Recent Articles in the Creek

Empire, Obama and America's Last Taboo

A Speach by John Pilger, Socialism 2009, San Francisco, July 4, 2009

Transcribed by Elaine Sullivan / RCFP

Two years ago I spoke at “Socialism in Chicago” about an invisible government which is a term used by Edward Bernays, one the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays, who in the 1920s invented public relations as a euphemism for propaganda. And it was Bernays, deploying the ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud, who campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation calling cigarettes “tortures of freedom”. At the same time he was involved in the disinformation which was critical in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. So you have the association of cigarettes and regime change. The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media: PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising and their power of branding and image making. In other words, disinformation.

And I suppose I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement, the rise of Barrack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. But all of this has a history, of course and I’d like to go back, take you back some forty years to a sultry and, for me, very memorable day in Viet Nam. I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village in the Central Highlands called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a unit of US Marines who had been sent to the village to win hearts and minds. “My orders,” said the Marine Sergeant, “are to sell the American way of liberty, as stated in the Pacification Handbook, this is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Now, page 86 was headed in capital letters: WHAM (winning hearts and minds). The Marine Unit was a combined action company which explained the Sergeant, meant, “We attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays.” He was joking, of course, but not quite. The Sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up on a Jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody we’ve got rice and candies and toothbrushes to give you.” This was greeted by silence. “Now listen, either you gooks come on out or we’re going to come right in there and get you!” Now the people of Tuylon finally came out and they stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey Bars, party balloons, and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery operated, yellow, flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow, flush lavatories unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and took out a handwritten speech, “Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts, they carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen there’s no place on Earth like America, it’s the land where miracles happen, it’s a guiding light for me and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky as having the greatest democracy the world has ever known and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.” Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrope sitting upon a hill got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Bangled Banner playing softly in the background. Of course the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about, but when the Marines clapped, they clapped. And when the colonel waved, the children waved. And when he departed the colonel shook the Sergeant’s hand and said: “We’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here, carry on Sergeant.” “Yes Sir.” In Viet Nam I witnessed many scenes like that.

I’d grown up in faraway Australia on a cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan. The American way of liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook. I’d learned that the United States had won World War II on its own and now led the free world as the chosen society. It was only later when I read Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion, a manual of the invisible government, that I began to understand the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad histories on a grand scale.

Now, historians call this exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls “liberty” to the rest of humanity. Of course this is a very old refrain. The French and British created and celebrated their own civilizing missions while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties. However, the power of the American message was, and remains, different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an Age of Innocence. American motives were always well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said, “There was no ideology” and that’s still the case.

Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology. It’s both conservative and it’s liberal. And it’s right and it’s left. And Barack Obama is its embodiment. Since Obama was elected leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as, “a nation of moral ideals”. Those are the words of Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist of The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Mark Morford wrote, “Spiritually advanced people regard the new president as a light worker who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs. Or a Pakistani child whose house has been visited by one of Obama’s drones. Or a Palestinian child surveying the carnage in Gaza caused by American “smart” weapons, which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter, and I quote; “Only after the Obama team let if be known, it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.

In a sense, Obama is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never “change”, it was power. “The United States,” he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement, “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world; that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.” Words like these remind me of the colonel in the village in Viet Nam, as he spun much the same nonsense.

Since 1945, by deed and by example, to use Obama’s words, America has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements and bombed countless men, women, and children to death. I’m grateful to Bill Blum for his cataloging of that. And yet, here is the 45th (sic) president of the United States having stacked his government with war mongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, promising, not only more of the same, but a whole new war in Pakistan. Justified by the murderous clichés of Hilary Clinton, clichés like, “high value targets”. Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet, the peace movement, it seems, is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, “the nation of moral ideals.”

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest. When messages about their nation’s great mission were lit up; these included tributes to the; “…exceptional Americans who saved a million lives…” in Viet Nam; where they were, “…determined to stop Communist expansion.” In Iraq other brave Americans, “employed air-strikes of unprecedented precision.” What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times, but the shear scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have very much in common. The wars of both presidents and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America. A myth the late Harold Pinter described as, “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist; partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century and race together with gender, and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe above all, is the class one serves. George Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multi-racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary. Obama’s very presence in the White House appears to reaffirm the moral nation. He’s a marketing dream. But like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he’s a brand that promises something special, something exciting, almost risqué. As if he might be radical. As if he might enact change. He makes people feel good; he’s a post-modern man with no political baggage. And all that’s fake.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia in 1983; he describes his employer as, “…a consulting house to multi-national corporations.” For some reason he doesn’t say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation; which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action and infiltrating unions from the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia. Obama doesn’t say what he did at Business International and they may be absolutely nothing sinister. But it seems worthy of inquiry, and debate, as a clue to, perhaps, who the man is.

During his brief period in the senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority, but instead he has excused torture, reinstated military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact, and opposed habeas corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower, was right, I believe, when he said, that under Bush a military coup had taken place in the United States giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates - a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s powerful Secretary of Defense. And by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In the middle of a recession, with millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes, Obama has increased the military budget. In Colombia he is planning to spend 46 million dollars on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in that region.

In a pseudo-event in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience, mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China. In another pseudo-event, at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that America had gone to Iraq to bring freedom to that country. He announced that the troops were coming home. This was another deception. The head of the army, General George Casey says, with some authority, that America will be in Iraq for up to a decade. Other generals say fifteen years.

Chris Hedges, the very fine author of Empire of Illusion, puts it very well; “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and brand Obama gets you to believe another.” This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel. And so you are kept in a perpetual state of childishness. He calls this “junk politics”.

But I think the real tragedy is that Obama, the brand, appears to have crippled or absorbed much of the anti-war movement - the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress; 30, just 30, are willing to stand up against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June the 16th they voted for 106 billion dollars for more war.

The “Out of Iraq” caucus is out of action. Its member can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March the 21st, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The out-going president of UFPJ, Lesley Kagen, says her people aren’t turning up because, “It’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty Move On, these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what, exactly, was said when Move On’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met Barack Obama at the White House in February?

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him? Working to elect the Democratic presidential candidate may seem like activism, but it isn’t. Activism doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics which like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people. And not only in the United States, I can assure you.

I write for the Italian socialist newspaper, Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February I sent the editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why, I asked? “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more positive approach to the novelty presented by Obama. We will take on specific issues, but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.” In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history, is ordained and depoliticized by important sections of the left. It’s a remarkable situation. Remarkable, because those on the, so called, Radical Left have never been more aware, more conscious of the inequities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions, so that almost every child knows something about global warming. And yet, there seems to be a resistance, within the Green Movement, to the notion of power as a military force, a military project. And perhaps similar observations can also be made about sections of the Feminist Movement and the Gay Movement and certainly the Union Movement.

One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera, “The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting.” We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy.

Long ago Edward Bernays’ invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The “American way of life” began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity. Thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for many ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity, within our grasp, is to recognize that something is stirring in America that is unfamiliar, perhaps, to many of us on the left, but is related to a great popular movement that’s growing all over the world. Look down at Latin America, less than twenty years ago there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. Today for the first time perhaps in 500 years there’s a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and language, a genuine populism. The recent amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. The successes in Latin America are expressed perversely in the recent overthrow of the government of Honduras, because the smaller the country, the greater is the threat of a good example that the disease of emancipation will spread.

Indeed, right across the world social movements and grass roots organization have emerged to fight free market dogma. They’ve educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem, rather than a solution to global poverty. They’ve politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. Look at the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, BDS, for short, aimed at Israel that’s sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and Western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to build a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities in the United Kingdom have begun to sever ties with Israel. This is how apartheid South Africa was defeated. And this is how the great wind of the 1960s began to blow. And this is how every gain has been won: the end of slavery, universal suffrage, workers rights, civil rights, environmental protection, the list goes on and on.

And that brings us back, here, to the United States, because I believe something is stirring in this country. Are we aware, that in the last eight months millions of angry e-mails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. And I mean millions. People are outright outraged that their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the passive mass presented by the media. Look at the polls; more than 2/3 of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves, sixty-four percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone, sixty percent are favorable towards Unions, seventy percent want nuclear disarmament, seventy-two percent want the US completely out of Iraq and so on and so on. But where is much of the left? Where is the social justice movement? Where is the peace movement? Where is the civil rights movement? Ordinary Americans, for too long, have been misrepresented by stereotypes that are contemptuous. James Madison referred to his compatriots in the public as ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. And this contempt is probably as strong today, among the elite, as it was back then. That’s why the progressive attitudes of the public are seldom reported in the media, because they’re not ignorant, they’re subversive, they’re informed and they’re even anti-American. I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian, Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what anti-American is,” she said in her forceful way, “its what governments and their vested interests call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States, they are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms though they would call it common decency. They are not vain; they are the people with a waitful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.” Truly exceptional, I like that.

