yielded enough explosive power to obtain such catastrophic results as envisioned.

One may suppose that the plotters were misled by the widespread impression, fostered by media misinformation and propaganda, that jet fuel was sufficient to bring down the twin towers. It should be noted that jet fuel is designed to burn at a temperature that won't melt fuel tanks and also not to burn too rapidly. So, while it is excellent stuff for motivating planes, it isn't a terribly efficient explosive.

For more on the jet fuel issue, please see
Thumbnail of NIST's 9/11 theory
http://kryptograff.blogspot.com

Murdoch's cavemen versus science

2007-05-28T14:10:00.000-07:00

"The Assault on Reason" is the title of Al Gore's analysis of the media's role in a political climate that seems to increasingly pander to the irrational side of human nature.

A good example of that is the journalists and commentators working for Fox News and other Murdoch media who publicly excoriate experts as "nutty", "loopy" and "wingnuts" if they question official claims about 9/11.

Many of the people making these claims are university professors, and a number of them are mathematicians and physicists. Yet their detractors in the Murdoch newsrooms don't know the difference between the Pythagorean theorem and a regression line. Ask them who David Hilbert was, and they'll say "David who?"

Bring up the topic of mathematics or physics and every one of them will say, "Oh, I don't know anything about math."

Ask them to calculate the minimum time it takes for a stone to drop from 400 meters up, and they'll respond, "I'm a journalist, not a numbers guy."

Yet, they feel they have the right to belittle and humiliate people who are competent to do the math and the physics.

Bush media ally in red scare

2007-05-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

George Bush's best media pal, Rupert Murdoch, is on the defensive in a burgeoning controversy over communist influence in his media decisions.

The Financial Times reports that Murdoch, head of News Group, which owns Fox News, told the press that he was innocent of ordering his editors to do things that pleased China's communist rulers in furtherance of his business ambitions.

Journalists at the Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau warned in a May 10 letter to the Journal's owners that Murdoch was a notorious communism appeaser, and others have cited various instances of what they see as Murdoch's subversion of news in favor of communist censorship.

Many on the Journal's staff are urging the owning Bancroft family to reject Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones, which owns the Journal.

A Murdoch takeover of Dow Jones would give Chinese communists powerful influence over U.S. economic interests, some fear. Financial news and data companies, such as Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg, are major components of the nervous systems of the U.S. and global economies.

Some worry that a communist-friendly Journal would tone down and bury stories on the U.S.-China trade gap and currency issue or on Chinese nuclear espionage against America.

The communism uproar around Murdoch is ironic in that his media, in whatever country, portray themselves as superpatriotic and hurl charges of disloyalty against critics. Murdoch's media troops, aside from reportedly shielding reds from too much unfavorable news, also engage in scathing attacks on those who charge that 9/11 was an inside job.

Murdoch's Fox News has been cited as a principle reason that so many Americans were deceived by White House innuendos linking Saddam to 9/11.

See the Znewz1 report: Fox News: Trumpet of Israel's hard right
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nfold/rupert.html

or Google "Fox News: trumpet"

for background concerning Murdoch's China dealings.

Gore sees Bush as 9/11 fiend

2007-05-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

In his latest book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore casts a harsh spotlight over what he sees as George Bush's treacherous behavior during the 9/11 crisis.

Gore quotes Richard Clark, then the White House terrorism chief, as saying that on Sept. 12 Bush was pressuring him to pin the blame for the attacks on Iraq, despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence system knew this to be a false charge.

Gore then says that Bush quickly started tying Saddam to the attacks via sound-bite innuendo, demonstrating that Bush knew he was using callous deception in order to exploit the tragedy for his crazed purposes.

The former vice president decries the de facto censorship concerning 9/11 and other major issues, blaming power-hungry monopolists in control of a debased media system. This system suits lowball Bush propaganda tactics, says Gore.

A reader is left to wonder why Bush was more interested in establishing a fairy tale about who was responsible than about being absolutely sure who carried out the attacks. Gore is suggesting that Bush didn't really care who was behind the attacks.

So is Gore hinting that Bush's suspicious behavior during the 9/11 crisis implies something really sinister? Gore doesn't go that far, and yet he is plain about his estimate of Bush's potential for evil.

Gore's commentary differs from George Tenet's recollections of the period soon after the attacks, in which the ex-CIA chief claimed that Bush wasn't yet hopped up about Iraq. However, Bush's attitude seems plausible in light of Tenet's claim that then Pentagon adviser Richard Perle left a White House huddle very soon after the attacks and was ready to blame Iraq.

Giuliani: trade center 'implosion' was bizarre

2007-05-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Rudolph Giuliani says the collapses of the twin World Trade Center towers struck him as strange.

Asked during a CSPAN broadcast whether he expected the towers to fall, the former longterm mayor and former federal prosecutor replied:

"Yeah, but not the way they did. It occurred to us that they might ultimately collapse over -- the way buildings usually collapse, which is in stages.

"It looked like at some point the top of the building would come off, and then maybe the middle of the building, and then maybe there'd be a shell left -- the way Number 7 came down at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon over a period of time.

"But the idea that it would implode, the implosion that took place, I actually did not realize that until much later."

Giuliani said he was inside the police command post when the towers fell.
Later he saw a televised broadcast of a collapsing tower.

"It was a shock to see it just implode like that," the GOP presidential candidate said on April 19, weeks before he accused rival Ron Paul of seeking to blame American policy for the attacks. Paul has recently said that he believes a 9/11 coverup of incompetence took place but asserts that there is no evidence of U.S. government complicity in the attacks.

Giuliani's comments may be found on YouTube.

Giuliani's reference to a supposed slow, graduated fall of the 47-story building 7 conflicts with video footage available on the internet, which shows a very rapid and complete fall. However, internet video footage is not always reliable, because of data compression problems and possibly because of tampering.

Seismographs recorded 18 seconds of shaking during WTC7's collapse, as opposed to 8 and 10 seconds for each twin tower.

[Crockett Grabbe, an Iowa physics professor, corrected a reporting error of mine. See his comment below.]

The political ramifications of 9/11 suspicion are heating up, with the Rocky Mountain News' editorialist claiming that the 9/11 truth movement is a plot by Marxist professors. The paper is following in the footsteps of Fox News commentators who have been trying to equate suspicion of the government with lack of patriotism and leftism.

The News lashed out at Howard Zinn, a radical professor who has said that 9/11 skeptic David Ray Griffin's observations deserve further investigation, charging that it was people like Zinn who were responsible for the results of a recent poll that showed that a third of Democrats believed George Bush knew about the attacks in advance.

In fact, there has been a strong current in the far left opposing taking 9/11 skepticism seriously. Radical writer Noam Chomsky has urged the left to avoid the issue, Alexander Cockburn's leftwing magazine Counterpunch has run articles trying to substantiate the official claims and the progressive magazine The Nation ran a cover story with a headline that equated 9/11 skepticism with paranoia.

Though 9/11 skepticism may be unwelcome to some presumed public opinion molders, the topic appears to be emerging as a potent political issue in the presidential primary campaigning.

The "inside job" wrangle has at least one precedent in U.S. history: the controversy over Soviet penetration of the U.S. government during and after World War II. Released CIA and KGB files essentially confirm that extensive higth-level Soviet penetration of the government occurred, one of the results being far-too-rapid Soviet development of the atomic bomb.

More recently, China's development of a lighter-weight nuclear weapon was attributed to an inside job in the weapons laboratories, though a scientist "suspect" has never been charged in that matter. In fact, after 9/11, CIA and FBI resources for countering communist inside jobs were redirected toward Islamic radicalism. "The heat was off" communist networks in the U.S. government.

Cop recalls trade center explosions

2007-05-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

Before World Trade Center 1 collapsed, a series of explosions ripped through the upper floors, according to a policeman who was at the scene on 9/11.

After WTC2 fell, says a Port Authority police memorandum dated Dec. 9, "periodically you would hear a loud boom from the top" of the north tower. The memo, signed by Officer Middleton, said that following a loud boom from upper floors was a series of smaller explosions which "appeared to go completely around the building" at upper floors.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology dealt with these smaller explosions by suggesting -- without vouching for the suggestion -- that falling debris from within the building had ejected belches of dust.

However, Middleton's account seems to indicate that the lesser explosions were loud enough to be heard from about 90 floors below.

Needed: subversive scientists

2007-05-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's clear that the invisible government is moving heaven and earth to isolate academics and experts who are too accurate about 9/11.

Scientists, being human, rightly fear the "UFO effect," whereby even breathing certain words aloud is enough to cast a pall over a career. But, there must be a way to bypass those who engineer the taboos. Here's an idea:

Are you a concerned scientist frustrated by the silence of most experts over the preposterous claims of public officials concerning 9/11? Why not adopt a nom de plume and blog about what's wrong with government claims? It's the next best thing to going public.

Clearly your fellow scientists and engineers will tend to recognize your credentials simply from the blog content.

Now it's true the feds will be able to chase down your terminal and, unless you use special security measures, dope out your identity. But, they won't be able to share that info with your employer (at least, until they get really desperate).

You can send around an email to colleagues and peers giving a rough summary of your credentials and explaining the need for a pen name.

Sure, you'll get a lot of interference, harassment and negativity and feedback will be limited to a few token comments. But, if you're going to fight, then fight.

Carter denounces Bush
Jimmy Carter says Bush II has been the worst prez ever for American interests. Included on Carter's list of peeves is the policy of conveying federal billions to faith-based initiatives. No other president has ever so baldly blurred the difference between church and state, says Carter, who calls himself a traditional Southern Baptist.

Carter's blast can be seen as the unleashing of pent-up rage at what's been going on in America, I suggest. I think things are going to get a lot rougher as Democrats realize they can do something.

The invisible government is going to have a heck of a time trying to tame all these nostril-flared broncs and settle everything back to conspiracy, murder and intrigue as usual.

Behind the White House meltdown

2007-05-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Paul Wolfowitz, top mastermind of the Iraq war, is about to become yesterday's news. Alberto Gonzales might be able to hang by his fingertips a bit longer, but even if he stays (which ain't likely), his credibility and leadership are in shambles.

And there has been a mass exodus of the upper middle ranks of political appointees, it has been reported.

A group of House Republicans last week read Bush the riot act over the Iraq mess and expressed strong trepidation about the future of the GOP.

Something is fueling the fires leading to this meltdown. Of course, the Iraq fiasco is one of the logs on the bonfire. Yet, there is something else: Americans aren't merely dissatisfied with the war effort, they are baffled and many are enraged.

Why? Because the Fox/White House propaganda technique no longer is working all that well. More and more people know that they were sold a bill of goods by a group of neocons and their allies intent on war.

And, there is increasing awareness that there was something decidely fishy about the 9/11 attacks. Sure, corporate media and hacks of both major parties tend to ignore or scorn that point. Yet, all sorts of Americans, including many a public official, many a journalist, have a strong sense of what happened. These are fightin' mad people whose voices have been muzzled.

What do you think is likely to happen when you get a whole bunch of gagged but incensed people? Not allowed to hit with brass knuckles? OK, they'll pick up baseball bats. Not allowed to get down to the nitty gritty about 9/11? Then other issues will just have to do-- such as the abuse of power that stemmed from the 9/11 power-grab.

Hillary's 9/11 gambit

2007-05-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

Billary knows that 9/11 treason is a top issue among Democrats, with one in three willing to state publicly a belief that 9/11 was a gigantic stab in the back.

Remember, we're in primary season and as the highly seasoned Clintons know, a wedge issue can make the difference between winner and losers in state primaries.

On the other hand, it is plain as the nose on your face that the corporate media do not like this wedge issue and are trying to ignore or delegitimize it. A certain contingent of Israelophiles seems to think that too much emphasis on whodunit is bad for Israel. And that contingent makes sure Democrats sense that position.

