9/11 WTC Demolition Conspiracy Revealed!!!

I love conspiracy theories! I love 'em, love 'em, love 'em!

They're fabulous entertainment, and here's the latest. This one is quite well done, focusing on the steel construction of the World Trade Center towers and how the jets alone couldn't have brought them down.

Oh, it's got the usual stuff, the rate of fall, explosive squibs, and all of that. But it's got shots of wreckage I've never seen, photos of other buildings that collapsed, explanations of how controlled demolitions work, and much, much more! It is so, so deliciously plausible that the towers and WTC 7 were brought down by demolition.

But I won't accept that as fact.

Please don't be glum, my conspiracy buff friends! I'm not out to rain on your parade. I aim to point the way to take this from theory to fact to general acceptance, if indeed the towers were imploded.

You see stodgy plodders like me understand that a theory is just a plausible explanation for an observed phenomenon. Before such can be accepted by methodical truth seekers, it must predict something that can be observed or tested. Scientists want a paper describing the theory and testing in exhaustive detail, so that they can recreate the test and satisfy themselves that you were sound in your methodology.

Oy, that's not entertaining at all! Please stick with me, it gets better.

If you can do this, you will gain allies who can hold a press conference, have reporters come, and be believed!

So how do you test the demolition theory? Metal!

You see, imploding a building requires that support beams be cut with high energy explosives. These substances leave traces in the remains of the beams. Find that metal, get it tested for explosive residue, and learn the truth.

Does that sound like a daunting task? Take heart. For inspiration, consider the story of the guys who exposed the CIA's network of rendition flights. They tested the theory that prisoners were sent to other countries by predicting the necessity of a CIA flight network and then found those flights.

They used the internet and a worldwide network of airplane spotter enthusiasts to gather their observations, and blew the CIA's cover. I'm thinking there are a whole lot more 9/11 conspiracy buffs than airplane spotters. You just need to track down WTC metal, and get it to this guy. He'll do the rest.

I'm pulling for you because, as I said, it's a plausible explanation. And if you do, the next step is answering the question: who did it?

Our government? As Richard Clarke pointed out, "The government is not sufficiently competent to pull off such conspiracies and too leaky to keep them secret." You've seen this government in action! What Clarke says makes sense.

So, if the Feds didn't do it, who did?

I'll just point out that Osama bin Laden grew up in the family business, the bin Laden Group, which is the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia.

Do you think he knows any demolition experts? It's plausible, isn't it? It would be massively embarrassing to the government if al Qaeda not only got 19 hijackers past our security, but three demolition teams and their explosives as well. Wouldn't that explain our government's reluctance to even consider the possibility?

It could be true.

But I won't accept it as fact, and now you know why.

But don't get distracted, take it one step at a time. You've got metal to find!

If there's more, it's here.

When your friends laugh at your enemy's jokes, they are no longer your friends

I finally got around to listening to Hugo Chavez's speech to the U.N. General Assembly today on my iPod. I heard him say:

I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil -- the devil, himself, is right in the house.

And the devil came here yesterday. (crossing himself)

Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

And the U.N. General Assembly laughed and applauded!

Chavez concluded with:

You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

May God bless us all. Good day to you.

And the U.N. General Assembly applauded - sustained applause for 40 solid seconds.

Of course, the US press commented on Chavez's rudeness, but they missed the crudeness of the insult, or chose to ignore it. It's pretty plain that Chavez had seen this little tidbit in US News and World Report:

Animal House in the West Wing

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

The UN delegates obviously got the joke, and we missed it entirely.

So contemplate this.

President Clinton was the butt of plenty of jokes over the Lewinsky affair, but nobody dissed him in the UN.

Does it say something about how we are viewed; that five years after 9/11 gave us the overwhelming support and sympathy of the world, our enemy comes to our country, stands on our soil, and makes our President the subject of a fart joke?

And what does it say that the joke is warmly received by those who were so firmly in our corner five years ago?