My own guess is that a populism is growing, once again in America evoking a powerful force beneath the surface which has a proud history. From such authentic grass roots Americanism came women suffrage, the eight hour day, graduated income tax, public ownership of railways and communications, the breaking of the power of corporate lobbyists and much more. In other words, real democracy. The American populists were far from perfect, but they often spoke for ordinary people and they were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. That was long ago, but how familiar it sounds. My guess is that something is coming again. The signs are there. Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, “Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant.” No one predicted 1968, no one predicted the fall of apartheid, or the Berlin Wall, or the civil rights movement, or the great Latino rising of a few years ago.

I suggest that we take Woody Allen’s advice and give up on hope and listen, instead, to voices from below. What Obama and the bankers and the generals and the IMF and the CIA and CNN and BBC fear, is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action as they’ve done so often throughout history.

“At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Thank you.

The Deep State Does Not Respond To FOIA Requests

A Profile of 9/11 Researcher Aidan Monaghan

By Sheila Casey / RCFP

In an attempt to get to the bottom of what really happened on 9/11, citizen investigator Aidan Monaghan has filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with federal agencies such as the FBI, SEC, Department of the Navy, and the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Agency after agency has refused to comply with his requests, instead claiming that the information cannot be found, does not exist, was never properly filed, or even, from the FAA, that it was simply “not in a position to release said records at this time.”

The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Johnson in 1966. It mandates that information held by federal agencies must be made available to any citizen requesting it, unless that information is exempt. The Act specifies nine reasons why any given piece of information could be exempt, such as invasion of personal privacy, trade secrets, anything related to the supervision or regulation of financial institutions, and anything that could compromise either law enforcement or national security. In addition, the FBI has put an exemption on all of their 9/11 information and will release information only if compelled to do so by a lawsuit, of which Monaghan has filed two.

Despite the persistent stonewalling, Monaghan has turned up some interesting discrepancies. While it was widely reported in the media that the flight data recorder (FDR) also known as the “black box,” for American Airlines Flight 77 (the plane that allegedly hit the Pentagon on 9/11) was found at 4 am on September 14, 2001, the file containing the FDR data was dated over four hours earlier. In other words, the data from the FDR was downloaded prior to the FDR being found.

When Monaghan filed a Request for Correction with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and pointed out this disparity, his request was denied and an explanation offered that the file was created as a routine procedure prior to finding the FDR. However the FDR file indicates three parameters: date created, date modified, and date accessed. The “date created” and “date modified” fields are both listed as 11:45:38 pm on September 13, 2001, indicating that no data was added later, after the FDR was found. The “date accessed” field is blank.

This is, Monaghan says, “sufficient reason to wonder if the information is faked.”

Monaghan has also established that the NTSB does not have either serial or part numbers for the FDRs from American Airlines Flight # 77 or United Airlines Flight # 93 (which allegedly crashed in Shanksville, PA). This is highly unusual, in fact, according to Monaghan, there is only one other occasion in the past 20 years when the NTSB report for a airplane crash did not contain the part and serial numbers for the FDR. That was, oddly enough, exactly ten years earlier, on September 11, 1991, when a Continental Express flight broke up in mid-air, killing 14 people, when the horizontal stabilizer failed. The accident was blamed on the negligence of Continental’s maintenance and inspection crew.

The NTSB’s own handbook indicates that the part number and serial number of the FDR are required for data readout of the FDR. The NTSB did not have this information, giving us another reason to question how the FDR data was created.

Other researchers have raised serious doubts about Flight #77. The fact that the file for American Airlines Flight 77 FDR was created before the AA 77 FDR was found, was first reported on the forum for Pilots for 9/11 Truth in August of 2007, but with a timestamp of six hours earlier than reported by Monaghan. Pilots for 9/11 Truth have also concluded that the FDR data released by the NTSB has the plane flying too high to hit the Pentagon.

Monaghan also uncovered a discrepancy suggesting that either the FAA or Popular Mechanics writers are lying. Monaghan filed a FOIA with the FAA requesting data about the number of times the FAA had asked NORAD to intercept an aircraft in three specific years, but received a reply stating that the FAA does not track or record that information and that they “have no records responsive to your request.”

But on page 22 of the 2006 Popular Mechanics book Debunking 9/11 Myths, the writers quote an unnamed source at the FAA as saying that scrambles were routine, but interceptions were not - especially over the continental United States. If the FAA does not track that information, how did the FAA source know this?

Another discrepancy arose when Monaghan asked the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) for the last pre-9/11 flights of the aircraft that were allegedly destroyed on 9/11. BTS responded with a spreadsheet that showed that prior to 9/11, three of the four aircraft had not flown since December 2000. (No information was given for the plane that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon.) However a searchable online database on the BTS website shows that three of the four flights (again, no information for the Pentagon plane) flew continuously until September 11, 2001.

The list of FOIAs that Monaghan has filed which have yielded no information is long.

He asked the Secret Service for documents that reveal what time former Vice President Dick Cheney entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), as well as documents pertaining to the names of persons admitted to PEOC on the morning of 9/11. Reply: no records or documents pertaining to your request.

He asked the SEC for a bibliography of the investigation records that were located in the SEC’s offices on floors 11-13 in World Trade Center 7, even attaching a copy of a September 17, 2001 article in the National Law Journal which stated that SEC and EEOC investigations had been delayed due to the loss of “substantial files” for 3,000 to 4,000 cases. The reply: “did not locate or identify any information responsive to your request.”

In an attempt to shed light on what may have led to the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, Monaghan asked the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey for a complete list of outsourced contract projects performed upon World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2 from January 1, 2001 to September 11, 2001. Reply: “no documents in Port Authority files responsive to your request.” (Monaghan notes that since the Port Authority was located in WTC 1, it is possible that all files were lost that day.)

Monaghan sued the FBI to obtain “documentation revealing the process by which wreckage recovered by defendant, from the aircraft used during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was positively identified by defendant…as belonging to the said aircraft…” Reply: “…there are no responsive records. The identities of the airplanes hijacked in the September 11 attacks was never in question, and, therefore, there were no records generated…”

As reported in the April, 2008 Rock Creek Free Press, the aircraft were very much in question, as transponders were turned off and one plane, Flight 77, was even lost to radar over Ohio for a time. NTSB officials are on record stating that they were involved in aircraft parts identification, and bins were set up at all three crash sites labeled “aircraft parts.”

The Rock Creek Free Press reported in May 2009 that explosive, unreacted thermitic material containing nano particles of aluminum and iron oxide had recently been discovered in the dust from the World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11, 2001. The Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center was described in 1999 as “the only reliable source for aluminum nano-powders in the United States,” and in 2008 as “probably the most prominent US center for nano-thermite technology.”

Monaghan asked the Naval Surface Warfare Center for records about the research and development of nano-sized aluminum powders or nano-sized iron oxide powders. Reply: “have not found any records responsive to your request.”

Monaghan is currently trying to get more information from the FBI with Aidan Monaghan v. US Dept of Justice, et al., 09-CV-0060. When you sue the FBI, Monaghan explained, you go up against the Department of Justice, since the FBI is a division of the DoJ.

This lawsuit asks for information about the wreckage recovered from American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight #93, the flight management computers and multi-mode receivers used on all four aircraft, the serial numbers for the flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders for AA77 and UA93, communications between the four hijacked aircraft, information regarding the presence of bombs in the World Trade Center towers, three days of logs of the recovery of human remains from the crash sites of AA77 and UA93, an audio copy of the cockpit voice recorder from UA93, and information about phone calls placed from AA11, UA175, AA77 and UA93, including the existence of seatback or Airfone telephones for passenger use on all four aircraft.

Monaghan admits that he is now “running out of ideas for FOIAs for file.” As recently as September 2007, the FBI denied Monaghan’s FOIAs under the law enforcement exemption, claiming that this is an “ongoing investigation” and that information related to identifying the aircraft used on 9/11 “could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if the FOIA is just a lot of theatre for public consumption to provide a perception that yes, government is accessible, it’s transparent,” said Monaghan. “For two years now I’ve tried to pull as much 9/11 info from the federal government as I can, and the most noteworthy thing I’ve found is the absence of information. Material that should be there just isn’t.”

Monaghan is married, lives in Las Vegas and works in risk management and public safety for a large commercial property that gets a lot of public traffic. He was educated as an electrical engineer.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Turkish Intelligence Blackmailing Sitting Member of House

By Wayne Madsen/ Wayne Madsen Report

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds testified August 15th that while she was working for the FBI she was aware of bribes being made by the Turkish government to elected and former members of Congress, as well as senior officials of the executive branch, including the Department of State. Edmonds was subpoenaed by the Ohio Election Commission in a case brought against Ohio Democratic House of Representatives candidate David Krikorian by incumbent Ohio Republican Representative Jean Schmidt. Schmidt alleges in her complaint to the Commission that Krikorian made “false statements” in his 2008 independent race against her.

Edmonds named Rep. Schmidt as one of the recipients of Turkish government bribes along with former House Speakers Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dick Gephardt (D-MO), and brief House Speaker Robert Livingston (R-LA), as well as Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) and former Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY). Also named are Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser under George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and former George W. Bush State Department Political Undersecretary, Marc Grossman.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI job after she complained to her superiors about Turkish intelligence infiltration of the translation branch of the bureau; she was exonerated in a report by the FBI’s Inspector General.