Hillary of course feels a need to pander to what is perceived as Jewish block voting -- though that phenomenon is no longer as airtight as in the past -- as can be seen by her statement that Iran is becoming a menace to both the United States and Israel.

But on the other hand playing too dumb on 9/11 is liable to shave off a significant portion of votes, with a come-from-behind Kucinich grabbing many of the votes of the 9/11 truth element. He has said he plans to hold hearings on a couple of specific holes in the government 9/11 account -- but which holes, I don't know.

Hence, here comes Billary: we're doing something about 9/11 cover-up... except that it's the easy thing to investigate: bureaucratic mishandling of the issue of the toxic cloud over Manhattan.

Of course, if Clinton and co-prober Rep. Jerry Nadler could somehow show that the coverup of the poison-gas effect was part of a larger intelligence system plot, perhaps we'd see some real change. Fat chance.

Of course the 9/11 treason issue is ensnarled in Iraq war politics. Despite the Senate's rebuff of a Democratic measure to limit war funding, anything can happen in this matter. Bush felt the need to appoint a "war czar" (many generals ducked the White House call) to try to save his administration. But, again, no telling what might happen. Everything is fluid. Impeachment of Bush and Cheney are not off the table yet. Republicans will back such a move if one more thing goes wrong, for sure. It's the Dems who oppose impeachment... But, anything goes...

BTW, some senators balked at the Dem war fund cutoff on grounds that support would have been "irresponsible." However, what do you call playing dumb about 9/11 treason? Responsible?

Wolfowitz is getting the bounce from the World Bank. A woman brought him down, they say. Yet there is another potential factor in the desire to dissociate from him: his role as a Pentagon hawk who has to be among the top suspects in the coverup of 9/11 treachery, and possibly in the advance plotting.

NOTE on previous post: So what do you think, few read this blog and of those who do, either none feel censored or if a few do, they don't feel like responding to my query? Or do you think that positive replies are blocked?

I happen to know excerpts from this blog often are posted by others, only to be quickly blocked by search engines. I am not the only person complaining of this problem. For example, the Israeli politician who writes the Samsonblinded blog has also complained of international net censorship imposed because of the writer's beliefs (which I neither oppose nor endorse).

Do you think you've been censored?

2007-05-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

Have you experienced electronic interference activities, or other actions, that have the effect of censorship?

Please either post a comment or send me an email at the address above or one of my other addresses that you manage to locate. Be sure to note who benefits from the censorship.

"Paranoid" is an an easy put-down for such suspicions. However, I would point out that hacking of web sites and email for political reasons is in principle no different from the hacking of Diebold's no-paper-trail voting machines for political reasons.

Some may recall the televised Irancontra hearings. At first, the videotapes were supposed to be available for replay. That idea was quickly scotched. So the full hearings were broadcast by PBS, as I recall. However, whenever the testimony veered too close to the CIA and got really interesting, somebody "tripped" over a wire and cut off the audio or the broadcast was suddenly interrupted for a station break. This happened repeatedly.

Then, one day the witnesses discussed the details of the Israeli government's role in the affair, including the provision of landing sites and so forth. Next day, not one word about Israel appeared in any New York area newspaper.

So, we have examples of interference from two sources: the CIA and Israelophiles. It might be easy to blow me off as paranoid or anti-Semitic, but what happened is what happened.

Now let's be aware that the government could easily feel justified in running interference against me on grounds of national security. It could be said that the concern isn't protecting 9/11 traitors but the concern is to make it hard for me to help terrorists. That's not a stretch. After all, I did post on my other blog, http://kryptograff.blogspot.com, an easily-followed recipe for strong encryption.
Now, there's nothing illegal about that. But the Pentagon may say, yes, but it's sensitive information that we don't want generally disseminated.

From my experience observing black ops, I have noticed that the "machine" keeps working, even when the point of the operation no longer holds. (Welcome to the Army; in fact, welcome to Iraq.)

So once one has drawn the attention of these folks, a disruption operation may be mounted and simply continued on and on, evidently out of bureaucratic inertia and maybe because of some Captain Queeg syndrome on the part of lower-level ops people.

The media are controlled

2007-05-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

Let's face it: the lid is on the media.

No matter how much we wish that stories exposing 9/11 treason would be published, in general that's not happening.

In fact, even small media like 911blogger aren't able to convey everything. Blockades are up.

Most of the posts on 9/11blogger are no threat to the conspirators. They are interesting, but unlikely to cause a collapse of the control clique. But even stuff that's a real threat isn't picked up by "the press."

That is, it's still a tough slog.

My point in writing this post is to caution others about being too trusting of certain 911truth sites. Even supposing those who run them are well intentioned, there is nothing to prevent a ruthless group in the intelligence system from causing major problems in these sites.

I don't mean to say, give up. No. Never surrender. But, be not only pure-hearted, be wise also.

The 9/11 truth squad idea is a good one. It will be necessary to spread the videos of candidate confrontations around the net.

Also, let's do what we can to encourage "minor" candidates who espouse the cause of 9/11 truth and justice.

Times are a-changing...

Palm Beach Post: U.S. hides 9/11 data

2007-05-13T08:48:00.001-07:00

Five and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department is still fighting to keep much information about the purported hijackers secret, according to the Palm Beach Post.

After a protracted legal wrangle, the Justice Department released 105 pages of FBI data to the newspaper -- but nearly all of that information had already been released via a congressional inquiry in 2003, the 9/11 commission in 2004 and the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in 2006, according to Eliot Kleinberg, writing for Saturday's editions.

The Cox newspaper has two appeals pending of Justice Department denials of Freedom of Information Act requests for FBI files concerning the 19 alleged hijackers, 15 of whom purportedly lived in South Florida, some reportedly training at flight schools there.

Among the scanty new details, the Post said, was a report that Waleed Alshehri and alleged ringleader Mohamed Atta each withdrew $100 from the same West Palm Beach ATM, Alshehri on June 8 and Atta on July 19. [I'm wondering if even that is new; I seem to recall something like that in the 9/11 commission report.]

NOTE: In the version of this blog that comes up on my screen, the link and comment icons are missing. Cute, huh?

NOTE 2: THIS JUST IN: A number of U.S. senators are demanding that the CIA stop hiding 9/11 data. A CIA inspector general's report on 9/11 has been suppressed, possibly because a number of high-level spooks were chastised.

Censored about 9/11 censorship

2007-05-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

Around 1030 am CDT, I posted a blog query about censorship on 911blogger.com and-- guess what?--it hasn't appeared as of 620 pm CDT.

Additionally, a recent post of mine went missing and other posts could not be retrieved, despite showing up on the 911blogger search engine -- which is run by Google.

I had tried to ask others their experience with 9/11 censorship and noted that Yahoo and Google news and blog alerts had become increasingly useless, indicating heightened filtering of news.

Sure the censors can hide behind the notion that somebody at 911blogger made the decisions for technical, political or even personal reasons. But, who really benefits?
Government censors.

This also implies that 911blogger is being controlled by the feds, either willingly or unwillingly.

Well, what else can we expect? There is a big bunch of killers who can't afford for the public to become convinced that treason occurred.

Personally, I see this latest block as one of a myriad of things that have occurred to me indicating an intense desire by the control clique to keep me roped off. Recently, an ad of mine was deleted from Craigslist shortly after being posted, though there was nothing wrong with it.

Experience tells me that some kind of flimflam will next occur to make it look like I don't know what I'm talking about and that all is well. Then, a short time later, the interference will occur again, though in slightly changed form.

Make a noose for killers out of purse-strings

John Edwards, following the lead of presidential rival Dennis Kucinich, is urging Americans to push Congress to cut war funding now.

Assuming that Congress knows damn well who pulled off 9/11 and used it to try to impose tyranny, we should also urge Congress to pull funds from those elements of the government that caused 9/11 and are fighting to cover it up.

Of course, they'll cry boo-hoo that the "war on terror" will go badly without their services. But, maybe it will go well. U.S. attorneys would be in a better position to prosecute traitors if those traitors weren't protected by clandestine armies.

9/11 propaganda shift at Fox?

2007-05-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

Alan Colmes did something very peculiar recently. Despite a hail of vituperation and unfair tactics against a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Colmes seemed to concede that World Trade Center 7 and other buildings were brought down in a controlled fashion for safety reasons.

Go to YouTube and search Colmes, Tarpley

Colmes, on Fox's Hannity and Colmes, played the video showing John Kerry saying that he believes WTC7 was brought down in a controlled fashion for reasons of safety. Colmes then went on to browbeat 9/11 conspiracy author Webster Tarpley and to accuse "wingnuts" of misprepresenting Kerry's words to mean that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.

Murdoch's house liberal then argued that the fact that some buildings were demolished for safety reasons did not imply a conspiracy.

Well I don't know whether Colmes was pulling a fast one to get Kerry's statement past Murdoch, or whether a new propaganda line is emerging, whereby the controlled demolition of World Trade Center 7 is conceded.

No doubt Colmes was countering some others at Fox News who had used the Kerry clip to suggest that "the crazies love him." Colmes was evidently trying to shield Kerry from being smeared as a "crazy." Still, despite all the spin, Kerry's words were broadcast.

I'm not sure whether Colmes knew or cared about the fact that the NIST has been saying publicly that it has found no evidence of controlled demolition of WTC7, even though its contract investigators have been granted permission to test the controlled demolition hypothesis.

But one wonders why Colmes doesn't ask why the NIST is wasting money on a still-incomplete probe of WTC7's collapse if people in government -- and, it seems, the press -- already know that demolition was done "for safety reasons."

The NIST is now in a pinch. If it has been pretending not to know that explosives were used for WTC7, why should anyone trust its conclusions about the twin towers?

Some claim that Kerry misspoke and that he was talking about WTC6, about which there is little controversy. Even if true, we can see that Colmes and others at Fox made virtually no effort to check the facts. It's all about spin.

Worthless Google 9/11 alerts
Google's 9/11 blog alerts have resumed, but the service has become transparently thin. There should be hundreds of posts, or at least scores, daily, but only two or three a day are arriving. They are largely uninformative.

Sure, maybe invisible standards have been changed. But why? Why is it necessary to make a useful service worthless?

Likewise, Google's 9/11 news alerts are bizarrely pared. Services that routinely were picked before are now bypassed. Again, news that's really bad for the conspirators rarely shows up. Normally, I find it by other means.

I suppose that those controlling this system believe that they will be exempt from prosecution as enemy combatants. But, one never should say never...

GOP to Bush: the party is pooped

2007-05-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

The White House wishes to portray Tuesday's session with House Republicans as limited support for Bush's Iraq efforts.

The Republican moderates told him that if things didn't shape up by fall, the party would bolt him. They told him he was death to the party, that constituents were totally fed up and ticked off.

They told him they'd support some sort of Iraq war fund bill for now but, if the mideast situation didn't shape up fast, even that support would end. They certainly conveyed the thought to him that he had better beware too hasty a use of the veto pen.

They may have been terribly polite, but clearly the Republicans all would have been very happy had Bush and Cheney agreed to resign by sundown tomorrow.

Bush is facing a rough road now. If he's too veto-happy, there will be a showdown between the White House and the Democrats over who is pulling the rug out from under our troops. This then may well leave the Dems with little option but to move to impeach, though such an action would throw a monkey-wrench into Democratic presidential ambitions. However, the argument will be made that sometimes the good of the country really should come before personal ambition.

If the Democrats move to impeach, there is a strong likelihood of considerable GOP support.

Of course, newspapers aren't running "Resign now" editorials because either they are quietly betting on Clinton, Edwards or Obama, or they, like Murdoch, are fighting a rearguard action for the neocons.

Yet a recent poll has disclosed that nearly 60 percent of Americans favor Congress immediately cutting off war funds.

