America’s Worldwide Impunity
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 19, 2016
After several years of arming and supporting Syrian rebel groups that often collaborated with Al Qaeda’s Nusra terror affiliate, the United States launched an illegal invasion of Syria two years ago with airstrikes supposedly aimed at Al Qaeda’s Islamic State spin-off, but on Saturday that air war killed scores of Syrian soldiers and aided an Islamic State victory.
Yet, the major American news outlets treat this extraordinary set of circumstances as barely newsworthy, operating with an imperial hubris that holds any U.S. invasion or subversion of another country as simply, ho-hum, the way things are supposed to work.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House
On Monday, The Washington Post dismissed the devastating airstrike at Deir al-Zour killing at least 62 Syrian soldiers as one of several “mishaps” that had occurred over the past week and jeopardized a limited ceasefire, arranged between Russia and the Obama administration.
But the fact that the U.S. and several allies have been routinely violating Syrian sovereign airspace to carry out attacks was not even an issue, nor is it a scandal that the U.S. military and CIA have been arming and training Syrian rebels. In the world of Official Washington, the United States has the right to intervene anywhere, anytime, for whatever reason it chooses.
President Barack Obama has even publicly talked about authorizing military strikes in seven different countries, including Syria, and yet he is deemed “weak” for not invading more countries, at least more decisively.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has vowed to engage in a larger invasion of Syria, albeit wrapping the aggression in pretty words like “safe zone” and “no-fly zone,” but it would mean bombing and killing more Syrian soldiers.
As Secretary of State, Clinton used similar language to justify invading Libya and implementing a “regime change” that killed the nation’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and unleashed five years of violent political chaos.
If you were living in a truly democratic country with a truly professional news media, you would think that this evolution of the United States into a rogue superpower violating pretty much every international law and treaty of the post-World War II era would be a regular topic of debate and criticism.
Those crimes include horrendous acts against people, such as torture and other violations of the Geneva Conventions, as well as acts of aggression, which the Nuremberg Tribunals deemed “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Justifying ‘Regime Change’
Yet, instead of insisting on accountability for American leaders who have committed these crimes, the mainstream U.S. news media spreads pro-war propaganda against any nation or leader that refuses to bend to America’s imperial demands. In other words, the U.S. news media creates the rationalizations and arranges the public acquiescence for U.S. invasions and subversions of other countries.
In particular, The New York Times now reeks of propaganda, especially aimed at two of the current targets, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. With all pretenses of professionalism cast aside, the Times has descended into the status of a crude propaganda organ.
On Sunday, the Times described Assad’s visit to a town recently regained from the rebels this way: “Assad Smiles as Syria Burns, His Grip and Impunity Secure.” That was the headline. The article began:
“On the day after his 51st birthday, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, took a victory lap through the dusty streets of a destroyed and empty rebel town that his forces had starved into submission.
“Smiling, with his shirt open at the collar, he led officials in dark suits past deserted shops and bombed-out buildings before telling a reporter that — despite a cease-fire announced by the United States and Russia — he was committed ‘to taking back all areas from the terrorists.’ When he says terrorists, he means all who oppose him.”
The story by Ben Hubbard continues in that vein, although oddly the accompanying photograph doesn’t show Assad smiling but rather assessing the scene with a rather grim visage.
But let’s unpack the propaganda elements of this front-page story, which is clearly intended to paint Assad as a sadistic monster, rather than a leader fighting a foreign-funded-and-armed rebel movement that includes radical jihadists, including powerful groups linked to Al Qaeda and others forces operating under the banner of the brutal Islamic State.
The reader is supposed to recoil at Assad who “smiles as Syria burns” and who is rejoicing over his “impunity.” Then, there’s the apparent suggestion that his trip to Daraya was part of his birthday celebration so he could take “a victory lap” while “smiling, with his shirt open at the collar,” although why his collar is relevant is hard to understand. Next, there is the argumentative claim that when Assad refers to “terrorists” that “he means all who oppose him.”
As much as the U.S. news media likes to pride itself on its “objectivity,” it is hard to see how this article meets any such standard, especially when the Times takes a far different posture when explaining, excusing or ignoring U.S. forces slaughtering countless civilians in multiple countries for decades and at a rapid clip over the past 15 years. If anyone operates with “impunity,” it has been the leadership of the U.S. government.
Dubious Charge
On Sunday, the Times also asserted as flat fact the dubious charge against Assad that he has “hit civilians with gas attacks” when the most notorious case – the sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013 – appears now to have been carried out by rebels trying to trick the United States into intervening more directly on their side.
A recent United Nations report blaming Syrian forces for two later attacks involving chlorine was based on slim evidence and produced under great political pressure to reach that conclusion – while ignoring the absence of any logical reason for the Syrian forces to have used such an ineffective weapon and brushing aside testimony about rebels staging other gas attacks.
More often than not, U.N. officials bend to the will of the American superpower, failing to challenge any of the U.S.-sponsored invasions over recent decades, including something as blatantly illegal as the Iraq War. After all, for an aspiring U.N. bureaucrat, it’s clear which side his career bread is buttered.
We find ourselves in a world in which propaganda has come to dominate the foreign policy debates and – despite the belated admissions of lies used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Libya – the U.S. media insists on labeling anyone who questions the latest round of propaganda as a “fill-in-the-blank apologist.”
So, Americans who want to maintain their mainstream status shy away from contesting what the U.S. government and its complicit media assert, despite their proven track record of deceit. This is not just a case of being fooled once; it is being fooled over and over with a seemingly endless willingness to accept dubious assertion after dubious assertion.
In the same Sunday edition which carried the creepy portrayal about Assad, the Times’ Neil MacFarquhar pre-disparaged Russia’s parliamentary elections because the Russian people were showing little support for the Times’ beloved “liberals,” the political descendants of the Russians who collaborated with the U.S.-driven “shock therapy” of the 1990s, a policy that impoverished a vast number of Russians and drastically reduced life expectancy.
Why those Russian “liberals” have such limited support from the populace is a dark mystery to the mainstream U.S. news media, which also can’t figure out why Putin is popular for significantly reversing the “shock therapy” policies and restoring Russian life expectancy to its previous levels. No, it can’t be that Putin delivered for the Russian people; the only answer must be Putin’s “totalitarianism.”
The New York Times and Washington Post have been particularly outraged over Russia’s crackdown on “grassroots” organizations that are funded by the U.S. government or by billionaire financial speculator George Soros, who has publicly urged the overthrow of Putin. So has Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which funnels U.S. government cash to political and media operations abroad.
The Post has decried a Russian legal requirement that political entities taking money from foreign sources must register as “foreign agents” and complains that such a designation discredits these organizations. What the Post doesn’t tell its readers is that the Russian law is modeled after the American “Foreign Agent Registration Act,” which likewise requires people trying to influence policy in favor of a foreign sponsor to register with the Justice Department.
Nor do the Times and Post acknowledge the long history of the U.S. government funding foreign groups, either overtly or covertly, to destabilize targeted regimes. These U.S.-financed groups often do act as “fifth columnists” spreading propaganda designed to undermine the credibility of the leaders, whether that’s Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 or Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Imperfect Leaders
That’s not to say that these targeted leaders were or are perfect. They are often far from it. But the essence of propaganda is to apply selective outrage and exaggeration to the leader that is marked for removal. Similar treatment does not apply to U.S.-favored leaders.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
The pattern of the Times and Post is also to engage in ridicule when someone in a targeted country actually perceives what is going on. The correct perception is then dismissed as some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory.
Take, for example, the Times’ MacFarquhar describing a pamphlet and speeches from Nikolai Merkushkin, the governor of Russian region of Samara, that MacFarquhar says “cast the blame for Russia’s economic woes not on economic mismanagement or Western sanctions after the annexation of Crimea but on a plot by President Obama and the C.I.A. to undermine Russia.”
The Times article continues: “Opposition candidates are a fifth column on the payroll of the State Department and part of the scheme, the pamphlet said, along with the collapse in oil prices and the emergence of the Islamic State. Mr. Putin is on the case, not least by rebuilding the military, the pamphlet said, noting that ‘our country forces others to take it seriously and this is something that American politicians don’t like very much.’”
Yet, despite the Times’ mocking tone, the pamphlet’s perceptions are largely accurate. There can be little doubt that the U.S. government through funding of anti-Putin groups inside Russia and organizing punishing sanctions against Russia, is trying to make the Russian economy scream, destabilize the Russian government and encourage a “regime change” in Moscow.
Further, President Obama has personally bristled at Russia’s attempts to reassert itself as an important world player, demeaning the former Cold War superpower as only a “regional power.” The U.S. government has even tread on that “regional” status by helping to orchestrate the 2014 putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych on Russia’s border.
After quickly calling the coup regime “legitimate,” the U.S. government supported attempts to crush resistance in the south and east which were Yanukovych’s political strongholds. Crimea’s overwhelming decision to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia was deemed by The New York Times a Russian “invasion” although the Russian troops that helped protect Crimea’s referendum were already inside Crimea as part of the Sevastopol basing agreement.
The U.S.-backed Kiev regime’s attempt to annihilate resistance from ethnic Russians in the east – through what was called an “Anti-Terrorism Operation” that has slaughtered thousands of eastern Ukrainians – also had American backing. Russian assistance to these rebels is described in the mainstream U.S. media as Russian “aggression.”