Edmonds’ testimony also dealt with Turkish and Israeli joint operations to engage in smuggling nuclear technology from the US. In particular, the Turkish espionage and influence-peddling ring was heavily involved in the Bush White House “outing” the covert identities of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates, non-official, CIA- cover firm.

Perhaps the most explosive part of the deposition involved the Turkish government being engaged in a sexual blackmail operation against a sitting member of the House of Representative. In what the FBI termed a “hooking process,” an American-Turkish Council (ATC) female operative enticed a female member of the House into a lesbian sexual encounter at a Washington, DC townhouse. A Turkish intelligence surveillance team had placed surveillance bugs throughout the townhouse, including the bedroom and captured the lesbian tryst on tape, according to Edmonds’s testimony.

WMR has learned that the House member in question is Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a strong supporter of AIPAC and Israel and a close political ally of President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

To her credit, Schakowsky had been a vocal opponent of private military contractors and the lack of government oversight of their activities, especially in Latin American and Iraq, but since being compromised, she has “gone quiet” on all her signature issues, including private military contractors, and she has become very hawkish in support of Israel.

In January 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Schakowsky to be a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Currently, Schakowsky is chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations — which puts her in a conflict-of-interest in investigating Turkish and related Israeli intelligence penetration of the FBI and State Department.

WMR has also learned from congressional sources that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was aware of Schakowsky’s “problems,” and he resisted pressure from Obama and Emanuel to appoint Schakowsky to Obama’s vacant Senate seat. When Blagojevich signaled he was going to appoint someone other than Schakowsky to the seat, the joint Israeli and Turkish lobbies, in addition to Emanuel, arranged for US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to receive a green light to arrest Blagojevich, even before any federal corruption indictments were handed down by a grand jury. Blagojevich was later impeached by the Illinois House and removed from office by the state senate. An indictment on multiple counts was later handed down by a federal grand jury.

WMR has previously reported that Fitzgerald dragged his feet on the investigation of the leak by the Bush White House of the covert identities of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover firm. Fitzgerald was trying to limit damaging exposure to the nuclear smuggling operation that involved the Turkish and Israeli Lobbies and Turkish MIT and Israeli Mossad intelligence operations. Mrs. Wilson and her team were apparently narrowing in on the Turks and Israelis in nuclear smuggling around the world. The key US government players in outing Brewster Jennings were named by Edmonds in her deposition.

Blackwater (now Xe) has been accused of smuggling weapons through Iraq to Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey. Recent allegations that Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) terrorist attacks in Turkey have been “false flags” carried out by the “deep state” Ergenekon and the allegations by Edmonds that the ATC and its affiliates in Washington are part of the Turkish “deep state” point to possible long-time collusion between Blackwater and Turkish intelligence. The fact that Turkish intelligence successfully blackmailed Schakowsky, the major congressional opponent of Blackwater’s operations, could not have come as better news to the firm.

With the CIA and Blackwater/Xe vigorously opposed to any further details of their cooperation emerging, there is the strong possibility that Turkish state intelligence has shared its “take” with the CIA and Schakowsky is, once again, being blackmailed into submission as she was when the ATC and its sister organization, the Israeli AIPAC lobby, pressured her to back down on her support for an Armenian genocide resolution in the House.

Such juicy blackmail information certainly may have ended up in the hands of those CIA officials who went to work in senior executive positions for Blackwater, including the CIA’s former chief of the Counterterrorism Center Cofer Black, former chief of the CIA’s Near East and South Asia Division Robert Richer, former CIA Special Operations Group official Enrique “Ric” Prado, and Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, who, while his brother Howard “Cookie” Krongard was blocking an investigation of the State Department’s contracts with Blackwater while serving as State’s Inspector General, was serving on Blackwater’s advisory board. In addition, Joseph Schmitz, the Pentagon’s former Inspector General, was hired on as the general counsel for the Prince Group, the parent company of Erik Prince’s Blackwater.

It is also reported that after CIA director George Tenet canceled the CIA’s contract with Blackwater. His replacement, Porter Goss, renewed the deal. Goss’s Executive Director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, now jailed for fraud and corruption, would have been involved in hammering out the CIA’s renewed contract with Blackwater. Foggo, had a personal and business relationship with Pamela Martin & Associates proprietor, his old friend from San Diego the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey, to provide escorts for the agency for clandestine tasks. That activity also involved providing escorts for Washington hotel “poker parties” at which Goss, Foggo, and jailed former Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham were present. Cunningham served as chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Appropriations subcommittee, which approved Blackwater’s Pentagon contracts. Blackwater, according to recent court depositions in Alexandria, Virginia, is accused of running a prostitution camp in Baghdad, which also involved the use of children.

The connections between Blackwater and the CIA now indicate that the Pentagon entity that was working closely with Langley in paramilitary assassination operations was largely composed of Blackwater contractors.

Many in Congress are demanding an explanation for the CIA’s contracts with Blackwater; but with Schakowsky being blackmailed, there is little hope that her subcommittee can look into the contracts between the CIA and Blackwater/Xe, let alone the operations of the Prince Group’s other murky entities, including Presidential Airways, Greystone Ltd. of Barbados, Falcon, EP Investments, Xe Airships, Total Intelligence Solutions, and Raven Development Group.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist and a regular commentator on Russia Today TV. His columns have appeared in the Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and many other papers.

The Second Wave of The Depression: Hyperinflation Likely

Webster Tarpley responds to Ellen Brown’s article about hyperinflation in the July issue

By Webster Tarpley
July 15, 2009
The second wave of the world economic depression is coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: “I don’t think the worst is over ….” A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the 1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand, told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum (FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a planetary Weimar “in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the German events of 1922 - 1923.

During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency — and not the US Hawley-Smoot tariff — strangled world trade, thus making that depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book, the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.

TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931

Today, therefore, we are, so to speak, in the trough between the October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and banking panic of 2008) and the September 1931 wave, which this time around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?

The next wave is likely to involve a worldwide dollar panic. Using ballpark figures, we can say that there are about $4 to $5 trillion sloshing around the world in the form of hot money, US Treasury securities, Euro dollars, and various forms of zeno-dollars. Japan has about a trillion, China almost $2 trillion, and so forth. It is naturally very unwise for a developing country like China to hold so many dollars rather than using them to purchase needed infrastructure and capital goods, and the Chinese leaders are now very uncomfortable with their own foolish decision, which was of course taken under heavy US pressure. But the point is that this $4.5 trillion overhang is by its very nature exceedingly unstable. Every country that holds large sums of dollars or US Treasury bonds is nervously eyeing every other such country to see if they show signs of bolting for the exit. Up to now, so far as we know, no large holder of dollars has attempted to reduce its exposure to the battered greenback by dumping these dollars on the international market. If anyone did so, it would cause a true universal financial panic which would create chaos and mayhem not just in the United States and Great Britain, but in the vast areas of the rest of the world as well. This is concretely how hyperinflation could now very well arise: if one or more US creditor nations attempts to abruptly lighten up on dollars, the value of the US currency could undergo a catastrophic collapse, and that would spell runaway hyperinflation on the US domestic front.

World Dollar Panic Imminent?

We need to recall that the value of a modern currency is not determined inside the country, but rather on the international foreign exchange markets. This is where the fatal vulnerability of the US dollar is located. In the ruined form of the Bretton Woods system which has prevailed for almost 40 years since Nixon‘s colossal historical vandalism of August 15, 1971, the US has emerged as the only country with a permanent license to finance imports by simply printing more of its own currency and sending those banknotes overseas. Every other country has to manufacture and export something that others want to buy in order to earn the necessary foreign exchange to pay for its own imports. The US license to print has made this country the buyer of last resort and the dumping ground for the unsold junk of the world, leading in the process to high permanent unemployment here. There are many signs that this inherently unworkable arrangement has now reached the breaking point.