Murdoch implicates Israel in 9/11

2007-05-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few telltale signs that the Israeli government had a covert hand in 9/11, but it's not so easy to conclude that this must be so. After all, any group clever enough to orchestrate such a fraud would be sure to scatter a bunch of false leads around.

However, the rising hysteria of Murdoch's crew to try to shame, browbeat and isolate people who see 9/11 as an inside job makes one wonder. Here is Murdoch, whose media have for years run interference for Israeli militants, also running interference for the 9/11 murderers by trying to shout down irrefutable facts proving an inside job -- by avoiding the facts and engaging in personal attacks against the man or woman. How does that look?

It looks as though Murdoch, a naturalized citizen, is working with his business colleague Baron Rothschild, the noted Zionist, to protect what are seen as Israeli interests.

True, no telling what Murdoch is really up to. But, his tactics certainly bring the neocon cause into disrepute and, by extension, cast a cloud over Israel's government.

Also, the Murdoch media's move to whip up diehard Bushites concerning the evil 9/11 truth backers serves Pentagon censors well. Now the Pentagon can use its ability to control "bad" computer sites and limit dissemination of 9/11 news while giving the impression that it's the whipped-up anti-9/11 crazies who are responsible. Cute, huh?

BTW, Murdoch hitman O'Reilly is blaming Soros for wickedly funding 9/11 truth activists. Gee, wish I could get some of that money. I have never received a dime for my work on 9/11 matters and, from what I can tell, there is a group which maneuvers behind the scenes to make sure I have nothing.

Really, O'Reilly is simply using a smear tactic to try to discredit the burgeoning 9/11 truth movement, which is largely a true American grassroots phenomenon. But, even if Soros did indeed channel money to some 9/11 truth groups, why shouldn't he?

The Murdoch press is also routinely accusing ultra-leftists of pushing for 9/11 truth and justice. However, 9/11 truth people have had to fight like the dickens against what appears to be a conspiracy in the left to ignore 9/11 truth.

Gee, with all those Wall Street Journal staffers signing an anti-Murdoch petition, do you think that maybe, just maybe, the paper, under its new editor, might start exposing some ugly facts concerning 9/11 coverups? I suppose that IS too much to ask.

Tenet's jibe at Rockefeller
In his memoir, Tenet pointedly notes that Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat, told the public that there was "unmistakable" evidence that Saddam posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction even though the secret National Intelligence Estimate said that the likelihood was very low that Saddam would use such weapons, other than if he were in desperate straits, such as a U.S. invasion.

Elsewhere, Tenet mentions that, in connection with Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame matter, he learned that Bush had quietly declassified part of the National Intelligence Estimate -- without saying what this information was. He plays totally dumb on the fact that Bush had declassified Plame's identity, supposedly, without telling him. Boy, that's loyalty!

So I can't help but wonder what faction he's allied with here. A faction that wants to protect Bush from impeachment maybe. It must be a pretty powerful clique, willing to put the onus on the neocons and Rockefeller, too.

No, I don't think Tenet could have published such a memoir without having some sort of a clique he thought he could rely on.

Two versions of 911blogger?
I just checked 911blogger for my posts and encountered an error message. And upon reviewing the blog, found that my post on Naomi Wolf was missing. I then went to the site by another route, and found it there alive and well.

Naturally, I can't help but wonder whether there is a government-sponsored game going on to limit distribution of some 911blogger submissions.

Noted feminist links Reichstag fire, 9/11

2007-05-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Have you seen feminist writer Naomi Wolf's piece on how to rip off democracy in 10 easy steps?

Wolf, a onetime aide to Bill Clinton's campaign, might have been writing for the Sons of Liberty or the Minutemen of King George's era. The Guardian first published her piece on April 24 and the Huffington Post blog reprinted it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064517,00.html.

As she points out, the Bush administration has taken every one of the steps that history shows constitute the prescription for tyranny.

Interestingly, Wolf draws a parallel between the Reichstag fire, which was an inside job "terrorist attack" used to implement Nazi controls, and the attacks of 9/11.

Wolf, who grew up in a liberal Jewish household, had a mystical experience with Jesus several years ago, but says that that experience only reinforced her commitment to the cause of women.

Edwards goes blank on WTC7
Tucson 9/11 Truth posted a video showing an exchange between a 9/11 truther and presidential candidate John Edwards. See it at 9/11blogger or Youtube.

Edwards didn't have a clue what "World Trade Center 7" meant until someone explained that it was the third trade center building that collapsed on 9/11.

The questioner is to be commended for bringing up the issue of WTC7 and noting that nothing much has been done on the matter. But, a somewhat uncomfortable Edwards could only say that his staff would get back to the questioner with an answer.

The problem was that the question was not precise enough and left plenty of waffle room, though it did bring out that a man who would be president is alarmingly ignorant of the basics of 9/11 and the big holes in the government story.

Had Tucson's 9/11 Truth Squad drafted two or three specific questions in advance, the result might have been less nebulous and more interesting. Even so, the confrontation is important and likely to have big consequences in the presidential maneuvering.

Though I generally -- but not invariably -- disdain media polls, I suppose we might mention that a recent poll shows that more than one in three Democrats was willing to say out loud that it appeared that 9/11 was an inside job. Hence, feigning ignorance or being ignorant on this subject seems like a bad move for a Democratic candidate during the primary phase, when wedge issues can make the difference.

Even GOP candidates must beware. Because later, Democrats will be voting in the "poll that counts" and rash rebuffs of 9/11 truth concerns might easily be played back during the general campaign.

Try something like this
There are numerous sharp questions that might be asked about specifics.

But here's a general question that forces a candidate to reveal his or her position and which may help stimulate debate:

Question: How would you rate the chance that 9/11 was an inside job? Zero-to-low, fair, or strong chance?

And, if needed, here's a follow-up:
Question: You say the chance was low, but how would you rate the chance that there is still a major cover-up of odd things that might be creating the impression of an inside job? For example, John Kerry has said World Trade Center 7 was demolished in a controlled fashion for safety reasons. But the official denial or silence on this point might be fueling speculation.

You gotta believe!

2007-05-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

Two things that need doing, urgently:

*9/11 truth squads should engage every presidential candidate. Good, to-the-point questions should be carefully phrased in advance and then posed to a candidate with the videocam running. The response should be posted on the net, of course.
Also, a short but concise set of 9/11 questions should be submitted to each candidate's staff and the answers, if any, posted.

*A circular letter should be drafted by several scientists who are well-known in their fields to the effect that the undersigned believe that government explanations regarding the events of 9/11 lack scientific credibility. The letter might also call for an international commission to investigate 9/11 that accepts no government funds.

Of course we cannot expect the two best-known activist groups of scientists to initiate any action concerning 9/11 coverup. Neither the Union of Concerned Scientists nor the American Federation of Scientists have lifted a finger in this matter. They will have to be brushed aside as vestiges of a bygone "Old Left" era.

The letter should avoid any particular conspiracy theory and focus on the fact of the major holes in the government account and the point that the government storyline does not meet minimal scientific standards. In that light, care should be taken, at least in the initial stages, of coalition-building.

Let us recall the fact that a large number of academic experts signed a circular sharply questioning the outcome of the 2004 presidential election and the "explanation" of the sharp statistical anomalies provided by the media-hired exit pollsters. The mainline media did not cover this group to any extent, though one or two activists landed a good interview here and there.

Yet, the word got out via the net and Congress is even now trying to require a means of auditing elections. That is, the activists bypassed the Maginot Line of the establishment press and, as a result, polling place fiddling was much more difficult to do in the recent midterms that put the Democrats in power. (Still, such fiddling may have limited the success of the Democrats.)

So, the point is, push for 9/11 truth AND justice! Believe right can prevail.

Psyop alert
A professional government psywar op is going on right now, whereby various ploys are being used to try to imply that active measures to hack and censor 9/11 news, books and blogs are the work of fanatical GOP partisans rather than the work of the Pentagon units that carried out 9/11 and are struggling to maintain control.

Perle's denial is shaky

2007-05-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

Perle told CNN Friday that Tenet was simply trying to shift the blame for 9/11 missteps to him but denied telling Tenet on Sept. 12 that Iraq would have to pay for the attacks. Perle denied having ever claimed that Iraq was responsible for the attacks.

However, someone sent me a transcript of a public statement the weekend after 9/11, in which Perle says that secret evidence, which perhaps might not meet a judicial standard, strongly indicated that Saddam had been conniving with al Qaeda and was involved in the attacks.

So Tenet's recollection may be off, but the substance of his representation of Perle's position is correct.

Google alerts 'restored'
The 9/11 alerts have been restored, but as I said previously, someone is finding ways to leave a lot out, it appears. More so than in the past.

Also, based on past experience, the alerts may capriciously stop again.

As reported previously, no White House email alerts went to any of my email addresses, despite efforts to get them sent. Then, when Card left the White House, they started up again, lasted for a month or two and then fell silent again. Perhaps I was nixed from the list because I rarely opened them. But that doesn't seem a very good reason. Most places wait till you unsubscribe before unsubscribing you.

Stupid 9/11 polls
As the 9/11 truth and justice movement gains adherents, we have polls of U.S. public opinion concerning what they believe. The latest avers that 35% of Democrats think Bush knew about 9/11 in advance while Republicans reject 9/11 conspiracy theories 7 to 1.

Such polls, though seemingly justified as presidential campaigning gears up, are stupid because the media think that it is OK to sample opinion for what the public believes without doing any investigative reporting that might inform the public and give it a firmer basis of belief. It's almost as if some polls represent a rearguard action by the opinion molders saying, well, we can still marginalize "conspiracy theorists" or, short of that, turn 9/11 truth into a "mere partisan game.

Perhaps a more interesting result came from the mad shoebomber (the Padilla) trial in Florida. There the judge asked prospective jurors whether they believed the government and the press were telling the truth about the 9/11 attacks. She expressed surprise at how many people were skeptical.

Another reason this is interesting is that the story got past the AP's state desk and went national. AP coverage of anything challenging the official line has been pretty much nonexistent. So many wire editors play it safe and don't run anything not highlighted in the AP news budget.

The antiwar lobby's missing WMD
The antiwar lobby, which did so much to push through the now-vetoed troop pullout deadline, is worried that Reid, Pelosi et al will capitulate to the White House on war funding, says today's NY Times.

I'd like to point out that, for the most part, the antiwar lobby has followed a leftist political decision to duck the issue of treason on 9/11. Yet this is a most important issue: Bush lacks the moral authority to wage war because of the fact that he is protecting a group of criminals who made 9/11 happen and then, by degrees, gained control of the mass media sufficiently to stanch the hemorrhage of news pointing to official complicity.

Sure, the antiwar leaders fears being smeared as conspiracy theorists, which is kind of silly in that they have no problem talking about all sorts of OTHER matters as if they are Bush administration conspiracies.

Yet, if the antiwar lobby is serious about halting the war, the weapon of mass political destruction should be fired: It's time to pressure the Democratic leadership concerning very serious holes in the official storyline.

Just do it.

Keller hires a dangerous man
Will Clark Hoyt have the power he once had as a top Knight Ridder editor who early on challenged the White House's Iraq war claims? Keller has named the 64-year-old to a two-year term as New York Times public editor.

Though he won't be directing news coverage, Hoyt may well have substantial influence. Just the act of hiring him sends a message to Times staff to get on the ball and start doing some old-fashioned hard-nosed questioning and digging.

Of course, it must be admitted that as a top establishment press editor, Hoyt WAS under control -- but just barely. Despite many brickbats from empty-headed "patriots," the Knight Ridder coverage established a record that would later haunt Bush and Cheney.

Of course, one must wonder whether the conservative investor who pushed through the cannibalization of Knight Ridder was ticked off at Hoyt for not playing the game.

