Economists are still debating what it was that ended the financial crisis and turned the economy around. It is inarguable, though, that Geithner's stabilization plan has proved more effective than many observers expected, this one included.
Whereas the Atlantians suggest that our fabled civilization was not destroyed by the gods for excess greed and corruption, 'cause Timmeh held back the thunderbolts with hizown chest:
Yet when the history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack Obama's key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the finance system. Economically, Geithner's plan has worked better and more cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago.
The twin, virtually interchangeable pieces appearing at the same time and having extremely similar, if not identical overall angles is prolly just a coincidence, as opposed to a controlled marketing campaign, don'tcha think?
Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know they can relax. Everything's hunky dory now and Tim G is an elfin sizzle chest whose athleticism "inspires an adolescent awe in male colleagues."
A new tasteless Trash-Piece about President John Kennedy, composed almost entirely of ficticious dialog, malicious rumors, and outright lies, is now being made by Joel Surnow (the creator of the series "24") -- a well-known Hollywood ultra-conservative Neocon, in the form of a 8-part Mini-Series, titled: "The Kennedys", to be aired on "The History Channel" network.
The piece is so completely full of made-up-out-of-whole-cloth garbage and malicious propaganda, that even the mild mannered Ted Sorenson (former Kennedy aide, and speechwriter) has come out publically denouncing it, in advance of its airing (which is one whole year away).
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald obtained an early version of the screenplay containing a draft of the dialog and its content. Greenwald said, "this one-sided right wing script suffers from a totally vindictive, malicious approach". Greenwald and Sorenson both contend that it is not only littered with easily documented falsehoods, they also insist that the production team drafted a ridiculous "cartoon" and "caricature" of the former president -- downplaying all the weighty historical episodes in favor of tawdry, salacious and entirely ficitious material and dialog.
Greenwald told the Huffington Post he counted more than a dozen sex scenes written into the biopic with only scant acknowledgment of the Cuban Missile crisis. Sorenson, in the film, says that each and every one of the conversations he is depicted to have had with the President never even happened.
"I was amazed to find reading those pages that every single conversation with the President in the Oval office or elsewhere in which I according to the script participated, never happened. There were no such conversations... A minimum amount of research could've avoided the remarkable number of obvious errors of that kind in this script."
---Ted Sorensen
Robert Greenwald has now started a Web Site: StopKennedySmears.com where you can sign a Petition to demand that The History Channel stop this character assassination piece that has no business, and no merit being aired on "The History Channel" network.
Everyone please go and sign the Petition StopKennedySmears.com. With enough public pressure from the public, this piece of sleaze journalism, and fraudulent history can be stopped.
Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.
In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.
As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)
The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived.
"The Bigger the Lie, the More the People will Believe it"
- Adolf Hitler
Just a few days after the latest fake Osama bin Laden tape release, scantly a month after the ridiculously trumped up false flag underwear bomber 'attack' on Jesus's fake birthday and on the heels of a relentless propaganda campaign of fear obviously designed to roll away the stone and resurrect the big lie of 9/11 there is this: Report: Al-Qaeda aims to hit U.S. with WMDs. Bravo to the neocons, they are right back in the game, not that they ever left, you just can't completely get rid all of the cockroaches after an infestation no matter how good the Orkin men happen to be. The Mighty Wurlitzer's story on the report in question leads with this nightmare blurb which smacks of the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds that years before had been used to sell the wars that are still bankrupting America:
I guess now that it's the dead of winter, the time when people can really get sick, the "Swine Flu" panic is a thing of the past.
We have many more things to panic about now, right? I mean, we've got the official CNN 24/7 "terrorgasm", we've got coffers to bill at Big Corporations who can Supply Things To Us That Will Keep Us Safe.
And considering that there was a case of a suicide bomber somewhere (Afghanistan?) hiding the bomb up his rectum, Colbert's suggestion that all Muslim men have a colonoscopy before boarding an aircraft doesn't seem like something that would be far-fetched in today's world.
