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Iran condemns UAE, Israel’s ‘ridiculous’ claims at IAEA

Press TV – September 18, 2019

Iran has denounced “ridiculous” allegations raised at the recent general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by the UAE “nuclear newcomers” and the Israeli regime.

“It is quite ridiculous that a regime which has ignored all the non-proliferation and disarmament commitments and developed all kinds of weapons of mass destruction is preaching to a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) whose nuclear facilities and materials are under the IAEA’s safeguards,” Iran’s permanent representative to international organizations Kazem Gharibabadi said on Wednesday.

“The Zionist regime, with its long history of [adopting] opportunistic policies to deflect attentions from its brutal and inhumane measures against the people of Palestine and other countries in the Middle East, has been one of the main sources of crisis, instability, pain, and anger in the region’s recent history,” he noted on Wednesday.

He called on the international community not to be distracted from the Israeli regime’s atomic weapons program, and said that Tel Aviv must abandon its nukes and join the NPT immediately, putting all its nuclear facilities under the IAEA’s safeguards.

In an address to the 63rd IAEA general conference, the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission claimed that the IAEA needs to show “greater vigilance” considering what he called Iran’s “methods of deception and concealment in the nuclear realm.”

He also accused Iran of “concealing and removing nuclear materials and equipment from its clandestine sites” and undermining the IAEA’s “ability to conduct effective verification missions.”

The allegations come as Israel, the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, has a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear program.

In his Wednesday comments, Gharibabadi also downplayed the “irrelevant and groundless” accusations raised by the UAE envoy, and gave assurances that “Iran has utilized the highest standards in building and launching its nuclear facilities.”

He said adopting such safety standards requires domestic technical capacities, which “cannot be easily purchased and imported” along with certain equipment.

“While the peaceful use of nuclear energy is the undeniable right of all governments … we strongly advise that regional newcomers to the nuclear field, including the UAE, show maximum transparency and avoid any deviation in their peaceful nuclear program,” he added.

“Iran has transparently shown on many occasions, including in the fight against terrorism, that it is the main source of security and stability in the region,” Gharibabadi said.

He made the remarks in reaction to comments by Hamad Alkaabi, the permanent representative of the UAE to the IAEA, who called on “the international community to devise a new approach towards addressing concerns and threats of Iran’s nuclear and regional activities.”

“With regard to the JCPOA, my country calls on Iran to honor its obligations under the IAEA safeguards, the NPT and its commitments under the JCPOA and to fully cooperate with the IAEA to address all concerns related to its nuclear activities, as well as to refrain from actions that could undermine the nonproliferation regime,” he said, referring to the Iran nuclear agreement using its abbreviation.

September 19, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Trump says attacking Iran would be too ‘EASY,’ calls restraint a ‘sign of strength’ as others drum up WAR

RT | September 18, 2019

As American and Saudi Arabian officials blame Iran for attacking Saudi oil refineries, President Donald Trump has remained noncommittal about a US response, calling his prior restraint a “sign of strength.”

Speaking to reporters in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the US president said that he would outline new sanctions on Iran within 48 hours, after announcing them via Twitter earlier in the day. While it would be “very easy” to attack Iran, his reluctance to do so is “a sign of strength,” Trump added.

That statement echoed his reply on Tuesday to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who called Trump’s cancelation of military strikes on Iran in June a “sign of weakness.”

Graham, the former wingman of the hawkish Senator John McCain, has emerged as one of the loudest proponents of retaliatory strikes in recent days, declaring the oil refinery attack an “act of war,” and calling for an “unequivocal” response. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also described the attack as an “act of war,” while Vice President Mike Pence said on Tuesday that America is “locked and loaded” to defend her Saudi allies.

Trump, on the other hand, has been more ambivalent. Stopping short of outright pointing the finger at Iran the president said on Monday that it was “certainly looking” like Iran was behind the attack, adding that “we pretty much already know” Tehran is to blame.

Regarding a response, Trump has boasted of the US military’s readiness to strike, but said that he would “certainly like to avoid” war.

While Trump’s response may seem unduly measured, the president had signaled something of a softer attitude towards Iran in the days before the weekend’s attacks. After saying last week that he would have “no problem,” meeting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Trump even gave a “we’ll see what happens” when asked if he’d consider lifting sanctions to get Rouhani to the table. The attacks on Saudi oil facilities, however, seem to have put paid to that.

Houthi rebels in Yemen – against whom Saudi Arabia has been waging war since 2015 –  claimed responsibility for the strike, and Iran denies all connection with it. However, Saudi officials claimed at a press conference on Wednesday that it was “unquestionably sponsored by Iran,” and presented the wreckage of Iranian missiles and drones as proof.