Certainly Knight Ridder was as boxed in as the rest of the for-profit media about probing the realities of 9/11 versus the official myths. Whether Hoyt's hiring will have an impact that way remains to be seen.

Google 9/11 alerts halt

2007-05-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

I receive a daily alert from Google for 9/11 news and blog posts. As of May 2, none have been received. Other Google alerts halted the next day.
The Yahoo 9/11 news alerts are still arriving, though we'll know more tomorrow.
The Google alerts had become skimpier and skimpier anyway.
Posts from this blog never made it to the general 9/11 blog alert system (at least not that I saw).
Also, I have run across a number of very embarrassing -- for the feds -- news items that never made it to Google alert status. Also, I can't help thinking that some sources were pruned from the Google system once it was realized that I might be published by those sources.
That is, Google will publish my blog, but otherwise it takes active measures to limit my stuff and either takes or permits active measures to filter what I can see.
This isn't the first time alerts have halted.
In the weeks before 9/11, all Yahoo alerts concerning terrorism, the CIA and national security were blocked. Just froze up. And Yahoo alerts didn't begin again until I said on a journalism listserv that I assumed its alert service was fini. After a hiatus of several years, inexplicably, the alerts started showing up again about a year ago, I'd say.

Osama didn't mind whether brother died on 9/11...

2007-05-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

Osama bin Laden was "estranged" from his brother. So thus Osama really didn't mind whether his brother was within the target zone of the al Qaeda hijackers.

That seems to be the suggestion of ex-CIA chief George Tenet in his new book, At the Center of the Storm, which is evasive and fishy enough to be worthy of a top spook.

Tenet notes that when Flight 77 struck the Pentagon [I'm using the government's silly storyline here], Shafiq bin Laden was representing his billionaire family interests at the annual investor conference of the Carlyle Group at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.

Didn't the feds tell us that an intended target of Flight 93 was the White House or the Capitol building (likewise not too far down the Washington mall from the conference)?

Well, sure some brothers ARE spiteful enough not to find a way to give a brother a heads-up to stay away from D.C. and New York on Sept. 11. BUT, Osama had good relations with his mom, whom he chit-chatted with on his cell phone shortly before 9/11, the government claims. Had Shafiq been killed or injured in the attacks, what would his mother have thought of Osama? In fact, what would his al Qaeda comrades thought of him?

Maybe Osama was enough of a probabilist to figure that the chance of his brother being struck was fairly low. Yet, surely Osama would have realized the possibility of death or harm from secondary effects, such as getting crushed by a panicked crowd.

Well, before Shafiq could be questioned publicly, he was spirited out of the country on White House orders.

Tenet vouches for the 9/11 yarn told by the 9/11 commission, but seems to be trying to put the lion's share of the blame for the Iraq war on a few now-well-known neocons, specifically Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Scotter Libby.
He says that initially Bush and his top aides had little enthusiasm for striking Iraq in retaliation for 9/11.

So, if the poop does hit the fan with respect to 9/11, Tenet will be able to say it was some neocons in the Pentagon that outplotted the CIA.

Let's think back to June 2002. That's when public disclosures put the CIA and the entire security apparatus in great danger of being torn apart limb from limb. Soon thereafter, Bush made a big show of "doing something" about security with his "homeland security" reorganization plan.

But, that wasn't quite enough and as Bush mulled with advisers during the hot Texas August in Crawford, we began to hear intimations that war with Iraq was brewing. Once September rolled around, it had become inevitable, with the war tom-toms going full blast. Nothing like a war to save the system, as occurred following the JFK murder.

As Tenet says, "everything changed" after 9/11 and so the official policy of regime change in Iraq was now translatable into a war of offense.

So then, what was the real motive for 9/11? Very likely "the group" feared losing power under a weak (before 9/11) president and favored a powerplay to control the nation with a greatly-strengthened Pentagon as its base.

Surely some neocons found such a scenario appetizing. But there are others, whom Tenet is shielding (including to a great extent, Bush). For example, a shadowy element of the hard left is running interference for the 9/11 murderers. What group do you suppose that might be, given the history of the 20th century and the maneuvers to rob democracies of liberty?

Psst... we're going to blame Iraq for 9/11

2007-05-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't read ex-CIA chief Tenet's new book, though perhaps I will at least scan it.

The LA Times quotes Tenet as saying that the day after 9/11 he ran into Richard Perle coming out of the White House and that the neocon insider snapped that Iraq would have to pay for the attacks.

Tenet says he wonders what Perle, an unsalaried adviser to the Pentagon with important media connections, was doing at the White House but that he never received an answer.

"One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war on Iraq became inevitable," Tenet wrote.

This comes in light of another recent report that a big U.S. airbase was quietly built in Qatar in preparation for an air war against Iraq -- well before 9/11.

And Newsweek quoted ex-9/11 panel executive director Zelikow doing his best to undermine Tenet's credibility. Zelikow surely had a strong hand in the craftily written 9/11 coverup report.

Another physicist assails official 9/11 story

2007-04-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

Draft 5

Crockett Grabbe, a longtime physics professor at the University of Iowa, is convinced that the twin towers and a third World Trade Center building were felled by explosives.

In an exclusive interview with INN World Report's Lenny Charles, the physicist, who has done research for NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory, disputed an argument by a government physicist, Manuel Garcia, that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 had been brought down by fires weakening key points.

Garcia's article may be found in Counterpunch. The Grabbe interview is available via innworldreport.net. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has yet to complete its inquiry into WTC7's collapse. For more background on Garcia's views, see Scientists clash over 9/11 collapses at 911science.blogspot.com (link at right).

Grabbe endorsed an argument by Steven Jones, recently retired as a Brigham Young University physics professor, that the quantity of melted steel found at the trade center sites indicated the use of a Thermite-type explosive. The fires in the buildings did not pack enough energy to melt steel, he said. The NIST has also said the fires were insufficient to melt steel, but said nothing about much molten steel found on site.

The physicist, who has been listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, said if collapse of the 47-story WTC7 was initiated as Garcia theorized, it should have fallen chaotically -- not symmetrically nor so swiftly. Additionally, Grabbe argued that though there may have been enough thermal energy for Garcia's model, there wasn't enough power -- the rate at which energy is expended -- to account for the quick, symmetrical collapse.

Grabbe also said that the top block of World Trade Center 2, the first building to fall, had too little energy to knock down the entire building. The laws of the conservation of momentum seem to have been violated in the government theory, he said, an argument previously made by David L. Griscom, a former government physicist who once worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (See the "politics" link on Griscom's consulting firm web page http://www.impactglassresearchinternational.com)

Grabbe cited a number of "squibs" -- puffs of smoke -- prior to collapse in each building that he called direct evidence for the use of explosives. He also said the idea that the twin towers had each fallen as a result of compression from gathering momentum had only a very remote probability of truth. The NIST offered no explanation for most of the puffs.

Grabbe, like Garcia, specializes in plasma physics and has a number of recent research papers to his credit. Grabbe is also an expert in the earth's magnetic field, an area of endeavor important to space technology and hence to NASA and the Pentagon.

In the era of the "Star Wars" debate, Grabbe wrote a book on space weapons, an area where plasma physics is important. In the INN interview, the scientist never brought up the possibility that the buildings were destroyed with Star Wars particle beam weaponry, a conjecture put forward by a few people with academic credentials.

Professors push against 9/11 coverup

2007-04-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

An increasing number of professors and experts are challenging the official claims about the attacks of 9/11.
Thanks to the georgewashington blog for putting together a good piece on that point, with many useful links.

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2006/09/jones.html

The latest is a physics prof in Iowa. More on him later, hopefully.

How to counter Giuliani on 9/11

2007-04-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

So Giuliani says that a Democrat as president would increase the risk of another 9/11.

Giuliani is the former federal prosecutor, who, as mayor, took no notice of the failure to preserve the physical evidence of the trade center collapses. NIST probers later lamented that they had little to go on since almost all the steel had been hurriedly shipped overseas as scrap. In fact, as mayor, Giuliani had to have been deeply involved in that process.

As a former federal prosecutor, it is impossible that he doesn't know that 9/11 was an inside job and that, at most, al Qaeda operatives were low-level pawns. Clearly he feels that "the system" won't call him on his baloney.

Yet, the best antidote to Giuliani is a congressional focus on the unresolved questions concerning 9/11. Sure, right now the Democrats think that the Iraq war issue suffices for their political purposes. However, it's easy enough to go from debunking the official WMD myths that led to the Iraq war to debunking the official 9/11 myths that were used to pave the way to that war.

Yes, the corporate press won't touch the 9/11 issue right now. BUT, in the heat of a presidential campaign, the "inside job" issue may just go mainstream (although, in fact, it is mainstream if you go by what a significant portion of the public believes).

Troubled Times and missing news

2007-04-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Times company is under fire from dissident investors for a lackluster return on their dollar.

Hassan Elmasry, of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, led a symbolic no-vote protest at the annual shareholders meeting. More than 42 percent of Class A shares were represented by the dissident shareholders and more than half these dissidents were not part of the Ochs-Sulzberger family which controls the board.

Some may say that the Times' troubles are all about technicalities of the media market.

But then again, consider the news that the editors, who are controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, regularly bypass, such as a great deal of heavy-duty stuff about 9/11. The educated public is becoming increasingly skeptical of the Times as a reliable source. Also, so much news is buried or ignored these days that the news columns have become boring.

Recall John Kerry's recent disclosure that he had inside information that World Trade Center 7 had been felled by controlled demolition for safety reasons. This is shocking, in that the NIST claims it has no knowledge of such a controlled demolition and is trying to come up with an alternative scenario that, from what we know at present, would have done Rube Goldberg proud.

Go to the Times search engine and try to find that story. Nada.
No follow-up. No questions of the senator, the NIST, others in Congress, the FBI. Zilch.
That's a pathetic result for a NEW YORK newspaper, in particular.

Now suppose you are Elmasry or another investor who lives and works in New York and who personally knew a number of colleagues who were killed on 9/11, wouldn't you be hopping mad? Though these investors may feel that they can't talk about the editorial content, surely at least some of them must be thinking about the Times' role in shielding a certain group from inspection of its 9/11 activities.

A perplexing incident

2007-04-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

A reader writes,

Paul,
Something very odd just happened when I clicked on the link to access your site [this blog, concerning the Kerry disclosure]. I have broadband now, I wait for the window to pop open. Well, it did pop open, but for a couple of blinks of the eye it wasn't your site -- it was a page that had a military or police type emblem in the middle with a four- or five-figure number underneath it, some lines of copy under that... but I'm giving you an impression of an impression. It definitely looked "official." Then the window went dark and your site popped open. I am not making this up.

Kerry: WTC7 felled by controlled demolition

2007-04-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

It has just come to my attention that John Kerry has recently told a questioner that it was his understanding that World Trade Center 7 was brought down by controlled demolition because of a danger of a wall collapsing.

A video is found at
http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/220407_kerry_wtc7.html

This brings us back to my previous assertions that lawmakers apparently were told that WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition but that that fact was kept quiet for "national security reasons" (i.e., because the public might then suspect that the twin towers were likewise demolished).

So now we have the NIST, which after all these years, is still studying the collapse, saying it has found no evidence of controlled demolition in the WTC7 collapse -- thus contradicting the statements of the owner, Larry Silverstein, and of a presidential candidate, John Kerry.

See the Kerry video at http://www.newcitizenship.net

Now you may say that you can accept the idea that WTC7 was demolished for security or safety reasons but that the action was kept quiet because of problems of public perception. But here we have again the issue of a government which fibs to the people, as occurred with respect to WMDs and the run-up to the Iraq war.

So will the NIST, or its contractor studying the collapse, be sure to interview Kerry or at least send his office a request for more information? What about the FBI? Will it interview Kerry as to where he got that information? Or maybe the FBI was actually a source of that information.