But that's not what this is about. This is about --- gosh, I almost forgot it myself, how distracting today's panics are! -- "Swine Flu", you know that thing that was supposed to kill all of us, that thing we were all geared up to be SCARED SCARED SCARED about -- and more importantly that thing that was designed to open all our wallets.
You'll never see this on our 24-hour news terror programs, but for some reason the European Parliament has decided to investigate this scam:
The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma's industry's influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry. The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a "Golden Triangle" of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.
The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current "pandemic" Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century."[1]
The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, "In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The "bird-flu"-campaign (2005/06) combined with the "swine-flu"-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies."[2]
The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of „falsified pandemic" that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 "Avian Flu" and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given "urgent" priority in the general assembly of the parliament.
In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where "unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines," and that, for a flu strain that is "vastly less harmful" than all previous flu epidemics.
There you have it, in plain English.
What everybody knew, who was paying attention. Of course NOW they decide to do this, NOW, after the pharmaceutical companies have sold all the vaccines they could, I mean, if you haven't gotten a vaccine by now, you're probably not gonna get one, right?
This reeks of the "I am shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here" line from Casablanca (and forgive me if i'm not quoting it correctly).
I mean, the EU sure wouldn't want to actually infringe on a corporation's god-given natural rights to scam the public into making money? But to keep a little legitimacy in the public eye, they'll sure pretend to investigate it afterwards, probably to slap a few fines on the perps so they can share the wealth, you know?
I was saying it back when they fear was being ramped up to fever pitch (excuse the pun) over this bogus flu. That the WHO must have been corrupted. Because it was, well, just obvious as fuck (pardon the language)..
The world is completely corrupt. You can't believe anything any more.
But the public keeps getting punked. It seems every year the public is ever-more-easy to punk.
LONDON - A BBC investigation has cast doubt on key evidence in the case against the Libyan convicted of blowing up a US jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, the broadcaster said Wednesday.
A tiny fragment of the timer allegedly used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 -- crucial in linking Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to the bomb -- was not properly tested and was also unlikely to have survived the explosion, it said.
Megrahi was jailed in 2001 for the attack which left 270 people dead, but was controversially released from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal cancer and only had months to live.
Investigators believe the plane bomb was contained in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown suitcase with various items of clothing, and was triggered by a digital timer that was later linked to Libya.
But according to the BBC's Newsnight programme, the fragment of the timer -- found embedded in a charred piece of clothing three weeks after the bombing -- was never tested to confirm if it had actually been in a blast.
Even now, they pull back, far back, from the truth of this story. It's not just that this was "never tested".
A fragment of circuit board alleged to have been part of the bomb's timing mechanism is the sole item of physical evidence linking the two Libyans to the December 1988 bombing. But Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, declared: "I have come to suspect that the timing device in question was not that of Pan Am 103 but a different timing device that the CIA had picked up from the Libyans ... I have been driven to the conclusion that the device was a CIA plant."
Mr Dalyell, a long-standing critic of US and British government insistence that Libya was behind the attack, said an analysis of the fragment had shown it had been exposed to a temperature of 4,000deg C. But a Swiss police specialist had cast doubt on this, saying the explosion would have lasted only a fraction of a second in outside air temperatures of about minus 40C.
Accusing the Crown Office, the Scottish prosecuting authority, of failing to follow up the right leads, Mr Dalyell said - to strident denials from Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Scottish Office minister - that it had allowed itself for six years "to be suborned by political pressure into failing to carry out its duty".
He said this was a "wicked" dereliction of duty that brought shame on Britain.
That's from 1995. Thanks, BBC, for being on the ball here!
Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling of Megrahi as the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and US intelligence.
"The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution," Swire told the Scotsman Newspaper.
Top level UK diplomats tend to agree with him, such Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.
"No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence," Miles told the BBC.
The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.
Back to square one
Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got correctly the date of the worst act of terror in the UK.
In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history they wrote: "At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky." As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21st 1988.
Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the UN Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.
"It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys," Sharf wrote.
"The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove."
