911truth.org

THE TOP 40

REASONS TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL STORY OF SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001

… An outline in simple talking points …

911Truth.org is home to articles backing virtually every point made below. Much of the basic research is available at the Complete 9/11 Timeline (hosted by cooperativeresearch.org), the 9/11 Reading Room (911readingroom.org), and the NY Attorney General Spitzer petition and complaint (Justicefor911.org). For physical evidence discussion, see Point 7.

THE DAY ITSELF – EVIDENCE OF COMPLICITY

1) AWOL Chain of Command
a. It is well documented that the officials topping the chain of command for response to a domestic attack – George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, Montague Winfield – all found reason to do something else during the actual attacks, other than assuming their duties as decision-makers.
b. Who was actually in charge? Dick Cheney, Richard Clarke, Norman Mineta and the 9/11 Commission directly conflict in their accounts of top-level response to the unfolding events, such that several (or all) of them must be lying.

2) Air Defense Failures
a. The US air defense system failed to follow standard procedures for responding to diverted passenger flights.
b. Time lines: The various responsible agencies – NORAD, FAA, Pentagon, USAF, as well as the 9/11 Commission – gave radically different explanations for the failure (in some cases upheld for years), such that several officials must have lied; but none were held accountable.
c. Was there an air defense stand-down?
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Smile – Big Brother Is Watching

Thanks to tomdispatch.com for this:

On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’” This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress’s action did not end the “total information awareness” program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public — for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness Program” is still going strong today.

(source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174959)

Bush & Co: Terror, Inc.

netflix.com page for film
imdb.com page
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

No End In Sight is a well-made feature-length documentary film which reviews the mistakes made by the Bush Administration in Iraq. I just finished watching it, and it prompted me to write the following observations.

The biggest frustration I have with Bush is that he and his dwindling followers convince themselves that he has been fighting a war on terror, and has made us safer, when in fact his bumbling missteps and criminal neglect to lead his nation’s military has made us much more vulnerable, creating more ill-will and terrorist motivation than if he had just done nothing at all after September 11, 2001.
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Winter Soldier 2008

UPDATE: Now that the event has finished, the archiving begins. You can still hear all the testimony at the links below. But Democracy Now! is devoting a portion of their hour long show every day this week to rebroadcasting portions of it. Go to democracynow.org for more.

Iraq Veterans Against the War
warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008

You owe it to the troops.
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We Gave Them Napalm

“What this suggests about the people running America is far worse than if they were simply malevolent super-geniuses: They don’t know the backstory and couldn’t care less. It’s as though we’re riding in the back seat of a car driven by people who demanded the wheel but aren’t sure what the gas pedal does or what a stop sign actually looks like.”

- from Jonathan Schwartz’s reflections on Bill Kristol’s March 28, 2003 debate with Daniel Ellsberg on CNN

No, I think maybe they actually are malevolent. I can’t seem to distract myself from the perspective of God in the Final Judgment. We gave them napalm! That’s pretty much malevolent’s very definition, yup.

Back up. This is a quote from Jonathan Schwarz’s wonderful article in TomDispatch.com, “The Lost Kristol Tapes,” first seen by me on commondreams. This article is wonderful because it slaps back into his seat that petulant man-baby, Bill Kristol, who wants so bad to get his hands on the launch codes, but somehow (God, maybe?!) keeps getting held back into position as “journalist,” or “advisor,” or, once, Dan Quayle’s chief of staff. Maybe the neocons are smart enough to know that certain people, if given absolute power, would destroy the whole sand box.
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Torture Is An Anti-democracy Virus

From the press kit of Alex Gibney’s new film, Taxi To The Dark Side, releasing in January of 2008:

[T]he issue of “torture” is not really about interrogation techniques. It is about a pandemic of corruption that ensues when the rule of law is weakened. He taught me that torture is like a virulent virus – spreading, mutating, building resistance to attempts to stop it – that infects everything in its path. It haunts the psyche of the soldier who administers it; it corrupts the officials who look the other way; it discredits the information obtained from it; it weakens the evidence in a search for justice, and it strengthens a despotic strain that takes hold in men and women who run hot with a peculiar patriotic fever: believing that, because they are “pure of heart,” they are entitled to be above the law.

Click here to go to Wikipedia’s article on the Geneva Conventions

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War is Theft

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

For the less Biblically literate of jimblog readers, that whacko peacenik pinko hippie Eisenhower is referencing Jesus’ own words in Matthew 25:42-43. We need the old Republican party back! (The one that produced an ex-general President who could say the above).

Jesus The Insurgent

Isaiah 52:14, The Message:

He didn’t even look human– a ruined face, disfigured past recognition

…Makes me think of Mel Gibson’s Christ (beautifully acted by James Cavaziel) in the post-flog Passion scenes.

Soldiers did this.

Military might smashed in the face of my Jesus.

The superpower, torturing an insurgent ring-leader in order to put on display an example of what results from trying to do things His own way.

Simon the zealot-terrorist and the other ten had been led around, gathering sympathy from the bitter masses, resentful of their occupiers, and got all twelve of the disciples and their Leader on the Watch List.

Operation Jewish Freedom had brought peace, safety, roads, and “civilization” to this dusty Middle Eastern colony. And this was the thanks Rome gets! Not exactly flowers and chocolates, eh?

I’m sure there was tortured rationalization all up and down the chain of command, from Pilate who pretended he could wash his hands of the dirty work to the grunts on the ground down there, really giving that Jesus guy the deluxe thrashing.

But rationalizing it didn’t work. It never does. The torturers always are tortured and shocked by their own inhumanity to their fellow man. The torture works both ways, scarring both the perpetrator and the victim.

But it’s worse for the Victim.

How many Iraqi fathers and brothers and sons end up hating (secretly, i.e. safely) soldiers for what soldiers always destroy: harmony, health, safety, peace . . . even as we salute them, honor them, sculpt images to them, anthem, moment-of-silence them? Because they smashed our best friend, our Brother, our Father, our Son, our Jesus, our Jesús, our José, our Jimmy, Johnny, GI Joe?

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Perilous Power

This is the cover photo of Perilous Power: The Middle East and U. S. Foreign Policy, by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar (subtitled, Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War and Justice).� I think this photo just says it all.� Click on it for a fuller version of the cover.� Go to the website of the publisher for more info and purchasing.

Mukasey + Congress = Torture

Well, I think that was an absolutely shocking display, and I think what’s most shocking about it is this idea that this is somehow a question of good government and the torture question can be belittled. I mean, what we just saw was lawmakers knowingly voting in favor of someone who has said that one of the classic modern torture techniques — I mean, the classic torture techniques of the French in Algeria, for instance, were simulated drowning, electroshock and rape. These are the three main tools of contemporary torture. And this is a man who has said to the world that one of those key techniques, simulated drowning, water torture, is not illegal. So, with that knowledge, he was just endorsed.
And to elevate a man who has said this to the highest legal office in the country, I think, just puts everyone of those lawmakers, but particularly the Democrats who voted for him, into bold new territory. They have just crossed a line, because they can no longer pin this on Bush. They can no longer claim ignorance. Anyone who faces these techniques in the future, they will be complicit in those war crimes, in those crimes against humanity — everybody who voted for this man.

– Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism, on the Wednesday, November 7, 2007 broadcast of Democracy Now!

thanks to thirdestatesundayreview.blogspot.com