Yet the Saudis could not pinpoint a launch site, nor prove that the Houthis did not launch the supposed Iranian projectiles of their own accord. Likewise, Hesameddin Ashena, an adviser to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, asked why the Saudis’ air defenses “failed to thwart the attack.”

September 18, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , | 2 Comments

Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of sponsoring oil-plant attack, says it ‘couldn’t have originated in Yemen’

RT | September 18, 2019

Saudi Arabia has claimed that Iran was the sponsor of attacks on its oil treatment facilities, presenting wreckage of drones and missiles as “definitive proof” of Tehran’s involvement.

Speaking to the press on Wednesday, a spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of Defense displayed what he said was wreckage from the projectiles used in the strikes on petrol plants in Abqaiq and Khurais last weekend.

The type of weapons used proved that the assault “could not have originated in Yemen,” Colonel Turki al-Malki claimed. He said the capabilities of the drones and the cruise missiles have been known to Riyadh from previous attacks.

Accusing Iran of sponsoring the attack, the spokesman called on other countries to “acknowledge Iran’s malign activities in the region.”

“The attack was launched from the north and unquestionably sponsored by Iran.”

He also presented surveillance footage from one of the oil facilities, claiming it depicted a drone in flight, though the UAV was difficult to make out in the video.

It wasn’t clear where precisely the attack originated, al-Malki admitted. He said the government was “working to know exactly the launch point.”

The press conference came just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Jeddah, where he is scheduled to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss the attacks.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the drone and missile strikes on Saturday, which caused a severe disruption in global oil markets and sent prices soaring upward by nearly 20 percent. The damaged refinery in Abqaiq was among the world’s largest oil processing facilities, while the Khurais plant sits on the country’s second largest oil field.

Does missile type prove anything?

The missile used in the attack could be a copy of the Soviet-designed cruise missile Kh-55, which Iran acquired from Ukraine and then developed into its own weapon, a military analyst and retired army officer Viktor Murakhovsky told RT.

However, this does not qualify as definitive proof that Iran launched such an attack, Murakhovsky said. It is “hardly a secret” that Iran sells weapons to the Yemeni Houthi rebels, he explained, adding that Tehran has spoken in support of Yemen’s right of self-defense.

Moreover, it is not difficult for Houthi forces to launch a cruise missile, so their responsibility cannot be ruled out.

“You do not need a narrow-focus specialist in order to use this missile. You need to input the launch mission data and carry out the launch, that’s all,” Murakhovsky said.

September 18, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 6 Comments

Ignorant Iran ‘experts’ just the beginning of Washington’s foreign policy troubles

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | September 16, 2019

An explosive essay calling out the lack of legitimate expertise about Iran ought to be a wake-up call for the US foreign policy field. Yet the same problem also affects Washington’s analysis of Russia, China and many other places.

Imagine a field of study in which less than a third of the experts had related doctorates, half of them could not read, speak or write the language required, and just as many have never set foot inside the relevant country. Preposterous, you might say – yet scientific observation has shown that this is precisely what the US expertise on Iran looks like, according to an essay by political anthropologist Negar Razavi, recently published in the journal Jadaliyya.

Razavi describes the think-tank culture of DC as “a wider system of knowledge production in Washington – one which has consistently rewarded ungrounded, ideologically driven assessments of the Islamic Republic at the expense of qualified, in-depth, and evidence-based analysis.”

This is her conclusion after two years of “ethnographic fieldwork” in the US capital, attending hundreds of events, following the writings and presentations of think-tank experts, and interviewing over 180 people between 2014 and 2016. In other words, this was a serious academic study.

This culture of “expert impunity” when it comes to Iran has combined with historical and contemporary US grievances against Tehran to produce the current policy of confrontation, in which allegations are treated as unquestioned facts while any nuanced assessments are dismissed as the work of “regime apologists,” according to Razavi.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because the problem is not limited to Iran. Though Razavi focused exclusively on the state of Iran expertise, her assessment applies in equal measure to the self-styled experts on Venezuela, or Russia, or China, or the Balkans…

The examples are legion. Razavi herself mentions (though not by name) “Heshmat Alavi,” a supposed expert on Iran who recently turned out to be a construct – an online persona operated by the Iranian exile group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK). This is an outfit that seeks regime change in Tehran, and has been endorsed by former National Security Advisor John Bolton and President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Gordon Chang, who predicted the “coming collapse of China” in a 2001 book, has been embraced by CNN and Fox News alike as an expert on Beijing – despite the obvious failure of his prediction to actually materialize. Likewise, Swedish economic Anders Aslund has heralded the demise of Russia since 2000 – and cashed in his “expertise” with the Atlantic Council and the governments of Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and the Baltic states.