Note: Kerry's general comments show a disinclination to vouch for a 9/11 conspiracy. His comment about WTC7, in fact, is aimed at a "reasonable" explanation of collapse. However, he very well may not have realized that he was disclosing confidential information. He could well have forgotten that he had been briefed on a national security basis.

Winnipeg Sun editor vents 9/11 skepticism

2007-04-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

The quest for a truthful international inquiry into 9/11 got a boost from the editor of the Winnipeg Sun.

In a column published Wednesday, John Gleeson argued that the controlled demolition theory of the collapse of the trade center towers "has won persistent support from engineers and academics from other disciplines."

In a discussion of the work of various academics who favor a "inside job" scenario, Gleeson said, "You can see why these scholars are calling for an independent, preferably international investigation."

The editor cast such academics as David Ray Griffin, the theologian turned 9/11 skeptic, in a favorable light.

To read Gleeson's column, go to
http://www.winnipegsun.com and search: gleeson, 9/11

BTW, I have updated my energy calculations for the World Trade Center collapses and have found that the collapse of the top block onto the bottom provided, in each case, five orders of magnitude less energy than the energy that should have been available for the resistance force.

Please see my "The case of the missing energy" at blog http://kryptograff.blogspot.com

I specifically request that engineers and physicists check my calculations and see whether I am right. I will gladly publish the comments of any professional on this matter. And, if convinced I am in error, I will pull the post. But, so far, it looks good to me.

Ex-Scientific American writer a 9/11 skeptic

2007-04-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

The post on the GOP insider is just below this one.

Maybe it's because he is Canadian. Maybe it's because he is now a professor emiritus.
But why does a man like A.K. Dewdney get the brush-off from U.S. politicians?

Dewdney, a longtime professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario, has written a slew of popular math books and been a regular contributor to Scientific American. At least one of his books has been re-issued by Springer-Verlag, a well-known publisher of mathematical books.

Then one day Dewdney had the bright idea of testing whether cell phone calls reputedly from jetliners hijacked on 9/11 were a likely possibility.

What he found was that cell phone usability decreased with increasing altitude. But even at lower altitudes, contact was only intermittent.

Obviously, this finding brings into question the official accounts, especially the accounts of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania. In fact, I once saw an internet report that quoted a telephone company spokesperson as expressing puzzlement about the purported high-altitude cell calls, which were made reputedly in addition to the airphone calls made by some passengers.

Dewdney specialized in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science. In latter years, he focused on computer modeling of biological phenomena.

I think -- but am not positive -- that Dewdney went public with his early cell phone experiment soon before he retired. Dewdney is another example of the "old guy phenomenon," whereby professionals who have retired, and presumably have little to lose professionally, speak out about 9/11 deception.

His credentials are found at
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/faculty/akd/akd.html
http://www.csd.uwo/ca./faculty/akd/PERSONAL/hp.html

His site devoted to debunking official 9/11 myths is found at
http://physics911.net/
and his cell phone report is found at
http://physics911.net/projectachilles

GOP insider: 9/11 fit White House plan

2007-04-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency.

In his book "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP" [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war.

Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats.

The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast guardsmen may have fired on a U.S. destroyer.

Citing a 1998 neocon letter to President Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq, Gold says that once Bush gained office war was a foregone conclusion. "There would be regime change in Iraq. All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"

Bill Kristol, editor of the Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, is a leading neocon.
In 1898, the battleship Maine inexplicably blew up in Havana Harbor and the Hearst press led a cry for war against Spain, though Spain's complicity in the incident was unlikely.

Gold said that, even with 9/11, war against Iraq was a hard sell, and the WMD deception was necessary. He takes pains to point out the holes in the official WMD line and has some acerbic comments about Israel's low-profile responses to this alleged threat.

Gold is a Goldwater conservative, having served as press aide to Goldwater and later to Spiro Agnew. In the 1980s, Gold was a senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush and co-wrote a book with him. Gold also describes himself as a friend of the Bush family.

Gold applauds Goldwater's response to Jerry Falwell as someone the GOP should have kicked in the pants and laments the influence of "theo-cons" in the GOP. An oustpoken faction of the religious right, especially those with TV access, have promoted a strong backing of the state of Israel based on certain interpretations of scripture.

Gold's stinging rebuke of the current state of GOP affairs is part of a growing chorus of noted Republicans who express severe dissatisfaction with the younger Bush.
However, Democrats are in no mood to begin impeachment proceedings, seeing little partisan gain. Thus, unless more GOP critics are more forthright about 9/11 suspicions, impeachment or forced resignation seems unlikely.

Dispute over Pentagon crash data

2007-04-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Data released to a 9/11 truth group contradict official claims about a jetliner crashing into the Pentagon, the group says.

Pilots for 9/11 Truth says that its examination of data released by the National Transportation Safety Board disclosed the following points:

. The altitude data show the aircraft was on a trajectory that would have brought it at least 300 feet above light poles that were reportedly struck.

. The rate of descent wouldn't permit the jet to have both clipped the two light poles and been caught on the FBI's "five-frames" surveillance video.

. The NTSB record of data halts at least one second before the official time of impact.

. If the data trends are continued, the aircraft would have passed 100 feet over the Pentagon roof.

The group includes pilots and other aircraft industry professionals with many hours of flight time.

Their press release is found at
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24288.shtml
If link fails, try http://axisoflogic.com and search "pilots for 9/11 truth"

Hopefully, the group will publish their specific analysis rather than just the conclusions.

WTC7 probers studying controlled demolition

2007-04-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

The government is still having a heck of a problem solving the mystery of World Trade Center 7's collapse.

In March 2006, the NIST granted Applied Research Associates, a defense constractor, a contract to come up with a computer simulation of the collapse, based on NIST input data. The NIST specified that ARA was to use only the input data provided by the government.

But, the ARA scientists were, it seems, not happy and came back to NIST and obtained contract revisions. In Jan 2007, the NIST authorized ARA to study "impact damage and fire effects" on its own and also to determine whether a blast or series of blasts might have brought down the building. NIST says it finds "no evidence of controlled demolition" but, ARA apparently needs to know whether blasts of certain magnitudes could have done the job.

Now, why didn't NIST consider studying such blast scenarios for the other two buildings? Well, they were hoping to evade that chore for WTC7, but evidently ARA just wouldn't play along. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that ARA will be permitted to say, well yes, the building most likely was felled by explosives.

Yet I can bet that the ARA experts dread the idea of being accused of scientific flimflam and demanded the right to study the explosives scenario. Let's be aware that the FEMA probers pointedly said that their best scenario for WTC7's collapse had only a "low probability." Of course, they didn't mention controlled demolition, but they clearly suspected it.

And ARA surely knows how lame is the probe of the twin tower collapses in that NIST did no work to examine the possibility of controlled demolition -- even though its experts had quite a lot of difficulty coming up with a model that led to collapse and eventually settled on one with highly dubious hidden assumptions.

My own calculations (see my post on WTC energy sums on http://kryptograff.blogspot.com) show a huge energy deficit between the energy needed to fell the building and the energy available from gravitational collapse.
I'd be glad if a professional engineer or physicist would check my calculations and let me know the result.

Bush bunch suspends laws of physics
I've noticed that many of the 9/11 debunkers are the same sorts of people who disingenuously debunked the oil industry's contribution to global warming. These folks exploited relatively minor differences of opinion among experts, along with the malformed opinions of some amateurs, in order to create the false impression that scientists were very iffy about the oil industry's part in the hot-house effect.

Also, some of these debunkers would engage in ad hominem attacks (against the person) when the scientific evidence was inconvenient. That's certainly a standard tactic of many of those who seem over-anxious to prove there was no inside conspiracy.

Now suppose I am correct about the energy deficits in the collapses of the twin towers.
It's not impossible of course for a small amount of energy to initiate the collapse of a high-energy system. It's known as the butterfly effect. Or think of a small boxcutter, properly placed and used, able to take a human life.

However, how would a small amount of energy carry high destructive power in the case of a 400-meter-tall Manhattan skyscraper? There are only two ways that I can think of:

1. A critical structural flaw (which I'll call the "keystone effect").

2. Resonance vibration, such as is believed to have brought down the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1940.

However, the NIST did not identify any critical structural flaw for WTC1 or WTC2 of the type that would have resulted in an obvious collapse scenario (though comments were made about various design issues). Some modern buildings have a "keystone" but it's for show; no high-rise uses a keystone. In fact, high-rises tend to be built with plenty of damage-control redundancy.

As for resonance, the NIST examined the sway factor of the building and did not find that the impact of a jetliner would have provided sufficient oscillation to cause much problem.

Remember, no engineer in the world builds a steel structure that doesn't take into account the resonance frequency of the structure. I have a physics textbook which shows huge dampers inside Citicorp's Manhattan tower. These dampers tend to reduce the energy of each oscillation, so that even if the building vibrates momentarily at its resonance frequency, the amplitude and frequency will be quickly damped.

So then, though it is not utterly impossible that one tower collapsed because of a fluke combination of force interactions, it is quite unlikely. And for a SECOND tower to fall as a result of some other fluke combination of forces is far less likely.

So, in the case of the twin towers, it would appear that the Bush bunch has suspended the law of conservation of energy (which is sometimes called the first law of thermodynamics).

Well, perhaps at least in the case of WTC7 there is a clear "keystone" structural flaw. As the NIST's chief investigator Sunder has said, that 47-story building could have collapsed if only one column had been compromised. Once that column gave, the whole structure would, supposedly, have crashed at near the free-fall rate.

However, FEMA experts were very doubtful that the building, which housed the CIA's New York station along with Pentagon offices, could have been brought down by fire alone.

My reading of the FEMA and NIST reports suggests that WTC7's big puzzle -- realizing that much information is either missing or being passed over in official silence -- is how the fuel oil managed to pool for several hours before a high-intensity fire ignited.

Here's why:

1. The pumping system would have had a routine spill failsafe, whereby a plunger in a moat lifts a shutoff switch when that moat fills with fluid. No explanation is available of why that shutoff system supposedly failed.

2. The Fire Department quickly shut off power throughout the WTC complex, so no outside-source electricity was available to power the pump bringing fuel-oil up from a ground-level tank. Hence, the building's emergency generator would have been needed to power the pump. Yet, for the emergency generator to work, fuel oil sent via that pump or some other pump seems to have been necessary, though, again, the schematics are missing,

So then, apparently we have the pump supplying fuel to the generator which in turn supplies electricity to the pump, in a closed cycle. The U.S. Patent Office won't accept patent applications for perpetual motion machines, but evidently such a device works in a top-secret building. Must be some advanced DARPA stuff, I guess.

Scientists have the means to measure how long it would take such a system to cease functioning (not long, in this case, I suspect). They use calculations based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that a system that does work always dissipates some energy, which is why perpetual motion machines can't operate in our world.

[Insert, April 4, 2007] This all is somewhat confusing, and I don't have my copies of the relevant reports at hand right now.

But, what we have is this: the upper-floor day tank did not hold enough fuel oil for a fire with sufficient thermal energy to compromise the steel support. So, to escape the explosives scenario, the idea was that fuel was being pumped up from the ground-level tank and was spilling out for hours, thus forming a large enough pool to bring enough energy to bear. Isn't it convenient that the spill sensor didn't work and shut off the supply?

Now in order for the pump to keep drawing up fuel from below, a sensor in the day tank would have had to have taken a continuous low reading, meaning it would have to have been drained continually, so apparently the leak occurred at or after that point in the system.

My thinking is that the emergency generator was fed fuel from the day tank. So a day's supply of fuel would keep the generator busy all day with no problems of circularity. However, if the day tank was being emptied rapidly and being replenished by being pumped up from below, then we have circularity, in which the second law of thermodynamics appears to have been suspended.