I don't even watch CNN, not on purpose, but I often flip by them when I'm channel surfing. Sometimes I'll even click on them deliberately just to see what kind of b.s. they're peddling. And I admit I have hated them with a passion for years now, ever since I used to trade e-mails with their news head, and he would actually write me back, and he'd try to convince me that they weren't really that biased, and then he got sacked for not being biased ENOUGH. I think his name was Jordan Eason or Eason Jordan, I can't remember. He actually had the temerity to claim that Wolf Blitzer wasn't biased. Ha!
They jumped the shark a long time ago.
But if there's a term for jumping the shark AGAIN, I think it would apply to CNN these days. The Second Jumping of the Shark, or perhaps the Jumping of the Whale.
Every time I flip by there, it's pure "TERROR!" and nothing else, 24/7, over and over.
I'm confused. Some patsy tried to set his balls on fire on an airplane and it's an international crisis? Wow. Are people really buying this crap these days? Haven't they wised up?
I mean, just today they had an Elephant in the Room situation where it was revealed that the father of the "terrorist" talked with the CIA about his son not too long ago. I mean, he MET with the CIA.
Then, right on schedule, the guy is helped onto an airplane by a well-dressed man in Amsterdam, because he doesn't have a passport and somehow he convinces an international air carrier to let a guy onto an international flight without a passport? And the guy by some just WHACKY coincidence isn't on the "no fly" list even though we have nuns and thousands of people who have no business being on it -- hell, Ted Kennedy was on it -- and now they're trying to come up with all KINDS of excuses as to why this guy wasn't on the no-fly list .....
But what I always try to look at during times like this is this:
What news stories are NOT being reported right now?
Because this is how they "cover stuff up". They find another story that's just SOOO fascinating and they have to spend SOOOO much time on that they (gosh!) just don't have time to report other stories.
Anyway, I have a couple of candidates. Please feel free to add your own.
WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
Oops. Yeah, we sure wouldn't want the U.S. population to know about this, because next month we might want to ramp up the hatred against Iran again, it might be a timely thing to do, and we sure wouldn't want them remembering this, now, would we?
Forget raising the cap to $800 billion for Fannie/Freddie. They announce (on Christmas eve no less) that the slush fund for picking up toxic mortgage is unlimited:
Treasury uncaps credit line for Fannie, Freddie
The Obama administration pledged on Thursday to back beleaguered mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no matter how big their losses may be in the next three years.
It also jettisoned a demand that the two companies cut the size of their mortgage-related investment portfolios next year, allowing them to provide even more support in the near term for a housing market recovering from its worst slump in decades.
Wow! Now if the majority of the American people actually knew about both of these, they might be a little angry, and justifiably so.
But you gotta wonder what other pockets are being picked while the "news" channels are on this 24/7 "TERRORGASM".
I don't know how to deal with this piece except to quote from Chris Floyd himself:
Here is another story in the news: in an isolated rural province in Afghanistan, 10 people were killed in a raid by American-led forces. The Afghan government, installed and sustained in power by the United States, said the victims were all civilians -- including eight schoolboys.
But there was no international outcry about this incident; it barely garnered a few mentions in the global press. And even these were quickly shunted aside after a NATO official denied the claims of the Afghan government, and affirmed that all those killed in the raid were evil-doers. As the NYT reports:
A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. ... "When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.'s," the official added.
Local officials on the scene in Kunar Province said otherwise. They said 10 civilians had been killed. They said eight of the dead were children:
The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that "the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters," but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that "10 people were killed and all of them were civilians."
But the NATO official said the Afghans were lying. We will never know the whole truth, of course, for the story will ultimately be controlled by the very force that carried out the attack: the American-led military occupation.
But what an instructive contrast. In one story, an attack which did not happen and which killed no one shakes the entire world. In another story, ten human beings, including eight children, were slaughtered in a sneak attack by night -- and the world can scarcely be bothered to notice.
In yet another example of unbelievable douchebaggery, our favorite Senator Joe Lieberman has decided, based on some guy trying to set his underwear on fire on a flight to Detroit, that we need to go to war with Yemen.
"Somebody in our government said to me in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday's war," Lieberman explained. "Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war. That's the danger we face."
Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), also appearing on the program, seemed to agree, calling an attack against Yemen "something we should consider."