Then there was the never-ending parade of “Russia experts” on cable news shows helping cultivate and propagate the hoax of President Donald Trump’s “Russian collusion” over the past three years, only to see the Mueller Report conclusively quash their fabrications. Have there been apologies? Of course not. As Razavi points out, being an “expert” in DC means never having to admit wrongdoing.

Her essay reveals how actual experts and scholars – who warned against things like the 2003 invasion of Iraq or ‘Russiagate’ – have been been sidelined or smeared time and again, while the think-tank factories churned out false expertise on cable channels and social media. Their takes would then find their way into official papers at the State Department and the Pentagon, morphing along the way into facts that “everybody knows” and no one is allowed to question.

The result of this unholy alliance of tanks and think-tanks has been decades of mis-shapen US foreign policy, with arguably disastrous results – from trillions in squandered treasure to millions of deaths around the world.

September 17, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Explaining CIA’s ‘Agent Smolenkov’

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 16, 2019

The saga of daring escape by a supposed Russian CIA agent from the Kremlin’s clutches and then the added twist of a security-risk American president putting the agent’s life in danger does indeed sound like a pulp fiction novel, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it.

How to explain this sensational story? “Opportunism” is one word that comes to mind.

The news media who pushed the story, CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post, are vehemently “anti-Trump”. Any chance to damage this president and they grab it.

Also, perhaps more importantly, these media are desperate to salvage their shot-through journalistic credibility since the “Russiagate” narrative they had earnestly propagated died a death, after the two-year Mueller circus finally left town empty-handed.

This damage to supposed bastions of US journalism cannot be overstated. More than two years of spinning speculation-cum-reporting about Russian collusion with Trump and/or interference in US politics has produced not a crumb of substantive fact. That means those media responsible for the “Russiagate” nonsense have forfeited that precious quality – credibility. They no longer deserve to be categorized as news services, and are more appropriately now listed as fiction peddlers.

So when they got the chance to seemingly resurrect their buried “Russiagate” yarn with this latest fable about agent Oleg Smolenkov being exfiltrated from Russia to the US, they leapt at it because their equally buried reputations are also at stake.

As far as we can tell, an anonymous intelligence source started the ball rolling. The source is likely to be former CIA chief John Brennan or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Both are hangouts for the anti-Trump media since they lost their intel jobs at the beginning of 2017, and both are believed to have seeded the “Russiagate” narrative in 2016 from before Trump was elected.

Notably, the current CIA assessment of the latest US media reporting on the exfiltrated spy is that the reporting is “false” and “misguided”. In particular, the CNN spin that the agent (Smolenkov) had to be extricated from Russia in 2017 because Langley feared that Trump may have endangered the supposed Kremlin mole when he hosted Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the White House in May 2017.

Also of note is the dismissive response from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who rubbished the reports. He was head of the CIA during 2017. (Admittedly, Pompeo is a self-confessed liar.)

According to CNN, NY Times and Washington Post, the former spy in the Kremlin, named as Oleg Smolenkov by subsequent Russian media reporting, was a top mole with direct access to President Vladimir Putin. It is claimed that Smolenkov confirmed allegations about a Putin-directed plot to interfere in US presidential elections. The agent is said to have also confirmed that Putin (allegedly) ordered the hacking of the Democratic party’s central database to obtain scandalous material on Hillary Clinton which was then fed to the Wikileaks whistleblower site for the purpose of scuttling her bid for the presidency in November 2016, thus favoring Trump.

Smolenkov was allegedly providing this information on a purported Kremlin interference campaign in 2016.

The US media claim Smolenkov was exfiltrated from Russia by the CIA in June 2017 – out of concern for his safety, which CNN reported was being jeopardized by President Trump due to his implied compromised relations with Putin. Smolenkov and his family disappeared while on a holiday in Montenegro in June 2017.

After the story broke earlier this week about the exfiltrated Kremlin mole, subsequent media reporting tracked down Oleg Smolenkov and his wife living in a $1-million-dollar mansion in Stafford, Virginia. Curiously, public records showed the house purchase was in their names, which seems odd for a supposed top-level spy, who had apparently committed extreme betrayal against the Kremlin, to be living openly. The family apparently fled the house to unknown whereabouts on September 9 after the story about his alleged spy role broke this week.

Who is Oleg Smolenkov? The Kremlin said this week that he previously worked in the presidential administration, but he was sacked “several years ago”. He did not have direct access to President Putin’s office, according to the Kremlin. For his part, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov says he never heard of the man before, never mind ever having met him.

