Empire, Obama and America's Last Taboo

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:12:03 -0400

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

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:15:30 -0400

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

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:54:00 -0400

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

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:01:40 -0400

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

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:53:05 -0400

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

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:43:34 -0400

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

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:15:19 -0400

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

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:16:04 -0400

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

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:47:09 -0400

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

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:23:42 -0400

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.

NY Times Complicit in FBI Anthrax Coverup

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:21:06 -0500

BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Back in 2001, just months after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, several articles came out in mainstream newspapers that pointed clearly to the CIA and Army as the most likely sources of the weaponized anthrax. Articles in The Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, Washington Post and New York Times laid out the facts that incriminated Battelle Memorial Labs in West Jefferson, Ohio, and the Army’s lab at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah as the only logical sources for the anthrax. These facts, as reported in 2001, include:

1. For over a decade, Army scientists at Dugway have been making weapons-grade anthrax that is “virtually identical” to the anthrax used in the attacks.

2. The anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was extremely concentrated, with a trillion spores per gram. The Dugway anthrax had a similar concentration.

3. The FBI was increasingly focused on US government bioweapons research programs as the source of the deadly anthrax.

4. Both the lab in Utah and the lab in Ohio received anthrax samples from the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, although USAMRIID deals only with wet anthrax and ships it wet.

5. The investigation was focused on the Dugway anthrax, and Dugway was described as the only facility that was known to be weaponizing anthrax.

6. One FBI official said that the CIA’s anthrax was “the best lead we have at this point.”

7. Army officials said that Fort Detrick did not have the equipment for weaponizing anthrax.

The FBI has never explained what became of this initial focus on the labs in Utah and Ohio. Instead, after the death of Fort Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins in July, 2008, the FBI attempted to make the case that Ivins was the murderer and all other suspects had been cleared of suspicion.

Since Ivins’ death, the media have, with very few exceptions, passively swallowed the line dispensed by the FBI, and have acted as little more than stenographers in parroting the hollow arguments presented by the FBI that Ivins is guilty.

On December 12, 2001, The Baltimore Sun published a seminal article by Scott Shane that clearly laid out just how strong the evidence was against the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Subtitled “Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress,” Shane’s article also includes this eyebrow-raising line: “Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.”

Apparently Shane has forgotten all that he reported seven years ago. Now with The New York Times, Shane’s latest piece, published January 4, 2009, raises troubling questions about the independence of The Times, and the memory hole that Shane must have used to shunt away all that he once knew about the case the FBI code-named Amerithrax.

Shane calls his 5,200 word article “the deepest look so far at the investigation.” Titled “Portrait Emerges of Anthrax Suspect’s Troubled Life,” it is primarily a hatchet job on Bruce Ivins. Filled with innuendo and unsubstantiated allegations, the purpose of the article is clearly to solidify the perception that Ivins was the killer, and to pooh-pooh the widely held belief that the anthrax came from a CIA or military lab in Utah or Ohio.

Shane dismisses these beliefs breezily, stating: “The Times review found that the FBI had disproved the assertion, widespread among scientists who believe Dr. Ivins was innocent, that the anthrax might have come from military and intelligence research programs in Utah or Ohio.” Not a single piece of evidence is presented to back up this sweeping claim.

Halfway through his article, Shane springs another shocker on us. “By early 2004, FBI scientists had discovered that out of 60 domestic and foreign water samples, only water from Frederick, Maryland, had the same chemical signature as the water used to grow the mailed anthrax.”

Really? Do FBI scientists think that anthrax researchers go to the kitchen sink for the water they use to grow the anthrax? According to Wikipedia, biochemistry labs use only highly purifi ed water, such as double-distilled. Distilled water is created by boiling water and collecting the steam. To obtain double-distilled water, the process is done twice, so that all impurities and minerals are removed. Distilled water has the same chemical signature, namely none, no matter where in the world it originates.

It is unprecedented to have a major development in a high profi le case go unreported for a full five years. Not only has the FBI never before mentioned this so-called discovery about the signature of the water, but when they were specifically asked if anything could be learned from the water, they said no.

The question came up on August 18, 2008, when the FBI held a science briefi ng to follow up on the highly publicized August 6 press conference by DOJ attorney Jeff Taylor. The science briefi ng was hosted by Dr. Vahid Majidi, Assistant Director of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

Dr. Majidi was asked: “In your looking at the elemental and chemical properties, could you tell anything about the water that was used to fi lter this anthrax, and did that do you any good?”

Dr. Majidi replied: “No. No.”

Yet here we are, five months later, with Scott Shane telling us that the FBI has known since 2004 that the anthrax was grown near Fort Detrick, because of the chemical signature of the water.

Beyond these outrageous claims, Shane’s article is busy assassinating Bruce Ivins’ character. We have Nancy Haigwood saying of Ivins “he did it,” for no apparent reason other than she doesn’t like him and thinks he’s odd. She also thinks Ivins vandalized her house 27 years ago and impersonated her. No reason is given for why she believes these things.

Shane editorializes heavily. He charges that Ivins was “chipper” even as five people were dead or dying of anthrax inhalation, and was relishing his moment in the spotlight. No evidence is presented for how Shane reached these conclusions about Ivins.

Words Shane uses to describe Ivins (including quotes from others) are: corny, dour, scary, provocative, emotionally laden, thin-skinned, aggressive, goody two shoes, very sensitive, creepy, possessing an unnerving hubris, stressed, depressed, rude, sarcastic, nasty, devious, jumpy and agitated.

We find out that Ivins had been a nerdy, awkward teenager, was not popular in high school, and was still bitter about this.

He liked to eat a mixture of peas, yogurt and tuna for lunch and wore outdated bell-bottoms, practices that, according to Shane, got him labeled an “oddball.” The words odd, oddball or oddities appear five times in Shane’s article.

The final reference, regarding “a man whose oddities, for many people, made the FBI’s anthrax accusation more plausible,” tips Shane’s hand. His constant harping on Ivins oddness betrays the poverty of the FBI’s case, which Shane acknowledges has “yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch” that Ivins was the killer.

Fortunately for many of us, being odd is not a crime.

But was Ivins odd? The Frederick News Post published a letter from Amanda Lane on August 10, 2008 that includes: “I want to shout from the mountain tops that Bruce was the kind of man we look up to … He was a decorated scientist and the humblest of men who didn’t use his title as a status symbol. He picked up a mop or emptied the trash without a moment’s hesitation. If he thought you were having a bad day he would offer candy or a catchy tune to cheer you up. If someone had to stay late to accomplish a task, Bruce would work with you so that the task would get completed faster.

“He was not the greatest athlete, but he was the best cheerleader present at every game to support his friends. I will truly miss his good humor, as there are few people in life who measure up to this man. I hope that he knew how much joy he brought to my life and others around him. If I learned anything from Bruce, it was to enjoy life and to always smile. His friendship brightened so many lives. I hope that Americans will remember Bruce for the funny and compassionate person that he was, because that is all Bruce knew how to be.”

Although Shane does mention that Ivins’ colleagues cherished him, the implication is that they didn’t really know him, as “he hid from them a shadow side of mental illness, alcoholism, secret obsessions and hints of violence.”

The New York Times has published a hit piece, devoid of incriminating facts, more gossip than journalism. Shane’s article raises disturbing questions about the relationship between The New York Times and the US government. What happened to the FBI’s original focus on the CIA and Army labs? Who is behind the drive to pin the attacks on a dead man who possessed neither the means nor the motive to carry them out? And why is The Times acting as a PR arm for those with an agenda that has nothing to do with journalism?

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has been published by the Chicago Sun-Times, Reuters, the Denver Post, Dissident Voice and Common Dreams.