So there we have it: The Bush bunch has suspended the first and second laws of thermodynamics in the interests, I suppose, of national security.

Seismic issues
I first drew attention to problems with the available fall time data on my page
"Trade center collapse times: omissions and disparities" at http://angelfire.com/ult/newzone/fallrates.html
The data are essentially based on readings of the Lamont-Doherty Near Earth Observatory seismograms. But the seismographic data is somewhat iffy, giving a reading of 8 seconds for WTC2, 10 seconds for WTC1 and 18 seconds for WTC7.
Now I am not a seismologist and I wish to cast no aspersions on Lamont-Doherty's experts.
However, given that ascertaining of correct fall times should have been high priority, one wonders why the FBI, NIST and others did not reach out to the seismographic systems run by the federal government. The feds run a worldwide system of seismographs that were emplaced to detect underground nuclear explosions. But, of course, that's not all they're good for. Also, the U.S. Geological Survey is a hub of seismographic analysis.
Now if there was any fuzziness in the Lamont-Doherty data, the normal thing, I would think, would be to check it against everybody else's data. Sophisticated computer programs are able to compare the input of a large number of stations to arrive at fairly accurate results.
Yes, perhaps such an attempt wouldn't have improved the data. But there is no record of such an attempt being made.
Here's something else of interest: Seismographs are now so sensitive that they can detect human footsteps meters away. So even though the surface waves were weak by seismic standards, one suspects that they weren't so weak as not to be detected for quite some distance by military seismographs.
Anyway, the real issue is that the fall time record has been given the brush-off by the Bush bunch and its flunkies.

Who are the 9/11 conspirators?

2007-03-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Among them are those who control AOL/Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Walt Disney, Liberty Media, News Corp., Gannett, Bertelsmann, Vivendi, Universal and Sony.
Our news media are largely dominated by these corporations.

Learn who really controls these companies and you'll know who has agreed to protect the conspirators. As you can see, it wouldn't take very many people to agree to a cover-up.

Of course, this isn't the whole story, but it will give you an idea of how it's done.

I notice also that the more credibility the 9/11 truth movement gains, the more organized seems to be the "independent" reaction. Wonder who's funding all thse 9/11 deniers.

Griffin targets 9/11 energy deficit issue

2007-03-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have just read a review of David Ray Griffin's latest book, "Debunking 9/11 Debunkers" and would like to check it out.

My thinking has been in the past that not every point made by Griffin is convincing, but that some of his facts are irrefutable.

The review, by Paul Craig Roberts, appears in Information Clearinghouse (google it) and is quite positive. I plan to read the Griffin book ASAP.

One point that Roberts mentioned is that Griffin had determined that there was a major energy deficit in the collapse of the WTC towers. That is, he had determined that gravitational energy was insufficient to bring down the buildings.

Griffin is a theologian with many well regarded books to his credit unrelated to 9/11. I have noted a technical error or two in his first book, but I would hope that he has consulted with engineers and-or physicists on this matter.

Anyway, if you'll take a look at my kryptograff.blogspot.com and look at my piece on energy sums, you'll see that there appears to be a serious problem here.

A serving of crow

2007-03-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

OK. Time to eat crow and take my paranoia meds.

A fellow journalist tells me that a lot of freelance work was taken offline after a court decision protecting the digital rights of free lances. So, I can't say the Times set out to make me a liar by blocking access to my byline articles.

Actually, I never thought my work for the Times was any big deal. But I got fed up with certain people questioning whether I had ever been a working journalist and so I bannered the Times connection atop my blog.

My son found an old Times clip of mine, and I'll be happy to send along a copy upon request. The article is nothing special; the only point of making it available is to affirm that I am, or at least was, a "real" reporter.

Times makes me a liar

2007-03-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

I have just checked the New York Times web archives for my byline "Roger Conant." Nada. None of my old 1980s stories show though all sorts of rinky dink does show.
Cute. Well, what else would I expect?

WTC numbers look funny

2007-03-02T15:27:00.000-08:00

I have just completed energy calculations for the World Trade Center's two main towers which seem to imply that in each case the collapse should have petered out after a few floors.
Please see http://kryptograff.blogspot.com
for more detail.

Mood swings at Downing Street?

2007-02-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Downing Street web site seems to be having mood swings. Yes you can comment on the PM's question time. No you can't. It's an on again-off again thing.

Sometimes Blair's web site directs one to the They Work for You transcript which offers a comment option. Then again, sometimes it directs one to the Parliament's official transcript service, which offers no such option.

A look at some recent links shows the comment option restored (see previous posts) but then dropped again for the most recent question time.

Not sure what's going on. One can imagine all sorts of political pressures, especially in that Blair is getting ready to step aside.

Well, in lieu of posting something on They Work for You, I'll just mention here that I have improved my argument on 9/11 collapse times

http://kryptograff.blogspot.com

whereby I clarify the physical model.

Whitewater rafting

2007-02-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

The ethics of Whitewater are back, it seems, with Billary scooping up millions from special interest groups for Bill's essentially worthless speeches.
Oil interests, communists, sleazy operators... doesn't matter. You pay, he'll gab.
It's just good old fashioned Whitewater enterprise...
It's also the ethical base which allows The Great Feminist to send Americans to war based on false pretenses.
See John Solomon's Washington Post report and Cal Thomas's column.

Why did Bush let Miller rot?

2007-02-21T07:19:00.000-08:00

Let's take Bush and Cheney at their word, and accept that Bush secretly declassified Valery Plame's CIA status during a White House huddle with Cheney.

Some questions come to mind:

When there were calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the apparent breach of national security, why didn't Bush or Cheney step forward and spare everyone the bother of a major investigation by simply saying that Bush had declassified Plame's status? Rather, we discover that the White House decided to keep the declassification order secret from the CIA, as well as everyone else. (See Jim Rutenberg's New York Times story of Feb. 20.)

BUT, the White House was putting out statements that the leak investigation was a very, very serious matter -- while Bush and Cheney all the while knew that no crime had been committed. It seems pretty obvious that they were thinking about their political position, and not about the truth.

So Patrick Fitzgerald turns out to be a tougher nut than they perhaps expected and reporters are grilled about the "leak."

Judith Miller of the Times spent three months in jail before finally caving. Yet, Bush and Cheney kept silent, even though they knew that no crime had been committed.
Was it too much to expect that Bush would step up to the plate and admit to declassifying Plame's status BEFORE Miller went to jail?

Even had Fitzgerald tried to keep her locked up anyway, Times lawyers would have been in federal court urging her release based on the point that if no crime had been committed, then Fitzgerald had no need to know the names of sources.

But instead, Bush and Cheney let Miller rot. And, for good measure, her career was terminated based in large part on the turmoil that stemmed from an unseemly conspiracy of silence by Bush, Cheney, Libby and others.

HOWEVER, as soon as it appeared that Fitzgerald might have enough to draw the vice president into the legal wringer, blam: oh, no crime was committed. Let's drop the whole thing.

But by then it was too late in the game and Fitzgerald had enough on Libby to indict him for perjury.

Now, again, assuming that Bush and Cheney did not commit perjury at the last minute, one must wonder about the character of men who ask Americans to brave battle peril but who themselves haven't the courage to right a grievous injustice when it was clearly in their power to do so.

Curiously, the media haven't made much of this point or of the fact that reporters and news organizations were unnecessarily put through the wringer over a crime that Bush secretly knew never occurred.

Also, when Libby or somebody "leaked" this data about Plame to a reporter, that reporter had to sweat whether he should risk charges about breaking the story --which Miller didn't -- even though no crime had been committed. Even by Washington standards, what we have here is unparalleled cynicism.

Congress has been pretty lame about these issues also. But these are serious issues. Are these the type of people entrusted with a global struggle against terrorism?

This little White House tale has a credibility quotient on a par with White House claims about WMDs and about who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Postscript A: Oh yes, what does this attitude have to say about fair play for the Guantanamo detainees? Clearly, if the Bush bunch has no qualms about an American suffering unjustly when their political needs come first, what kind of chances would they give to foreigners? Habeas corpus may be a technical term, but that term embodies a principle: a person should not be jailed without good faith protections of basic rights.

Postscript B: Plainly, we have a very strong case for the impeachment and removal of both Cheney and Bush. Provably, both severely abused, for mere personal gain, the national security authority entrusted to them during a period of national crisis. However, some Democrats don't want this scenario to play out as it should -- because their personal ambitions would be thwarted. If Bush and Cheney were removed, that would leave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as interim president and a likely Democratic presidential nominee for the full term. Hillary would be beside herself, and John Edwards would be none too happy either. Yet, what these men did is so low that it is really impossible that they should remain as leaders of a respected nation.

A call for airtime to rebut BBC

2007-02-21T07:15:00.000-08:00

9/11 truth groups in England and in America should be pressing the BBC to permit a responsible rebuttal of the cheap-shot broadcast smearing 9/11 skeptics by associating them with the silliest theories.
That's about as logical as insisting that airplanes can't fly beceause a lot of people have weird theories about UFOs.
What is needed is equal air time in the same time slot and a professionally done documentary-style rebuttal.
If the BBC refuses to permit a rebuttal, then that point should be constantly mentioned.

Proud to be censored about 9/11 truth

2007-02-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

I get, at a Yahoo email address, Google alerts of blog posts concerning 9/11.
Recently I got one posted by a New York cab driver, which is cool.
However, my blog posts concerning 9/11 never show up.
Guess someone doesn't want my observations getting around too much.
Must be that the 9/11 truth hurts.

That reminds me: Zero comments showed up on this blog for a long time. But when I was fiddling with the system, I suddenly discovered some comments that hadn't been visible to me. The control panel claimed that this had been a consequence of my decision. So anyway, those comments that I saw are now visible below.
However, the comments have gone back to zero. In other words, when I accidentally found some comments, they were permitted to remain. But no others show up. My conclusion is that comments are routinely barred by a clandestine force.

Anyway, Islamic scholar Kevin Barrett quotes Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies program and an expert on Bin Laden, as saying that the famous Bin Laden confession tape of 2001 is a fake.

http://911blogger.com/node/6317

Treason charge scalds Hillary

2007-02-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

If sending America's young men and women to a war launched on false pretenses isn't treason, then I don't know what treason is.

Sure, the antiwar faction of the Democratic Party is too polite for that particular descriptive. Yet when the senator from New York faces continuous challenges about her pro-war vote in 2002, is she not forced to contend with the issue of treason?

As she campaigns for the party's presidential nomination, she has been cornered by the antiwar group which asks why she doesn't apologize for the vote and admit to a mistake.

Her response is that she was misled by faulty prewar intelligence on Saddam's alleged WMD stockpile. Funny that other attentive Americans were not misled. Also, she surely knew how baseless was the White House propaganda implying that Saddam was somehow linked to the attacks of 9/11.

But as neocon Paul Wolfowitz once effectively admitted, the WMD issue was a political ploy meant to get waverers on board the war wagon. Hillary knew the 9/11 link was phony, but she had political cover with the WMD link.

The point is that Hillary, along with numerous others, knew that Americans were being sent to war, in part, based on false claims about 9/11, claims hoked up by Murdoch's Fox News. I am quite sure she doesn't see her vote as an act of treason. Yet she surely knew that Americans, and Iraqis, would die based on hyped-up, phony claims.

On the other hand, her war vote stood her in good stead with her onetime nemisis, Rupert Murdoch, who started publicly making nicey with the Clintons. The naturalized media mogul, of course, has a cold-fish view of Americans, as is obvious from his soulless propaganda machines.

Now one may take the position that he or she is unsure about whether 9/11 was an inside job. But, can such a person easily dispute that the Bush bunch's cold-blooded misuse of that atrocity in order to send Americans to war is -- calling a spade a spade -- treason?