It is understood that Smolenkov previously worked in the Russian embassy in Washington under ambassador Yuri Ushakov (1999-2008). Smolenkov reportedly continued working for Ushakov when the diplomat returned to Moscow after his ambassadorial tenure in the US.

Here is where we may speculate that Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA during his diplomatic assignment in the US. But we assume that the Kremlin’s assessment is correct; he did not have a senior position or access to Putin’s office. By contrast, the US media are claiming Smolenkov was “one of the CIA’s most valuable assets” in the Kremlin and that he was providing confirmatory information that Putin was (allegedly) running an interference campaign to subvert the US presidential elections.

The discerning detail as to the truth of the imbroglio is revealed by the US media claims that Smolenkov corroborated the alleged hacking into the Democratic party database in 2016. However, that specific allegation has been disproven by several top hacker experts, notably William Binney who was formerly technical head at the US National Security Agency. There was no hacking. The damaging information on Hillary Clinton was leaked by a Democratic party insider, possibly Seth Rich, who soon after was shot dead by an unknown attacker. In short, the entire narrative about the Kremlin hacking into the Democratic party is a fiction. The premise to “Russiagate” is baseless.

Thus, if Smolenkov is peddling fiction to his former handlers in the CIA, that means he has no credibility as a “top mole”.

Again, opportunism is the key. Somebody came up with a lurid story about “Russian interference” in US democracy and “collusion” with Trump. Maybe it was Smolenkov who saw an opportunity to win a big pay day from his CIA patrons by flogging them a blockbuster. Or maybe, Brennan and Clapper (known liars in the public record) dreamt up a scheme of Kremlin malignancy to benefit Trump, and if that could be tied to Trump then his election would be discredited and nullified. But what they needed was a “Kremlin source” to “corroborate” their readymade story of “Russian interference”. Step forward Oleg Smolenkov – fired and out of work – to do the needfed “corroboration” and in return he gets a new life for himself and family with a mansion in a leafy Virginian suburb.

CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Brennan and Clapper are so much damaged goods from past failure of “Russiagate” fabrications, they find an opportunity to salvage their disgraced names by outing the hapless Smolenkov at this juncture.

That then raises the grave question of why he was permitted to live openly in his own name?

There is a sinister similarity here to the Sergei Skripal case in England. Is Smolenkov being set up for a hit which can then be conveniently blamed on Russia as “revenge” by the Russophobic, anti-Trump, deep state US media?

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Magnitskiy Myth Exploded

By Craig Murray | September 16, 2019

The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.

The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.

However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy and action by the authorities “years” before he started to make counter-accusations of corruption against officials investigating his case.

This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:

The applicants argued that Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest had not been based on a reasonable suspicion of a
crime and that the authorities had lacked impartiality as they had actually wanted to force him to
retract his allegations of corruption by State officials. The Government argued that there had been
ample evidence of tax evasion and that Mr Magnitskiy had been a flight risk.
The Court reiterated the general principles on arbitrary detention, which could arise if the
authorities had complied with the letter of the law but had acted with bad faith or deception. It
found no such elements in this case: the enquiry into alleged tax evasion which had led to
Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest had begun long before he had complained of fraud by officials. The decision
to arrest him had only been made after investigators had learned that he had previously applied for
a UK visa, had booked tickets to Kyiv, and had not been residing at his registered address.
Furthermore, the evidence against him, including witness testimony, had been enough to satisfy an
objective observer that he might have committed the offence in question. The list of reasons given
by the domestic court to justify his subsequent detention had been specific and sufficiently detailed.
The Court thus rejected the applicants’ complaint about Mr Magnitskiy’s arrest and subsequent
detention as being manifestly ill-founded.

“Manifestly ill founded”. The mainstream media ran reams of reporting about the Magnitskiy case at the time of the passing of the Magnitskiy Act. I am offering a bottle of Lagavulin to anybody who can find me an honest and fair MSM report of this judgement reflecting that the whole story was built on lies.

Magnitskiy did not uncover corruption then get arrested on false charges of tax evasion. He was arrested on credible charges of tax evasion, and subsequently started alleging corruption. That does not mean his accusations were unfounded. It does however cast his arrest in a very different light.