Top Scientists Ask Journal "Science" To Retract Original AIDS Papers

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:06:54 -0500

BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP

Thirty-seven doctors, senior researchers and attorneys have asked the journal Science to retract four articles published in 1984 that supposedly established that HIV was the cause of AIDS. The articles, by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo, have drawn criticism for some time. An investigation in the early 90s by the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements.” A Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations produced a staff report onthe papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.

Now, new analysis of the documentation behind the papers has revealed even more reason to doubt Gallo’s findings. The letter refers to “recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo…”

Dr. Mikulas Popovic wrote the manuscripts while Gallo was in Europe, but Gallo made handwritten changes to the manuscripts upon his return. Popovic wrote: “Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.” This sentence was deleted and replaced by a statement that the findings suggest that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Gallo submitted micrographs to Science that were identified as containing the HIV virus. But just four days before he submitted them, Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, wrote a letter to Gallo and Popovic stating that he “does not believe” that the micrographs contain images of HIV. The micrographs were published in Science on May 4, 1984 and identified as containing HIV.

These developments add to the mounting body of evidence that the original conclusion that HIV causes AIDS is deeply flawed.

Thus far there has been no response from Science regarding the request for retraction.

Cartoon by Joe Sutliff, Rock Creek Free Press, Feb. 2009

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:59:48 -0500

Cartoon by Joe Sutliff, Rock Creek Free Press, Feb. 2009

A Call for a Re-evaluation of the AIDS Dogma

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:32:49 -0500

By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

A paper about to be published in a scientific journal raises the intriguing possibility that many AIDS cases are in fact misdiagnosed cases of syphilis. The paper was authored by an International group of scientists led by National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wolfgang E. Krumbein, professor of Geo-microbiology in Oldenburg, Germany.

The paper, titled Spirochete round bodies. Syphilis, Lyme disease & AIDS: Resurgence of “the great imitator,” will be published in SYMBIOSIS V47, No.1, 2009.

John Scythes, one of the researchers on the paper, reports that he has not found a single case of an immune suppressed patient (regardless of HIV status) who has died of complications of syphilis since the discovery of AIDS in the early 80s. The implications of this are staggering. It is simply not possible that syphilis stopped being fatal just as the new disease of AIDS came on the scene.

The researchers speculate that, because of its immune suppression effect and its ability to imitate other diseases, syphilis is being missed or misdiagnosed as AIDS. Now that improved tests for syphilis infection are available, the researchers urge a large scale investigation into the extent that this is happening.

In addition to Dr. Margulis, other co-authors include Andrew Maniotis PhD. Department of Patholog, University of Illinois at Chicago, J. MacAllister, U. Mass Amherst; J. Scythes of the Community Initiative for AIDS Research, Ontario, Canada; O. Brorson, Tonsberg, Norway; J. Hall, U. Mass. Amherst; W.E. Krumbein, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg Germany; and M.J. Chapman, U. Mass, Amherst.

Ever since Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur in Paris first described HIV virus-like particles isolated from “patient 1” in 1983, a close connection has been shown between AIDS and a history of syphilis exposure.

As with AIDS, patients infected with syphilis do not die from syphilis directly, but rather suffer from opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dysentery.

Syphilis was once known by doctors as “the great imitator” because of its immune suppression effects and its ability to mimic the symptoms of many other diseases. If syphilis and other spirochete diseases are being misdiagnosed as AIDS, that would explain why the number of reported syphilis deaths has plummeted since the introduction of AIDS.

Many human infections such as Lyme disease, syphilis, anthrax and many others are caused by a class of bacteria called spirochetes. These bacteria are characterized by a spiral free swimming form, and by the ability to revert into a cyst form when subjected to threat such as heat, starvation or antibiotic attack. This ability to form cysts (also called “round bodies”) makes spirochete diseases extremely resistant to treatment.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that syphilis is easily treated with antibiotics, the disease is frequently impervious to antibiotic treatment except in its earliest stages. Far from eradicating syphilis, antibiotics have driven the disease underground.

Until recently, the only way to definitively tell if someone had the syphilis germ, was high magnification microscopy by an expert microscopist. Since this is not usually done for patients in a clinical setting, reported cures of either syphilis or Lyme disease are suspect.

Spirochetes are an ancient form of bacteria. The oldest spirochete in the fossil record was discovered in the intestine of a 20 million year old termite preserved in amber.

Scientists know that Lyme and syphilis are caused by spirochete bacteria because the spirochete is able to cause the symptoms of the disease when it is introduced into a healthy test subject. This observation is one of the steps needed to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease. Called Koch’s Postulates, the four steps require that the agent must:
1. be found in all cases of the disease;
2. be isolated from the host;
3. cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host, and
4. then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

While syphilis and Lyme bacteria meet the test of Koch’s postulates, HIV fails all four.

In the case of both Lyme and syphilis, it is very likely that the disease-causing bacteria establishes a permanent human-spirochete symbiosis soon after infection. The symptoms of the disease vary greatly and may be easily overlooked or misinterpreted.

Most spirochetes are harmless, free swimming species in nature, unrelated to any disease, therefore unknown to medical science. Animals and spirochetes have co-existed for millions of years and have co-evolved to the point that they have a symbiotic relationship, a partnership. It is theorized that some components of mammalian cells such as sperm tails and cilia are descended from these ancient bacteria. If this theory is correct, spirochete remnants have dwelled in stable symbiotic partnership inside animal cells for about 1 billion years.

Over eons of time, integrated symbiotic bacteria (which include Lyme and syphilis as well as many other non-pathogenic bacteria) have lost the ability to live independently. They have shed much of their own DNA and have become dependent on the gene products of the human host.

Scientists call this relationship “cyclical symbiosis” and have shown that in this type of symbiosis, virus-like particles are created as part of the integration process between the symbiont partners. These virus-like particles are not the disease-causing agents themselves; they are simply packets of genetic information being exchanged between co-evolved symbionts. Reverse transcriptases and virus-like particles are abundant in such cyclical symbioses.

Is it possible that HIV and other retroviruses are not disease-causing agents at all, but are rather genetic messages being passed between symbiotic partner cells? If so, that would explain why AIDS vaccine trials failed so spectacularly. It would also explain why HIV fails every one of Koch’s postulates for a disease causing agent.

Is it possible that the conventional HIV-AIDS medical orthodoxy is wrong? That certainly would explain why we are no closer to a cure today than we were 25 years ago when AIDS was first discovered; nor have we experienced the long predicted “AIDS pandemic.” There were approximately 1 million AIDS cases in 1990 and there are roughly that number today.

But the implications for public health are far more serious. The ongoing disintegration of the conventional medical theories about HIV-AIDS demonstrates that the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have failed the public spectacularly yet again. It also means that thousands of patients are being erroneously treated with toxic, potentially deadly, AIDS drugs.

The entire HIV-AIDS paradigm must be re-evaluated.

The only “change” we are likely to get.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:29:00 -0500

The only “change” we are likely to get.

Everything You Know About AIDS is Wrong

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:26:00 -0500

By Sheila Casey / RCFP

On April 23, 1984, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler and researcher Robert Gallo from the National Cancer Institute held a press conference and announced that Gallo had found the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the retrovirus HIV. Heckler estimated that a vaccine would be available in just two years. That same day in 1984, Gallo patented the blood test to detect the HIV antibodies.

As a retrovirus researcher, Gallo had previously tried to pin the blame for Alzheimer’s, leukemia and neurological disorders on a retrovirus, all without success. Now AIDS was in his sights.