Oddly, U.S. news outlets find nothing objectionable about the U.S. government launching military strikes in countries halfway around the world, including the recent massacre of scores of Syrian soldiers, but are outraged that Russia provided military help to ethnic Russians being faced with annihilation on Russia’s border.
Because of the Ukraine crisis, Hillary Clinton likened Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.
Seeing No Coup
For its part, The New York Times concluded that there had been no coup in Ukraine – by ignoring the evidence that there was one, including an intercepted pre-coup telephone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should be made the new leaders of Ukraine.
The evidence of a coup was so clear that George Friedman, founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, said in an interview that the overthrow of Yanukovych “really was the most blatant coup in history.” But the Times put protecting the legitimacy of the post-coup regime ahead of its journalistic responsibilities to its readers, as it has done repeatedly regarding Ukraine.
Another stunning case of double standards has been the mainstream U.S. media’s apoplexy about alleged Russian hacking into emails of prominent Americans and then making them public. These blame-Russia articles have failed to present any solid evidence that the Russians were responsible and also fail to note that the United States leads the world in using electronic means to vacuum up personal secrets about foreign leaders as well as average citizens.
In a number of cases, these secrets appear to have been used to blackmail foreign leaders to get them to comply with U.S. demands, such as the case in 2002-03 of the George W. Bush administration spying on diplomats on the U.N. Security Council to coerce their votes on authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a ploy that failed.
U.S. intelligence also tapped the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose cooperation on Ukraine and other issues of the New Cold War is important to Washington. And then there’s the massive collection of data about virtually everybody on the planet, including U.S. citizens, over the past 15 years during the “war on terror.”
Earlier this year, the mainstream U.S. news media congratulated itself over its use of hacked private business data from a Panama-based law firm, material that was said to implicate Putin in some shady business dealings even though his name never showed up in the documents. No one in the mainstream media protested that leak or questioned who did the hacking.
Such mainstream media bias is pervasive. In the case of Sunday’s Russian elections, the Times seems determined to maintain the fiction that the Russian people don’t really support Putin, despite consistent opinion polls showing him with some 80 percent approval.
In the Times’ version of reality, Putin’s popularity must be some kind of trick, a case of totalitarian repression of the Russian people, which would be fixed if only the U.S.-backed “liberals” were allowed to keep getting money from NED and Soros without having to divulge where the funds were coming from.
The fact that Russians, like Americans, will rally around their national leader when they perceive the country to be under assault – think, George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks – is another reality that the Times can’t tolerate. No, the explanation must be mind control.
The troubling reality is that the Times, Post and other leading American news outlets have glibly applied one set of standards on “enemies” and another on the U.S. government. The Times may charge that Bashar al-Assad has “impunity” for his abuses, but what about the multitude of U.S. leaders – and, yes, journalists – who have their hands covered in the blood of Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, Yemenis, Syrians, Somalis and other nationalities. Where is their accountability?
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Matt Kwong, Accessory after the Fact [source: CBC]
Winter Patriot | September 15, 2016
Number 4 : Matt Kwong and the CBC, for “Why the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement endures 15 years later”
As we saw in the previous installment, when Jack Holmes tried to prove the Truthers wrong on all major points and failed dismally, a head-on, evidence-based attack on 9/11 Truth is sub-optimal strategy. In this episode, we turn to an accessory after the fact who set himself a much different task, but failed anyway.
Presumably because he’s too smart to attack the Truth Movement from the front, Matt Kwong of the CBC comes at it from the rear. Rather than taking on the evidence, which did no good at all for Jack Holmes, Matt Kwong turns to time-honored journalistic tactics: smear and innuendo, woven together with sleight-of-hand that would have made a magician drool if it had worked.
The result is not merely a pathetic fail but a nasty one — a transparently ugly smear against the people who want to know the truth about 9/11, and especially against Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son Bobby that day.
Bob McIlvaine has been trying to find out what happened to Bobby, and trying to get people to care about what happened to all of us, for the past 15 years. To those of us who have followed the story, Bob McIlvaine is something of a role model — because he didn’t believe the lies he was told, and he didn’t cower when he was told to sit down and shut up, and he’s been waging an uphill battle for a long time, and he hasn’t quit.
If Bobby McIlvaine had died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country, and Bob had spent 15 years trying to find out what happened to him, Bob would be seen as a heroic figure. A paperback writer would churn out a vapid tribute to his dogged persistence and his enduring love for his son, and we would see the result in drugstores.
But because of where, and when, and how Bobby McIlvaine died, Bob’s efforts cannot be praised, only denigrated. This is how far we have fallen.
Under the bizarre sub-heading “Father of 9/11 victim reconciles unconventional beliefs with grief,” Matt Kwong writes:
Robert McIlvaine knows better than to talk, unsolicited, about the research he pores over at home in Oreland, Pa. […] it’s the circumstances around the attacks — specifically, McIlvaine’s beliefs about precisely how the world-altering event unfolded — that he’s cautious to discuss. […] “My wife doesn’t take me out; doesn’t go with me anymore because she’s afraid I’ll bring it up with friends,” he says. […] “No one wants to talk about it,” McIlvaine says. “It’s like you have leprosy.”
… and so on. But there’s a mystery. If no one wants to talk about it, why are people still talking about it?
There must be a reason. What could it be? … Well, maybe it’s the Internet!
Fifteen years later, the devastating attack on America that coincided with the nascent internet age continues to spawn discussions hosted in forums that speculate about the moon landing, the Hollow Earth hypothesis and the JFK assassination.
Here we go! This is called red herring and guilt by association, a truly journalistic combination of logical fallacies to provide just the right context for what comes next — the few relevant details we will ever get from Matt Kwong:
The official account says McIlvaine’s eldest son […] was […] on the 106th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower.
McIlvaine suspects otherwise. Based on injuries his son sustained, including to his face and chest, he maintains Bobby was killed by an explosion, possibly before the plane crash. As Bobby was among the first 10 bodies found, he says, McIlvaine believes his son was in the tower’s lobby.
“If he was on the 106th floor, he wouldn’t have been found so quickly.”
I think Bob’s kidding himself. In my view, if Bobby was on the 106th floor, he probably wouldn’t have been found at all!
But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the condition of Bobby’s body. “Injuries […] to his face and chest” hardly qualifies as an accurate description of the wounds.
Matt Kwong doesn’t give you enough details to help you understand this aspect of the story. But if you do some research to supplement his so-called journalism, you can learn quite a bit, fairly easily.
According to McIlvaine, the wounds described by the doctor indicated that his son had been hit by flying glass from some kind of massive blast. Bobby’s face was damaged beyond recognition, he had lacerations all over his chest from flying glass, and he had post-mortem burns. In fact, the blast was strong enough to literally blow Bobby out of his laced shoes (they were not on the body when it was brought to the morgue).
“My final summation is that he was walking into the building, and before he got into the building there was a huge explosion, and of course the force of it just threw him back into the open area,” McIlvaine says. “That’s why he was picked up so quickly, because the EMTs came down there so quickly. Someone had gotten him out of there and to the morgue before the towers came down.”
In other words, Bob has good reason to think Bobby was not killed by fire at the top of the tower, but by blast and flying glass at its base. And if Bob thinks these were the result of a massive explosion? Well, what else could it have been?
Matt Kwong could have told you this; anyone familiar with the stories of the 9/11 families could have done the same. Bob’s been speaking in public for a long time, and his story about Bobby — unlike the official narrative — hasn’t changed. He certainly wouldn’t have been reluctant to tell Matt Kwong why he thinks what he thinks.
But Matt Kwong can’t (or won’t) tell you all this. And the reason is simple: If you focus on two things — what Bob knows about his son’s death, and the official explanation behind the attacks — you can’t help seeing the basic contradiction: How could Bobby have been killed by an explosion if there were no explosions?
National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice responds to a question during testimony before the 9/11 Commission in the Hart Senate office building in Washington on April 8, 2004.
(Larry Downing/Reuters) [source: CBC]
What did Bob McIlvaine do about it? According to Matt Kwong, he waited to see what the government would say, thus:
McIlvaine attended the 9/11 Commission [but] he left angry and dissatisfied by testimony from then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
(Curiously (or not!), several paragraphs before mentioning Condoleezza Rice, the CBC inserted a photo of Miss Rice herself, looking cool and comfortable as she testified before the Commission. The photo, the caption, and the placement combine to create a subtle hint that Bob’s got his nose out of joint for nothing. I’ve included the photo and CBC’s caption verbatim, several paragraphs before mentioning it, to give you a subtle hint of what CBC is doing.)
But Matt Kwong doesn’t tell you about Miss Rice’s testimony. And he certainly wouldn’t want you to see a video of her being questioned. Matt Kwong won’t show you video evidence of the other family members who were outraged at the hearings, either.
But I digress. Here’s Matt Kwong again:
McIlvaine began to dig on his own for answers online, watching web documentaries such as Dylan Avery’s 9/11 truth staple, Loose Change, as well as reading more American history.
And this was the dangerous, slippery part. By daring to educate himself, Bob McIlvaine put himself in danger of becoming what’s called a “conspiracy theorist,” of the noxious variety known as “9/11 Truther.”
To help you “understand” what happened to Bob, Matt Kwong takes you on a journey to the land of conspiracy theory research. But he weaves the McIlvaine story through the travelogue, making things very confusing. (I didn’t say the confusion was deliberate.)
In this piece, I have shuffled the order somewhat, separating Bob McIlvaine’s story (which we’ve been reading) from the conspiracy theory research (to which we now turn).