And finally, what does it say that we are too clueless to get the goddamned joke?

Colin Powell was wrong. The world is well past doubting the "moral basis for our fight against terrorism".

If there's more, it's here.

Peter Bergen's Letterman Countdown of 9/11's Causes

Folks, this is da bomb. You should read the whole thing.

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, and this article is one of the most useful short takes on why 9/11 happened.

He also has a list of plausible, but flawed theories, that is almost as enlightening.

None of the following explanations is alone sufficient to explain the attacks, but together they do help us to understand 9/11. They are ranked in ascending order of importance.

10. Radicalisation caused by the Afghan jihad. While there is no evidence that the CIA trained or funded Bin Laden or his followers, the Afghan war against the Soviet Union nonetheless radicalised a generation of Arab militants. They swapped business cards, gained battlefield experience and came to believe that they had played a big role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. All of these factors would lead to the founding of al Qaeda in 1988, established to take the jihad to other parts of the globe.

9. A particular reading of Islamic texts. In the many discussions of the "root causes" of Islamist terrorism, Islam itself is rarely mentioned. But if you were to ask Bin Laden, he would say that his war is about the defence of Islam. We need not believe him but we should nevertheless listen to what our enemies are saying. Bin Laden bases justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy. He often invokes the "sword" verses of the Koran, which urge unprovoked attacks on infidels. Of course, that is a selective reading of the Koran and does not mean Islam is an inherently violent faith, but to believers the book is the word of God.

8. Decline and stagnation in the middle east and the "humiliation" of the Islamic world. Bernard Lewis is the best-known exponent of the idea that the Muslim world is in a crisis largely attributable to centuries of decline, symbolised by the fate of the once powerful Ottoman empire and its ignominious carve-up by the British and French after the first world war. Lewis also argues that the problems of the middle east were later compounded by the import of two western ideas -- socialism and secular Arab nationalism -- neither of which delivered on their promises of creating prosperous and just societies. The economic and political failures in much of the Muslim world are underlined by statistics such as the fact that the non-oil revenues of all of the gulf states add up to less than the GDP of Finland.

Three weeks after 9/11, as the US began launching air strikes against Taliban positions, a video of Bin Laden sitting on a rocky outcrop was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. On the tape, Bin Laden said, "What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. The Islamic world has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for 80 years... Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live in it in Palestine, and not before the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." So in his first statement following 9/11, Bin Laden emphasised the "humiliation" of the Muslim world and the negative effect of US policies in the middle east. In this sense, Bin Laden seems to agree with Bernard Lewis. Indeed, Bin Laden often talks about the "humiliation" suffered by Muslims at the hands of the west. For Bin Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman empire between the French and British has the same resonance that the 1919 treaty of Versailles did for Hitler. It must be avenged and reversed.

7. The spread of communications technology. The humiliation felt by some Muslims is amplified by the communications revolution. The umma, the global community of Muslims, is far more aware of conflicts around the Islamic world -- and the role of the west in some of those conflicts -- than was the case a decade ago. The creation of Al-Jazeera in 1996 coincided with Bin Laden’s first call for a holy war against the US. Since then Arabic satellite channels and jihadist websites have proliferated, sensitising Muslims to the oppression of their co-religionists in Kashmir, Palestine, the Balkans and so on. These grievances have fuelled the spread of al Qaeda’s ideology and underpinned the rage of the 9/11 hijackers.

6. Authoritarian middle east regimes helped incubate the militants. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the militant jihadist movement, and later Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, were radicalised by their time in the jails of Cairo. It is no accident that so many members of al Qaeda have been Egyptians and Saudis.

5. The alienation of Muslim immigrants in the west. Three of the four 9/11 pilots and two key planners, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, became more militant while living in the west. Perceived discrimination, alienation and homesickness seem to have turned them all in a more radical direction. This is true for other anti-western terrorists. Swati Pandey and I have examined the biographies of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst recent anti-western terrorist attacks. We found that one in four of these terrorists had attended colleges in the west.