But Gallo had skipped an important step in the scientific process: his HIV research had never been subjected to peer review, and was not published until after the press conference with Heckler had already conferred legitimacy on it.

Billions of dollars poured into research programs and millions of people lined up to have their blood checked; by 2006, 72 million Americans had been tested, with a third of that number tested every year. As its creator, Gallo received a percentage of the cost of each test.

To receive a positive HIV test result was considered a death sentence: you would get AIDS and die a miserable death, sooner or later.

As the years passed, it became apparent that this was not true. Only five percent of the people who tested HIV positive went on to develop AIDS. A vaccine has never been found. And there is now a growing group of scientists who dispute that HIV causes AIDS.

Peter Duesberg is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg earned renown as one of the scientists to discover a cancer gene in 1970, and earned tenure at UC Berkeley at the age of 36. At 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1986 he received a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health.

He was on the fast-track to receive the Nobel until he published an article in 1987 in Cancer Research challenging the consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS. After that his funding dried up and he was dismissed as a misguided contrarian by those with careers and billions in funding riding on the view that HIV is the cause of AIDS.

The views of Dr. Duesberg, David Crowe, Dr. Charles Geshekter, and other disidents who dispute the infectious model for AIDS are summarized below.

1) All viruses are harmless after antibody immunity. Disease is caused before the antibodies are created, because it is the antibodies that neutralize the pathogen and enable the host to recover. When people test positive for the antibodies, that means they have developed resistance, ‘immunity’ to the virus. No microbe causes disease only after antibodies have appeared, as HIV is claimed to do. Why develop a vaccine for people who already have the antibodies to the disease? Duesberg: “there is no virus in AIDS patients, only antibodies.”

2) Retroviruses, which are one type of virus, do not kill T-cells. They do not kill the cell they infect—ever. (AIDS is diagnosed partly by a deficiency of T-cells.)

3) HIV does not infect enough T-cells to cause disease.

4) No retrovirus causes disease and there is no logical reason why they should.

5) Viruses replicate quickly; there is no such thing as a slow virus. If a host cannot mount an immune defense quickly enough, the virus will overwhelm and kill the host in a matter of days or weeks. Yet we are told that HIV can cause up to 30 different diseases ten years after initial infection. None of these diseases are specific to AIDS; all existed prior to the “discovery” of AIDS.

6) HIV is not a new virus. When a virus is new in a population that has never been exposed to it, it explodes exponentially. But this is not what we see with AIDS. The number of AIDS cases hasn’t changed since 1985.

7) It fails Koch’s Postulates, which require four steps to verify that an infectious agent is the cause of a disease.

1. the agent must be found in all cases of the disease;

2. it must be isolated from the host;

3. it must cause the same disease when injected into a healthy host; and

4. it must then be found growing again in the newly infected host.

HIV fails all of these tests. Although theoretically it can be found and isolated from a host, this is in practice very difficult to do, since the HIV virus is not found in humans; only antibodies to HIV are found.

The history of medicine has many examples of diseases which were assumed to be infectious but later proved not to be. Scurvy is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, Beriberi is caused by a thiamine deficiency, and pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency. All failed Koch’s postulates and all ultimately proved to be non-infectious dietary deficiencies.

8) AIDS has remained in its original risk groups and has not broken out into the general population. Outside of Africa, 97% of AIDS patients are homosexuals, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and transfusion patients.

9) The US Army tests recruits for HIV and finds the virus evenly divided between men and woman, yet AIDS is 90% a male disease.

10) With other infectious diseases, cases are always seen among the doctors and nurses who work with infected patients—but this has not happened with AIDS. Medical workers are actually less likely to become sick with AIDS than the general population.

11) AIDS behaves differently depending on geography. African AIDS appears to be a completely different disease. In part, this is because in Africa, no HIV test is necessary for diagnosis. A patient is considered to have AIDS if he exhibits three of the 4 symptoms: persistent cough, persistent fever, persistent diarrhea and weight loss. These also happen to be the symptoms of malaria, malnutrition and tuberculosis, but there are no large funding programs for those diseases. If something is called AIDS, money pours in.

12) According to David Crowe, president of Rethinking AIDS, and founder and president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, HIV is not transmitted sexually. He quotes a study done in the 90s on seroconversion in couples where one partner was HIV positive and the other HIV negative. Not a single case was found where the HIV negative partner became positive, even after years of unprotected sex.

13) Different risk groups manifest AIDS in a different way. IV drug users get tuberculosis and wasting syndrome, gays get Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Yet these specific diseases also occur in high numbers among members of these risk groups who do not have HIV infection. If an IV drug user has tuberculosis and no HIV antibodies, he is simply diagnosed with tuberculosis. If he has tuberculosis and does have HIV antibodies, he is diagnosed with AIDS. It is this method of defining AIDS that assures a high correlation between HIV infection and the constellation of diseases defined as AIDS.

14) HIV supposedly causes 30 different diseases. All other viruses cause only one disease. Duesberg: “There is no HIV specific disease anywhere.”

15) AIDS occurs without HIV infection, and 95% of those with HIV infection never get AIDS. Despite all this, it is clear that people are sick and dying. If not HIV, what are they dying from? AIDS is a condition of suppressed immunity, and there are many things that can suppress immunity. One of the worst is the HIV drug AZT, which destroys the bone marrow and which Duesberg describes as “the most toxic drug ever licensed for long term consumption in the free world.” Many people who test positive for HIV antibodies are told they must go on these dangerous drugs—even though they are completely healthy.

In a tragic case described by Celia Farber in the March 2006 Harpers magazine, Joyce Ann Hafford, a healthy 33 year old single mother, four months pregnant, was enrolled in an HIV drug trial, put on three anti-HIV drugs in June, and was dead by August 1. Although Hafford felt completely well prior to the drug trial and the drugs immediately made her violently ill, she stayed on them in the belief that she must, at all costs, prevent passing the HIV virus on to her unborn child. Hafford had only one HIV test prior to enrolling in the study, and was never told that pregnancy can cause a false positive HIV test.

According to Duesberg, recreational drug use also suppresses immunity and the gay community has, to some degree, brought their woes upon themselves. He points out that it is common knowledge that toxic foreign substances cause disease: alcohol causes cirrhosis of the liver and smoking causes emphysema. But gay activists typically dismiss it as homophobia to point out that drug use and sexual promiscuity can result in lowered immunity.

Crowe says that gay community leaders essentially had a choice between facing up to promiscuity in the gay population, or to the rampant use of recreational drugs such as inhalant nitrate poppers. They were willing to face up to the promiscuity, but not the drug use.

Because recreational drugs such as heroin, cocaine, speed and poppers suppress immunity, many gay men use large amounts of antibiotics to combat infections. Repeated antibiotic use eventually wears down the immune system.

If a gay man with a depressed immune system develops pneumonia and is found to be HIV positive, he will be diagnosed with AIDS and put on toxic HIV drugs, which will further destroy his immune system and virtually guarantee his eventual death.

According to AIDS dissidents such as Crowe and Duesberg, gay community leaders have unwittingly contributed to prolonging the fiction of a viral cause of AIDS, due to their unwillingness to confront and change the behaviors that are destroying the immune systems of gay men. Instead, they have successfully clamored for more research dollars focusing on the infectious model, drawing a disproportionate amount of funding away from other, more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

But what about Africa? Surely there are not large numbers of Africans inhaling poppers and overloading their immune systems with antibiotics? Yet we are told that AIDS is decimating Africa, and that Africa is teeming with AIDS orphans who have lost both parents to the disease.

Yes, say the AIDS dissidents, Africans are much sicker now than they were 25 years ago. Colonialism has destroyed traditional societies, and there is rampant malnutrition, malaria, war, poverty and a lack of clean drinking water.