Here’s Matt Kwong:
“People who are more personally distrustful tend to buy into conspiracy theories more,” says Mike Wood, a Canadian lecturer at the University of Winchester in England specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories.
If anything, Americans seem more distrustful of their government than in a long time. […]
Wood says those suspicious of the government also tend to be more aware of “actual historical conspiracies, where the government did something shady.” […]
Research also shows conspiracy theories tend to reach peaks around “times of uncertainty,” according to Wood. In the case of something as extraordinary as a 9/11, an event resulting in thousands of lost lives, a massive reshaping of the iconic New York skyline and two wars, he says the conventional narrative may be tough to swallow.
It certainly is. And there’s nothing wrong with this analysis as far as it goes. But where does it go?
Matt Kwong again:
Some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11. And so, alternative explanations filled the vacuum, says Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry […]
Dave Thomas may be Skeptical, but I fear he’s not quite skeptical enough!
It may be true that “Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11,” and it may be true that “alternative explanations filled the vacuum,” but there’s no causal connection here, because there’s a link missing.
As the attack was unfolding, and in the immediate aftermath, there was no vacuum. There was an avalanche. No matter where you turned, the news kept talking about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and Afghanistan, and the country was ready to go to war before the dust had settled. The vacuum came later, when more and more people began to see through the lies that comprise the official story. That’s when “alternative explanations filled the vacuum.”
As time went on, we learned more and more about the official story, and the more you know about it, the less credible it is, so the number of people who questioned it — or rejected it outright — grew. Some people started reading American history, just like Bob did. And what they learned was shocking … until all the pieces started to click into place. And suddenly, the nonsensical official story made perfect sense to them, once they saw it as an elaborate deception rather than a series of unprecedented failures.
Had the official story been credible, none of this would have happened. If the story had been even halfway believable, most of us would have been happy to believe it and get on with other things. But that didn’t happen.
I can explain what did happen in a parable. Think of this mystery as a “connect-the-dots” puzzle. From the day of the attack (or earlier in some cases), we started taking note of important dots, and wondering what they could mean. As the official story became clearer, we looked at how the dots were being arranged, and how they were being connected, and how many of the dots weren’t being connected at all, and we started to wonder. But when we realized how many of the dots had been erased, we stopped wondering, because we knew those dots didn’t erase themselves.
So it’s far more accurate to say the vacuum was caused by the holes in the official story.
The fact that “some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11” doesn’t make any difference at all.
But Matt Kwong can’t tell you that. Instead — if we want to follow his story — we have to think backwards.
Backward thinking regarding 9/11 shows up in many guises. For instance, as I showed in the previous installment, the 9/11 Commission was set up to run backward. They decided who committed the crime, and then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether it could be used to support their predetermined conclusions. Then they put together a narrative that was supposed to tie all the evidence together. But there was a problem with some of the evidence, namely: the evidence they decided not to consider. And the problem is: We know about that evidence, and it undermines their story. So their solution is: the facts must be suppressed. And now the defenders of the official story claim not only that there were no explosions, but also that there was no evidence of explosions!
This claim is clearly false. The New York Times published an oral history of 9/11, compiled by the NYFD, in which more than 100 first responders described bombs in the towers, or gave other evidence that can only be explained by explosions. Numerous other eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the day and later, described the explosions they experienced. There are videos in which we can see and hear explosions going off in the buildings. Mainstream media reports on the day of the attacks contained many mentions of explosions. And the whole world watched the towers exploding on television, over and over and over — for two weeks! But according to defenders of the official story, none of this happened — even though much of it, including the NYT oral history, is freely available online.
And the reason why they claim none of this happened is because the official story-tellers couldn’t figure out a way to explain how al Qaeda could have planted explosives in the towers. Their line of backward thinking ran: al Qaeda did it; al Qaeda could not have planted explosives in the towers; therefore there were no explosives in the towers.
Similarly, we have a whole new field of academic research now, in which Conspiracy Theories are studied as a sociological or psychological phenomenon. Bright, well-educated people, who really ought to be doing productive work, are now paid to track conspiracy theories, to watch how they grow and spread, and to explain, if they can, why people believe them.
But explaining this is more difficult than I’ve indicated, because they have to explain them in a politically acceptable way. That is to say: they cannot ever consider the possibility that some “conspiracy theories” may be more credible than the corresponding official stories.
This consideration is essential, in my analysis, because of the fact that so many official stories are impossible. In each of these cases, all conspiracy theories are more credible than the official story, even if they are only marginally plausible. But no academic researcher can say this; they have to pretend that the official stories are all true.
So all their research has to run backward. They can’t connect cause and effect in the logical way, so they do it in reverse. And this is how they get the idea that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government.
To be sure, some researchers will grant that we don’t trust the government because we know more about the government than those who do trust it. But they can’t admit that what separates conspiracy theorists from the people around us is our greater knowledge of topics such as history and government!
Instead they claim that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government, when in fact the opposite is true: We don’t believe the official stories because they are clearly false. And this is why we believe conspiracy theories, and this is also why we don’t trust the government.
But this is a path which accessories after the fact dare not tread.
Instead Matt Kwong continues this way:
Distrust in authority “plays into this rejection of the reigning or orthodox narrative of some subject,” says Syracuse University professor emeritus of political science Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy.
“We want stories and narratives that make sense of the world,” Barkun says. “The idea that such an event like the sudden destruction of landmark buildings like the World Trade Center could be caused by 19 nobodies belonging to an organization that almost no Americans had ever heard of, living in ragged encampments in Afghanistan, simply, I think, made no sense to some people.”
It made no sense to a lot of people!
Some of them went on with their lives and didn’t think about it anymore. What could they do about it? So why should they worry about it? What’s so mysterious about that?
The rest of us did worry about it. We didn’t just get on with our lives, because we could see that something fundamental had changed, in a truly awful way, based on a story which couldn’t possibly be true. It bothered us, and we thought we lived in a democracy, because we’ve been taught that we have some influence in the political process, so we got active. What’s so mysterious about that?
But NO! NO, NO, NO! We are definitely not going there! We’ll go sideways instead, with Matt Kwong:
Researchers who study conspiracy theorists point to the dismissal of an official “lone nobody” conclusion on 9/11 as sharing similarities to the continued obsession with the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963.
It’s a diversion and a red herring, and the word “obsession” is a smear, but in sad fact, the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks display many similarities, some of which are relevant enough to discuss here.
For serious researchers, the main point of interesting similarity is not that “Oswald was a nobody” and “Nobody had ever heard of al Qaeda,” although these curious facts may have piqued some interest for some of them at one time. Personally, I’ve never given either of these ideas any thought at all, except when I’ve stumbled over them in propaganda pieces.
The main point for me, and for many other serious researchers, is this: neither Oswald nor al Qaeda could possibly have done what they are alleged to have done.
Does this matter? YES! As Webster Tarpley keeps reminding us, we always need to ask: Did they have the physical and technical capabilities to cause the observed effects? And the answers, in the cases of JFK and 9/11, are clearly “NO!”
Why? The sight on “Oswald’s rifle” was out of alignment. The FBI fired it for testing, and their expert marksmen couldn’t hit any targets with it. So they adjusted the sight and tested it again. But Oswald, who was not a marksman at all, was said to have caused 7 wounds with 3 shots, firing at a moving target, all in 6 seconds, with that rifle, before the sight was adjusted.
Oswald’s pistol was in even worse shape. It wouldn’t fire at all because the firing pin was bent. So the pistol was disassembled, the firing pin was straightened, and the pistol was reassembled so that it could be tested. But Oswald was said to have killed Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, with that pistol, before it was repaired.
This information came into the public domain through the Warren Commission itself. So the facts themselves can hardly be disputed, and therefore the accessories after the fact would prefer us to ignore them. Otherwise the situation would be too clear.
We don’t have problems with the story because “Oswald was a nobody.” We would have been much more reluctant to accept the story if we’d been told that JFK was killed by somebody famous — like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. On the contrary: aside from the obvious tampering with evidence, we have problems with the official story because Oswald lacked the physical and technical means to commit the crimes for which he was accused.
With 9/11, we have the same pattern, and the primary illustration is this: al Qaeda could not have put explosives in the towers, so the official story doesn’t try to explain how they did; instead it pretends there were no explosives in the towers at all.
How do we know al Qaeda couldn’t have put explosives in the towers? We have two main ways of knowing this. First, according to defenders of the official story, nobody could have put explosives in the towers. It would have taken too long, somebody would have noticed, and so on. Presumably this logic applies equally, or especially, to nasty-looking foreigners who have no reason to be in the towers at all. And second, if al Qaeda could have put explosives in the towers, then the official story-tellers would admit the presence of explosives and blame them on al Qaeda, which would be much easier than trying to suppress all the evidence of explosives, if only it could be done at all.
But that’s not the only impossibility in the story. The alleged hijackers had no idea how to fly a jumbo jet — according to their instructors, they could barely fly a Cessna — and yet they were said to have performed low-altitude maneuvers that the best pilots in the country couldn’t match, at speeds which would have been far beyond the capabilities of the aircraft.
The terrorists had no way of disabling America’s security systems, from airport surveillance videos right up to the US Air Force. But they are said to evaded every defense along the way.
And no magician has ever made a jumbo jet disappear into a field, leaving only a 20-foot wide hole and no wreckage. But that’s what the plane in Shanksville is supposed to have done.
The list of impossibilities goes on and on. But we don’t have to examine all of them to see the same pattern that we saw in the JFK case.