4. US foreign policies in the middle east, in particular its support of Israel. By Bin Laden’s own account, this is why al Qaeda is attacking America. His critique has never been cultural; he never mentions Madonna, Hollywood, homosexuality or drugs in his diatribes. US support for Israel, especially the support it gave to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, first triggered Bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, which during the 1980s took the form of urging a boycott of US goods. He was later outraged by the "defiling" export of 500,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

3. Bin Laden is an astute tactical leader and rational political actor fighting a deeply felt religious war against the west. Like others before him, Bin Laden has made a rational choice to adopt terrorism as a shortcut to transforming the political landscape. It is clear from the 9/11 commission report that Bin Laden intervened to make two key decisions that ensured the success of the attacks. The first was to appoint Mohammed Atta to be the lead hijacker; Atta would carry out his responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second was to rein in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plans for ten planes to crash into targets in Asia and on the east coast of America simultaneously. That number of attacks would have been hard to synchronise and might not have succeeded.

2. 9/11 was the collateral damage of a clash within Islam. The view that 9/11 was the result of a conflict within the Muslim world was brilliantly articulated in early 2002 by middle east scholar Michael Scott Doran in a Foreign Affairs essay, "Somebody Else’s Civil War." Doran argued that Bin Laden’s followers "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity and think that the future of religion itself, and therefore the world depends on them and their battle." In particular, Egyptians in al Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, hold this view, inheriting it from Sayyid Qutb, who believed that most of the modern middle east is living in a state of pagan ignorance. The Egyptian jihadists believed that they should overthrow the "near enemy"-middle east regimes run by "apostate" rulers. Bin Laden took the next step, urging Zawahiri that the root of the problem was not the "near enemy" but the "far enemy," the US, which propped up the status quo in the middle east.

1. The 9/11 attacks were the fruit of Bin Laden’s flawed strategic reasoning. Bin Laden’s total dominance of al Qaeda meant the organisation was hostage to his strategic vision. His analysis of US foreign policy was based on the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, after the attack on the barracks that killed 241 American servicemen, and from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu. From these retreats, Bin Laden concluded that the US was a paper tiger, capable of withstanding only a few strikes before it would withdraw, leaving client regimes in the middle east vulnerable. But the US response to 9/11 was to destroy the Taliban regime and decimate al Qaeda. Although 9/11 was a tactical success for al Qaeda, it actually threatened the organisation’s future.

Some of the harshest critics of the 9/11 attacks have been al Qaeda insiders such as Abd-Al-Halim Adl, who in June 2002 wrote to the 9/11 operational commander, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "Today we must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The east Asia, Europe, America, horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco groups have fallen."

To conclude, 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world of political Islam. On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who want to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared to deal with the west, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a war against "the far enemy" in order to hasten the demise of the "near enemy" regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that cause. That effort has, so far, largely failed.

Yet Bin Laden and his attacks on the US have shaped an ideological movement that will outlive him. Binladenism has drawn tremendous energy from the war in Iraq, and will probably gain further adherents from the conflict in Lebanon. Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was prescient when he warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would spawn "100 new Bin Ladens." It is that new generation of militants that is Bin Laden’s legacy.

Given the way things have been going, clear thinking is a precious commodity. Without it, I fear we will exhaust ourselves running from crisis to crisis, war to war. We don't have unlimited resources, and the world won't let us run a tab forever.

We have to spend less in blood and treasure for more weakening of the terrorists who stalk us. Right now, that ratio is horribly against us. Consider, 9/11 cost al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000; Iraq is is going to cost us what? $1,000,000,000,000?

Unsustainable, and in keeping with bin Laden's plan to bleed us dry.

That's why Bergen's column is important. To effectively fight them, we have to know the enemy and what motivates them.

If there's more, it's here.