According to Charles Geshekter, Ph.D., a three-time Fulbright scholar who teaches African history at California State University in Chico, the current explanation for the AIDS epidemic in Africa is based on racist beliefs about African promiscuity. In fact, says Geshekter, the European communities in South Africa are far more promiscuous than the Africans, yet AIDS is practically unknown among the Europeans, who are much richer, well-fed, and have access to clean drinking water.

Also, virtually all HIV testing in Africa is done at pre-natal clinics. Although pregnancy causes high numbers of false positives, statisticians extrapolate from the tiny numbers at the clinics to the continent at large, giving the impression of a vast epidemic. In addition to pregnancy, there are 70 different conditions—including use of cosmetics and skin lighteners—that can cause false positives for the HIV antibody.

“After 25 years of a so-called epidemic, with unlimited amounts of money being spent, there is absolutely nothing to show for it,” says Geshekter. He posits that there is not supposed to be an end to the AIDS epidemic in Africa – it is just supposed to keep going. “To ask hard questions threatens the livelihood of the thousands of AIDS researchers, as well as the journalists who have won Pulitzer Prizes for conforming to the received wisdom about AIDS in Africa,” says Geshekter.

Geshekter says that humanitarian groups have a strong incentive to hide the truth about AIDS in Africa. “All the people with money in Africa are those in AIDS programs.” He goes on to explain that there is little money for organizations helping Africans build wells and improve their nutrition and sanitation—but billions upon billions poured into programs to fight AIDS. As for journalists, Geshekter states baldly that those who report the truth about AIDS lose their jobs, while massive research organizations would shrivel up and die if it became known that HIV does not cause AIDS.

The pharmaceutical companies would be wiped out by lawsuits from the survivors of the millions of people who have died after taking toxic HIV drugs, if the truth were to come out. It seems that everyone is making money from the AIDS epidemic – all at the expense of those who suffer and die from the constellation of diseases, many of them pharmaceutically induced, we call AIDS.

In 1990, Neville Hodgkinson, then medical and science correspondent of the London Sunday Times, wrote: “If HIV does not cause AIDS, then we will have witnessed the biggest medical and scientific blunder of this century.”

Eighteen years later, it seems all but certain that Hodgkinson was right.

Sheila Casey is a DC-based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Reuters, Chicago Sun-Times, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams and the Rock Creek Free Press. She blogs at sheilacasey.com

A Guilty Agent: The Shadowy Role of Timothy McVeigh

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:55:49 -0400

On the left, McVeigh in Waco in 1993. On the right, an alleged McVeigh from recently surfaced video at Camp Grafton, North Dakota fi lmed in August 1993— well after McVeigh was honorably discharged from service in May 1992. Was McVeigh being secretly trained, as he told his sister, to be a paid government assassin? - JonesReport.com

By Wendy S. Painting
What may seem like conspiracy theories surrounding the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, have been given more credibility do to newly released internal defense memos for Timothy James McVeigh, who was convicted and executed for his role as “Mastermind” and “Lone Wolf Bomber.” McVeigh, who was said to have orchestrated the bombing with minimal help from two Army buddies, may not have been what he seemed.

A source out of Austin, Texas memorialized in the documents gives weight to previous evidence and supports the existence of a real life conspiracy theory. The source, who because of privacy concerns, will be referred to simply as “D.” D was known to have had heavy ties to U.S intelligence agencies as well as groups targeted for Federal investigation and infiltration, such as White Supremacists, Neo- Nazis and Militia members. On March 9, 1996, D gave a statement to McVeigh’s defense team, laying out several shocking details which have now, thirteen years later, been corroborated by other sources.

Immediately after the bombing many journalists put forth the story that McVeigh had flunked out of Special Forces. This is one reason often cited for his intense anger at the government, which they say, caused him to wage war on ordinary American citizens. D told the defense that Timothy McVeigh was working for the Federal government and was assigned to infiltrate the neo- Nazi Skinhead movement, yet D’s claims that McVeigh was working for the government are not made by him alone, and are supported by other internal defense memos and various other credible sources.

Another supporting memo shows that in 1991, when McVeigh applied to work for a well known security company in Buffalo, New York, he had advised his soon to be employers that he held DOD Secret Clearance. McVeigh’s military records also reflect on the fact that he held a SECRET clearance.

The fact that McVeigh was indeed accepted into Special Forces and went on the work for the government during the time leading up to the bombing is supported not only by his previous employers and military records, but by the claims of Terry Nichols, convicted co conspirator, McVeigh’s younger sister, and claims of McVeigh himself. Nichols, in 2006, stated that that in November 1992 McVeigh told him he had been recruited by the Army for an undercover mission. This is also the exact time, according to other defense records which reveal that McVeigh was suddenly able to pay off all of his credit card bills after he had accumulated an enormous debt while gambling on the Buffalo Bills. McVeigh also advised his defense team that he had been issued a DOD issued credit card in the years prior to the bombing.

Another memo dated December of 1995, states that McVeigh, who joined the National Guard in Upstate New York, after his return from the Gulf War and alleged Special Forces “flunk out,” became highly agitated and upset when his defense confronted him with some disturbing information. When McVeigh was asked by his lawyers what exactly his job had been while in the National Guard, McVeigh, the model solider, stated he did not remember, something which would have been highly uncharacteristic of him. His lawyers then confronted and questioned him as to why he told his first lawyer, immediately after the bombing, that he had been “operating within the confines of the United States Government” when he bombed the Murrah building. McVeigh had confided to his first lawyer that he had been recruited by the government while serving in the National Guard and that his job was to “search for neo-Nazis and other problem troops within the Guard,” which further corroborate D’s claims.

Additionally, he told his original council that he was only supposed to blow out a few windows of the federal building but that the truck had been switched possibly without his knowledge.” After confronting McVeigh about this, his council noted that he became highly angry, and stated that he thought he had told the previous lawyer this information in confidentiality.

That the damage to the Murrah building was much more severe than could be expected from the Lone Ryder truck bomb, is not only supported by his first defense attorney, but also by the mysterious source D himself, who says that McVeigh’s government handler instructed McVeigh on the morning of the bombing, to park the Ryder truck in front of the Murrah building and then meet him at a nearby restaurant. However, D says, things did not go according to plan, and at 9:02 A.M on the morning of April 19, 1995, the Ryder truck, which was filled with ammonium nitrate and a large amount of C-4, detonated. Immediately afterwards, D claims, “strategically placed charges” blew out the four main building supports. D’s statement also align with original media accounts, first responder transcripts, seismographs and expert witnesses who believe the destruction done that was done to the building, was caused by much more than a “Lone Ryder.”

Furthermore, D also claimed he was “convinced that the Oklahoma City bombing had international connections which included Great Britain and Germany, and that there seemed to be no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was used simply as a tool by the actual perpetrators to carry out this mission.”That other countries could have been involved is also evidenced by the involvement of another major player in the saga of the bombing, German born Andreas Strassmeir, member of the elite GS9 German Counter Terrorism unit. “Andy the German,” as he was known around gun show circuits in the 1990’s, had been part of a joint U.S- German operation to infiltrate and track the sources of banned white power literature within Germany which was thought to originate in the United States.