It doesn’t matter whether anybody had ever heard of al Qaeda. We don’t buy the official story because the alleged hijackers lacked the physical and technical means to cause the effects for which they were blamed.
In other words: we know both official stories are false because the events they describe not physically possible.
So why should we believe them? According to Matt Kwong, the answer lies in Popular Mechanics.
Despite an exhaustive 2005 special report by Popular Mechanics debunking 9/11 theories, polls still show a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account.
As I mentioned in the previous post, no “report” in such a format could be anything but cursory and shallow.
The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then “debunk” it with a “telling quote” from an “expert source.”
It’s a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it’s all predicated on the notion that “denied” means the same as “debunked.”
But in PM‘s case, the format was the strongest part of the “report.” The so-called “evidence” presented by PM wasn’t even weak — it was ludicrous.
Thus, contrary to Matt Kwong’s assertion, the “report” from Popular Mechanics was neither “special” nor “exhaustive,” and because they can’t give us anything more convincing, and because nobody else even wants to try, it may be time to consider the possibility that “a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account” because it’s simply not true!
But Matt Kwong won’t go in that direction. He’s going this way instead:
For his part, McIlvaine doesn’t care about the Truther movement one way or the other, or about the many articles and investigations that have debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories.
He remains convinced about his own narrative.
“I feel good about what I’ve done. My wife’s happy about it, my [other] son’s happy about it. I still go to bed,” he says. “And I’ll say I did what I did for Bobby.”
Bob McIlvaine is tired of being lied to, he’s tired of being belittled and betrayed, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks anymore — all of which is entirely understandable in my view, given what he’s experienced.
Matt Kwong paints him as a stubborn crackpot who started wondering why his son’s body was found so soon, fell into a hole called the Internet, and wound up believing the craziest nonsense — and he leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps: the 9/11 truth movement endures because it’s made up of stubborn crackpots who started out asking simple questions and fell into the same hole.
That may be true in some instances, but for me personally it’s despicable slander. I know the official story is false because so many of its features are physically impossible. I don’t care how many accessories after the fact call me crazy. And I am not one in a million — I am one of many millions!
This is why the 9/11 Truth movement endures.
We’re smart enough to spot an obvious lie, even though we’ve heard it a thousand times. And we’re brave enough to say so.
If that makes us stubborn crackpots, so be it. Like it or not, that’s the reason we haven’t gone away. And we’re not going away anytime soon.
Sorry, Matt! You lose! You had all the pieces in your hand and you couldn’t — or wouldn’t — put them together.
Sorry, CBC. You lose, too! There will be a special place in Heaven for any mainstream news organization that’s brave enough to treat this issue with the integrity it deserves. But so far we have none.
In any case: Matt Kwong and CBC, you both stand clearly and willingly on the wrong side of a mass-murderous lie, and an obvious one at that. May God have mercy upon your souls.
On the other hand, Congratulations! You’ve made my list!
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
NYPD admits accounting for its civil-forfeiture seizures is hopeless
RT | September 19, 2016
A detailed account of money and property seized by the New York Police Department is essentially impossible, an official says, as a comprehensive effort to report how much money the NYPD takes during arrests would “lead to system crashes.”
The New York City Council is considering a bill that would require the NYPD to offer annual reports of how much money and property it collects as potential evidence through the process of civil forfeiture. The bill aims to make civil forfeiture more transparent, but the NYPD claims it has no idea how much money it seized from New Yorkers and others it arrested last year.
Late last week, in testimony to the city council’s Public Safety Committee, NYPD Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner said detailing department seizures is technologically unworkable based on limitations of the NYPD’s Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS).
“Attempts to perform the types of searches envisioned in the bill will lead to system crashes and significant delays during the intake and release process,” said Messner, according to the Village Voice. “The only way the department could possibly comply with the bill would be a manual count of over half a million invoices each year.”
PETS was put in place in 2012, yet NYPD officials told the council last week that the system is too antiquated to meet the demands of the proposed transparency bill. Upon installation of PETS, however, the NYPD touted it as able to offer “the cradle-to-grave life cycle of property and evidence… visible upon demand,” and entered the system into the 2012 Computerworld Honors, which acknowledges “those who use Information Technology to benefit society,”according to Ars Technica.
When asked by the council whether they had come to the hearing with any kind of idea of how much money the NYPD actually seized last year, the officials said they did not.
“I find it strange that the most technologically sophisticated police force in the world cannot track its own property seizures. I just have trouble imagining that that’s the case,” said city councilmember Ritchie Torres during the hearing. “I’m skeptical about the NYPD’s testimony.”
To retrieve money or property, the defendant, whether or not they were charged with the crime they were accused of, must supply their own lawyer given the seizure is done through civil, not criminal, courts. Thus, the civil-forfeiture retrieval process is one most people cannot afford.
The NYPD did say during the hearing that, in 2015, more than $11,650 was legally forfeited, in which the NYPD made the case to a court why it should keep an amount of seized assets. But much more money is kept by the NYPD, given the process it takes to retrieve money or property seized by police as evidence is nearly impossible unless one has the wealth and legal resources to navigate the department’s administrative requirements for retrieval.
“Can a lay person be reasonably expected to defend themselves against the NYPD in their efforts to retrieve their property?” Torres asked Bronx Defenders attorney Adam Shoop during the hearing, according to Village Voice.
Shoop responded: “I don’t think a person can reasonably be expected to go through any of the administrative steps required to go about retrieving their property.”
The Bronx Defenders defense lawyers offer legal representation to low-income New Yorkers.
Though the NYPD says true reports of its seizures is next to impossible, Bronx Defenders admitted documents as part of its testimony detailing NYPD’s own accounting figures of such seizures. Those documents show that the NYPD had nearly $69 million in cash from seizures as of December 2013. That amount had been seized over a number of years, as the documents showed that the department brought in millions in revenue each month.
While NYPD officials maintained that the department’s technology is incapable of meeting the bill’s demands, they said the NYPD is willing “to work with the Council to achieve the goal of the bill,” Village Voice reported.
In January, the Bronx Defenders filed a federal lawsuit — Encarnacion v. City of New York — that challenged the NYPD’s civil-forfeiture process. The lawsuit, which has now reached class-action status, alleged that the NYPD’s failure to return items it seized related to cases that have been terminated is a violation of constitutional rights.
“Once a criminal case is over, the US Constitution does not permit the City to withhold someone’s personal property without justification,” attorney Eric Brenner said in June. “This City’s current policies violate the basic rights of individuals who need the cash and phones that the City is refusing to return.”
Bronx Defenders’ Molly Kovel added: “For people without access to an attorney, the hurdles they face to get their property back are simply too high, and they often give up. We hope this case leads to much-needed reform.”
Read more:
‘$1.2 billion slush fund’: Justice Dept. resumes controversial asset forfeiture ‘equitable sharing’
Funding ‘toys for police’: Best and worst states to have your assets seized
Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire
WinterPatriot | September 13, 2016
Jack Holmes, Accessory after the Fact [source: Daily Beast ]
Number 5 : Jack Holmes and Esquire, for “Disproving 9 of the Biggest 9/11 Conspiracy Theories”
We continue our review of pathetic propaganda disasters with a piece from Jack Holmes and Esquire. It begins with one of the niftiest bits of verbal gymnastics I have seen in a long time. Get a load of this:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn’t make sense.
There’s magic in them there words, and it’s powerful magic, too.
You don’t believe me? Read it again, without the magic:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. For some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings doesn’t make sense.
Now read it again, the original text this time, with emphasis on the magical words:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn’t make sense.
I can’t disagree with Jack Holmes when he says, “An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation.” This is clearly true. Who could disagree?
And I can’t argue against the statement that “for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners […] and use them […] to destroy […] massive buildings doesn’t make sense.” This is clearly true as well.
So we have two statements that nobody could deny, strung together and twisted with the words “but” and “still” to create the implication that the official explanation should make sense to everybody because it’s extraordinary, as was the attack. And that makes no sense on the face of it.
The attack was extraordinary in many ways. It was certainly extraordinary in scale and ferocity. It was also an extraordinarily brazen attack, and one that would be, under normal conditions, extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.
The official explanation is extraordinary in many ways as well. It arrived with extraordinarily promptness; we “knew” Osama bin Laden was behind the attack before it was even over, and we “knew” the twin towers had “collapsed” due to “damage from aircraft impact and the resulting fires” almost as quickly. It was also extraordinarily flexible; we got three very different stories about why the Air Force didn’t stop those “400-ton missiles” which were on course to “destroy massive buildings.” But above all, the official explanation is extraordinarily implausible, in more ways than Jack Holmes cares to admit.
But many readers won’t take the time to think this through, and there’s the magic. If you don’t think too much about the magical opening passage, it all looks true, but if you pay attention to the magic words, you can see that Jack Holmes is kicking off his attempt to “disprove” the “conspiracy theories” by sneakily implying that the official explanation should satisfy everyone because the attack and the explanation were both extraordinary — i.e. because the attack was extraordinarily unlikely and the explanation is extraordinarily implausible.
This is as twisted as anyone could hope for, because in the world of sane people, an extraordinary event requires an extraordinarily credible explanation.
Unexpected: The top of the South Tower turns to dust as explosives pulverize the steel and concrete below the damaged zone. This was called a “collapse.” [source: Esquire ]
If a scientist sees something unexpected in an experiment, and a colleague offers a loopy explanation, the scientist doesn’t say, “Well that must be it, then. It’s a weird explanation, but it was a weird event, so you must be right!” On the contrary: The stranger the event, the more plausible, the more thorough, and the better supported the explanation must be, otherwise nobody will believe it. But we’re not supposed to think this way about 9/11, according to Jack Holmes.