9/11 - Five Years On

I drove to work listening to music and entered the building thinking about the football game the night before. When I saw the crowd in the conference room, I knew something bad had happened. I hadn't seen a crowd like that at work since the Challenger blew up.

I saw the planes hit and the towers fall at my desk, courtesy of our T1 line and streaming video. I remember speaking with a coworker in the hall who wailed, "What will the markets do?". I paused, stunned at his words, and responded, "That's not important now." It's funny, I can remember exactly where we stood, but can't remember who I was speaking with.

My wife and I reached out to family and friends in NYC and Washington. We were lucky. A friend who worked in WTC 1 was on vacation, and my cousin, who was at a meeting in the Pentagon, escaped harm.

In the days that followed, I heard more about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda than I had ever heard before, saw pictures of Afghanistan on TV instead of in National Geographic, and watched President Bush gain stature as he reassured the country we would heal and defeat those who had attacked us.

The year that followed was a down year. There was a lot of patriotic fervor and display, which in the past had always boosted my morale, but somehow felt false this time. I felt an undercurrent of intolerance and jingoism, a willingness to strike out at dissenters, and it chilled me even though I was no dissenter, but heartily in favor of striking back against Al Qaeda. It smacked of McCarthyism.

That spring, Colorado caught fire; at least that's what the governor said. He got slammed for hyperbole, but I knew what he meant. Smoke was everywhere, friends and coworkers fled their homes, and a hacking, asthmatic cough was my constant companion.

That summer brought a drought, everybody's lawn died, and the area farmers were in misery.

So when September 11, 2002 rolled around, I studiously avoided the media blitz of coverage and remembrance. It was still too soon, too fresh a pain.

The war drums were beating for Iraq, and I felt that was a mistake. Most of my friends were surprised to hear this from me, but they seemed to respect my argument that we hadn't finished job one, Al Qaeda, and were spreading our forces too thin.

However, only my town gassed anti-war protestors, a low point for our community.

I was all too soon proven right, but I got past that, for time and family and work have a healing effect.

On September 11, 2003, I sat alone at my computer after the kids went to bed and watched the videos of the WTC. I felt the familiar sadness and a cold resentment toward our leaders who had abandoned their duty to defeat bin Laden and bring him to justice.

I don't look at 9/11 pictures now. It's not that I avoid them, but I've put them in context.

I changed after 9/11, as many Americans did. I walk into work thinking about the lecture or debate I listened to in the car, or the court opinion I read the night before. Where I used to open the morning paper to the sports section and comics, now I read the news and editorials first. I used to read science fiction and mysteries, now I read non-fiction, history, politics, economics, and law. Of course, there are more mysteries now.

I keep a well thumbed copy of the Constitution in my pocket, write my Congressmen periodically, and occasionally the editor of the newspaper. I tune out celebrity gossip, but can still talk football even though I only watch a game or two a year.

I cherish my family and my friends more than before, because I know that there will be another attack. And while I pray that we make it though OK, I will not live in fear of it.

Our enemy profits from such fear, for it diminishes our Republic.

Until next year, keep the faith.

God Bless America, and keep her free!

If there's more, it's here.

Heck of a job Rummy!

It's late & I'm tired. These two tidbits won't help me sleep.

Eustis chief: Iraq post-war plan muzzled:

Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

U.S. count of Baghdad deaths excludes car bombs, mortar attacks:

U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Great, just wonderful. Heck of a job!

If there's more, it's here.

9/11 Turns Five and Ground Zero is STILL a Hole In The Ground

Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, caught crap when he defended the pace of rebuilding in New Orleans by mentioning NYC's Ground Zero:

That'’s alright. You guys in New York can'’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it'’s five years later. So let'’s be fair.

He was accused of disrespecting the dead and what Tim Russert referred to as "holy ground". Of course, he groveled for forgiveness on Meet the Press, like a good politician, but that doesn't change the truth of what he said.

Ground Zero has not been fixed. It's STILL a hole in the ground.