International Currency Relations, Not Money Supply, Are The Key

Ms. Ellen Brown, who apparently supports the doctrines of the social credit movement of the 1930s, has recently argued that deflation is now on the agenda, and that hyperinflation can be ruled out. She bases this analysis on the fact that the private credit markets in this country have largely collapsed, and on the contention that the M1 and M2 money parameters have either declined or increased only slightly. But all of this is beside the point. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury have so far provided almost $13 trillion of new loans to banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and other purely financial institutions. This is being done in an effort to bailout the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble, of which something like two-thirds or more, meaning one quadrillion dollars, can be located inside the dollar zone. The world depression started when this derivatives bubble went into reverse leverage, meaning that super losses instead of super profits were generated at the apex of the speculative pyramid, as seen in the case of the $3 trillion AIG hedge fund located in London. The Obama regime is engaged in an hysterical attempt to restart derivatives production in the form of securitization, i.e. the creation of more and better asset backed securities derivatives. At the same time, the Obama regime has cynically and deliberately driven the Detroit automakers into bankruptcy, destroying hundreds of thousands of the few remaining industrial jobs here in the United States. This means that US industrial production continues in drastic decline. The mere mention of production reminds us that the assorted Austrian, Chicago, and social credit schools are predominantly or exclusively concerned with money and banking, and pay little or no attention to industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural production, meaning of course that they neglect the creation of those tangible physical use values, capital goods, and related forms of real wealth upon which human existence depends. With bailouts increasing and all forms of commodity production declining, we have the classic situation of far too much money chasing too few goods. Internal pressure towards hyperinflation comes from the fact that the bailout and public debt lending, on top of the bloated, fictitious, and exponentially growing mass of kited derivatives, are all charges which must be added to the prices of commodity production. Add this to the more important factor of looming dollar panic in the international exchanges, and the preponderance of the evidence points towards hyperinflation. “Helicopter Ben“ Bernanke got his name from his famous recipe of throwing bales of dollars out of helicopters onto the lawns of bankers to stimulate the economy out of a depression, and this reminds us that the profile of the Anglo-American financial leadership from Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King to Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke is decidedly hyperinflationary. Ms. Brown’s belief that hyperinflation is impossible is therefore mistaken.

The German 1923 hyperinflation was generated internationally, not within Germany, as a campaign of economic warfare by Britain and France against their defeated rival. Germany had signed the Rapallo agreements with Soviet Russia, creating an economic combination which was more than a match for the Anglo-French. To abort the potential of Rapallo by creating chaos in the German economy, the Anglo-French systematically destroyed the value of the German Reichsmark on the international exchanges, taking advantage of the Versailles reparations system and the French occupation of the industrialized Ruhr area. The mark went down every day when the London exchange rate was announced. Today, it is the enormous international dollar overhang which threatens to annihilate the US greenback.

The one way deflation might actually come about is if someone like the self-professed Austrian school ideologue Ron Paul were to take power. Ron Pauls “libertarianism“ alternative to Obama‘s continued bailouts of Wall Street is evidently an immediate deflationary crash, which he asserts will be followed by an automatic recovery. Ron Paul is a modern representative of the so-called liquidationist school to which 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon belonged. Mellon demanded the liquidation of stocks, bonds, real estate, and labor. German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, another liquidationist, savagely cut German unemployment benefits (Ron Paul’s “nanny state“) at the height of the Depression, helping to bring on the debacle of January 1933. Liquidationists tend to be people who have money and who believe they will continue to have money even after an all-out crash, when they will be able to buy up distressed assets and desperate unemployed workers for rock-bottom prices and cash in. But liquidationism obviously cannot be a solution to depression of the entire society.

The recent meetings of the leaders of the expanded G-8 countries in L’Aquila, Italy were marked by a growing awareness that the US dollar, because of the criminally irresponsible policies of the Wall Street financiers who have dominated the Bush and Obama administrations, can no longer play the role of the single world reserve currency. Russian President Medvedev showed off a sort of future world coin to try to prod the Obama regime in the direction of serious world monetary reform, which is of course the urgent task before everyone. Naturally, finance oligarchs like Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke want to continue to play the role of world currency dictators, and not be forced to negotiate the end of Anglo-American hegemonism. The world needs to go toward a new pro-growth world monetary system in which the euro, the yen, the dollar, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, a possible Latin American monetary unit, and a possible Arab monetary unit would all be included. It will be important to make the transition toward such a new system as orderly as possible, since a catastrophic collapse of the dollar in the short term would be to no one‘s advantage, and would rather represent a sure path to universal ruin. World economic growth rates under the 1944 to 1971 Bretton Woods system were the highest in recorded history before or since. This was accomplished through statism and dirigism in the form of narrow bands of isolation among the currencies, combined with gold settlements of surpluses and deficits among the nations, which provided an indispensable reality principle to restrain the hyperinflationary tendencies of the Anglo-Americans. The new world monetary system should include the abolition of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their current forms, since these institutions have strangled the economic progress of the developing sector. Rather, the goal of the new monetary system should be to restart the export of high technology capital goods of the most modern type from Europe, Japan, and the United States toward the impoverished countries of Africa, South Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.

The Federal Government Should Stop Borrowing And Start Lending

Here in the United States, we need to wipe out the derivatives bubble with the help of a 1% Tobin tax or securities transfer tax, on all speculative financial transactions, including futures, options, stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, and so forth. A California Tobin tax would solve the state budget crisis. The top 16 Wall Street banks are zombie institutions that need to be seized and liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy at once, with all of their derivatives going into the shredder. Foreclosures on homes, farms, and businesses should be banned outright for five years or for the duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. To provide a credit supply, the Federal Reserve should be seized and nationalized, and used as a vehicle to issue 0% Federal credit for productive activities only, not for speculation. To revive credit demand, state and local governments could then take out 0% Federal loans for such long overdue projects as the construction of 1,000 hospitals, the building of 50,000 miles of modern maglev rail systems, and 100 fourth-generation, high temperature, pebble bed nuclear reactors, plus the rebuilding of water systems and the interstate highway network. Idled auto plants should be reconverted for these purposes. Science drivers in the fields of space exploration and colonization, high energy physics, and biomedical research should also be fully funded in this way to provide technological modernization. The social safety net needs to be expanded and developed, with larger Social Security pensions for a generation whose 401(k)s and IRAs have been largely destroyed, along with increased Medicare and Medicaid benefits for those whose insurance companies are insolvent, like AIG and The Hartford, which have been devastated by derivatives speculation. These are quite simply the requirements for the maintenance of human civilization in this part of the world. Until measures like these are carried out, the United States and the world will continue to sink deeper into the bottomless pit of economic depression.

Webster Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.

More Brits Think Government Behind 7/7 London Bombings

In the August Issue:

By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

After four years, rumors swell in London that the British Government had a hand in the terrorist attacks of 7/7. Three Tube stations and a bus were struck with bombs that morning.

The government’s official story, that the attacks were staged by four British Muslims, inspired by al Qaeda but unaffiliated with any specific group is being rejected by growing numbers of Brits.

The official story is weak: four British Muslims — Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Jermaine Lindsay, 19, and Hasib Hussain, 18 — blew themselves up using explosives cooked up in their bath tub, killing 56 and injuring 700 on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus.

They had traveled on a mainline train from Luton into King’s Cross Thameslink Station in London, each carrying a heavy backpack of explosives.

At least that’s the version of events as presented by a high-level Parliamentary inquiry and a government report, which were published in May 2006, ten months after the events.

One immediate problem was that the accused bombers just didn’t seem to be the type.

They were family men, one a teacher, another played cricket the night before; not the actions a fundamentalist jihadist bent on suicide the following day. After viewing the Closed Circuit videos of the men, the police said they looked like “happy hikers”, laughing and joking and carrying heavy bags.

London Anti-Terrorist Police admitted that the bombers “did not fit the preconceived terrorist profile.”

They parked a rental car outside the train station and paid to park for seven days, then purchased round-trip tickets to London. The suspects were seen to be arguing with cashiers, walking in and out of shops, including McDonalds, and “bumping into people” in the minutes before the blasts — hardly the behavior of people who are in the final crucial moments of planning a terror attack in which they will be killed, and who wish to go unnoticed.

“I’ve seen the CCTV footage of these people. They do not appear to be on their way to commit any crime at all,” a London Metropolitan Police representative said.

“The roundtrip tickets, the fact that one of them spent a lot recently repairing his car and one of them had a family and was the teacher of the disabled and underprivileged children, it doesn’t ring right,” said Paul Beaver, a security and defense expert in London with close police contacts. “If you had that much commitment, how are you going to take your life? It’s happened in Palestine, but these people were brought up in the UK.” (Watson, Prison Planet)

Almost immediately after release of the official report, people noticed that there were problems with the official time-line as well.

The official story puts the bombers on the 7:40am train from Luton, which would have arrived at King’s Cross in good time for them to board the Tube trains.

But, the 7:40am train never ran that morning. It was cancelled.

The Government has since corrected this information — but only after the error was raised by survivors. The revised story now is that the bombers actually caught an earlier train, the 7:25am from Luton, for the 35-minute journey to King’s Cross. It was due to arrive in the capital at 8am.

But records show this train ran 23 minutes late because of problems with the overhead line which disrupted most of the service between Luton to King’s Cross that morning. It arrived in London at 8:23am, according to station officials.

Just as problematic is the official scenario for the bombers’ supposed arrival at King’s Cross. While it takes seven minutes to walk from the Thameslink line station to the main King’s Cross station, the Police say the four men were seen on the main King’s Cross concourse at 8:26am after getting off the Luton train at 8:23am. Yet they have not released any CCTV photos placing the men there, nor are there any eyewitnesses who remember four men running between stations at triple speed and carrying large heavy backpacks.

Another problem with the revised timeline is that it is contradicted by an already released security camera frame which purports to show the bombers entering the Luton station at 7:22, which would give them only three minutes to walk up the stairs at Luton, buy their £22 round-trip tickets and get to the platform, which was already packed with commuters because of the earlier travel disruptions.