What these two double-douchebags fail to mention is that we've already attacked Yemen.
Do they really think we're that stupid? I guess if you're appearing on Fox, you can assume your audience IS that stupid, but c'mon. Just a few days ago we sent Tomahawk missiles into Yemen, slaughtering dozens of civilians. We also signed off on Saudi air strikes that had the same result -- a slaughtering of civilians.
So yeah, let's just ignore that for the time being, and maybe we can somehow retroactively justify something we've actually already done, based on some extremely flimsy evidence about this guy who tried to set his nutsack on fire on an airplane. Flimsy evidence? How can that be? Why would CNN be reporting on this 24/7 with it's "Fear! Fear! Fear!" tactics if the evidence was flimy? Yemen is the enemy damnit! I heard it on TV!
Wow, that didn't take long at all. Scant days after the American war machine took the cloaking device off its direct military involvement in Yemen, we have an alleged attempted terrorist attack by an alleged attempted terrorist who, just scant hours after his capture, has allegedly confessed to getting his alleged attempted terrorist material from ... wait for it ... Yemen!
Yemen-trained terrorists on the loose in American airplanes! At Christmas! Great googily moogily! It's a good thing our boys are on the case over there right now, pounding the holy hell outta some of them Al Qaeder ragheads! And to think, a few pipsqueaky fifth columnists had been starting to wonder why we were killing dozens of innocent civilians on behalf of an authoritarian regime embroiled in a three-way civil war on the other side of the world.
(snip)
And it must be true, right? I mean, just look at how well-sourced the NYT story is. "A law enforcement official" -- Police captain? State trooper? G-Man? Traffic cop? -- said that the alleged attempted terrorist said he'd got his "explosive chemicals" from Yemen. (Elsewhere in the paper, other unnamed officials told NYT reporters that the alleged material strapped to the alleged attempted terrorist was "incendiary," not explosive. But who cares? "Bomb, Terror, Yemen!")
Of course, the NYT noted that "authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the suspect" (nor, they could have added, have they independently corroborated that the claim was actually made), but still, the completely anonymous "law enforcement official" said that the suspect's claim "was plausible," and even added: "I see no reason to discount it."
Well, it doesn't get more solid than that, does it? They nailed that story down so tight you couldn't pry it open with God's own crowbar. An anonymous source confirmed the plausibility of his own claim. Man, that's ironclad. It's certainly good enough to light up the media firmament with headlines linking "terror in the Heartland" with the empire's newest killing field in a volatile foreign land.
So yeah, with that kind of evidence, let's go bomb a new country! Oh, wait, we already have. Shhh!
Let's see how this is working here. The Pentagon crook Robert Gates has decided that in spite of a majority of Americans "lacking the resolve" to "perservere" and "win at all costs" in Afghanistan, has decided to have some stupid lackey tell us that hey, you know, sometimes Osama bin Laden actually crosses the border and ENTERS Afghanistan.
He could be there right now! He could be! I mean, prove that he's not! I'll bet you five bucks he's there right now! And and and if he does, and we're bombing Afghanistan when he walks into it, he might walk into one of our bombs and and and then he'd be, like, dead! 'Cause we'd blow him up!
What a childish bunch of douchebags.
Do they have any evidence of this?
No.
Is there any intelligence that might actually support such speculation?
No.
Is this anything other than a wild guess?
No.
Is it pure unadulterated bullshit?
Yes.
I could just as easily get up on a podium in front of the press and swear that I'm pretty sure Ken Lay is alive and well and living in a Penthouse suite in Reno. Have I actually seen him? No. Do I have any evidnece he's there? No. Then why would I say such a thing? Because he could be there. It's possible!
Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" whether the administration has reliable intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts, Jones replied, "The best estimate is that he is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border."
Yeah, and sometimes he's at the Taco Bell in Kandahar. I mean, why not? He could be. That's a "guess", too, right up there with his "best guess". What makes one "guess" better than another "guess?"
Jones did not comment on the intelligence behind that estimate, nor did he cite a time period or describe more specifically bin Laden's apparent border crossings.