Where the Court did find in favour of Magnitskiy’s family is that he had been deprived of sufficient medical attention and subject to brutality while in jail. I have no doubt this is true. Conditions in Russian jails are a disgrace, as is the entire Russian criminal justice system. There are few fair trials and conviction rates remain well over 90% – the judges assume that if you are being prosecuted, the state wants you locked up, and they comply. This is one of many areas where the Putin era will be seen in retrospect as lacking in meaningful and needed domestic reform. Sadly what happened to Magnitskiy on remand was not special mistreatment. It is what happens in Russian prisons. The Court also found Magnitskiy’s subsequent conviction for tax evasion was unsafe, but only on the (excellent) grounds that it was wrong to convict him posthumously.

The first use of the Magnitskiy Act was to sanction those subject to Browder’s vendetta in his attempts to regain control of vast fortunes in Russian assets. But you may be surprised to hear I do not object to the legislation, which in principle is a good thing – although the chances of Western governments bringing sanctions to bear on the worst human rights abusers are of course minimal. Do not expect it to be used against Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or Israel any time soon.

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 1 Comment

Prematurely assigning blame for attack on Saudi oil facilities is irresponsible, says China

RT | September 16, 2019

Beijing has warned that it would be irresponsible to guess who is the culprit behind the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities without conducting a proper investigation. The US had immediately blamed Iran for the operation.

“Pondering who is to blame in the absence of a conclusive investigation, I think, is in itself not very responsible. China’s position is that we oppose any moves that expand or intensify conflict,” Hua said on Monday during a press briefing.

She implored all parties concerned to “restrain themselves” in order to “safeguard peace and stability” in the Middle East.

Washington wasted little time in pointing the finger at Iran. In an ominous tweet, President Donald Trump said on Sunday that his country’s military was “locked and loaded” for a potential response to the attack. Tehran has denied any involvement in the incident, accusing the Trump administration of trying to tarnish the Islamic Republic’s image in order to justify “future actions” against the country.

Contradicting the US narrative, Houthi rebels in Yemen have already admitted responsibility for the attack. The group said they used 10 armed drones to hit two Aramco oil refineries on Saturday. The attacks caused massive fires and other damage to the sites, halving Saudi Arabia’s oil output.

In a statement, the Houthis said that Aramco facilities remained a target and could be attacked again at “any moment.”

September 16, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 2 Comments

9/11: You Weren’t Stupid, Mr. Brown!

CNN’s brief shining moment on September 11, 2001

By Graeme MacQueen | OffGuardian | September 11, 2019

Aaron Brown, news anchor during most of CNN’s coverage on September 11, 2001, was interviewed on the 15th anniversary of the event. He said in that interview that he had felt “profoundly stupid” when he was reporting the destruction of the first Tower (the South Tower) on that morning.

I… I will tell you… that a million things had been running through my mind about what might happen. About the effect of a jet plane hitting people above where the impact was, what might be going on in those buildings. And it just never occurred to me that they’d come down. And I thought… it’s the only time I thought, maybe you just don’t have what it takes to do a story like this. Because it just had never occurred to me.” (CNN, Sept. 11, 2016, interviewer Brian Stelter)

Is it not remarkable that Brown was made to feel stupid, and to feel inadequate as a news anchor, during the precise moments of his coverage of that day when his senses and his mind were fully engaged and on the right track?

Shortly after 9:59 a.m. Brown had been standing on a roof in New York City about 30 blocks from the World Trade Center. He was looking directly at the South Tower as it was destroyed. He was not just a journalist and not just a news anchor: he was an eyewitness.

He immediately interrupted a journalist who was reporting live about the Pentagon:

Wow! Jamie. Jamie, I need you to stop for a second. There has just been a huge explosion…we can see a billowing smoke rising… and I can’t… I’ll tell you that I can’t see that second Tower. But there was a cascade of sparks and fire and now this… it looks almost like a mushroom cloud, explosion, this huge, billowing smoke in the second Tower…” (9:59:07 a.m.)

Having reported honestly what he saw with his own eyes, Brown next did exactly what he should have done as a responsible news anchor. He let his audience know that while he did not know what had happened it was clear that there were two hypotheses in play, the explosion hypothesis and the structural failure hypothesis. And then he went to his reporters on the scene, as well as to authorities, to try and sort out which hypothesis was correct.

Here are examples of his setting forth—after the first building was destroyed and again after the second was destroyed—the rival hypotheses:

and then just in the last several minutes there has been a second explosion or, at least, perhaps not an explosion, perhaps part of the building simply collapsed. And that’s what we saw and that’s what we’re looking at.” (10:03:47)

This is just a few minutes ago…we don’t know if…something happened, another explosion, or if the building was so weakened…it just collapsed.” (10:04:36 a.m.)

we believe now that we can say that both, that portions of both Towers of the World Trade Centre, have collapsed. Whether there were second explosions, that is to say, explosions other than the planes hitting them, that caused this to happen we cannot tell you.” (10:29:21 a.m.)