This still CCTV photo of the four bombers arriving at the station in Luton is the only one of the four men together on July 7. But this officially released still has serious problems. It appears to be a fake, and a crudely done one at that.

Another problem for the official story is that there are no eyewitnesses who can place the individuals — supposedly carrying large and heavy backpacks filled with homemade explosives — on the trains. In fact some of the surviving witnesses closest to the explosions remember there being no one and no back packs in the location of the explosions.

Bruce Lait, a victim of the Aldgate Station bombing, described to the Cambridge Evening News how he and his partner were sitting nearest to the bomb when it detonated. As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been. “The policeman said ‘mind that hole, that’s where the bomb was’. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don’t remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag,” he said.

Photos recently released seem to verify Lait’s statement that the explosion came from under the floorboards of the train.

Victims and their families, like the 9/11 victim’s families in the US are not pleased with the inconsistencies and basic mistakes in the official account and their explanation. The Government has so far refused to re-open the investigation and has stood by the increasingly discredited account. This has only fueled demand for books, DVDs and internet sites pointing out the glaring deficiencies of the official story.

Now even the Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at the time of the bombings, Andy Hayman, has called for an independent public inquiry. In his new book The Terrorist Hunters, Mr. Hayman writes: “Incidents of less gravity have attracted the status of a public inquiry — train crashes, a death in custody, and even other terrorist attacks. How can there not be a full, independent public inquiry into the deaths of 52 commuters on London’s transport system? …There has been no overview, no pulling together of each strand of review, no one can be sure if key issues have been missed.”

That’s putting it mildly.

Just to be clear, Hayman is not suggesting the government is behind the attacks. His criticisms center on what he contends are “intelligence failures” on the part of MI5 because, as he points out in his book, MI5 was well aware of and had been tracking Mohammad Sidique Khan for some time.

Frustrated by the lack of response to the public criticism of the 7/7 report, families of the victims and survivors are taking High Court action over the government’s refusal to grant an independent inquiry.

Even more suspicious is the revelation, made on the day of the events by Peter Power, a former Scotland Yard anti-terror expert, that they were conducting security drills on 7/7 that simulated the exact type of attack in the exact stations at the exact time of the actual events. “…At half-past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise…based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning”.

This is again reminiscent of the 9/11 events in the US where 15 or more drills and military exercises, some simulating hijackings, some even simulating planes crashing into buildings, were being conducted at the same time as the actual 9/11 attacks.

Another weakness of the official story is that the devastating explosions are claimed to have come from crude home-made explosives the bombers are supposed to have made in their bath tub, no less. Initial assessments of experts at the scene of the explosions were that high grade military explosives were used. Only later was the story changed to have the bombers cooking up their own home-made bombs.

Clifford Todd of the Forensic Explosives Laboratory at Fort Halsted in Kent has testified that the 7/7 bombs were made with a mixture of (don’t laugh) hair peroxide, powdered masala spice and ground black pepper. However, according to his testimony on 2 May 2008, no pepper residue was detected at any of the four bomb sites.

Much of the controversy recently has centered on a low-budget home made documentary called “Ripple Effect” that points out many of the problems with the official story.

“Ripple Effect” is having an effect. The popularity of this video, similar to the run-away success of the Loose Change video in the US, has forced the government to respond. The TV show “Conspiracy Files” on BBC2 has responded with a hit-piece which attempts to “debunk” the claims made in “Ripple Effect”, but such efforts may be only adding fuel to the fire. Skepticism in Britain of the official story continues to grow.

As you might imagine, it is among London’s Moslem community that skepticism of the government’s story is greatest.

The chairman of Birmingham’s Central Mosque, Dr. Mohammad Naseem, says in the BBC2 documentary: “We do not accept the government version of July 7, 2005. The “Ripple Effect” video is more convincing than the official statements.”

Mr. Naseem has made 2,000 copies of “Ripple Effect” for members of his mosque. Even before the contentious video came out, one in four British Muslims thought the Government or the Secret Services were responsible for the 7/7 atrocities. Now the number of doubters is growing.

At Friday prayers recently, Dr. Naseem asked the congregation to raise their hands if they did not accept the government version of events. Nearly the entire gathering of 150 men and boys did so. (Sue Ried, Daily Mail)

Unable to counter “Ripple Effect” with propaganda, the government has resorted to force. The government is going after the film’s creator, 60-year-old Yorkshireman Anthony John Hill who lives in Kells, County Meath, Ireland. He has been arrested and is currently fighting extradition to Britan. He is charged with “perverting the course of justice” for sending copies of his video to jury members in a terrorist case.

England has no First Amendment.

Researchers Release 9/11 Pentagon Attack Report

By Sheila Casey / RCFP

Among 9/11 truth activists, there is little disagreement about what happened at the World Trade Center and at Shanksville. Although it’s not possible to know all the details of what transpired until there is an independent, impartial investigation, there is wide agreement among 9/11 researchers that World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 were brought down by controlled demolition and that the hole in the ground that was presented to us as the crash site of flight 93 in Shanksville does not contain the remnants of an airplane.

But when it comes to the Pentagon, the truth community has yet to reach a consensus, and 9/11 forums are filled with bitter arguments from proponents of one view or another. It is assumed by most savvy 9/11 activists that the truth movement has been infiltrated by intelligence agents tasked with crippling activists in any way possible, and that many of the most strident arguments come, not from sincere researchers, but from disinformation agents intent on spreading confusion and discord. These agents are in a position to know the truth about what happened and can be expected to mount vigorous arguments against that truth, the better to keep the movement divided and to prevent a clear, cogent message about the false flag attack at the Pentagon from reaching the masses.

To many activists, the Pentagon attack stands as the single most incriminating feature of 9/11. The official conspiracy theory (OCT) would have us believe that the world’s only superpower, with the most powerful military that has ever existed, was unable to defend its own headquarters 51 minutes after the north WTC tower had been hit, 34 minutes after the south WTC tower had been hit, and 41 minutes after the FAA knew that there was an emergency aboard flight 77 (the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon). Regarding flight 77, Wikipedia states:

“By 08:56, the flight was turned around, and the transponder had been disabled. The FAA was aware at this point that there was an emergency aboard the plane. By this time, American Airlines Flight 11 had already crashed into the World Trade Center, and United Airlines Flight 175 was known to have been hijacked and within minutes of also striking the World Trade center.”

Where was America’s air defense during the 41 minutes after it was known that flight 77 was hijacked and before the Pentagon was attacked? In highly incriminating testimony given to the 9/11 Commission, then Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta stated that while he was in the bunker with Dick Cheney:

“There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, ‘The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.’ And when it got down to, ‘The plane is 10 miles out,’ the young man also said to the vice president, ‘Do the orders still stand?’ And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, ‘Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?’”

A few minutes later, the Pentagon exploded in flames, killing 125 unsuspecting workers in the building. No evacuation order had been given.

Norman Mineta’s testimony was not included in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Given these facts, plus many other anomalies about the OCT, it is no surprise that millions of people have concluded that the government is lying about what happened at the Pentagon. With the scene of attack completely controlled by the military, and with all video of the attack confiscated from nearby businesses by the FBI within minutes of the attack, for years 9/11 researchers speculated about what had actually transpired at the Pentagon, with little hard evidence to guide them.

Frustrated with idle conjecture, two men from southern California, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis, joined forces to form Citizen Investigation Team (CIT). They traveled to the Pentagon and sought out eyewitnesses who saw the plane approach the Pentagon. They interviewed each eyewitness, on camera, at the exact location where he had been standing on the morning of 9/11 when he saw the plane, and had each eyewitness draw the plane’s flight path on a map and sign it.

A pattern began to emerge, and the more witnesses CIT interviewed, the clearer the pattern became: the plane had not taken the path claimed by the government, and the path that it did take proves that the plane did not hit the building.

CIT interviewed three Pentagon police officers (Officer William Lagasse, Officer Chadwick Brooks and Officer Roosevelt Roberts Jr.); five Arlington National Cemetery workers (Darrell Stafford, Darius Prather, Donald Carter, William Middleton Sr. and George Aman); auto mechanic Edward Paik; Citgo gas station attendant Robert Turcios; air traffic controller Sean Boger (who was at the Pentagon Heliport at the time of the attack); Terry Morin, a project manager for Sparta (saw the plane from the Navy Annex); courier Levi Stephens (saw the plane from the Pentagon’s south parking lot); and Maria de La Cerda, a career musician with the Army band, who saw the plane from Arlington National Cemetery.

Every one of these people clearly recalls seeing the plane take a path that disagrees with the government’s story. None of them report seeing the plane fly south of the Citgo station, where it would have had to have been to have caused the damage at the Pentagon.

One witness, Roosevelt Roberts Jr., saw the plane after the explosion, banking low over the parking lot.

There is a zone of destruction heading towards the Pentagon, and into the building, that corresponds with a south side flight path. Five light poles were destroyed, and the damage in the building lines up perfectly with those five light poles.

Under most circumstances, physical evidence would trump eyewitness testimony. But in this case, the crime scene was controlled by the primary suspect, tainting the credibility of the evidence under their control. In addition, there are many anomalies with the physical evidence.