That's because he doesn't have any intelligence. Of any kind. The kind in your brain that makes you smart, or the kind that gives you information.
Gates told ABC's "This Week" that "we don't know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is," although he agreed that his likely location is North Waziristan.
Yeah, and who told you that, Gates? The Osama fairy?
Obama administration officials have often asserted, as did the Bush administration, that they believe bin Laden is being sheltered on the Pakistani side of the border, along with other senior al-Qaida leaders. But Jones broke new ground by saying publicly that the al-Qaida chief may at times have slipped back into Afghanistan.
Oh good, they believe it. Well my son believes that Santa Claus lives on the North Pole, and I think that both are about as likely.
I quit believing in Santa Claus when I was eight years old, and I quit believing in the Osama Bin Boogeyman a few years ago, too. Both are myths designed to manipulate people into behaving certain ways. My son will jump through all KINDS of hoops when I tell him stories about Santa Claus. It feel kinda guilty, but we do it to everybody, right?
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made a somewhat similar, if less specific, remark Sunday about bin Laden's movements. He told NBC's "Meet the Press" that knowledgeable people have told him that bin Laden "moves back and forth."
Yeah, and he does pilates every morning, too. And brushes his teeth with the bones of a dead secretary from 9/11.
Have you seen that movie "Idiocracy"? This country is actually turning into that.
(PilotsFor911Truth.org) - Newly decoded data provided by an independent researcher and computer programmer from Australia exposes alarming evidence that the reported hijacking aboard American Airlines Flight 77 was impossible to have existed. A data parameter labeled "FLT DECK DOOR", cross checks with previously decoded data obtained by Pilots For 9/11 Truth from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) through the Freedom Of Information Act.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 am Eastern Time. According to reports and data, a hijacking took place between 08:50:54 and 08:54:11[1] in which the hijackers allegedly crashed the aircraft into the Pentagon at 09:37:45. Reported by CNN, according to Ted Olson, wife Barbara Olson had called him from the reported flight stating, "...all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers..."[2]. However, according to Flight Data provided by the NTSB, the Flight Deck Door was never opened in flight. How were the hijackers able to gain access to the cockpit, remove the pilots, and navigate the aircraft to the Pentagon if the Flight Deck Door remained closed?[3]
Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is a growing organization of aviation professionals from around the globe. The organization has analyzed Data provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for the Pentagon Attack, the events in Shanksville, PA and the World Trade Center attack. The data does not support the government story. The NTSB/FBI refuse to comment. Pilots For 9/11 Truth do not offer theory or point blame at this point in time. However, there is a growing mountain of conflicting information and data in which government agencies and officials along with Mainstream Media refuse to acknowledge. Pilots For 9/11 Truth Core member list continues to grow.
Enjoy. Please pass along to others. If you doubt the credibility of this site, please check out that bottom link for the member list. It's pretty impressive.
Pilots know the "official story" of 9/11 is a lie.
The AP continues its right-wing propagandistic ways, this time asking one of those "hypothetical" questions that the right wing loves to throw out there, you know, the "Is Obama really a Muslim", or "Is Bill Clinton guilty of rape?" or whatever, you know the drill, it's something anyone can do, it's the classic "when did you stop beating your wife?" technique, but nobody does but the right-wing in this country because, well, nobody owns the media in this countyry except the right wing corporate bastards, and the AP is their clearinghouse for this shit.
So today, thanks to EK's afternoon news digest here, I am presented with this gem:
As stated in other recent diaries, perhaps this nation's demographics are such that the white, male Christian ruling class is destined to suffer the ravages of diminishing power and influence. Although this writer shares that fervent hope and allows that present conditions may portend such a monumental, seismic shift, this process will likely take far longer than we might want to imagine.
Despite the best efforts of the Reich Wingnut talking heads to encourage their minions to "get busy" and create hoards of newborn teabaggers, their relative numbers are likely to continue shrinking.
No doubt the so-called elite (aka GWB's base) are assiduously studying the tactics applied by the Spanish conquistadors who, during their invasion and swift, easy conquest of the native populations in the Americas, demonstrated that it is possible for the few to control the many.