Recall that though it was Dick Cheney who specified unverifiable links between Saddam and 9/11, it was Bush who not only didn't repudiate Cheney's claims, but capitalized on them by repeatedly invoking 9/11 whenever beating the war tom-toms against Iraq.

We also know that Bush was not sincere about the reasons for the war because U.S. troops are still there. Yet, the publicly stated mission has been accomplished. Saddam was removed from power and Iraq poses no threat as to weapons of mass destruction.

So, clearly, Bush had and has a hidden agenda in Iraq.

So there it is: Hillary threw in with treason for political gain and is now trying to squirm out of that awful taint.

Obviously, she believed that the mass media would remain closely tethered, perhaps by her ally, the Israeli lobby. But, though the media remain constricted, there is still some fight left, unfortunately for her.

Postscript: Dick Morris says in a Feb. 23 column that Edwards dared to express the view that silence on Iraq was "betrayal" and that "Clinton gunslinger" Howard Wolfson then blasted Edwards for negative campaigning.

Libby's dirty little secret

2007-02-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

"National security" was abused in a White House plot to discredit an effective critic, according to I. Lewis Libby's testimony.

Libby, former national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he, Cheney and President Bush had conspired to blacken the reputation of Joseph Wilson, a diplomat who blew the whistle on the fact that the White House was using a discredited claim about Iraqi attempts to go nuclear.

Libby, a longtime Washington insider and ally of the neocon contingent, was the lawyer who helped push through President Clinton's last-second pardon of Marc Rich, the influential Israeli-American wanted for illegaly trading with the enemy at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Libby seems to have thought that it was normal politics to conspire to misuse national security against critics. National security was misused in two ways: the identity of Valery Plame Wilson as a CIA operative was disclosed; and the White House was supposed to have been protected by a special national security understanding with representatives of the elite media.

Bush's probable involvement in this conspiracy to destroy a man and woman while hiding behind a national security screen is indicated by the fact that he somehow declassified Plame's identity without consulting anyone much. Certainly Plame didn't know her identity had been declassified. Now if Bush declassified Plame's identity, why did her identity have to be anonymously leaked? Clearly, we have political conspiracy cloaked behind national security.

So who else did the Gang of Three (make that Gang of N), using their national security advantage, conspire to politically neutralize?

Hard to say for sure. But, do we doubt that there have been many such nasty little plots?

In fact, yours truly is not quite a "public figure" but would not the White House perceive this experienced newsman's activities as threatening? It's true that the names of investigative reporters and columnists do not usually appear in the political debate (at least prior to the Plame matter) and so from that standpoint the fact that both politicians and media elite seem to ignore me is not terribly surprising.

Yet how does the White House's national security politics unit handle journalists that imperil the President's political well-being. Well, if need be Bush will call up the editor and push to have a story killed.

Suppose there is no editor to call up? In that case, such a journalist will have few friends in high places and all sorts of nasties may be OKd. And of course the Washington media will be expected to keep quiet ... in the name of national security.

'Real ID' backlash and 9/11 truth

2007-02-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

A backlash is building against the federal law to require every state to adhere to the "real ID" form of driver license, which includes a chip that carries vital information.
Supposedly these cards can't be counterfeited. Of course, following the darwinian imperative, crooks and terrorists will find a way.
States say the new ID costs are prohibitive and there is fear of identity theft from people with electronic surveillence gear.
I like to think that a thus-far unspoken part of the backlash is the growing suspicion among all levels of society that 9/11 was an inside job and the new IDs are bringing America under some kind of 666 cult. Your driver license will be trackable at all times by federal authorities. If you give some powerful person some lip, you may find all kinds of bureaucratic or technical problem with your card, which will be under control of central computers, of course.
Honest dissidents will always be under thumb. No room to breathe in this kind of cult-ure.
Some call such fear paranoia. Too bad more Germans weren't paranoid back in the thirties.

NIST flipflops on trade center explosives

2007-02-04T13:22:00.000-08:00

The NIST, no doubt stung by sharp criticism of its probe of the collapse of the twin towers, has decided to include controlled demolition in its models of WTC7's collapse.
The agency says that of course it found no evidence of explosives but that nevertheless it will try out several scenarios of a thermite explosion at a key column.
Well, I expect that they will then use their results to "prove" that explosives weren't used.
But hasn't the NIST really discredited its investigation of the twin towers' collapse, an investigation which did not model for explosives (though it did consider the possibility of a "small bomb" but not a large one or group of bombs).

See the NIST's most recent progress report by Googling
NIST, WTC7

Nation barraged

2007-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

The Nation's letters section published a strong rebuttal to Christopher Hayes' article by Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The other letters also were effective answers to those who pooh-pooh the probability of an "inside job."

It should immediately be noted that 9/11 critics do not agree on every point, and in fact I have some concerns about a few of the statements given in the Scholars' rebuttal. However, that does not diminish the fact that there are far too many outstanding anomalies for the official accounts to be credible.

Nation editors, who were barraged with mail concerning the Hayes article, acknowledged that nearly everyone agreed that much information is still lacking concerning the events of 9/11.

It's also significant that the Nation did not feel it was in a position to continue the 9/11 denial policy coming from suspicious elements of the left.

When Blogspot burps
BTW, I forgot to mention that a week or so ago, Blogspot went down while I was working on my blog and all the links were erased from this blog and the associated blogs. Some of these links were very likely disliked by the control freaks. I haven't revived them all yet.

Imagine that the control freaks want to get rid of a large number of web pages. Arrange a system burp, wiping out links everywhere. Restoring links takes work. Hence, entropy will reduce the restoration of many of these links. Also, many people will not have the original URL and will use Google or some search engine to find it -- BUT, it won't be there. Presto! Damning web page removed from easy access.

The Nation carries a 9/11 rebuttal

2007-01-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

The Jan. 17 issue of the progressive magazine The Nation carried a substantial rebuttal of Christopher Hayes' attack on the 9/11 truth movement, I am told.
I plan to check it out soon.

Downing St 'comments' restored

2007-01-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

I suppose it was another case of Yuletide follies, but the Jan. 11 post below is no longer operative. That is, the prime minister's website is relinked to TheyWorkforYou and the public comment option has been restored.

Hence, I have posted a comment on the transcript of the Jan. 17 question time concerning 9/11, including a link to kryptograff.blogspot.com on "9/11 collapse issues."

I don't really think that scads of people will be swayed by my comments or my "scientific reasoning." The hope is that enough people with expertise will get wind of the collapse issues and discomfit the high and the mighty.

Mondale redacted?

2007-01-22T19:46:00.000-08:00

I happened to be checking the Washington Post for recent stories concerning 9/11 and came upon an Associated Press report of Jan. 19 about Jimmy Carter's veep, Walter Mondale, slamming Dick Cheney. Mondale specifically mentioned the alleged "Iraq connection to 9/11."

Yet, the story never showed up in my news alerts from Yahoo and Google.

I've often suspected that those alerts are being politically filtered.

Oh yeah, I also get blog-post alerts on 9/11. A lot of Screwloosechange alerts come through, but I've never seen this blog's 9/11 posts make it on the alert circuit.
Yeah, I know. Google has secret and ever-changing parameters. That may explain why Znewz1 is blanked out but how do they explain Mondale's speech getting lost. Nuther computer glitch, I guess.

I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that Mondale was speaking at a meeting where Carter was the focus. Carter made a lot of people mad at him about his comments on the Israeli lobby's ability to censor the U.S. media.

Why are Dems happy with incomplete 9/11 report?

2007-01-22T11:08:00.000-08:00

Congressional Democrats, such as Patrick Leahy, say they're satisfied with the Kean commission's 9/11 report. That's why, says Leahy, he has no intention of urging further investigation into 9/11 [see post below].

Now this is remarkable, considering that that report is incomplete.

The 2004 report never mentions the collapse of World Trade Center 7 hours after the collapses of the twin towers. Why? Well, as several top federal investigators have said, no credible explanation has been found for the collapse. The NIST is still working on it but, says the NIST's lead investiagtor, Shyam Sunder, the NIST just doesn't have a good handle on how it could have happened.

But, apparently the Kean panel knew what the outcome of any WTC7 probe would be, so the commissioners didn't feel it necessary to get into that matter.

Or maybe Leahy and other key lawmakers, along with 9/11 panelists, have agreed to a national security blackout on WTC7's collapse. It did house the CIA's New York station. And we know that a public TV web site deleted footage of trade center owner Larry Silverstein's remark that officials had decided to "pull" the building.

But even supposing Leahy is party to a national security blackout on that aspect of the events of 9/11, the Kean panel was also neglectful in the matter of collapse times.

The Kean panel report gives a collapse time of 10 seconds for WTC2. If you dropped a stone from the top of WTC2, it would take 9.2 seconds to reach the ground -- in a vacuum. That is, a collapse time of 10 seconds implies almost no structural resistance, which is consistent with the use of explosives.

So it seems that the Kean panel's science advice was rather poor, whether it came from FEMA, NIST or the FBI. Later, we are told (but I can't find the citation), the NIST lengthened the time to 12 seconds. As I show at kryptograff.blogspot.com, even 12 seconds is good cause for profound suspicion.

But anyway, how is it that leading lawmakers are happy with a seriously deficient report?

One more thing: Much of the commission's narrative is based on the "testimony" of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was grilled by CIA interrogators at a secret jail overseas. The commission was given redacted copies of statements and summaries but was not permitted to interview him nor pose specific questions to be asked by the CIA.

So this evidence is largely untestable and we cannot be sure of what Khalid really said, or meant, or in what context. Some of the statements attributed to him are quite suspect.

This is what some top Democrats are satisfied with?

Aren't they the same Democrats who decry the use of extra-judicial means against CIA captives? Who object that the Bush tribunals are intended to block an effective defense against secret evidence?

Leahy lets a big sleeping dog lie

2007-01-21T15:18:00.001-08:00

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat, told a Vermont newspaper that he has no intention of urging a re-opening of the 9/11 investigation. Ditto, say Vermont's other federal lawmakers. Hooray! says Norman Chomsky. At least Leahy won't be draining enormous energy away from the liberal-left agenda!

The Burlington Free Press question came as it became apparent that Burlington voters will be asked whether they think their federal lawmakers should demand a new probe.

Leahy said that, though it's understandable that some would come up with their own theories of the events of 9/11, he's satisfied with the Kean commission investigation.

Leahy and politicos like him won't budge because they think that, in the main, the news media are under control on this matter. These politicians won't defy the Powers That Be. Nor do they respect the one-third or more of their constituents who believe -- based on some pretty good, old-fashioned American investigative reporting -- that the 9/11 report whitewashed a story of treason most foul.

However, 9/11 is one sleeping dog that won't be allowed to keep lying. We will keep pushing.

Sure it may be that Rep. Ron Paul's presidential bid is quixotic, but at least that Texas politician speaks candidly about a continuing 9/11 cover-up. These days, the people who deserve the most respect are the ones most likely to be cast out.

Another exception is British MP Michael Meacher, who raised a hue and cry for daring to say that Blair's war on Iraq was a consequence of a U.S. covert op to make 9/11 happen. He's now getting "the treatment" for defying the Big Lie.

BTW, I have come up with what I think are some pretty reliable numbers for the World Trade Center fall times and -- guess what? -- the government's story is found deficient.

See 9/11 collapse issues
kryptograff.blogspot.com/2007/01/911-collapse-time-issues.html

Muzzled by Downing Street?