Right from the beginning, questions arose. Where was the plane debris? Photos taken immediately after the attack show no wings, tail or fuselage. No luggage or bodies. No damage to the pristine green lawn, even though the Boeing 757 was supposedly piloted into the first floor of the Pentagon at 530 mph by rookie pilot Hani Hanjour, who could barely fly a small Cessna. The damage to the building is inconsistent with the crash of an airliner with a 44 foot tall tail and 125 foot wingspan, with unbroken panes of glass where the tail section should have hit.

Even the downed light poles are suspicious. Compared to a light pole that was knocked down by wind, and has a jagged edge where it broke at the base, the five downed light poles on 9/11 appear to have been cut, neatly and cleanly.

On top of this suspicious crash scene, we now have 14 eyewitnesses who have stated unequivocally on camera that the plane was not where it would have needed to be to down the light poles and hit the Pentagon.

CIT is not the only group concluding that the plane didn’t hit the Pentagon. Pilots for 9/11 Truth is a group of 200 aviation professionals who all agree that, according to the data released by the government, the government story is not correct.

In August 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released the Flight Data Recorder data for flight 77. According to Rob Balsamo, founder of Pilots for 9/11 Truth, the last recorded altitude for the plane (one second before the alleged impact) shows an altitude of 480 feet above sea level. The top of the Pentagon is 112 feet above sea level. Given this data, the plane cleared the building with 368 feet to spare. The NTSB has repeatedly refused to comment on this.

For the contingent within the 9/11 truth movement that is convinced that a plane did hit the Pentagon, the most compelling evidence comes from the dozens of witnesses who believe they saw the plane hit the building. Six of these witnesses are editors or reporters for USA Today, and all claim to have been on the same quarter mile stretch of Rt. 27, heading the same way at the moment of the attack, late to work at the USA Today building in Rosslyn, three miles away.

In a ten minute clip available on Google video called “The USA Today Parade,” CIT has demonstrated that the Pentagon is not visible for most of that quarter mile stretch of Rt. 27. With video taken in a car driving that same route, it is clear that the Pentagon only becomes visible at the point at which the plane would have been over or behind the car. For much of the route, the Pentagon is obscured by large, bushy trees. CIT interviewed alleged witness to the Pentagon impact and USA Today editor Joel Sucherman on camera in his office. Sucherman insists that he saw the Pentagon at a location which CIT’s video clearly shows does not have a view of the Pentagon.

USA Today is owned by the Gannett company, which also owns Army Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times and Navy Times.

In the 9/11 truth movement, CIT’s work has been controversial. They are banned from posting on the largest 9/11 truth forum, 911blogger.com. Recent threads demonstrate that 911blogger has a pronounced preference for the “yes, a plane hit the Pentagon” version of events, with frequent anonymous contributors angrily defending that point of view.

The primary criticism of CIT’s work is that all of their witnesses believe the plane impacted the building. As I wrote in my story about CIT in the April 2009 Rock Creek Free Press:

“All of CIT’s witnesses also believe that the plane they saw hit the Pentagon, although this cannot be possible. This fact has been used to dismiss CIT’s work as irrelevant, but it’s not a compelling argument.

“Less than an hour earlier, America had been treated to the sight of the south tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane and exploding into a huge fireball. Most people were aware that an attack was underway. If they saw a jet heading directly towards the Pentagon, and next saw a massive fireball, it is doubtful that one person in a thousand would question whether the plane had crashed and caused the fireball. To conclude that the fireball was caused by explosives pre-planted in one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet, in an intentional false flag attack to justify war, would require observers to have a degree of perspicacity that was extremely rare in the pre 9/11 world, and only slightly less rare now.”

For those who actually saw the plane fly over the building, there was a convenient cover story: media reports of a second plane that came along 30 seconds after the first. Anyone who saw a plane still flying after the fireball would most likely conclude that they had seen that second plane.

The attack at the Pentagon is best understood as a gigantic magic show. How many of us have ever seen a fireball exploding hundreds of feet in diameter? I am sure that if I were to see one, my eyes would be riveted on it and for at least a few moments I’d be completely unaware of anything else in my environment. This is the essence of the magician’s trade – with flourishes and fanfare, he makes you look where he wants you to look, so you never see him slip the card behind his ear or up his sleeve. With the news media batting clean-up, only witnesses that confirmed the OCT were given airtime, and any doubters who were interviewed were simply edited out of the evening newscast.

In an effort to hold media and government officials responsible for their evidence, CIT has produced a new film, National Security Alert, which is available as a free download at citizeninvestigationteam.com. This video compresses all of the CIT interviews into a concise 80 minutes (sans music) that summarizes their evidence clearly and soberly. Their site will also contain a section where citizens can record which officials have received a copy of the DVD, and their response (or lack thereof).

CIT will be showing excerpts of National Security Alert and addressing the implications of their findings at a free conference in Arlington, VA called Deconstructing the Pentagon Attack. The conference will also feature Shelton Lankford, Lt. Col. USMC (retired), a fighter pilot with over 300 combat missions, 10,000 hours of flight time, and a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross. As of publication, attendance by Rob Balsamo of Pilots for 9/11 Truth is unconfirmed.

Held at the NRECA Conference Center at 4301 Wilson Blvd, in Arlington, the event will run from 10 am to 2:30 pm on Saturday, July 11, and is sponsored by The Wisdom Fund. Both the conference and parking are free.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Spanish Government Divided Over Indicting Bush Administration Torturers

By Sheila Casey / RCFP

An internationally renowned Spanish judge is attempting to prosecute six former Bush officials for their role in allowing torture at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite being urged by the Spanish Attorney General to drop the case, Judge Baltasar Garzon has submitted the case to a lottery system which will now assign it at random to one of six high court judges. As one of those high court judges, Garzon has a one in six chance of getting the case back.

Spain has jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents claim to have been tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

The language used by Spanish Attorney General Conde-Pumpido, such as calling the case “fraudulent,” has led some observers to conclude that Conde-Pumpido bowed to pressure from the Obama administration. The AG also said: “If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out.”

US Attorney General Eric Holder said that he isn’t going to prosecute any Central Intelligence Agency employees who water-boarded suspects. Holder said that it would be unfair to prosecute those who actually carried out acts of torture because it was considered legal at the time by the Justice Department. Holder also said the US would defend the CIA torturers against attempted prosecutions from overseas.

The 1984 Convention Against Torture states: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture…” Both Spain and the US are signatory to the Convention, which the US was involved in negotiating.

Judge Baltasar Garzon is well known as a fearless crusader against tyranny and torture. Garzon had Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet served with an arrest warrant while he was visiting Britain in 1998. During 17 years in office, Pinochet ordered the murders of thousands of his political enemies and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands of others.

Pinochet was held under house arrest for over a year until British Home Secretary Jack Straw declared, based on a medical examination, that the former tyrant was brain damaged and unable to stand trial. Pinochet died in 2006 without ever being brought to justice.

The officials named in the Spanish complaint are former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s former legal counsel, David Addington.

Jay Bybee and John Yoo wrote the infamous torture memos, including the opinions that water-boarding isn’t torture, nor was anything torture, short of “death, organ failure or permanent impairment of a significant body function.” The Pentagon’s chief counsel, William J. Haynes, resigned after a magazine article accused him of rigging the trials of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Cheney’s chief counsel, David Addington, was a strong advocate of torture.

If the case lands with a judge who feels as strongly about torture as Garzon, the prosecution of these men will go forward. However, any convictions obtained could be essentially symbolic, as the US will not honor a request for extradition of former government officials.

The Obama administration has stated that it plans to continue to use rendition (kidnapping suspects and flying them to another country for torture or imprisonment). If Spain claimed for itself the same right to rendition that the US is claiming, we could see Bybee, Yoo or Addington kidnapped off an American street and into a Spanish prison.

Numerous Bush operatives have admitted that torture was committed, and the recently released torture memos make clear that prisoners, including children, were slapped, deprived of sleep for up to 11 days, subjected to stress positions, slammed against walls, water-boarded, and tortured with insects.

About water-boarding, the soon to be Attorney General Eric Holder said in January: “If you look at the history of the use of that technique, we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam… . Water boarding is torture.” President Obama has made clear that he has no intention of holding anyone accountable for torture, saying: “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past….that is why we must resist the forces that divide us and, instead, come together on behalf of our common future.”

Evidently Obama believes that those who want torturers to pay for their crimes constitute “forces that divide us.” The case against the Bush 6 was initiated when a Spanish human rights group, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners, filed a 98-page complaint with the National Court in Madrid, which specializes in international crimes. The court assigned the case to Judge Baltasar Garzon. Although the Spanish Attorney General recommended that the case be dropped, Garzon submitted it to a lottery system for another judge to continue.

The 1984 Convention against Torture states:

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture… .