More recent examples of minority dominion would be exemplified by the lengthy rule of the whites in South Africa, who, at their peak in 1911, accounted for only 19-21% of the population (13.6% when apartheid was abolished in 1994) and by the extended reign of the Sunnis in Iraq, who comprised only 15 to 20 percent of the country's entire population, yet dominated that country's government and economy throughout the 20th century.
And, closer to home, given their considerable power, one might reasonably conclude that large numbers are represented by the National Rifle Association, even though they comprise only about 1.3% of the U. S. population.
As Aldous Huxley so presciently observed in his 1931 novel, Brave New World, in order to maintain control over the oppressed, one need only convince those at each rung of the socioeconomic ladder that theirs is by far the best lot of all.
On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis' attack, America invaded ... Afghanistan.
Google it and you'll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.
Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.
Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.
It's the latest hit from the same crew that brought you Saddam = 9/11 and its twin chant, Saddam = WMD, Dick Cheney's chimerical tropes which the New York Times' Judith Miller happily channeled to the paper's front page.
And they're at it again.
Every war begins with a lie.
Every war begins with a lie. In addition to Saddam = WMD, I'm old enough to remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing the war in Vietnam, based on a fictional Vietnamese gunboat attack on our Navy. (White House recordings have Lyndon Johnson gloating privately, "Hell, those damn stupid [US] sailors were just shooting at flying fish.")
In the Glorious War against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the lie is thus: al Qaeda is "based" in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. If we don't fight the wily Taliban, as the British once fought the wily Pathan, al Qaeda will attack America again from Talibanistan.
The latest Taliban=9/11 fantasy is a yarn spun wildly outward from the finding of a passport of an al Qaeda flunky who worked with suicide pilot Mohammed Atta in the same mountain area where, years later, a Taliban group operated. It's a stretch, but when you want to sell a war, it will do.
He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.
In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.[1]
Smart guy, right? Smarter still that he turned on his masters and now speaks his mind, and the truth (as he knows it) to anyone who will listen.
An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda. Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail. Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs.
The researchers explain why so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it has become obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with the event. Americans developed elaborate rationalizations based on Bush administration propaganda that alleged Iraqi involvement and became deeply attached to their beliefs. Their emotional involvement became wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality. They looked for information that supported their beliefs and avoided information that challenged them, regardless of the facts of the matter.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: "In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation."
What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose.
This is why we see the extreme emotions displayed at a place such as Dailykos, where people get absolutely hysterical when anyone brings up the facts of 9/11. That is the power of good PSYOPS, and it is why the military has a PSYOPS division.
9/11 was a trauma for everyone. We were all wedded to what we thought happened that day, and our minds and our brains adjusted, as best they could, to what we thought was the reality of it. When we start to learn that what happened that day may have been completely different than what we not only believed, but what we mourned and grieved, we get angry.
They're like the emotions you'd experience if you found out someone you loved, who you thought was dead, who you had mourned and grieved, had actually staged their death. You'd be pretty pissed.
The psychology of belief retention even when those beliefs are wrong is a pillar of social cohesion and stability. It explains why, once change is effected, even revolutionary governments become conservative. The downside of belief retention is its prevention of the recognition of facts. Belief retention in the Soviet Union made the system unable to adjust to economic reality, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Today in the United States millions find it easier to chant "USA, USA, USA" than to accept facts that indicate the need for change.
Or to change "Obama! Obama! Obama!" than to recognize that Obama is just another one of "them".
The staying power of the Big Lie is the barrier through which the 9/11 Truth Movement is finding it difficult to break. The assertion that the 9/11 Truth Movement consists of conspiracy theorists and crackpots is obviously untrue. The leaders of the movement are highly qualified professionals, such as demolition experts, physicists, structural architects, engineers, pilots, and former high officials in the government. Unlike their critics parroting the government's line, they know what they are talking about.
Here is a link to a presentation by the architect, Richard Gage, to a Canadian university audience. The video of the presentation is two hours long and seems to have been edited to shorten it down to two hours. Gage is low-key, but not a dazzling personality or a very articulate presenter. Perhaps that is because he is speaking to a university audience and takes for granted their familiarity with terms and concepts.