Andy the German first appeared within the United States in the summer of 1989 when he was seen at a KKK rally in Texas. He then went on to act as head of security at a separatist compound in Oklahoma called Elohim City where he also provided paramilitary training. Strassmeir, although having been seen with McVeigh by an ATF informant at Elohim City, was also close associates of another man, Dennis Mahon, head of the Oklahoma KKK, and was being watched by the ATF and FBI for plans to blow up federal buildings. Strassmeir was allowed to return to Germany without being questioned by the FBI concerning his knowledge of the plot. Mahon, it seems, who admitted to knowing McVeigh, was never questioned. The fact that Strassmeir appeared in the U.S in the summer of 1989 in intriguing given that this was the same time that McVeigh returned from Germany after being involved in a “Change Up Program” the with German military, during his “active” duty in the military.

D then says that certain watchdog agencies, who had been tracking McVeigh for months before the bombing, had achieved their objective because the militias and skinheads were blaming the Feds and vise versa, and that in the midst of this confusion, then President Bill Clinton was able to pass his new Anti-Terrorism bill, which had been continuously shot down prior to the bombing. This bill, when read carefully, looks like a close relative of current post 9/11 legislation, including then widely expanded and unprecedented domestic spying capabilities and the erosion of habeas corpus.

Perhaps D is correct. Regardless, the fact that there is now much evidence to show that McVeigh’s role was much more obscure and intentionally hidden than previously thought, should be a concern of students of history, as well as those who support such needless legislation, such as the current H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, also called by many a “thought crime” bill, out of fear for the next Lone Nut Domestic Terrorist. Americans now live in a strange culture of consumerism and fear, are told continuously that they must be very fearful and vigilant against all kinds of terrors, including body odor, sexual impotence, road rage, bird flu, human flu, ADD and terrorists. We often thoughtlessly accept the remedies given, even when they are not in our own best interest.

Wendy S. Painting lives in Rochester, New York. She has a Masters in Humanities, from the State University of New York at Buffalo and she is currently writing a book on the Oklahoma City Bombing

Where Was NORAD on 9/11?

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:48:30 -0400

By Dean M. Jackson - Washington, DC

Testifying before the 9/11 Commission General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the commission in response to a question on NORAD’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks, “I can’t answer the hypothetical. It’s more - it’s the way that we were directed to posture, looking outward.” As we will see below NORAD, since its inception in 1958, was tasked with more than merely “looking outward”.

I found General Myers’ testimony on the capabilities of NORAD on 9/11 to be surprising, since it was long assumed that NORAD’s mission was more than “looking outward”. However, the 9/11 Truth Movement has been negligent in producing any documents that would confirm their suspicion that NORAD was tasked with watching over and intercepting errant aircraft in American skies before 9/11; that NORAD’s mission was more robust than “looking outward”. The following pre-9/11 citations conclusively documents the true capabilities of NORAD on the morning of 9/11.

“The NORAD mission is threefold. NORAD’s first responsibility is to provide surveillance and control of the airspace covering North America, specifically the airspace of Canada and the United States. This mission is based on agreements between the two governments….

The second part of NORAD’s mission is to provide the NCAs [National Command Authorities] with tactical warning and attack assessment of an aerospace attack against North America. This information is essential to providing those in command with information to aid them in making decisions on how to respond to an attack against North America.

NORAD’s third responsibility is to provide an appropriate response to any form of air attack. NORAD was created to provide a defense against the threat from air-breathing aircraft, specifically the threat from long-range bombers. However, over the years the threat has changed. Now NORAD must provide an appropriate response to a multitude of threats, to include the air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) and the sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM).”
— NORAD AIR DEFENSE OVERVIEW; Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, pre-1995 (http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/civ/vanguard/C2Demo/OPRef.html).

The last two missions constitute NORAD’s “outward” search for hostile aircraft approaching the North American continent. NORAD’s first mission, however, tasks the agency to monitor and control all aircraft within the United States’ and Canada’s air space. This is what NORAD calls “air sovereignty”. Let’s take a closer look at what constitutes “air sovereignty”.

As reported by the General Accounting Office in 1994 (GAO/NSIAD-94-76)

“NORAD defines air sovereignty as providing surveillance and control of the territorial airspace, which includes:
1. intercepting and destroying uncontrollable air objects;
2. tracking hijacked aircraft;
3. assisting aircraft in distress;
4. escorting Communist civil aircraft; and
5. intercepting suspect aircraft, including counterdrug operations and peacetime military intercepts.”

“NORAD defines ‘sovereign airspace’ as: the airspace over a nation’s territory, internal waters, and territorial seas. NORAD’s territorial seas extend 12 miles from the continental United States, Alaska, and Canada. Sovereign airspace above a nation’s territory is unlimited.”
— NORAD AIR DEFENSE OVERVIEW; Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, pre-1995 (http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/civ/vanguard/C2Demo/OPRef.html).

Let’s examine further citations from the 1990s that detail NORAD’s true capabilities on 9/11.

The article NORAD: Air National Guard manning stations across the country (National Guard Association of the United States, Sep. 1997) explains how NORAD’s six battle management and command centers identify commercial aircraft as these aircraft are being monitored flying through our air space, “Aircraft flying over our air space are monitored seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Much of the identifying process is done by hand.

Flight plans from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are compiled in logs and have to be manually searched to identify aircraft.”
—(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3731/is_199709/ai_n8766326.)

“The Air Operations Center (AOC) (also known as the Air Defense Operations Center - ADOC) maintains constant surveillance of North American airspace to prevent overflight by hostile aircraft. It tracks over 2.5 million aircraft annually. The ADOC collects and consolidates surveillance information on suspected drug-carrying aircraft entering or operating within North America, and provides this information to counternarcotics agencies.”
— Cheyenne Mountain Complex; Federation of American Scientists, 1999 (http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/cmc.htm).

“One ongoing mission of the Battle Management Center is to coordinate “air sovereignty” efforts, monitoring every aircraft that enters U.S. or Canadian airspace — some 2.5 million a year. NORAD is asked to investigate aircraft that do not file flight plans, contact ground controllers or identify themselves with transponders.”
— Cheyenne Mountain: America’s underground watchtower; CNN Interactive, 1999 (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/experience/the.bomb/route/01.cheyenne/).

“In 1998, Canada posses the ability to detect, identify, and if necessary intercept aircraft over Canadian territory. The “Canadianisation” of NORAD operations over Canada is complete. Though we still rely heavily on the Americans for the Integrated Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment and mutual defense, we have successfully transitioned on at least one of the three core functions of NORAD [surveillance and control of sovereign airspace].”
— Canadian Aerospace Sovereignty: In Pursuit of a Comprehensive Capability, by Maj François Malo; Department of National Defence (Canada), 1998 (http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/canada/0056.htm).

According to the article The Border Guards, NORAD: The Eyes and Ears of North America (http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0196/border.htm, 1996), in 1996 NORAD prepared and practiced “its charter through continuous training and a realistic exercise program. Probably the biggest of these exercises is Amalgam Warrior, which is held twice annually in the fall for the East Coast and in the spring for the West Coast. The five-day fall Amalgam Warrior put Americans and Canadians through their paces, challenging forces in three areas coinciding with the command’s aerospace warning, air sovereignty and air defense missions.

The exercise was conducted in real time with a fictitious world political scenario, which prompted NORAD forces to transition from a peacetime posture to a war-fighting stance. The threat escalated from tracking unknown aircraft, which filed bad flight plans or wandered off course, and in-flight emergencies [all four hijacked aircraft on 9/11 were also in-flight emergencies] to terrorist aircraft attacks and large-scale bomber strike missions.”

How important is the “air sovereignty” mission to the Air Force? Colonel Dan Navin, special assistant to the commander of 1st Air Force in 1997 speaks to this question when he commented,”…many say [it] is the most important job of the Air Force, and that is air sovereignty.”