The rest of his “appetizer” is not quite so magical, so I want to focus on the “main course,” so to speak. Jack Holmes has written a catchy and provocative headline, and it made me wonder: How will he “disprove 9 of the biggest 9/11 conspiracy theories”?
Jack Holmes says he will do it through the use of evidence:
Below are nine of the most prominent theories, as well as the evidence explaining why they simply don’t add up.
“Aha!” I thought. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Most defenders of the official story run away from evidence as fast as they can. They want to talk about other things. But this is better. Or at least, this promises to be better.”
And what’s the evidence? What evidence does Jack Holmes have? The answer is … a rehash of Popular Mechanics !
Jack Holmes not only copies the format used by Popular Mechanics in its infamous “Debunking 9/11” fiasco, he also quotes freely from it.
The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then “debunk” it with a “telling quote” from an “expert source.”
It’s a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it’s all predicated on the notion that “denied” means the same as “debunked.” In other words, if Jack Holmes can find one “expert” who says X is false, then X is false and that’s the end of the discussion. The one statement settles the matter and closes the case forever, no matter how much or how little sense it makes, no matter how much or how little evidence supports it.
For example:
THE HOLES WERE SIMPLY TOO SMALL
The theory: The two holes in the Pentagon after the attack—75 and 12 feet wide—were too small to have been carved by a 125-foot-wide jet. Some theories have concluded the attack was actually carried out with a satellite-guided missile.
The debunk: “A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building,” says Popular Mechanics, citing Mete Sozen, a structural engineering expert at Purdue University. One wing hit the ground, while the other was torn off by the force of impact. “What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to liquid than a solid mass.” The 12-foot hole was punched through by the plane’s landing gear.
There are multiple obvious problems with this attempted refutation.
If “one wing hit the ground,” why are there no scars on the lawn? Why is there no broken-off wing? What happened to the fuel in the wing? If “one wing hit the ground,” even if that wing magically bounced through the hole and into the Pentagon, even if all the fuel that was in the wing burned in a great fireball that nobody saw or reported, we should still see a large patch of black where the grass used to be green. This is what’s always left behind when there’s been a fire. So what happened to it this time?
And if the other wing “was torn off by the force of impact,” where did it go? Mete Sozen isn’t saying, and we can probably take that as a hint that he doesn’t know.
As for the rest of the plane, are we supposed to believe it “almost” melted, rather than crumpling and breaking up, as all the other planes that have ever crashed have done?
And even if the force of the impact caused the plane to “almost” melt, how did all that “almost” molten metal get through the hole?
It’s all very mysterious; nothing like this has ever happened before or since; the explanation is literally incredible, and Mete Sozen has a long track record of telling obvious lies about 9/11.
He explained the “collapse” of the twin towers by talking about fire heating the steel until “the steel goes away.” He demonstrated the plane crashing into the Pentagon using a computer simulation which shows the plane’s engines disappearing on impact.
How was this computer simulation built? One can only imagine: “What happened to the engines?” “Nobody knows. We can’t find any sign of engine damage in the building.” “Well, can’t we make up something the Truthers might believe?” “Probably not.” “Well, then, just get rid of the engines! Make them go away!”
Maybe the words are not quite verbatim, but this is clearly the level of integrity that we’re dealing with here. Mete Sozen is one of the most infamous accessories after the fact, reviled by anyone who has studied the issue. Why should we believe him this time? Especially when his “explanation” makes no sense.
This is a representative sample of Jack Holmes’ work, both the style of presentation and the “depth” of research. It’s a lame enough fail to make my short list all on its own, but there are eight more lame fails with it.
Here’s another example, possibly even a better one:
INSIDER TRADING
The theory: In the days leading up to September 11, a large volume of American and United Airlines stock was traded—and in many cases shorted, or bet against—by people who had prior knowledge of the attacks.
The debunk: Bloomberg Trade Book data did show much higher than normal put option volume (people betting against the stock of American and United) in the weeks and days leading up to the attacks, Snopes reports, including a volume 100 times above average on the Thursday before. However, the 9/11 Commission found no evidence those trades were the result of prior knowledge. For example, “a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent” of the put options on United’s parent company on September 6, according to the report, while “much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9.”
As that’s a government report, the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced.
Quoting the 9/11 Commission to prove the official story is like quoting the Bible to prove that Jesus was born of a virgin. It’s convincing for those who already believe it, but it doesn’t do anything for the skeptics except confirm their opinion. Surely any other source, any other evidence, would be more convincing. And Jack Holmes knows this. That’s why he says, “that’s a government report, [so] the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced.” So why does he offer nothing else? Because he’s got nothing else to offer. That’s why!
Again there are multiple problems with the attempted refutation. It may well be true that “95 percent of the put options on United’s parent company” were purchased by “a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.” But is this a legitimate reason not to investigate the investor? Or is it a hint that al Qaeda may not have been behind the attacks at all? What conceivable ties does this U.S.-based institutional investor have, exactly? How could he have known? What was the object of the trade? Was he gambling millions of dollars on a hunch? We’ll never know because the 9/11 Commission wasn’t the slightest bit curious about anybody who wasn’t obviously and intimately connected with al Qaeda.
And it may be true that “much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9.” But in what way does this imply that whoever sent the newsletter on September 9 had no idea what was going to happen on September 11? Here, the Commission doesn’t even offer the lame excuse of “no conceivable connection,” which suggests the question: Did the author of this newsletter have some conceivable connection with al Qaeda?
Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe the suspicion of inside knowledge is ruled out by the fact that the newsletter was faxed, because terrorists don’t know how to use fax machines.
It’s all so very lame, especially when we know that serious investigators always “follow the money.” But in this case it appears they ran away from the money, even by their own account.
In sum, even if it’s true, this “explanation” is a pathetic fail because it does nothing to prove or even support the official story, nor does it state or even imply — let alone prove — that the investors who bought the suspicious put options had no prior knowledge of the attack.
What it does prove — whether it be true or false — is that the so-called “investigation” was set up to run backwards: First they decided who did it, then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether or not it agreed with their predetermined conclusions. This is probably why defenders of the official story accuse “conspiracy theorists” of “cherry-picking evidence.” They always accuse us of the very things they themselves are doing.
But there’s good reason to believe that the core of this “debunk” is false, because we’ve had a number of reliable reports indicating that the bulk of the suspicious insider trading was carried out by a German bank closely affiliated with a certain “former” high-ranking CIA officer, which makes ties to al Qaeda slightly less than “inconceivable,” does it not?
al Qaeda, you may recall, was allied with the CIA before and after 9/11, but not during, at least according to defenders of the official story.
Again, this “debunk” is sufficiently pathetic to put Jack Holmes on my short list, even if he had not qualified already.
But let’s look at one more example. This one shows the same technique, but with a slightly different twist:
THE HIJACKERS ARE STILL ALIVE
The theory: Conspiracists seized on news reports in the immediate aftermath of the attacks—particularly one from the BBC—that reported various hijacker suspects identified by authorities were actually still alive and well. This indicates that the attacks had been carried out by actors with other means.
The debunk: The people who were found to still be alive in those reports were different people with similar or identical names to the hijackers, as other BBC reports showed. “The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names,” a subsequent report suggests, adding that both the 9/11 Commission and the FBI are confident they correctly identified the 19 hijackers.
The main problem here concerns the disappearing layers of detail.
The first BBC piece linked by Jack Holmes, which was published in September of 2001, reports on four of the hijackers who survived their martyrdom, beginning with Waleed Al Shehri. It explains that he saw his name and his photograph on the news, along with the name of the flight school he had attended, so he was sure he was the man the FBI had named as a suicide hijacker.
The second BBC piece refers to yet another BBC piece, published in October of 2006, which acknowledges some confusion but certainly does not refute — or even refer to — the 2001 story.
In other words, the 2006 piece does not state or even imply that Waleed Al Shehri was the one who was confused. It doesn’t even mention Waleed Al Shehri at all. So it’s difficult to see how the 2006 story could be used to support the claim made here by Jack Holmes, or by the BBC editors, for that matter.
Crucially, we’re still left with the mystery of how “different people with similar or identical names” could have posed for identical photographs and attended the same flight school.
But once again, it’s a case where the refutation doesn’t have to be thorough, plausible, or credible in any way. A “denial” is as good as a “debunking” as far as Jack Holmes is concerned. And why?
The BBC article that supposedly settles the question also says:
There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial. […]
The evidence is not being judged in a court of law. It only needs to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion.
As Dr. David Ray Griffin says, “The evidence wasn’t good enough to go to court, but it was good enough to go to war!”
And it looks as if the BBC itself was (and still is) trying “to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion,” which is totally more important than petty insignificant details like getting a credible account of what happened, and who did it, and why — or seeing that the perpetrators are brought to justice. But as far as Jack Holmes can see, the FBI’s word is gold, even if it took them five years to not find any direct evidence implicating the mastermind who was fingered on the very morning of the attack.
And the BBC’s word is gold too, and so is the unnamed subsequent report. Nobody can say, “Wait a minute! What about the photograph? What about the flight school? You’re positing one of the craziest coincidences ever, without even a shred of evidence.” That would be too journalistic, apparently. Too confrontational. Insufficiently dedicated to persuading governments around the world, and to a lesser extent carrying public opinion.