2007-01-11T18:01:00.001-08:00

In the past, Downing Street maintained an image of courteous liberalism by permitting the public to post comments about Tony Blair's statements.
However, the prime minister's web site has seemingly dropped its arrangement with TheyWorkforYou, which transcribes the statements of public servants and parliamentarians and which offers a public comment option, much like the comment option on this blog.
Oh well, it seems there'll be no more use of the PM's Question Time to contradict those who work for the public concerning serious problems with official 9/11 scenarios.
Something like this happened over the Christmas holiday season of a year ago, but the Downing Street site restored the public comment option and sent out an email saying there'd been some trouble with links.
This time, TheyWorkforYou pages show up on Downing Street links of a few months ago but not on January's or December's pages.
That's a bit odd. Because though when I went directly to the Downing Street site in December (on Christmas Day, as it happens), I couldn't find the public comment version of the PM's question time, when I operated via an official Downing Street email newsletter sent to me, the link took me to TheyWorkforYou and I promptly posted a comment. Curiously, the newsletter-linked web site was in appearance identical to the Downing Street site reached via Google.
I would like to have posted something to the effect that:

Scientists clash over 9/11
Two government weapons lab scientists are at opposite poles of a debate among scientists over whether official 9/11 collapse claims are credible.
See http://911science.blogspot.com

Take note of Dennis Loo

2007-01-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Check out Dennis Loo's comment to the 'Softies' post below. [This corrects a bum reference I gave last night when I was a bit sleepy.]
He's a professor who has published a book on a case for the impeachment of Bush. And he was one of those academics who dug up the mathematical and other irregularities that show that Bush was soundly defeated in 2004.

See http://dennisloo.blogspot.com
and
http://impeachthepresidentnow.com

Activist scientist backs official 9/11 line

2006-12-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

Manuel Garcia, a government weapons scientist, has gone to bat for the official narrative of the collapses of the World Trade Center towers as part of an assault by a group of leftists on those skeptical of government findings and the implication of a conspiracy within federal agencies.

Three analyses by Garcia were published by the noted leftist Alexander Cockburn in Cockburn's magazine Counterpunch. Cockburn, an Irishman living in the United States, also writes a column for the progressive magazine The Nation, which has just published a strong attack on 9/11 skeptics for supposedly whipping up paranoia.

Cockburn, son of a communist activist, has often been accused of taking up causes that reflect the communist political agenda but has been defended as an unjustly accused progressive.
[In fairness, Conant wishes to note that his reporting has appeared in the Communist Party organ, Pravda -- though that reference has been deleted from Google.]

Garcia, who holds a PhD in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University, has worked as a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which conducts classified weapons research, since 1978. His unclassified writings concern plasma physics experiments.

Garcia joins the scientist and noted socialist Noam Chomsky in denouncing those who don't believe the government's 9/11 claims.

Garcia was an activist on behalf of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who is suing the New York Times to try to force disclosure of the source of reports identifying him as a suspected spy for China's nuclear weapons program. Garcia also was a vocal critic of the Energy Department's plan to administer polygraph tests to scientists and others at weapons labs in the wake of the Wen Ho Lee uproar.

Garcia's analyses are found
http://counterpunch.com/physic11282006.html

Garcia's activism on behalf of Wen Ho Lee
http://198.170.104.197/WHLrefctms.htm
[The second page appears to have been disabled after this post went on-line]
His opening attack on conspiracy theorists in general as mentally deluded has become a familiar, if logically irrelevant, refrain from various quarters, including from a segment of the left.

One wonders why Garcia published his analyses in Counterpunch rather than submitting his papers to a peer-reviewed journal. We don't know whether he plans to submit his 9/11 work to a scholarly journal. If not, we'd have to conclude that either he is not all that confident of his work, or he believes that some force won't permit discussion of 9/11 science and technology in peer-reviewed journals.

At any rate, here are Conant's comments on Garcia's analyses:

. Garcia asserts that the NIST investigation was an extremely detailed investigation by 200 engineers and building professionals. However, most of them were concerned with the physical minutae of specific experiments and had little or no say in the NIST's final report. Only a few people were involved in the computer simulations of the fires leading to "global collapse."
He fails to concede that the computer models DID NOT WORK until initial conditions were sufficiently tweaked.

. He cites various statements of the NIST without regard for the fact that the main report and the backup reports are in a number of places inconsistent. He seems unaware of deliberate NIST evasiveness about details of its collapse scenario.

. He explains the belches of smoke ejected from tower windows prior to collapse as a result of compression shock waves transmitted downward through the steel as the upper block began to give way. Nice hypothesis. The NIST didn't use it. More to the point, Garcia is unable to test his hypothesis because the NIST did not publish an exact table of times and window locations for the mysterious puffs of smoke captured in the mass of video and still photo evidence it had available.

. The collapse times he cites are novel, not, as far as I know, appearing in the public record as of 2005, though it is possible the NIST has since posted collapse times (it should be noted that the NIST web site search engine has proved unreliable). His calculations indicating these collapse times as reasonable are noteworthy. However, why didn't the NIST publish any analyses of the issue of fall times in its main report or supplemental reports?

Also, Garcia seems to be unaware of the problem of collapse time authenticity (see http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/fallrates.html), which may imply one or more after-the-fact disinformation operations.

. Garcia notes that the NIST rejects the initial "pancake theory" of collapse, but slides over the point that a modified pancake theory is implied. Yes, the NIST says wrecked core columns drag floors and walls inward and downward, although even that claim is problematic. But, in the NIST account, the columns are severed or critically weakened on upper floors, followed by a pancake collapse. In other words, how relevant is his attack on those who cite the pancake theory? Without a modified pancake theory, the NIST would be left with the requirement that building supports give way at low levels, implying explosives.
Another NIST idea is that the thermodynamics were such that core columns shortened and thus dragged down the floors and exterior walls. An implication might be that this shortening affected lower floors as well, hence giving the impression of lower supports being kicked out. Yet, the NIST does not go that far.

. Another problem Garcia misses is the fact that NIST reports and data are in places inconsistent. On the one hand, floor joist damage is inferentially blamed, but on the other, the joists must stay intact while the columns and trusses are critically damaged.

. Garcia seems to be unaware of the NIST's evasively presented blowtorch scenario. Had the fireproofing been blown off the floor slab undersides, the fire heat would have dispersed upward through the cement and steel floor slabs, rather than vectoring toward core columns in a concentrated, sustained fashion.

So the NIST model would work only if the fireproofing remained on the floor underside. Apparently it needed to remain on the floor joists connected to the core columns but needed to be stripped or partially stripped from the columns themselves (of course, this is not the impression given in some parts of the NIST's sets of reports and data).

However, the floor joists would be at about the same height as the ceiling which the blowtorch heat was running along on its way to the core columns.

Garcia takes no note of any of this or of many other peculiarities found in the NIST's presentation.

. Garcia also seems untroubled by the fact that the NIST uses no crime-scene forensics reports from the New York City police and fire departments, nor from any federal agency.

. In his speculation on the collapse of WTC7, Garcia skips the comment by FEMA investigators that the only scenario they could devise had only a low degree of probability. Why was the probability low? Because a standard failsafe system should have shut off the fuel oil supposedly being pumped up for hours from a large tank below. NIST investigators couldn't find records that might have indicated whether there was some anomaly in the electrical circuits of the building or the alternate power system.

Garcia seems to know nothing of these issues.

. One of the most important points bypassed by Garcia is the fact that the NIST conducted no experimental work on the possible use of planted explosives. Hence, it began with the a priori assumption that explosives weren't used and never did anything to test that assumption (though later it inserted unsupported statements that it had found "no evidence" of explosives).

Garcia seems non-cognizant of the remarkable fact that the 9/11 commission made the same assumption, in consultation with the NIST, a year before the NIST's final report on the twin towers.

. Garcia, who plans a further analysis of WTC7, doesn't seem bothered by the fact that WTC7's collapse is unique in the annals of steel structure buildings. He is also unfazed by the fact that the NIST's report on the twin towers was issued before its probe of WTC7 was anywhere near completion. Clearly, the NIST knows in advance that it is expected to rule out explosives. Otherwise, its theory about the twin towers would be thrown into question.

[Note: Garcia uses the Britishism "car park" as opposed to "parking lot" in his analyses, leading to the question of whether he had a silent co-author or editor who is British or has learned British English. Possibly Cockburn or an editorial assistant from the British Isles edited Garcia's reports.]

9/11 collapse times: a checkered record

2006-12-21T15:18:00.000-08:00

A previous version of this post was a hasty note about Manuel Garcia's Counterpunch articles. I wrongly said that he did not consider WTC7 (because I had missed one of the articles). Apologies.
I still suggest that those concerned about World Trade Center collapse times review my article:
World Trade Center collapse times: omissions and disparities
http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/fallrates.html

'Softies' need to re-examine 9/11 and 2004 election

2006-12-20T15:20:00.001-08:00

A few thoughts on high priority issues for the new Democratic congress:

* The Democrats were repeatedly castigated as "soft on terror" by the White House and high-level Republicans. Hence, it is imperative that Congress re-examine the issue of 9/11 to see whether a "war on terror" was justified. That is, was 9/11 an inside job? Congress can easily say that sufficient new evidence has come to light to warrant a deeper look than the GOP-run 9/11 commission undertook. (The commission was technically bipartisan, but the executive director is very close to Condoleeza Rice, who was national security adviser on 9/11.)

* A reputable poll -- squelched by U.S. media -- found that 57 percent of Americans were very concerned by the post-9/11 surveillance laws and edicts. Surely Congress must take a new look at these measures in light of the fact that Americans plainly distrust them. In fact, such a look would dovetail with a new look into the circumstances of 9/11.

* The 2004 presidential election result was very, very improbable, despite the fact that Democrats at the time did not feel strong enough to do anything much. However, their recent gains has a lot to do with the repeated exposes and warnings by a group of expert mathematicians and computer scientists. Such a travesty should never happen again. It is imperative that Congress deeply examine that particular election and recommend such prosecutions as warranted as well, as implementing ballot security safeguards.
See Professor Dennis Loo's page at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html

A probe of this matter will take a degree of fortitude. Exactly who influenced the media to play possum prior to inauguration? Ask Jimmy Carter, he'll tell you a likely source of meddling.

9/11 and the crisis on the left

2006-12-19T11:02:00.001-08:00

An elite corps of left-wing luminaries is moving to try to stem the influence of the 9/11 truth movement with the time-honored mantra that the "conspiracy theory" is drawing off too much energy that should be used for real leftist concerns.

Following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky (see below) are Christopher Hayes, writing in the Nation, and Alexander Cockburn. All three make the same argument.

As the Democrats maneuver to decide what to do in Washington, we can expect to hear an increasing cacaphony of this kind of stuff. The aim: head off new investigations of the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks.

The problem for Chomsky et al are these points: more than a third of Americans think 9/11 was an "inside job"; more than half think there is a coverup of important facts concerning 9/11; and more than 57 percent are very concerned by intrusive post-9/11 surveillance laws and edicts.

Though I know of no poll concerning the beliefs of intellectuals concerning 9/11, I daresay the percentage of those who are convinced of conspiracy is far higher than the 36 per cent reported by a Scripps-Howard poll for the public at large.

So the hidden hand of the left, as represented by these leftwing icons, has the troublesome task of overcoming thes impressive political realities.

It should be noted that there was a core group of professionals who fought to get the truth out about the 2004 exit poll results. Though elements of the left did make some noises about election problems, there was no concerted effort to expose the massive election rip-off. However, the continued pressure from these experts eventually had a cumulative impact, which was reflected in the recent midterm results.

Appeal to physics, computer sci departments

2006-12-18T14:50:00.000-08:00

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is known for its exacting approach to the physical sciences.

Yet, its report on the World Trade Center collapses has drawn fire as an attempt to get computer simulations to work as desired by an unreasonable tweaking of initial conditions.

Is the NIST report credible, or is it in actuality a political document with little scientific basis?

An excellent exercise for students and professors in physics and computer science departments would be to read, with careful note-taking, the NIST's main report and all the various back-up reports.
Also, those whose interest is in detection of scientific fraud are strongly encouraged to read the material.