In point of fact, not only was NORAD postured to look inward on the morning of 9/11, but not long after the ‘collapse’ of the USSR NORAD’s inward mission-air sovereignty-was to become the raison d’être

for its continued existence. A NORAD strategy review emphasized a new justification for its core forces soon after the ‘demise’ of the USSR-that of peacetime air sovereignty:

“The dramatically changed threat and . . . development of post-Cold War defense policies suggest real possibilities for shifting NORAD’s focus from deterring massive nuclear attack to defending both nations [Canada and the United States] by maintaining air sovereignty . . . . The size of the core force would equate to that required to perform the peacetime Air Sovereignty mission.”

By the mid-1990s the shift in NORAD’s focus was complete according to the GAO: “According to the Chairman [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], the air defense force was structured to intercept the former Soviet Union’s long-range bomber force if it attacked over the North Pole. Since that threat has largely disappeared, the United States no longer needs a dedicated continental air defense force, and the force has refocused its activity on the air sovereignty mission…” We learn that by 1995 NORAD had changed its priorities. NORAD’s main mission of defending the continent against a massive nuclear attack would now take a back seat to the less glamorous inward mission of air sovereignty.

As Commander-in-Chief, North American Aerospace Defense Command from August 1998 to February 2000, General Richard Myers would have known that NORAD’s mission included surveillance and control of the territorial air space within the United States. Therefore when General Myers told the 9/11 Commission in response to NORAD’s mission, “I can’t answer the hypothetical. It’s more - it’s the way that we were directed to posture, looking outward” he knowingly committed perjury. As such, the United States Department of Justice now has the duty to charge General Richard Myers with perjury and determine why he committed perjury.

Now I understand why so many of us in the 9/11 Truth Movement seemed to remember that before 9/11 NORAD was tasked with more than just “looking outward”. That’s because before 9/11 the press, media, the government, including the militaries of both the United States and Canada, told us that one of NORAD’s responsibilities was surveillance and control of the territorial airspace above us.

The questions remain. Where was NORAD on 9/11? If they truly failed in their mission so badly on 9/11, why was no one fired or reprimanded?

Dean Jackson is a writer and 9/11 researcher in Washington, DC. His website, DNotice.org provides rigorous analysis of major issues concerning government malfeasance.

FBI Sweeps Anthrax Under the Rug

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:24:00 -0400

By Sheila Casey and Barry Kissin
US Attorney Jeff Taylor was sweating on August 6, as he laid out his case against the late Dr. Bruce Ivins at a news conference-and with good reason. Anyone familiar with the case is well aware that Dr. Ivins was railroaded, and that the news conference was a flimsy web of lies.

Ivins had nothing to do with the 2001 anthrax attacks. The attacks were almost certainly carried out by the only group that had the means to produce the highly weaponized anthrax in the letters: the CIA, its contractor Battelle Memorial Institute of West Jefferson, Ohio., and the Army at Dugway in Utah.

The DOJ-FBI frame-up of Ivins rests heavily upon the claim of new advances in genetic testing which supposedly prove that the killer anthrax could have come only from Ivins’ flask.

Jeff Taylor stated:

The FBI sought out the best experts in the scientific community and, over time, four highly sensitive and specific tests were developed that were capable of detecting the unique qualities of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks.

This is an outright lie. No special tests were required to assess the genetic heritage of the Ames strain in the envelopes. The Washington Post reported on December 16, 2001 that “only five laboratories so far have been found to have spores with perfect genetic matches to those in the Senate letters.”

The distinguishing feature of the anthrax that killed five people in 2001 is not related to its genes. What made that anthrax unique was that it was highly weaponized. Anthrax is a common pathogen found in the soil in many places. It doesn’t become lethal unless produced in such a way that it behaves like a gas, floating easily in the air and deep into a victim’s lungs.

The anthrax used in the attacks was beyond cutting edge. Donald A. Henderson, former assistant secretary for the Office of Public Health Preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Science magazine: “It just didn’t have to be that good” to be lethal.

Why the killer anthrax was so deadly

1. Precisely sized particles-1.5 to 5 microns. Anything smaller is exhaled, anything larger tends to get caught either in the nose or in the cilia in the trachea.

2. Coated with silica. The silica acted as a buffer, preventing spores from adhering to one another. The silica on the attack anthrax rested on a thin layer of polymerized glass, which is a highly advanced technique for coating anthrax spores. To do this required a “spray dryer,” the cheapest of which sells for $50,000. The lyophilizer in Ivins’ lab is used to dry anthrax, but can NOT be used to coat the spores with silica. Ivins did not have a spray dryer.

3. Highly concentrated. The letter to Senator Daschle’s office contained two grams of anthrax, about the weight of a dime. Each gram contained a trillion pure spores of anthrax, or enough to kill 200 million people.

4. Electro-statically charged. The slight charge on each spore caused it to repel the other spores and spread out into the room after the envelope was opened.

It is these attributes of the anthrax-not its genetic heritage-which made it so unique and so lethal.

The source of the anthrax was clear in 2001

US Attorney Jeff Taylor characterized a flask in Dr. Ivin’s possession as “the murder weapon.” But a Dec. 12, 2001 article in the Baltimore Sun stated:

For nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the mail attacks that have killed five people.

The article refers to Dugway as “the only site in the United States where weapons-grade anthrax has been made in recent years,” and also includes this:

Dugway’s production of weapons-grade anthrax, which has never before been publicly revealed, is apparently the first by the U.S. government since President Richard M. Nixon ordered the U.S. offensive biowarfare program closed in 1969.

The following day, The Washington Post echoed the Sun article:

An Army biological and chemical warfare facility in Utah has been quietly developing a virulent, weapons-grade formulation of anthrax spores since at least 1992.

On Dec 16, 2001, The Washington Post corroborated the Sun report by stating that “Dugway is the only facility known in recent years to have processed anthrax spores into the powdery form that is most easily inhaled,” also stating, “Army officials in Washington said yesterday that Fort Detrick does not have the equipment for making dried anthrax spores.”

On September 4, 2001, The New York Timest explained:

“Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons … even the [Clinton] White House was unaware of their full scope. The projects, which have not been previously disclosed … have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.”

These projects involve the CIA, Battelle Memorial Laboratories in West Jefferson, Ohio, and the Army at Dugway in Utah.

“[T]he need to keep such projects secret was a significant reason behind President Bush’s recent rejection of a draft agreement to strengthen the germ-weapons treaty, [the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention,] which has been signed by 143 nations.”

Had the treaty been strengthened, the Dugway and West Jefferson sites would have been subject to international inspections. It is important to note that Battelle not only operates its own labs in West Jefferson, but also is contracted by the Army to operate the labs at Dugway.

The DOJ-FBI news conference on August 6, 2008 was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from the secret anthrax weaponization projects by pinning the crimes on a dead man. So far the DOJ-FBI have succeeded in covering up the real perpetrators of the crime, concealing the illegal weapons program, and persuading many that it is time to close the investigation.

Dr. Ivins was an immunologist; he had neither the knowledge nor the equipment to produce the silica-coated, electro-statically charged, 1.5 to 5 micron sized, one trillion spore per gram anthrax that was mailed to Senators Leahy and Daschle.

The DOJ has made much of the fact that Ivins worked 45 extra hours in September and October of 2001. Yet when the FBI attempted to reverse engineer the weaponized anthrax from the attacks, they admitted after a year of trying that they were unable to come up with a product as potent as that in the letters.

Scientists doubt FBI’s story

As far back as October 28, 2002, The Washington Post reported that bio-weapons experts were skeptical about the view that the anthrax in the letters could have come from a lone nut:

“In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I’m one of them,” said Richard O. Spertzel, former deputy commander of USAMRIID (the Army bio-defense facility at Detrick). “And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good.”