Jack Holmes gives us six more bullet points, but there’s no point grinding through them all. This is America, right? Three strikes and you’re out!
Sorry, Jack! You lose! If this is the best you can do, maybe you ought to find something else to write about — at least until you learn to do your own research.
Sorry, Esquire! You lose, too! Maybe this drivel is good enough for guys who are mostly thinking about how much their next suit is gonna cost, but for real people who are really connected to the real world … no! sorry! That’s a big sad fail!
I said at the top that Jack Holmes’ magical implication “makes no sense on the face of it.” But then again, maybe it does make sense, if you consider that it’s coming from a bright young man who knows where his next meal is coming from, if not his next suit. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Jackie Boy! Don’t rock the boat! We need more young men like yourself, clever and clueless and eager to peddle transparent lies in support of our indefensible fiction!
It’s an extraordinarily pathetic fail, if you ask me. It’s almost as if Jack Holmes were a closet Truther, putting out the weakest nonsense he could find, trying to lead his readers to the obvious logical leap — since this is the best evidence that can be marshaled in defense of the official story, the story must be 100% phony — without running the risk of saying so in plain English.
But in the final analysis, there’s no evidence to support this line of thinking, and therefore no good reason to believe it. I think we have to assume that Jack Holmes meant what he said and said what he meant. In other words, I don’t think he’s a cowardly Truther. I think he’s a pathetic Liar.
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT
Next: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Pathetic Fail #3: Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward
WinterPatriot | September 16, 2016
Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Sam Kestenbaum, Accessory after the Fact [source: The Forward ]
Number 3 : Sam Kestenbaum, Naomi Dann, and the Forward, for “Progressive Brooklyn Space Won’t Dump ‘Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Nut’,” “9/11 Anniversary Sparks New Wave of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories,” “The Jewish Left Needs To Call Out Real Anti-Semites Like Christopher Bollyn,” and “9/11 Conspiracy Theorist Chris Bollyn Blames Terror Attack on ‘Zionist War Agenda’ in Brooklyn Speech”
In the three previous installments, we have seen examples of accessories after the fact trying to attack 9/11 Truth by addition, so to speak. They have been adding their voices (and their nonsense) to the public arena, using different tactical approaches:
Robert Bridge wrote as if the official story of 9/11 were obviously true and had never been seriously challenged, for readers who know better, and got called on it, repeatedly.
Jack Holmes attacked 9/11 Truth on the evidence, claiming to “disprove” the “conspiracy theories,” but proving only that he had nothing convincing to offer.
Matt Kwong tried to explain why so many people are still concerned about 9/11 Truth without even considering the possibility that the official story might be false. Since this required him to ignore significant and relevant evidence, including some which he himself presented, the result was unconvincing, to put it mildly.
Now we turn to accessories after the fact using a different strategy, attacking 9/11 Truth by subtraction. Rather than adding their voices to the discussion, they’re using their voices to try and prevent other voices from speaking. Or: they can’t compete with 9/11 Truth, so they’re trying to suppress it.
In this installment, we will consider an attack which was intended to prevent an independent researcher from speaking in a public space to which he had been invited, by inciting so much opposition that the event organizer would be forced to withdraw the invitation.
The space is called Brooklyn Commons, the researcher is Christopher Bollyn, and the accessories after the fact were connected with the Jewish newspaper, “The Forward.”
On September 7, Sam Kestenbaum wrote:
A progressive gathering space in Brooklyn is sticking by its decision, despite widespread condemnation, to host a talk by a conspiracy theorist who has blamed Israel and Jews for the 9-11 attacks on their 15th anniversary.
Melissa Ennen, founder of Brooklyn Commons, wrote in a statement released Tuesday afternoon that the Commons was not “designed to be a cozy cocoon for intramural debate among leftists. From the beginning my goal has been to foster discussion among disparate groups across a wide political spectrum.”
Ennen noted that since launching in 2010, the Commons has rented space to Tea Partiers, anti-union corporations and elected officials who supported wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While “progressive organizations dominate the calendar,” Ennen wrote, “the Commons is available for rental by other groups.”
In case you’re not aware, Christopher Bollyn is not only “a conspiracy theorist who has blamed Israel and Jews for the 9-11 attacks.” He’s also been identified by the Anti-Defamation League as a “prominent voice in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a raging anti-Semite.”
Poster advertising Bollyn in NYC, 2016 [source: Twitter via Noah Shachtman]
Why are Bollyn and his conspiracy theories anti-Semitic? Because he alleges
a “Zionist Jewish” plot to induce America into the War on Terror so that their “cabal” can expand its global power
according to Daniel Sieradsky of jewschool.com.
On what evidence does Bollyn base his allegations? That’s what all these people were trying to prevent him from talking about!
The first attempt didn’t produce the desired result, so Sam Kestenbaum tried again the next day with “9/11 Anniversary Sparks New Wave of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories,” which follows the pattern of ad-hominem attack established in the previous article, but packages it in a more concise way.
Meanwhile, Naomi Dann chipped in with “The Jewish Left Needs To Call Out Real Anti-Semites Like Christopher Bollyn,” in which she writes
It’s heartening that there have been so many calls from progressive organizations and leaders calling for the cancellation of the event, and extremely disappointing to see that the Commons has refused to cancel it.
Having said this, she goes on to explain how we can tell the difference between “anti-Zionism,” which the Jewish Left allegedly tolerates, and “real anti-Semitism,” which Jews of all political leanings are urged to fight at every turn.
The distinction, according to Naomi Dann, can be understood this way:
There should be a clear line between criticizing the policies, actions and even ideology of the state of Israel, and criticizing the Jewish people or religion.
Thus: One may criticize Israel’s policies, the actions that flow from those policies, and the ideology that gives rise to both, because such criticism is merely “anti-Zionism.”
But no one may criticize the people who promote that ideology, establish those policies, and carry out those actions; nor may anyone criticize the religion that gives rise to the ideology behind the policies, because such criticism is “real anti-Semitism.”
If this is not immediately clear to you, then you’re probably reading it correctly. I think it means I can say the Palestinians are being viciously abused, provided that I don’t identify the abusers or mention the grounds on which the abusers attempt to justify their vicious behavior.
Naomi Dann, Accessory after the Fact [Source: Jewish Voice of Peace]
If I have that wrong, perhaps the Jewish Left needs to work harder to change the narrative being imposed from above, as it were. Naomi Dann explains:
For us to expect others to understand that distinction, our communal leaders also have to stop acting as if any criticism of the state is an attack on our people.
because
It does not help us fight truly dangerous anti-Semitic narratives when the state of Israel claims to represent all of us Jews, nor when American Jewish organizations use the power that they have to silence criticism of the state.
I am impressed by the depth to which Naomi Dann seems unaware of the contradiction: she’s complaining about what happens “when American Jewish organizations use the power that they have to silence criticism of the state” of Israel, while urging American Jewish organizations to use their power for that very purpose. So in effect Naomi Dann is saying, “It doesn’t help us when we do what we’re trying to do, but it’s essential that we do it anyway.”
Perhaps I could help Naomi Dann to find a way out of her self-imposed maze, by suggesting that when “the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews,” it may not be especially motivated by a desire to “help” the American Jewish Left “fight truly dangerous anti-Semitic narratives.”
To me it seems more likely that the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews because in this way it can coerce the American Jewish Left into fighting against anti-Zionist narratives.
In other words, as I see it, all Jews — even those who oppose Israel’s policies and actions — are pressed into service as human shields, and active shields at that, trying to stifle anything — a news report, an opinion piece, a public speaking engagement, or whatever — that might reflect badly on Israel, for fear that the anger that might be generated by widespread knowledge of Israel’s policies and actions might fuel a wave of general anti-Semitism that might bring negative impacts crashing down on them, their families and friends, and those who share their religion. And this coercion comes about precisely because “the state of Israel claims to represent all Jews.”
To make a long, pathetic story short: They didn’t manage to get the event in Brooklyn canceled, although similar pressure did result in the cancellation of Bollyn’s invitation to speak at Busboys and Poets Café in Washington, according to Daniel Sieradsky.
As it turned out, Bollyn’s presentation at Brooklyn Commons was attended by only about two dozen people, some of whom came to disrupt the event, as Sam Kestenbaum was pleased to report from the scene.
So one must ask: How many people did the Forward and its friends scare away? Any? And what would they have accomplished had they managed to get the event canceled, other than depriving two dozen people of the opportunity to listen to Bollyn for a couple of hours?
Instead, Sam Kestenbaum and the Forward gave Bollyn publicity he could not have bought, linked to an online PDF of his book, “Solving 9/11: The Deception That Changed The World,” and provided a platform for his assertion that
“The ‘false flag’ terrorism of 9-11 is a monstrous Jewish-Zionist crime of our time […] The true culprits of this heinous crime are clearly being protected by a gang of like-minded Jewish Zionists in the highest positions of the U.S. government.”
As far as I can tell, nobody is trying to refute Bollyn’s allegations, though many are trying to prevent his voice from being heard. And it’s clear that refuting his allegations would be more convincing than trying to prevent him from speaking. So we can infer that they would refute him if they could, and they’re trying to prevent him from telling us what he knows because they can’t dispute what he has to say.
It’s a logical conclusion, and easy to reach, so I wouldn’t be surprised if at least two dozen readers, finding the Forward’s coverage on the Internet and intrigued by the hallmarks of a coverup, did a bit of exploring, downloaded Bollyn’s book, and did some reading at his website, to which Naomi Dann linked.