Those who believe the official 9/11 story and dismiss skeptics as kooks can test the validity of the sociologists' findings and Hitler's observation by watching the video and experiencing their reaction to evidence that challenges their beliefs. Are you able to watch the presentation without scoffing at someone who knows far more about it than you do? What is your response when you find that you cannot defend your beliefs against the evidence presented? Scoff some more? Become enraged?
Another problem that the 9/11 Truth Movement faces is that few people have the education to follow the technical and scientific aspects. The side that they believe tells them one thing; the side that they don't believe tells them another. Most Americans have no basis to judge the relative merits of the arguments.
Now he brings up something I've written about here, more than once: The Lockerbie bomber case.
For example, consider the case of the Lockerbie bomber. One piece of "evidence" that was used to convict Magrahi was a piece of circuit board from a device that allegedly contained the Semtex that exploded the airliner. None of the people, who have very firm beliefs in Magrahi's and Libya's guilt and in the offense of the Scottish authorities in releasing Magrahi on allegedly humanitarian grounds, know that circuit boards of those days have very low combustion temperatures and go up in flames easily. Semtex produces very high temperatures. There would be nothing whatsoever left of a device that contained Semtex. It is obvious to an expert that the piece of circuit board was planted after the event.
The Lockerbie case was similar to 9/11 in that people swallowed the government story, digested it, integrated it with their horror and grief at the tragedy, and now what they believe about the case is part of their actual belief system. To throw evidence at them that their belief system is actually flawed makes them angry. They feel insulted.
And now he gets to something that has confounded me for quite some time:
What I find puzzling is the people I know who do not believe a word the government says about anything except 9/11. For reasons that escape me, they believe that the government that lies to them about everything else tells them the truth about 9/11. How can this be, I ask them. Did the government slip up once and tell the truth? My question does not cause them to rethink their belief in the government's 9/11 story. Instead, they get angry with me for doubting their intelligence or their integrity or some such hallowed trait.
The problem faced by truth is the emotional needs of people. With 9/11 many Americans feel that they must believe their government so that they don't feel like they are being unsupportive or unpatriotic, and they are very fearful of being called "terrorist sympathizers." Others on the left-wing have emotional needs to believe that peoples oppressed by the US have delivered "blowbacks." Some leftists think that America deserves these blowbacks and thus believe the government's propaganda that Muslims attacked the US.
I think he's right about the emotional needs of people being a part of this, but he stops far short of the emotional truth of it. Like I said above, people mourned the event, they grieved it, they emotionally digested it until what they thought was the truth about it became a part of them.
To hear something that suggests that your very reality, that which you think is literally "the world that exists around you" is actually not true, is going to be met with fierce emotional resistance. There's going to be a knee-jerk emotional response of "no!" To use the word "denial" to describe this would be somewhat accurate, but this is actually something far more powerful than simple garden variety denial.
And this is what the propagandists understand.
And that is why they have power over us.
It is, perhaps, the greatest power you can have over people. It is greater than the power of force, because people will fight force. Force is obvious. Using force against people results in a similar knee-jerk emotional reaction, but against you. Good propaganda results in them cheering for you, as I saw somewhere else (here?) it's like the chickens rooting for Colonel Sanders.
Now THAT'S power.
In the next section he talks about this power, but he attributes it to the power of the government. I attribute it to the power of the media. For most people, their window to the world, quite literally, is their television set. Their sense of reality beyond their little tiny slice of the world is the television. If they don't see it on television, it's not "real" and it didn't really happen. We all know what I'm talking about because almost all of us, whether we care to admit it or not, experience this to some degree or another. I know I do, still, to this day (conditioning is hard to lose). People simply do not question the media.
As far as I can tell, most Americans have far greater confidence in the government than they do in the truth. During the Great Depression the liberals with their New Deal succeeded in teaching Americans to trust the government as their protector. This took with the left and the right. Neither end of the political spectrum is capable of fundamental questioning of the government. This explains the ease with which our government routinely deceives the people.