Our reporters in the area say they heard loud noises when that happened. It is unclear to them and to us whether those were explosions going on in the building or if that was simply the sound of the collapse of the buildings as they collapsed, making these huge noises as they came down.” (11:17:45 a.m.)

Brown’s honest reporting of his perceptions was balanced repeatedly by his caution. Here is an example:

it almost looks… it almost looks like one of those implosions of buildings that you see except there is nothing controlled about this…this is devastation.” (10:53:10 a.m.)

His next move, having set forth the two hypotheses, was to ask his reporters on the scene, who were choking on pulverized debris and witnessing gruesome scenes, what they perceived.

Reporter Brian Palmer said honestly that he was not in a position to resolve the issue.

Brown: Was there… Brian, did it sound like there was an explosion before the second collapse, or was the noise the collapse itself?” (10:41:08 a.m.)

Palmer: “Well, from our distance… I was not able to distinguish between an explosion and the collapse. We were several hundred yards away. But we clearly saw the building come down. I heard your report of a fourth explosion: I can’t confirm that. But we heard some “boom” and then the building fold in on itself.”

Two others were more definite about what they perceived.

Brown: Rose, whadya got? (10:29:43 a.m.)

Rose Arce: I’m about a block away. And there were several people that were hanging out the windows right below where the plane crashed, when suddenly you saw the top of the building start to shake, and people began leaping from the windows in the north side of the building. You saw two people at first plummet and then a third one, and then the entire top of the building just blew up…

Brown: Who do we have on the phone, guys? Just help me out here. Patty, are you there? (10:57:51 a.m.)

Patty: Yes, I am here.

Brown: Whaddya got?

Patty: About an hour ago I was on the corner of Broadway and Park Place—that’s about a thousand yards from the World Trade Center—when the first Tower collapsed. It was a massive explosion. At the time the police were trying desperately to evacuate people from the area. When that explosion occurred it was like a scene out of a horror film.

As can be seen, the explosion hypothesis was flourishing. Even the news caption at the bottom of the screen shortly after the destruction of the South Tower (10:03:12 a.m.) is striking to read today:

“THIRD EXPLOSION SHATTERS WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”

After checking with his reporters, Brown continued to explore his hypotheses, this time by consulting authorities. This was where he was led astray. “Authorities” are less securely tied to evidence than witnesses and may, in fact, be implicated in high level deception.

First Brown consulted a political authority. He got the Mayor of New York City on the line.

Brown: Sir, do you believe that… was there another set of explosions that caused the buildings to collapse, or was it the structural damage caused by the planes?” (12:31:45 p.m.)

Giuliani: I don’t, I don’t know, I, uh, I, uh… I, I saw the first collapse and heard the second ‘cause I was in a building when the second took place. I think it was structural but I cannot be sure.”

Later in the afternoon Giuliani got his script right and was more definite in ruling out explosions. But, of course, Giuliani had no right to pronounce on the science of building destruction. Brown should have persisted in his questioning.

Finally, Brown brought in an engineer, Jim DeStefano–associated, we were told, with the National Council of Structural Engineers. DeStefano’s brief comments put an end to Brown’s explosion hypothesis and rendered CNN’s news coverage safe for public consumption.

Brown: Jim De Stefano is a structural engineer. He knows about big buildings and what happens in these sort of catastrophic moments. He joins us from Deerfield, Connecticut on the phone. Jim, the plane hits… what… and I hope this isn’t a terribly oversimplified question, but what happens to the building itself? (04:20:45 p.m.)

DeStefano: … It’s a tremendous impact that’s applied to the building when a collision like this occurs. And it’s clear that that impact was sufficient to do damage to the columns and the bracing system supporting the building. That coupled with the fire raging and the high temperatures softening the structural steel then precipitated a destabilization of the columns and clearly the columns buckled at the lower floors causing the building to collapse.

I am not in a position to call DeStefano a fake or to claim he was reading from a script given to him by others, but I am prepared to say he was extremely irresponsible. He did not say “here is one hypothesis.” He said, in effect, “this is what happened.” He was in no position to make this claim. There had been no photographic or video analysis of the building destruction, no analysis of the remains of the WTC, no cataloguing of eyewitnesses, nor any of the other methods of evidence gathering. He was shooting in the dark. He was silencing a journalist who was sincerely trying to discover the truth. As we have known for years now, DeStefano not only could have been wrong: he was wrong.*

And let us remember that the entire War on Terror, with its suffering and oppression, has depended on this false structural failure hypothesis. No structural failure hypothesis, no guilty Muslim fanatics. No guilty Muslim fanatics, no War on Terror.