So what is the net gain to the Forward ? to Sam Kestenbaum? To Naomi Dann?
On one hand, they’ve demonstrated to their “communal leaders” that they can be trusted to stand and fight on command.
On the other hand, they’ve demonstrated to the rest of us that (1) they’re highly motivated by fear of a hypothetical future in which some of the consequences of 9/11 might be borne by innocent people who happen to share the same religion as the perpetrators, but (2) they have no problem with a real present in which the horrible actual consequences of 9/11 are borne by innocent people who happen to share the same religion as the scapegoats!
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| Christopher Bollyn [source: The Forward ] |
I recall a presentation several years ago in which Christopher Bollyn said he never had a problem with Israel, even lived there for a while; and never had a problem with Jews either, until he started investigating explosions in the WTC, at which point he started getting pressure from Jewish groups. At first he wondered why Jewish groups, in particular, would try to keep him from looking into the destruction of the towers. But the more he dug, the more Israeli connections he found, and the less he wondered.
That’s Bollyn’s story, as I remember it, and you may choose to believe it or not. It sounds loopy, but I had a similar experience. I never had any problem with Jews either, until I started blogging about evidence of explosions in the WTC, at which point I started getting pressure from other bloggers and readers who identified themselves as Jewish. It was this pressure which prompted me to entertain, for the first time, the possibility that the people who were talking about Israeli complicity in 9/11 might know what they were talking about.
So it seems to me that if they’re trying to suppress the facts, drawing attention to the people who are trying to disseminate those facts is a losing strategy. On the other hand, they can’t very well anger their “communal leaders” by not trying it.
In any case, it was a total fail. They didn’t get the event canceled, they gave a “raging anti-Semite” a moment in the anti-Semitic sun, and they revealed themselves and their followers to be transparent hypocrites.
Sorry, Sam! You lose! Your pathetic attack failed, and you wound up using your platform to publicize the very allegations you were trying to suppress.
Sorry, Naomi! You lose, too! You’re trapped behind the imaginary line you’re trying to draw, but so caught up in your own contradictions that you don’t even realize it.
And sorry, Forward ! You’re the biggest loser in the story, and the most hypocritical, too. As an alert reader pointed out in a comment:
The Dancing Israeli stories is a curious side bar to 911, turns out they were Mossad agents working for a Mossad front, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J. The details of which can be found in a Forward article dated March 15 2002 written by Marc Perelman
There’s boundless irony here, as the paper is busted on the strength of its own reporting. Shockingly, the piece referred to in the comment is no longer available at the Forward website, but the Wayback Machine hasn’t forgotten that Marc Perelman wrote, and the Forward published, the following:
Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned. […]
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI’s counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel. […]
According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.
However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
“The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it,” he said. “The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11.” […]
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.
However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.
In addition to their strange behavior and their Middle Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background.
And so on. I’ve omitted Marc Perelman’s attempts to spin the story in an innocent direction, just as Marc Perelman described the men as “acting strangely” rather than admitting that they attracted attention to themselves by dancing, exchanging high-fives, flicking their lighters, and photographing one another against the backdrop of the burning towers.
Marc Perelman’s story hints that the behavior of these five men was probably innocent and misinterpreted, and he repeated the same claim in a subsequent interview. But if that were true, they would never have been noticed, let alone arrested. Plenty of people were acting strangely that day. But the others weren’t dancing, high-fiving, flicking their lighters, or taking souvenir photos.
Another reader remembered that after being released on the pretense that they knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks,
Your freaking Mossad agents went on Israel live TV and said “our purpose was to document the event” wtf is everyone suppose to think of that?
wtf indeed! If you think he’s kidding, watch this short video.
The story of the five dancing Israelis is the tip of the iceberg called “Israeli complicity.”
You can click here to read about that iceberg. But I can’t tell you any more about it myself — because, as I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Next: … to be continued …
US & US-controlled forces haven’t fulfilled any Syria ceasefire deal obligations – Russian Army
RT |September 17, 2016
The US is still reluctant to take measures to force rebels under its control to implement the Syrian ceasefire, Russia’s Defense Ministry said, adding that if things do not change, Washington will be the sole side responsible for the failure of the truce.
“After five days of the ceasefire, it has to be noted that only the Russian and Syrian sides have been fully implementing their commitments. On its own initiative, Russia prolonged the cessation of hostilities for 48 hours, and yesterday it was extended for another 72 hours,” senior Russian General Staff official, Viktor Poznikhir, said at a briefing in Moscow.
But, according to Poznikhir, it is very different on the American side as “the US and the so-called moderate groups under their control didn’t fulfill a single commitment undertaken in the framework of the Geneva arrangements.”
The Russian official pointed out that “the main priority of the Russian-American agreements of September was the division of territories controlled by IS (Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL), Jabhat al-Nusra, and the areas controlled by the ‘moderate opposition,’ as well the separation of the ‘moderate opposition’ from Jabhat al-Nusra.”
Such a division is essential for the implementation of the ceasefire in Syria because “without it, the hands of the government forces are tied. They can’t fight the terrorists without knowing which of them joined the truce and who didn’t,” he explained.
Numerous Russian appeals to the American side remain unanswered, which “raises doubts over the US’s ability to influence opposition groups under their control and their willingness to further ensure the implementation of the Geneva agreements.
“Russia is making every possible effort to hold off government troops from the use of force in return [to opposition attacks]. If the US does not implement the necessary measures to fulfill their obligations under the September 9 agreements, the responsibility for the failure of the ceasefire will be solely America’s,” Poznikhir said.
The inaction of the American side has already led to a worsening of the situation in Syria, the General Staff official stressed.
“Tensions are rising in Syria, especially in the provinces of Aleppo and Hama, where opposition groups are using the cessation of hostilities to regroup forces, refill their stocks of ammunition and weapons and are preparing an offensive in order to capture new territories,” he said.
“In the past 24 hours, the number of attacks has increased drastically. The positions of government troops, the people’s militia, and civilians were fired at on 55 occasions,” Poznikhir added.
Last week, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and US Secretary of State, John Kerry, agreed to influence the Syrian government and the so-called moderate rebel forces respectively in order to establish a ceasefire in the country.
Since then, Russia has repeatedly complained that the US is failing to keep its part of the bargain. While the US, on its part, blamed Russia for not pressuring Damascus enough to facilitate humanitarian access to Syria.
Lavrov talked to Kerry on the phone Saturday, urging Washington to start influencing the opposition in Syria in order to expand humanitarian access in the country, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The FM also called on the American side to actively participate in monitoring the Syrian ceasefire instead of merely accusing Syrian government forces of violations.
“Due to Washington’s continuing claims of ceasefire violations by the Syrian government forces, the Russian Foreign Minister urged them to go beyond accusations and to ensure the US military’s full-fledged participation in the ceasefire control mechanism created as far back as February and March and to take action against violations,” the ministry said in a statement.
Lavrov also stressed that “as result of Russia’s efforts, the issues of putting on track cooperation between the Syrian authorities and the United Nations in the area of broader humanitarian access are being solved, though not without difficulty.”
Who killed Vladimir Petukhov?
Farida Islamova, widow of murdered mayor Vladimir Petukhov
OffGuardian | September 17, 2016
However much the likes of the Guardian try to portray Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky as a champion of freedom who suffered under the yoke of government oppression before escaping tyranny for the freedom of the West, the fact remains he was and is more Capone than Solzhenitsyn; a greedy robber-baron and willing tool of US hegemony, who exploited his country’s darkest hour, cheated his workforce and eventually served a well-deserved term in prison for fraud, tax-evasion and money-laundering, before scuttling out of his mother-land to live the life of a celebrated “pro-democracy” exile.
It’s less widely understood that there are even darker things being laid at his door than corruption, theft and opportunistic lying for profit. Murder for example. But yes, in 2015, Russian Interpol put Khodorkovsky on a wanted list in connection with the murder of a Siberian city mayor in 1998.
Vladimir Petukhov was the first mayor of oil-rich Nefteyugansk. Popular locally and considered to be a man of the people, he was shot dead on his way in to work, June 26, 1998. A subsequent criminal investigation described the killing as an assassination, and implicated two members of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil Company in a plot to be rid of the Mayor.
A court eventually sentenced Alexei Pichugin to life in prison for multiple murders and attempted murders. His boss Khodorkovsky was not accused of, or prosecuted for, any involvement, though many have claimed he may have known more than he claimed. According to Pravda :
In May 1998 Petukhov accused Yukos of tax evasion, which resulted in the shortage of funds in the local budget to pay wages to employees of state-run enterprises. The mayor went on a hunger strike demanding chairmen of municipal and district tax offices be dismissed from their positions and a criminal case against Yukos be filed on counts of tax evasion.
Vladimir Petukhov was shot dead on June 26 on his way to work.
Local residents took to the streets soon after the assassination of their mayor. Many attempted to seize the local office of Yukos. The Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation brought assassination charges against an employee of Yukos’s security service, Aleksei Pichugn, only in 2005.
Petukov’s wife, Farida Islamova was and is convinced Mikhail Borisovitch was involved in the plot to murder her husband, and for many years she has been trying to have him brought to justice. She has even written a book – Khodorkovsky, who killed my Husband?, given an English language translation in 2014. In it she says:
Vladimir Petukhov, Mayor of Nefteyugansk, was shot down on his way to work, not far from the municipal administration building. The killer fired several submachine gun bursts from the cover of nearby bushes. Later on, the investigators would find 18 empty cases at the crime scene. In the face of such fire-power, the unarmed security man, Vyacheslav Kokoshkin, was helpless, he himself took several bullets, has never recovered from his wounds… At that time he was only 30 years old, and still today lives with one of these bullets – a sort of a message from Khodorkovsky – in his body…..