Democracy is based on the assumption that people are rational beings who factually examine arguments and are not easily manipulated. Studies are not finding this to be the case. In my own experience in scholarship, public policy, and journalism, I have learned that everyone from professors to high school dropouts has difficulty with facts and analyses that do not fit with what they already believe. The notion that "we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead" is an extremely romantic and idealistic notion. I have seldom experienced open minds even in academic discourse or in the highest levels of government. Among the public at large, the ability to follow the truth wherever it may lead is almost non-existent.
The US government's response to 9/11, regardless of who is responsible, has altered our country forever. Our civil liberties will never again be as safe as they were. America's financial capability and living standards are forever lower. Our country's prestige and world leadership are forever damaged. The first decade of the 21st century has been squandered in pointless wars, and it appears the second decade will also be squandered in the same pointless and bankrupting pursuit.
When a courageous speaker of truth emerges from the forest of lies that is modern media, the risk is ever present that censorship, suppression, or worse could occur. Sadly, that is the case today. Glenn Beck produced an episode of his program that continued his valiant search for communists burrowing into the woodwork of America like subversive termites eating away at the foundation of our national home. However, this episode has mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately, I have acquired a transcript (h/t Esquire) of the "Lost Episode" that reveals perhaps the most insidious enemy of freedom yet unveiled by Beck.
In the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion any good journalist on the day Powell told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction would have been able to debunk Powell's claims the same day.
Former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter spoke in Tokyo the same day Powell made his presentation at the UN and told the Foreign Press Association of Japan that everything Powell had said that day in the UN was a lie, and it later turned out that Ritter was right. Ritter's speech that day was covered by Associated Press (AP) on video and wire services.
Every news organization in the world got Ritter's speech via AP, and virtually none of them published it. Rather the world press simply let Powell get away with his lies that helped lead to an illegal invasion that by some counts resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths, along with the more than 4000 US Troop deaths and tens of thousands of US Troop maimings.
Ritter is now making similar warnings about the drumbeats for war with Iran and debunking the false claims that Iran is well on the way to producing a nuclear bomb, which by the way if Iran did produce and use against Israel would likely immediately result in Iran's total destruction by Israel with their stockpile of by some counts 200 or more nuclear weapons.
We are being asked by a US Administration, Military Industrial Complex, and world press propaganda campaign, to believe that Iran is suicidal as a justification for attacking them.
A while back I wrote an essay here titled Angry about the "Lockerbie bomber" getting released? because, well, the media was able to ramp up quite a spectacle of anger and indignation regarding the dying man who was convicted of the attack being released.
The whole case has been fishy from the very beginning, and now? Well, flying well under the radar of the so-called "media" in this country (after all, a juicy blackmail story involving a celebrity is far more important than anything else in the world) are new revelations that key witnesses in Megrahi's conviction were paid just a TON of money for their testimony.
Two key figures in the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber were secretly given rewards of up to $3m (£1.9m) in a deal discussed by Scottish detectives and the US government, according to legal papers released today.
The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
Megrahi abandoned his appeal last month after the Libyan and Scottish governments struck a deal to free him on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. Now in hospital in Tripoli, Megrahi said he wanted the public to see the evidence which he claims would have cleared him.
"I continue to protest my innocence - how could I fail to do so?," he said. "I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known."
The documents published online by Megrahi's lawyers today show that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was asked to pay $2m to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who gave crucial evidence at the trial suggesting that Megrahi had bought clothes later used in the suitcase that allegedly held the Lockerbie bomb.
The DoJ was also asked to pay a further $1m to his brother, Paul Gauci, who did not give evidence but played a major role in identifying the clothing and in "maintaining the resolve of his brother". The DoJ said their rewards could be increased and that the brothers were also eligible for the US witness protection programme, according to the documents.
The previously secret payments were uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which returned Megrahi's conviction to the court of appeal in 2007 as a suspected miscarriage of justice. Many references were in private diaries kept by the detectives involved, Megrahi's lawyers said, but not their official notebooks.
So the money came from the United States. Gee, what a surprise.
March on Washington
Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.