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

This language makes clear that signatories have not just the right, but the duty, to prosecute torture, that there are “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” that can be used to justify torture, and that statements obtained as the result of torture cannot be used in a court of law.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust

By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

Scientists have detected flecks of undetonated explosives in four samples of dust from the World Trade Center catastrophe. A paper just published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal describes the findings of nine scientists after 18 months of work.

The paper is titled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”. The primary authors are Niels Harrit, professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Jeffrey Farrer, professor of Physics at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, Utah.

The research was initiated when Dr. Steven Jones, then also at BYU, observed small red/grey chips in the magnetic fraction of dust he was analyzing from the WTC disaster. The scientists studied four independently collected samples of dust. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC tower, two samples were collected the next day, and a fourth was collected about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).

After careful study of the material the scientists concluded that the red component of the bi-layer chips is a high-tech explosive nano-material known as super-thermite. The material is composed of ultra-fine grains of iron oxide intimately mixed with nano-sized aluminum metal in a matrix of silicon and organic compounds. While these chips are very small (typically less than a millimeter) tests show that the material is highly energetic and can be ignited to produce a micro-explosive effect. The observed properties and composition of the thermitic material appears to match the published descriptions of nano-thermite fabricated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere. These high-tech explosives were relatively new at the time of the disaster, with some of the first published descriptions appearing in the literature in the late 1990s.

The scientists begin the paper with an explanation of their motivation for pursuing the research. “The destruction of three skyscrapers (WTC 1, 2 and 7) on September 11, 2001 was an immensely tragic catastrophe that not only impacted thousands of people and families directly, due to injury and loss of life, but also provided the motivation for numerous expensive and radical changes in domestic and foreign policy. For these and other reasons, knowing what really happened that fateful day is of grave importance.”

While several government agencies, including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) produced reports on the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings, they pointedly did not analyze the debris for the presence of explosives. This omission is at odds with the requirement of the national standard for fire investigation (NFPA 921), which calls for testing related to thermite and other pyrotechnics. It is also at odds with the video evidence of explosions, and the testimony of fire department personnel, more than 100 of whom officially reported hearing or seeing explosions. NIST also failed to explain the source of large quantities of molten metal in the WTC rubble, or the abundant amounts of iron microspheres in the dust.

NIST spokesperson Michael Neuman was challenged by Hartford Advocate reporter Jennifer Abel on this glaring omission in the WTC report…

ABEL: … what about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?

NEUMAN: Right, because there was no evidence of that.

ABEL: But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?

NEUMAN: If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time….

And NIST cannot claim that it is unfamiliar with the nano-thermitic materials. Several of the lead 9/11 investigators at NIST collaborated with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in the late 90s, to test and characterize sol-gel preparations of high-power thermitic materials. Arden Bement, the former deputy secretary of defense who was appointed director of NIST by President Bush immediately after 9/11, was a metallurgist and expert on fuels and materials and former director of DARPA’s office of materials science and a former executive at TRW. He would be expected to be familiar with nano-thermite since DoD and DARPA are lead agencies in its development and TRW supplies NASA with advanced propellants including nano-gelled thermite.

[In an interesting side note: Bement was also a director of Battelle Corporation which was most likely the source of the weaponized anthrax spores used in the anthrax attacks of 2001.]

Some of the same individuals and organizations contracted by DoD and DARPA to develop nano-thermitic materials were selected by the Bush administration to investigate the collapse of the towers and Building 7. What the Scientists Found

The red/grey chips were found to be present in all samples of fine WTC dust analyzed to date. While the grey layer is the subject of ongoing investigation, the current paper focuses on the red layer. Very high magnification electron microscopy of the layer reveals a sponge-like structure composed of very small particles of several types. By using XEDS, researchers were able to map the elemental composition of the material. Iron oxide particles, shown as white in the image above, are fairly uniform in size and shape and about 100 nanometers long while the metallic aluminum appears as plate-like structures about 50 nanometers thick and up to a micron (1000 nanometers) in length. Other elements such as silicon and carbon were also detected in the red layer. This is significant because the presence of carbon in the material would supply the hot gas reaction products needed to turn the thermitic material from an incendiary into a low explosive. The authors avoided describing the material as “explosive” because the flakes studied are too small to assess the bulk properties of the material.

To test the power of this thermitic material, small samples were heated in a Differential Scanning Calorimeter, a very sensitive device for detecting the heat generated by a chemical reaction. The samples ignited at about 430ºC and generated as much or more heat than an equal mass of high explosive such as TNT. They also produced, as a reaction product, tiny metallic iron microspheres, just like the iron microspheres found in abundance in all samples of WTC dust as previously reported by USGS, FEMA and NIST.

Conclusions

“The chips are clearly a nano-engineered material with two types of extremely small particles, each highly consistent in shape and size, held in close stable proximity by a durable matrix which is laminated to a hard homogeneous material. The student of energetic materials will appreciate that this description matches exactly that of a super-thermite in which the reactant particles are suspended in a sol-gel matrix applied to a substrate.” (Jim Hoffman, 2009)

Sol-gels of nano-thermites are described in the literature as being very stable and safe to handle in liquid form. They can be applied to surfaces by spray or even paintbrush. It is entirely possible that the explosives were applied to the building disguised as a paint or as a spray-on fireproofing.

Researcher Kevin Ryan has previously published a paper (Journal of 9/11 Studies) noting the extreme coincidence that the floors in the towers where structural failure was initiated exactly correspond to the floors where fireproofing had recently been “upgraded” in 1999 and 2000. (See diagram)

Researchers have estimated, based on the weight of red/grey chips found in the four samples tested, that these chips make up as much as 0.1% of the mass of the fine dust produced on 9/11. While it is difficult to estimate the total mass of fine dust produced that day, the dust did cover Manhattan from river to river and for several miles in all directions. The dust mass was certainly at least several thousand tons (estimates range as high as 30,000 tons) which would mean several tons of the red/grey material is involved.

How did several tons of unexploded super-thermite end up in the dust of the World Trade Center disaster?



View Open Chemical Physics Journal article here.

Eyewitnesses Contradict Pentagon 9/11 Story

BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Two California men who call themselves the Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) have compiled impressive video evidence that the plane seen flying towards the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 could not have caused the death and damage at the Pentagon, nor the damage to five light poles outside the Pentagon.

Frustrated with the inability of 9/11 researchers to do anything other than speculate about what really happened that day, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis decided to take matters into their own hands. They have repeatedly flown in from southern California, canvassed the area near the Pentagon on foot to find people who saw a plane just prior to the fireball, and then quizzed these eyewitnesses extensively on camera to establish exactly what they saw, when they saw it and where they saw it from.

Their research is summarized at their website: thepentacon.com, as well as in four DVDs containing interviews with 13 witnesses who attest that they saw a plane fly to the north of the Citgo gas station on Pentagon property, not south of the Citgo station as required by the official story.

CIT had each witness draw the flight path he witnessed on a map; the compilation from all the witnesses is shown in the photo above. The yellow curved lines clustered together toward the top of the map are from the witnesses; the single straight line angling up from the bottom edge of the map is the official flight path of the plane, as described by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Taken together, the 13 witnesses deliver a devastating blow to the official story about the Pentagon attack. Five 40-foot, 247-pound light poles were knocked down that day. If the plane flew north of the Citgo station, it could not have knocked down those poles. The west side of the Pentagon was damaged as if it were hit by a plane heading north, with the zone of destruction angling north. If the plane flew to the north of the Citgo station before hitting the Pentagon, it would not have caused this kind of damage.

CIT’s evidence is compelling for a number of reasons. Three of their witnesses are Pentagon police officers who were on duty at the time of the attack. Most of the others were government employees at their jobs, and their presence at that place and time can be verified. This stands in sharp contrast to the witnesses who claim they saw the attack from their cars, as their presence on the road cannot be confirmed.

CIT’s witnesses are quite sure about what they saw. Sergeant William Lagasse, an officer with what is now known as the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, was fueling his patrol car at the Citgo station when the jet flew past him. He has stated that he is “100% sure” that the plane flew to the north of the gas station, that he would “bet his life on it.”

There is a remarkable degree of congruence in the witnesses’ accounts. They are not 9/11 researchers and none of them seemed to be aware that they were describing a flight path at odds with the official story, thus they had no reason to be less than forthcoming. Each was interviewed separately, yet their stories are quite similar.

CIT includes each interview in its entirety, without editing. Although this makes for a long video, it preempts any accusations of misinterpreting or leading the witnesses. We have the advantage of seeing the witnesses’ body language and hearing their tone of voice. We get a glimpse into their personalities and character, and are given the maximum amount of information possible with which to assess if they are telling the truth. We found the witnesses credible and convincing.

After thousands of hours of painstaking investigation and analysis, Ranke and Marquis have concluded that the plane seen by so many people did not hit the Pentagon, but flew over the building at the same time that pre-planted explosives caused a huge fireball and thick, black smoke, obscuring the fact that the plane was still in the air and flying away.

Several of CIT’s witnesses mentioned a second plane that came along about 30 seconds later, but media reports immediately after 9/11 talked about a second plane “shadowing” the attack plane. The belief that there were two planes in very close proximity serves as a useful fiction to confuse anyone who saw the plane fly over the Pentagon as the fireball exploded. Rather than concluding that the plane never actually hit the building, observers would almost certainly conclude that they had seen the “shadowing” second plane.