Writing in The New York Timest on Aug. 9, 2008, Gerry Andrews, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Wyoming, described the envelopes’ contents as “a startlingly refined weapons-grade anthrax spore preparation, the likes of which had never been seen before by personnel at Fort Detrick.” He continued: “It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope.”

Abundant evidence that Ivins is innocent

Ivins passed two polygraph tests and no link was made between his handwriting and that on the anthrax letters. Investigators were so frustrated at Ivins passing the polygraph tests that they searched his house for books or articles on how to fool a polygraph, but found none.

US Attorney Jeff Taylor stated that the investigators zeroed in on Ivins when they “conducted additional investigative steps,” and thus were “able to narrow the focus even further, exclude individuals, and that left us looking at Dr. Ivins.”

Those “additional investigative steps” were polygraph tests. Where passing a polygraph test was enough to exclude certain people, it did not exclude Ivins.

Ivins’ car, work locker, safe deposit box and house were thoroughly swabbed for anthrax spores multiple times over the space of years; not a single spore was found, although the killer anthrax was so highly weaponized that it behaved like a gas and was very difficult to contain.

None of the materials in the mailings were found at his house: not the tape, the envelopes, nor the pen used to write the letters. There isn’t one piece of evidence placing him in New Jersey at the time the letters were mailed: not a credit card receipt, restaurant receipt, nor a witness.

On August 3, 2008, Glen Greenwald wrote in Salon:

It is so vital to emphasize that not a shred of evidence has yet been presented that the now-deceased Bruce Ivins played any role in the anthrax attacks, let alone that he was the sole or even primary culprit. Nonetheless, just as they did with Steven Hatfill, the media (with some notable and important exceptions) are reporting this case as though the matter is resolved.”

Bruce Ivins: juggler, Red Cross volunteer, pianist

Jeff Taylor’s case against Ivins rests heavily on claims that Ivins was mentally ill. If Ivins was truly so unhinged, why was he allowed to work with toxic substances? His security clearance was never revoked.

Certainly a brilliant homicidal serial killer who is determined to avoid detection would immediately get rid of the Ames strain with the incriminating genotype in his flask, if he had used it to make weaponized powder and kill five people. Yet seven years later, the same genotype was still in Ivins’ lab!

The DOJ and FBI ask us to believe that Ivins launched the attacks because his vaccine research was not going well and he feared he might lose his job. It’s just not a plausible motivation.

In 2003, Ivins received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service-the highest award given to the Defense Department’s civilian employees. He had been a respected scientist at USAMRIID for 35 years and had a very secure job.

Ivins had been married for 33 years. He played keyboard at his local church, he was a member of the American Red Cross, an avid juggler and founder of the Frederick Jugglers. He also played keyboards in a Celtic band and would often compose and play songs for coworkers who were moving to new jobs.

The FBI focused on him as a probable fall guy in 2006, and for two years was all over him, repeatedly questioning him, searching his home, car and office, and confronting him and his family in public with accusations that he had “killed people.” His daughter was shown pictures of dead anthrax victims and told “your father did this.” His son was promised $2.5 million and a sports car of his choice if he would implicate his father in the anthrax attacks. Who among us would not resort to drink, or drugs, or fantasies of revenge under those circumstances?

Who had the expertise to weaponize anthrax?

William C. Patrick III, and Ken Alibek.

William Patrick was the originator of the first anthrax weaponization process. He has five patents on anthrax weaponization and wrote a paper in 1999 setting out exactly what an anthrax attack by mail would look like.

Patrick’s scenario is very similar to what actually happened in 2001. For example, he suggests no more than 2.5 grams of anthrax per envelope; the envelopes contained two grams. One footnote in his paper reveals “we now have the ability to purify to one trillion spores per gram.” William Patrick was a consultant to the CIA, Battelle, the Army, the DIA and the FBI on bio-weapons.

Ken Alibek headed up the Soviet bio-weapon programs until defecting to the USA in 1992. He brought with him the technology that was key in the anthrax attacks: using polymerized glass to attach silica to the anthrax spores. He worked for Battelle Memorial Institute in the late 90s.

These men had to have been instrumental in developing the technology used in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Who can control the FBI, DOJ and the media?

The significance of the railroading of the deceased Ivins cannot be overstated. This railroading is not a matter of incompetence. In detail after detail, the joint FBI-DOJ prosecution deliberately lies, evades and obfuscates in a desperate attempt to pin blame somewhere and close the case. (A transcript of the entire August 6 news conference is available on npr.org, titled “DOJ News Conference On Bruce Ivins.”)

US Attorney Jeff Taylor states at the news conference that the envelopes used in the attacks were “very likely sold at a post office in the Frederick, Md. area,” and that Ivins had a post office box there. This is another outright lie. Taylor’s own application for a search warrant stated:

…envelopes with printing defects, identical to printing defects identified on the envelopes utilized in the anthrax attacks during the fall of 2001, were collected from the Fairfax Main post office in Fairfax, Virginia, and the Cumberland and Elkton post offices in Maryland…

Taylor and his supervisors at DOJ must be hoping that no one will notice or care that they are blatantly lying about their evidence against Ivins.

Reading the transcript, it is striking how often Jeff Taylor and Joseph Persichini refuse to answer questions. They either refer reporters to the Department of Defense (which is not holding a news conference) or to the documents they have been given.

When asked when their all new, ground-breaking DNA research would be published, Taylor replies “I’m not going to comment on (that).” When asked a direct question about how many others were investigated other than Ivins, Taylor replies “I’m not going to get into the details.” Not only does he not get into the details, he doesn’t even give us the broad strokes. When asked how he can be so sure that there wasn’t another person involved, Taylor replies:

The evidence I described in my statement, and that I’ve described throughout this question-and-answer period, as I said, led us to conclude that Dr. Ivins is the person who committed this crime. We are confident, based on the evidence we have, that we could prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.

In other words, he doesn’t answer.

Honest citizens must ask themselves: who are the FBI and DOJ protecting? Who has the ability to control and corrupt an investigation of this importance? And why, after sitting through a news conference that is obviously a hastily constructed web of lies, have so many journalists dutifully reported the story just as instructed by Jeff Taylor?

We no longer have a working government in the United States. What we have are functionaries in various departments-Congress, FBI, DOJ, CIA-who take their orders from the corporations who make vast sums of money waging war and selling vaccines. Their influence extends to the major media outlets who control the flow of information to the American people. We are increasingly enslaved, manipulated and murdered by these corporations, and very few of us seem to realize it.

Sheila Casey is a DC based journalist. Her work has appeared in The Denver Post, Buzz Flash, Common Dreams and Dissident Voice. She blogs at http://www.sheilacasey.com Barry Kissin is an attorney/peace activist based in Frederick, MD, home of Fort Detrick.

OKC Bomb Survivor Remembers

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:11:00 -0400

Murrah Building, OKC, after the blast.

BY WENDY PAINTING / RCFP
Oklahoma City — June 17, 2008 Amidst all the dirty details of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, one can get lost. Recently I set out to uncover aspects of this story which have not been publicized or accounted for. The story of the cover-up cannot be separated from the effects which the bombing caused, the very real trauma of the survivors, to the families and to the country.

Like so many others, Ruth Schwab was not only a victim but an eyewitness. She was gracious enough to talk with me recently. Her story, like so many others that day, is not detached from the maze of other details.