Some readers will feel I am too generous with Brown and with CNN. But I am not interested in portraying them as broadly “dissident” or as on the political Left. I am simply interested in calling things as I see them and giving credit where credit is due. Anyone who wants a contrast to Brown’s performance is free to watch the work of Fox News anchor, Jon Scott, on September 11, 2001. The same confidence that allowed him to name Bin Laden as a suspect 42 seconds after the impact of the second plane allowed him to proclaim the structural failure hypothesis directly after the destruction of the South Tower. He persisted even when his reporters in the field clearly spoke of explosions.

David Lee Miller reported:

we heard a very loud blast, an explosion. We looked up, and the building literally began to collapse before us…” (10:01:17 a.m.)

Rick Leventhal said:

The FBI is here, as you can see. They had roped this area off. They were taking photographs and securing this area just prior to that huge explosion that we all heard and felt.” (10:06:39 a.m.)

News anchor Scott was troubled by none of this. He overrode, silenced and patronized Fox reporters. At no point did he even acknowledge the existence of a second reasonable hypothesis for the Trade Center destruction.

Of course, it is true that by the end of the day of September 11, 2001 CNN and Fox were singing from the same hymnbook. But I believe we ought to acknowledge Brown’s brief, shining moment and consider what might happen if journalists found their courage and trusted their senses and their minds.

Sources:

Same-day coverage by CNN and Fox for September 11, 2001 has been sporadically available on the Internet. My notes are from my own previously downloaded files. Times should be accurate to within two seconds.

Notes

*Many works have appeared over the years refuting the account of the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But special note should be taken of two sources:

Ted Walter, Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, 2015.

https://www.ae911truth.org/images/BeyondMisinfo/Beyond-Misinformation-2015.pdf

Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, First Amended Grand Jury Petition, filed July 30, 2018 at the office of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, N.Y.

https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/lc-doj-first-amended-grand-jury-petition/

In addition, a recent academic report on the related destruction of World Trade Center 7 destroys whatever confidence we might have in NIST’s accounts:

J. L. Hulsey, et al, A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 (draft), University of Alaska Fairbanks, Sept. 2019.

https://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50694/signup_page/uaf-wtc7-draft-report?killorg=True&loggedOut=True

September 12, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 3 Comments

A False Accusation of Antisemitism from Where You Would Least Expect It

By Jeff Blankfort | Dissident Voice | September 12th, 2019

I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.

— Benjamin Netayahu, 2001, quoted in Ha’aretz, July 15, 2010

It is not uncommon, of course, to be labeled “anti-Semitic” for calling attention to the inordinate power of the Israel Lobby over our political processes or suggesting that the Iraq War was launched on Israel’s behalf. The last place that I would expect to find such an allegation, however, was on the CounterPunch website to which I have contributed a number of articles on the subject over the years.

On August 2nd in an opinion piece by Ron Jacobs, headlined, “Israel—The Largest US Aircraft Carrier in the World,” those, like myself, who have described, in detail, on CounterPunch and elsewhere, the manner in which the Israel Lobby controls both Congress and the White House on issues relating to Israel, were accused of propagating “what is an essentially anti-Semitic argument concerning the nature of the Washington-Tel Aviv alliance.”

That Jacobs, a veteran of the Sixties as long of tooth as myself, a prolific writer and frequent contributor to Left publications, would make such an allegation, after what we have learned about the role of pro-Israel Jewish neocons in fomenting the Iraq War and following that, implementing crippling sanctions on Iran while agitating against the nuclear agreement with Tehran, is as mind boggling as it is insulting.

Jacobs did this under the cover of what purports to be a review of a new book by historian Stephen Gowans, Israel: A Beachhead in the Middle East, which Jacobs contends is “a necessary and forceful rebuke of those on the left and right who insist that Washington is Israeli-occupied territory.”

First, a book review it is not. One cannot do justice to any serious book in just 764 words which is the length of Jacobs’ piece, although whether Gowans’ book which amplifies the charge of antisemitism can be taken seriously is open to question.

If not a book review then, what is it? Let’s start with the title, a quote from the late general and Secretary of State Alexander Haig whose very sanity came into question following the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan when Vice-President George HW Bush was away from the capital. At that point, as the New York Times described it, Haig “raced upstairs [to the press room] and went directly to the lectern before a television audience of millions. His knuckles whitening, his arms shaking, Mr. Haig declared to the world, ‘I am in control here, in the White House.’ He did not give that appearance.”

In any case, Gowans use of Haig’s quote in his book turned out to be hearsay from a dubious source.