Does this show respect for the people who died there, that we can't manage to build them a monument of any kind? No park with trees and a pool in the footprint of the towers, no wall with the names of the victims? Or if poignant aint your thing, where's the 250 story Fuck You bin Laden, America Will NOT be Cowed by Terrorists! tower?

Nagin isn't the issue here, we are. Right there in NYC we are confronted by the inescapable evidence. We haven't done the right thing by our dead citizens for five long years, for lack of will, money, consensus, determination, or moral rectitude - take your pick. We have come up short.

Tomorrow is the five year anniversary of 9/11, and everybody's pushing their spin on the war on terror, Iraq, Islam, bin Laden, you name it. Not me. I'm gonna be taking a hard look at the USA, because things aren't entirely right here at home.

Now maybe you don't agree that Ground Zero is indicative of any problem, and I'll happily admit it is only a single example. But turn your attention back to Ray Nagin and his city, and tell me every thing is hunky-dory.

If there's more, it's here.

New Name for Blog

For the few who come here more than once and notice such things, I changed the name of the blog. I've been meaning to do it for quite some time, much like the 10 or 15 topics I've been meaning to post on.

Surely, by now you know I'm a lazy SOB!

If there's more, it's here.

When assumption trumps objectivity

From the Al Jazeera website:

After four weeks of devastating Israeli air raids across Lebanon, American news network NBC began its Nightly News bulletin with its anchorman, Brian Williams, asking: "Does the US really have any influence in this war?"

Hours earlier on sister network MSNBC, anchorwoman Chris Jansing seemed to be at a similar loss. "Can anything be done to stop the violence?" she asked.

But to an American audience, the thought of a Syrian or Iranian news anchor posing the same questions would be fit for a comedy skit.

After all, the Syrians and Iranians wield an obvious "influence" over the course of the conflict according to the NBC channels, which like CNN, Sky and many other Western new organisations reported relentlessly on claims that Hezbollah’s rocket imports were made possible through the help of its two "rogue" allies.

But where was the parallel analysis of multi-billion dollar weapons shipments bound for Israel from the United States? Most Western broadcasters reported religiously on the number of rockets fired at Israel each day of the month-long conflict, often comparing fresh figures with those of previous days and weeks, even peppering the audit with analysis and commentary.

Absent however was almost any accounting of the daily tonnage of US-manufactured munitions dropped from an unknown fleet of US-manufactured jets levelling an untold number of Lebanese homes and villages.

Sanitised

On American television screens, the US role in this conflict was a relatively sanitised one, pictured as diplomatic rather than military; seen across negotiating tables and in visits to foreign capitals - a far less sinister role than that repeatedly attributed to the Iranians and Syrians over allegations of their financial and logistical support.

In fact, so penetrating was the alleged connection that some channels, such as Bloomberg Television, began referring to Hezbollah on second reference as merely "the Syrian- and Iranian-backed group". But why did Bloomberg not choose to identify Israel, the largest official recipient of US foreign military assistance for decades, as "the US-backed state"?

Whether the decision was deliberate or unconscious, the prevailing notion of non-military US involvement is just one of many underlying assumptions communicated by the US media about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, assumptions that were continually reinforced in comments made by anchors and by hired analysts.

Viewed as part of an overall package, the assumptions appear to reflect US foreign policy, particularly the relationship with Israel, much more than the pursuit of journalistic objectivity.

More......

I don't watch TV news, so mostly I don't care about this kind of stuff. It's just working the refs to me.

However, given the amount of actual grief Al Jazeera has received at American hands for their biases, it's instructive to see them turn the tables.

No matter what you think of Israel, the fact that they buy much of their weaponry from us is well documented. That they use our military aid to do it is no secret. So, why be coy? They are our friend and we support them, and we do have influence over some of their actions.

Who are we fooling, except people who depend on US TV news for information?

Oh, yeah..... Voters.

If there's more, it's here.