About a week before the bombing, Ruth was pulling up to work at the Murrah building. As she was going into the garage she saw three men standing around talking. The men were dressed in work clothes, but she did not recognize any of them. Ruth knew many of the people that worked there. The men were holding what seemed to be a large sheet of paper. At the time, Ruth thought that they were holding floor plans. “You just don’t assume that these men are there because they are planning to bomb your building,” she said “but later, when I saw the news I remembered that morning…I can still see them standing there”

The Murrah building had always been on a list of targets. They had several bomb threats in the past. Usually, Ruth remembers, they didn’t hear about them until much later, on the evening news. She remembers she had said to someone once, that if there was ever a real threat, they wouldn’t know about it until much later. A week later, on April 19, 1995 Ruth was heading to work again. This time her boss was out of town and had offered her parking spot to Ruth. The spot was on the middle floor of the parking garage. Although Ruth was pulling up as several Ryder trucks were seen outside the Murrah that morning, she did not notice any. She parked her car and went in the building.

The first person Ruth saw that day was V. Z. Lawton. Lawton, another survivor, is one of the leading figures among the survivors who have worked tirelessly, despite threats and harassment, to try and find out what happened to themselves and their loved ones that day.

Ruth turned on her computer and waited for it to boot up. Just as she did, she heard a horrible noise and then haze. “I felt like I was in a science fiction movie…I was falling down a hole, just falling and falling.” Looking back, she says, the doctors think that she lost consciousness. As Ruth told me, the body protects itself. She does not remember pain, only the noise and the falling sensation. The next thing she knew, she was conscious but she could not see anything. It was then that she realized that a bomb must have gone off. Immediately she thought “I have to get out of here. I don’t know where I am or what’s going on but I have to get out.” She tried to sit up. She began yelling out, inquiring if anyone was there.

And that is when her guardian angel. V. Z. Lawton yelled out in response “Ruthy, don’t move. I am here. Don’t move.” She told him not to worry. Ruth was not moving anywhere. She couldn’t. Later, she would remember the sounds of moaning and groaning around her, sounds which she could not do anything about. The futility of not being able to help those around her haunted Ruth for years to come. V. Z. came over to her and handed her a handkerchief. Ruth says that Lawton was a perfect gentleman. The handkerchief she says was like “trying to put a Band-Aid on a bullet hole,” the damage to her face was that severe. She began to wipe her face. She felt no pain, but Ruth could not see anything. There was only darkness where her vision used to be.

V. Z. told her that he was going to try to find a way out. He moved enough of the debris around her, and with the help of another man, Ken, began to guide her out. Ruth remembers that she was on foot until she got half way down the stairs. It was at that point that someone carried her out. Ruth, incidentally, was able to meet the man who carried her out that day. Years later, at the OKC Memorial, he would be working as a guard and remember her.

Ruth was taken outside and laid down. A co-worker approached her, and in shock herself, gasped, and said to Ruth, “don’t worry. They can do a lot with plastic surgery these days.” This was not very comforting to Ruth. She did, though, make her co worker promise not to let them cut her clothes off in front of everyone. Her co-worker covered her up with a blanket while Ruth waited for the ambulance drivers to put her on a gurney.

Ruth was able to give enough information to rescue workers for them to contact her family. She was rushed to the hospital. They took her into surgery, and after they had done some superficial stitching to her face, they moved her into another surgery, this time to try and save her eye. This was all done within an hour and a half after the blast, which had occurred at 9:02 am. When Ruth came to again, the doctors were trying to save her eye. This was around 4 in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, Ruth’s children, all five of them, were removed from their classes and told what had happened. Better this, than finding out through the grapevine, Ruth thinks now. Her father and step mother had heard on the news.

At some point, while Ruth was in the hospital that day, a photographer came in and wanted to take a picture of her. Ruth’s sister fixed her hair the best she could and placed a recent picture of Ruth next to her head. “She wanted everyone to know what I had looked like before,” Ruth says. For years, the bloody shirt from that day and a piece of Plexiglas from the building sat in a bag in Ruth’s garage. Later, she would bring it out for reporters.

Ruth said good things have come out of the bombing, that God had a reason for her to stay on earth. Among these things is her ability to watch her five children grow up. A couple of her children were able to receive scholarship money set aside for victims and family members. One of her daughters was able to earn a law degree from these scholarships.

As a mother of five, Ruth would not have been able to send her children to undergraduate college, much less graduate or law school. “So this,” she says “is a blessing in some way. And her co-worker was right; plastic surgeons can do miracles now. To look at Ruth, you would never guess that she has a fake eye or reconstructive surgery. Both Ruth and V. Z. were pulling glass out of themselves for years. Two years after the bombing, glass made its way through Ruth’s eye. It had to beremoved.

Another time, in the shower, glass pushed its way out of her body. “The body just pushed it out,” she says “it hurts right before it comes out…I will always feel the effects…they will not go away.” Ruth will have to have eye surgeries for the rest of her life. Ruth says the bombing defines who she is. It also defines who her children are. It defines the people in Oklahoma City and it defines, whether they know it or not, the American people. It defines the country itself and beyond. It is central.

For years Ruth and her family would stay inside on the 19th of April. No travel. No leaving the house. This year she did not attend the anniversary, but her family threw her a party on April 19th only days away from her birthday. “The 19th is my birthday, it’s my day of life. I received 13 more years of life on this earth.” Ruth, like other survivors I have spoken to, does not take life for granted.

Ruth has a tree in her yard. The tree was grown from a seedling taken from the Survivor Tree which stands at the OKC memorial. She also has a piece of the building displayed in her garden.

Ruth speaks at churches and schools, “I speak as much as I can. I don’t want it to go away. I want people to know the effects it has had.”She shares this sentiment with V. Z. and others. “ We want the truth out. I want my grandkids to know and pass it on. My children will not let anyone forget.

I asked Ruth how the bombing and the cover-up had affected her views of the country, the government and politics. Ruth says for years she tried to ignore it. While she wasn’t a super patriot, Ruth loved her country and could not understand how her own government could be complicit in covering up the atrocity that happened to her and her friends that day. She focused much of her attention into raising her family, but eventually the information became too much to ignore. “The fact is that they knew there was going to be a bomb, EVERYONE KNEW…that blows me away. The day-care!! They could have done something… anything…they could have sounded a fire alarm, a fake one, they could have at least get the babies out…that was a heartbreaker.”

She remembers how on the way to work that morning the radio was talking about the anniversary of Waco. She knows how every eyewitness saw others besides McVeigh. She remembers how fast the FBI and Justice Department dropped those leads. She also remembers how fast the trials for Nichols and McVeigh were.

Ruth says she tries hard not be bitter, but she and her family do not take everything they hear on the news or read in the paper at face value anymore. How can they, when it is known now that not only was there prior warning of the bombing, but that officials knew down to the date that this would happen. April 19th 1995 was the date that a man named Richard Wayne Snell would be executed. Snell himself had previously tried to blow up the Murrah in the 1980s. Officials were also aware of the danger posed by the anniversary of Waco, and of another federal raid, which had angered so many people. The ATF, in fact, had been warned to avoid work that day. And they did. Of all the causalities to all of the federal agencies that morning, the ATF had none. Ruth says she hates the fact that her children now have to suffer with the pain of knowing this could have been prevented.

She says she feels for people like Jannie Coverdale, who lost her two baby grandsons, Aaron and Elijah that morning. Coverdale had just dropped her loved ones off at the Murrah daycare center, on her way to work. She would only see them again in her troubled dreams.v On parting, Ruth, in her friendly and motherly manner, wished me good luck, telling me I had my work cut out for me. She told me to keep going in pursuit of this. I told her I was just stubborn enough to take her advice.

Wendy S. Painting lives in Rochester, New York. She just finished a Masters in Humanities, at the State University of New York at Buffalo and she is currently writing a book on the Oklahoma City Bombing.

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