Vladimir Petukhov died in the hospital several hours after the attempt. That was a planned contract assassination…
Unsurprisingly, Farida has had little success in getting the English-language media to take interest in her story. No mainstream outfit has covered her book. Her wait for justice drags on as the western media continues to fete Mikhail Borisovich, embezzler of state funds, tax-evader and suspected murderer, as a symbol of the values they hold most dear.
Then again – maybe that’s not as stupid as it first sounds.
Facebook, Internet.org, and the End of Net Neutrality
By Tony Cartalucci | New Eastern Outlook | September 16, 2016
American-based aerospace company SpaceX is one of the few Western enterprises pursuing a greater purpose in a nation otherwise obsessed with power and profit. When its rocket was recently lost on the launch pad amidst an anomaly it took with it a satellite to be used by Facebook, an example of the latter.
The Guardian in an article titled, “SpaceX rocket explosion: Mark Zuckerberg laments loss of Internet.org satellite,” would report:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck a bitter tone in his response to the explosion of the SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite intended for use on his Internet.org project in Africa.
Writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said: “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”
However, while technically Facebook’s Internet.org would provide “connectivity” to people across the continent, it would not be providing them with access to the actual Internet.
Instead, it is Facebook’s version of the Internet, where the concept of net neutrality – the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites – does not exist.
On Facebook’s version of the Internet, only those willing to pay large sums of money can have access to audiences while others who do not pay, no matter how popular or meaningful their message may be, are essentially silenced. This is already a reality across Facebook’s social network itself, and this network is one of several “Free Basics” offered on Facebook’s Internet.org.
Internet.org by Facebook Aims to Control the World, Not “Connect” It
A visit to Facebook’s Internet.org reveals meaningless slogans and images of smiling brown people.
Looking past the superficiality at what Internet.org truly represents, it is clear that it is an attempt to takeover and monopolize the telecom industry and in particular, the entire Internet across the developing world. Not only does Facebook’s “Free Basics” limit users to information highly controlled by Western corporate-financier special interests and Facebook’s own net neutrality-usurping algorithms, but because the infrastructure employs methods including space-based satellites, the governments and communities exposed to this upturned version of the Internet have no say or control over it.
So obvious is this, that even before Facebook has completed its plans, nations are already fighting back.
In India, net neutrality activists succeeded in getting the invasive, manipulative, and monopolizing service banned from the country. The Guardian’s article, “India deals blow to Facebook in people-powered ‘net neutrality’ row,” would report:
Facebook has lost the right to offer its free mobile internet service in India after the country’s telecoms regulator ruled in favour of net neutrality, marking the end of an intense and very public 11-month national debate.
The new regulations published by India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) ban differential pricing for data services, and make it easier for smaller firms to compete with established companies including Facebook.
Facebook’s response was as unsurprising as it was dishonest, claiming:
Our goal with Free Basics is to bring more people online with an open, non-exclusive and free platform. While disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the internet and the opportunities it brings.
In reality, in order to eliminate barriers and connect people, the people themselves must acquire the skills and resources necessary to create their own infrastructure, companies to maintain it, and the ability to create their own content to transmit over it – the very embodiment of both the Internet itself and the underlying hope proponents of net neutrality hold for the Internet. The people using the Internet in their nation should be the primary benefactors of it – not just in terms of having access to useful information, but the ability to earn a living by maintaining its infrastructure.
In addition to Facebook’s ability to penetrate and monopolize any given developing nation’s telecom industry, considering Facebook’s ties to the US State Department and its role in facilitating regime change and even destructive, violent campaigns of armed subversion, it is very likely Facebook’s monopoly would make it that much easier to control and manipulate information space in any given developing nation during a Western-engineered crisis.
This may explain why legitimate nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India stood up to Facebook’s attempt to undermine net neutrality, but nations where NGOs are dominated by US State Department and Open Society funding like Thailand and the Philippines, Facebook’s Internet.org has gone unopposed.
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| Image: “Activists” complain about Thailand’s alleged “single gateway” plan to control domestic Internet infrastructure, while Facebook attempts to construct a global “single gateway” it controls, completely unopposed by these same groups – groups generally funded by the US State Department and Open Society, two partners Facebook has worked with in the past and groups that have themselves taken part in training assisted or sponsored by Facebook. |
Telecom and information technology, like food, water, energy, and a standing army, are essential building blocks for national security and prosperity. Handing the responsibility of any of these over to either a foreign nation or a foreign corporation – or both – is the relinquishing of one’s sovereignty and the compromising of one’s national security.
Nations and their people must develop their own Internet infrastructure. For Mark Zuckerberg and his government-connected corporation Facebook to presume they are the sole solution to “connecting the world” is but a modern-day version of “The White Man’s Burden” – those nations subjected to it subordinated to this domineering arrogance and the self-serving schemes that underpin it.
Facebook’s Internet.org is a wake-up call for developing nations to stand up and invest in modern day essential infrastructure – including domestic versions of social networks like Facebook – to ensure they are as safe in the field of information as their conventional armies keep them on the field of battle.
Egyptian state media claims 9/11 was carried out by West to justify war on terror
Orrazz | September 16, 2016
A columnist for a state-run newspaper in Egypt has suggested the US invented Isis and set up the 9/11 attacks to justify its military interventions in the Middle East.
“Is it possible to believe the official version, from the US government, of the events of 11 September 2001?” wrote journalist Noha Al-Sharnoubi in Al-Ahram, a major national Egyptian newspaper owned by the government.
Ms Al-Sharnoubi said the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks could have been premeditated to “justify the war on terror” in her column, published on 23 August.
She also cast doubt over the veracity of the actions of the so-called Islamic State, alleging the extremist group could have been made up to “trick” the world and validate US foreign policy.
Ms Al-Sharnoubi does not appear to shy away from controversial subjects. Her weekly column has recently discussed issues such as burkini bans, French military involvement in Libya and whether it is acceptable to sacrifice chickens, duck and geese.
According to an English translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri) [admittedly unreliable – Aletho News ], Ms Al-Sharnoubi wrote: “Is it a coincidence that the commanders of the September 11 attack trained at American flight schools?”
“Is it conceivable that four hijacked planes flew around so freely, penetrated US airspace and hit the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon one by one, with an interval of 15 minutes and 30 minutes between the attacks,” she added.
“All this took place without the Americans targeting the planes and downing them, despite all their intelligence, satellites and radars?
“Or was the whole thing planned [in advance] in order to justify the war on terror, the [first] episode of which [later] began in Iraq?”
Ms Al-Sharnoubi also questioned the contents of ISIS propaganda videos, suggesting the militant group could be “another story that was prepared in advance [by the West] to justify the devastation, partitioning and occupation” of Middle Eastern countries.
“Does it make sense that most ISIS members are foreigners [i.e., Western nationals], unless ISIS is another story that was prepared in advance [by the West] to justify the devastation, partitioning and occupation [of countries] that is taking place and will continue to take place in the Middle East?” she wrote, according to Memri.
“Those who are murdered and [then] accused of perpetrating terror attacks in the West – are they the real culprits?
“[Perhaps Western] intelligence elements are behind the attacks and the bombings, and later Muslim citizens are arrested and killed and simply accused of perpetrating [the attacks] in order to justify what is happening in the Arab countries in the name of the war on terror, and in order to justify the plan to persecute the Muslims in the U.S. and Europe and expel them? Have we really been deceived, and continue to be deceived, to such an extent?!”
Egypt is listed as number 159 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
According to the report, “journalists are obliged on national security grounds to report only the official version of ‘terrorist’ attacks” under an anti-terrorism law passed in 2015.
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From the Archives
USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Seyed M. Marandi: US-Iran War Inevitable: Kuwait and Bahrain May Fall
- Leaders Condemn Ansarallah Attack on Saudi Arabia While Ignoring Illegal War Against Yemen
- Leaked: Britain’s Covert Iraqi Psyops Network
- Yemeni Armed Forces Warn Airlines Against Using Saudi Airports, Exempt Mecca and Medina
- Iran security chief says powers greater than US tried to conquer Iran but ended in ‘dustbin of history’
- Europe’s mounting social chaos… chickens coming home to roost for proxy war against Russia
- US-Russia Diesel Deal Becomes Massive Defeat for Ukraine
- Hormuz and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- Dhubab offensive, media blitz and the rapid unraveling of Saudi-backed coalition’s new gambit
- Putin Conveys to Trump Iran’s Vision on Possible Conflict Resolution – Kremlin
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza: Ceasefire Anniversary Marks Year of Failed Promises
- The American Conservative: Mike Huckabee Should Resign
- A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention
- ‘He’s Desperate’: AIPAC Begins Spending Against Abdul El-Sayed to Boost Mike Rogers:
- Trump, Hormuz, and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- For three years, Israel has killed a child in Gaza every 71 minutes – Daily Update
- Israeli forces kill another child in Gaza – Daily Update
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- Nearly 2 Million in Gaza Need Urgent Shelter Assistance as Winter Looms: IOM Chief Warns
- Suppressing Palestinian resistance: US charity under fire for AI monitoring of Gaza classrooms
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