All of CIT’s witnesses also believe that the plane they saw hit the Pentagon, although this cannot be possible. This fact has been used to dismiss CIT’s work as irrelevant, but it’s not a compelling argument.

Less than an hour earlier, America had seen the south tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane and exploding into a huge fireball. Most people were aware that an attack was underway. If they saw a jet heading directly towards the Pentagon, and next saw a massive fireball, it is doubtful that one person in a thousand would question whether the plane had crashed and caused the fireball. To conclude that the fireball was caused by explosives preplanted in one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet, in an intentional false flag attack to justify war, would require observers to have a degree of perspicacity that was extremely rare in the pre-9/11 world, and only slightly less rare now.

The most riveting segment in the CIT footage is of the interview with Lloyde England, a taxi cab driver who was photographed numerous times just after the attack. In all the photos, England and his cab are on Route 27, on the bridge going over Columbia Pike. The front windshield of his cab has a big hole in it and the cab is at a stop and straddling the lanes. A broken light pole lies nearby.

England’s story is that he was going 40 mph when he felt the jet go over head, and then the light pole came smashing through his front windshield. He says he then skidded sideways to a stop, and that a stranger stopped and helped him remove the light pole from the windshield, and then left without ever giving his name or even speaking a word.

England’s story is suspect because photos show the hood of his sedan untouched and gleaming like a mirror, although his front windshield was destroyed. England is quite clear that it was not the smaller section at the top of the light pole that impaled his windshield, but the big, 40 foot, 247 pound pole. He contends that after it pierced his windshield, with perhaps five feet of the top end of the pole inside the cab, that the other 35 feet stuck straight out into the air, not touching the hood of the cab.

The question is, with the windshield destroyed, what held the pole up the in air? CIT drove with England to his property in the country to inspect the cab. They hypothesized that perhaps the narrow end of the pole had pierced the back seat or floorboards of the cab, holding it in place and not allowing it to touch the hood of the cab. But their inspection showed that there was only an insignificant rip in the rear seat, and no damage to the floorboards. Although the dashboard was damaged, no part of the hood, including the edge near the windshield, showed any damage.

What makes the story even more incredible is that England claims that as he was removing the pole from the windshield, he fell down, but managed, even as he was on the ground, to keep holding the pole in the air. Remember that the pole is 40 feet long and weighs 247 pounds, while England appears to be about 65 years old.

Pressed to explain how it can be that the pole never touched the hood of the sedan, England said only “The car speaks for itself.” Unfortunately for England, the car seems to be saying that his account cannot possibly be true. In addition, with 13 eyewitnesses saying that the plane went nowhere near those light poles, it seems clear that something else caused the damage to England’s windshield.

The video with England validates CIT’s practice of keeping the camera rolling as much as possible, even during casual conversation, as the most damning statements from both England and his wife came out spontaneously and unexpectedly. While Ranke and England’s wife were chatting at the Englands’ home, Ranke told her that they had determined that the jet never hit the Pentagon, but kept on going, and, amazingly, she agreed! The audio is hard to hear and she then refused to say more, but her meaning was clear. Mrs. England, who works for the FBI, also said that she knows why her husband’s car was not impounded as evidence, but wasn’t going to tell.

England spontaneously offered this damning statement: “You gotta understand something. When people do things and get away with it, you…eventually it’s gonna come to me, and when it comes to me, it’s gonna be so big, I can’t do nothing about it.”

CIT also kept the camera running during the 90-minute drive to see England’s car, and captured a few very interesting statements on tape. Although England speaks generally and indirectly, in the context of a conversation about the attack at the Pentagon, his meaning is clear.

England: I wasn’t supposed to be involved with this, this is too big for me, man, this is a big thing. This is a world thing happening, I’m a small man…I’m not supposed to be involved in this. This is for other people, people who have money and all this kind of stuff.

Ranke: Your point that these people who have all the money…

England: This is their thing.

Ranke: This is their event.

England: This is for them.

Ranke: Meaning they’re doing it for their own reasons…

England: (with conviction) That’s right. I’m not supposed to be in it.
…
Ranke: They must have planned it.

England: It was planned.
…
England: You know what history is? It’s not the truth. It’s “his story.” Has nothing to do with the truth.

As someone who has been researching the 9/11 story for two years, and has experienced mockery, abuse and denials from the government and media, I was a thrilled to hear someone who was directly involved in the cover-up admit on tape that it was a big event, a world event, planned by rich people for their own reasons.

Incredibly, once Ranke explained that 13 witnesses had all placed the jet at the north side of the Citgo station on a trajectory that could not have knocked down the five light poles, England changed his story and declared that he was not where all the photographs show him to be, but actually well north of Columbia Pike. Ranke showed England numerous photos of himself, his damaged cab and the downed light pole on the bridge over Columbia Pike. Even faced with incontrovertible evidence of his exact location, England resolutely maintained that pictures don’t always tell the truth and that the accident with the light pole had taken place much further north.

The 90-minute video of the interview with Lloyde England, completely discredits England. Ranke points out that England may well be a victim himself, in that he may have been forced to tell the story of the pole impaling his windshield. But his story is so incredible, and his protestations that he was not in the
location where multiple photos and videos place him on that day are so absurd, that Lloyde England’s account now stands as perhaps the most vulnerable point in the edifice of lies that constitute the official story of the attack on the Pentagon.

The entire body of work from CIT is a testament to the tremendous power of dedicated citizen journalists to uncover the truth behind a government story. Using thousands of dollars of their own money and thousands of hours of unpaid time, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis have performed a significant public service. They have created a body of work that definitively shows the government story about the Pentagon to be a lie.

CIT’s next move is to consolidate their research into a more concise format that edits all the lengthy interviews into a single 60 minute video called “National Security Alert.” The video will have no music or other artistic flourishes, which will make it suitable for informing government or media figures. Within the next 30 days, they expect to go live with a new website at CitizenInvestigationTeam.com. That site will have a link for free downloads of their new video, plus detailed information on how citizens can use the video to get action, including a series of steps to take if the appropriate authorities don’t respond.

Ranke and Marquis will be returning to the DC area to present a four hour conference in tandem with Pilots for 9/11 Truth. The free conference will be held at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) conference center in Arlington, Virginia from 12:30 pm to 5 pm on Saturday, July 11.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams. She
blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com

Cheney Directed Assassination Ring

BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed during a talk at the University of Minnesota, March 10, that Dick Cheney orchestrated assassination squads directly out of the office of the vice president.

Here is what Hersh said: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in The New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him [Cheney].

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s anexecutive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leader, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.” Interestingly, Hersh gives us two pieces of information here. First he tells us that the CIA has been “deeply involved” in domestic operations; something that is forbidden by law. And second, he reveals that the office of vice president has been directing assassination squads abroad, also clearly illegal underdomestic and international law.

It is not much of a leap of logic to put these two bits of information together and ask the question: ‘Did the CIA engage in domestic assassination as well?’ Clearly the fact that this would be illegal is no barrier; according to neocon doctrine, the unitary executive is above and beyond any law.

Let’s see if there have been any likely assassinations that may be the handiwork of the Cheney hit teams. For example:

September 9, 2001; Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan just two days before the 9/11 attack. His death cleared the way for the Afghan invasion.

Shortly before his October 2002 death in a mysterious airplane crash, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone met with the Vice President. Cheney was rounding up Senate support for the vote giving the administration the go ahead to invade Iraq in spite of United Nations objections. At a campaign stop in Willmar, Minn., days before his death, Wellstone told attendees that Cheney told him, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” Senator Wellstone’s death cleared the way for the Iraq Invasion.

On February 5, 2005, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari was killed in an explosion. His death was immediately blamed on Syria, but without any evidence. Within weeks Syrian peacekeeping forces which had been in Lebanon for a decade, were forced to leave. Syria’s departure cleared the way for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

The DC Madam, Deborah Palfrey, found dead on May Day, 2008, was very likely murdered. She had a very embarrassing little black book of clients for her prostitution service which included Washington lobbyists, defense contractors, intelligence operatives and even, reportedly, Dick Cheney himself. Before she was ‘suicided’ she made several public statements, including in radio interviews, that she had no intention of committing suicide and that if she was to be found dead, that it would be murder.

Mike Connell was a republican IT specialist: He helped the GOP orchestrate the electronic theft of the 2004 Ohio election (among others). He was scheduled to testify in a federal probe about not only the election thefts, but also about the “missing” White House e-mails. Before his death, Connell’s lawyers were on-record requesting protection for their client based on threats from Karl Rove.

Connell’s death appears to be part of a ‘clean-up’ operation.

This is but a brief list of possible, even likely, executive assassinations. Now that it has been revealed that a sophisticated covert program of assassination has been ongoing under the direction of VP Cheney, a thorough review of unsolved, politically convenient murders would seem to be in order.

Let’s start with the 3000 killed in lower Manhattan.