From Jacobs’ opening sentence, it seems clear that his intention was to provide “damage control” for the plethora of predominantly Jewish organizations whose primary raison d’etre is pushing the agenda of the Netanyahu government on Capitol Hill whose activities, not to mention, existence, have been largely ignored or dismissed by others on the “Left” who share Jacobs’ aversion to blaming even a segment of American Jews for anything. (Think Noam Chomsky, Phyllis Bennis, Stephen Zunes).

“The Israeli government does not control the foreign policy of the United States.,” is how Jacobs began his article. True, but none of those he is criticizing argue that it is and Jacobs must surely know this. They affirm, with considerable evidence to back it up, that supporters of the Israeli government are largely responsible for shaping US policies in the Middle East and nowhere else. In other words, Jacobs has created a straw man.

If we restrict ourselves to this millennium, one only has to look at the appointees from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) that George W Bush brought into his administration, and particularly to the Pentagon and who became activated, like sleeper cells, after the events of September 11.

From PNAC, came a troop of 20, foremost among them, Dick Cheney, Dubya’s Vice-President, Donald Rumsfeld, (Secretary of Defense), Paul Wolfowitz, (Deputy Secretary of Defense), Richard Perle, (Defense Advisory Board), Doug Feith, (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy), Lewis (Scooter) Libby (Cheney’s Chief of Staff), and John Bolton who received a recess appointment as UN ambassador when it was clear he wouldn’t get Senate approval. (Bolton would later be hailed by Israel’s UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, as “the sixth man in our office” and last year, after replacing H.R. McMaster as Trump’s National Security Adviser, he received the “Defender of Israel” award from the Zionist Organization of America).

Launched in 1997 by neocons Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, (son of Irving Kristol, the neocon movement’s co-founder), PNAC drew attention on Capitol Hill the following year when it sent a letter to then President Bill Clinton, calling on him to overthrow Saddam. Among its signatories were Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Legislation was passed, the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998, which stated that it was US policy to oust Saddam but no action was taken or contemplated.

What makes the Israeli connection indisputable was that PNAC was preceded a year earlier by a policy paper prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, entitled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” Its authors were a study group led by Perle which included Feith, David Wurmser and his Israeli wife Meyrav Wurmser and called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, highlighting Iraq’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Wurmser would go on to become a Middle East Advisor for Vice President Cheney and with Feith, help set up the Office of Special Plans to produce evidence of Iraq’s WMDs when the CIA failed to come up with it.

What those who insist that the 2003 war on Iraq was just a continuation of traditional US imperialist policies refuse to acknowledge is that the invasion of Iraq marked a 180 degree break with what US Middle Eastern policy had been up to that point, namely, to maintain stability in that oil rich region.

That is why former president George HW Bush, his Secretary of State, James Baker and his National Security Advisor, former general, Brent Scowcroft, publicly opposed the war and why Bush Sr resisted demands from the neocons and Israel’s allies in the media, to have US troops march to Baghdad and remove Saddam from power after ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait a decade earlier.

When this fact was pointed out to George W Bush by Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, Dubya responded, “I answer to a higher father.”

Before the war went south, Perle and Wolfowitz were competing in the media for credit for the great victory over Saddam. Both men, along with Cheney, Feith, and Bolton, were also members of JINSA’s Advisory Board, an influential but little known neocon operation that came into existence in 1976, apparently in response to President Gerald Ford having suspended a shipment of US jet fighters to Israel for six months upon Israel’s refusal to give up land in the Egyptian Sinai that it had captured in the October 1973 war.

Moreover, Ford sent a private letter to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warning him about a likely re-evaluation of US-Israel relations, hinting that he might call for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders. Rabin made the letter public which alerted AIPAC to respond. It struck back against Ford by getting 76 senators, three-quarters of that body, to sign a letter to the president, warning him that the US-Israeli bond was sacrosanct and should not be meddled with. Ford quickly backed off and over the years, many more such letters, drafted by AIPAC, would reach the desk of our presidents.

JINSA saw its goal as making sure that the US and Israeli militaries would become so entwined that no future president would ever contemplate or be able to disentangle the armed forces of both countries. To ensure that, it created a large advisory board composed of former generals and admirals and a few police chiefs while arranging programs to take newly retiring generals and admirals on all expense paid trips to Israel. There are currently 57 former generals and admirals on the JINSA advisory board. The first and last article about JINSA in a national publication appeared in The Nation in 2002 and like PNAC, its existence has been ignored by those engaged in damage control on Israel’s behalf.

Even Colin Powell’s attribution of the war to Donald Rumsfeld’s embrace by “the JINSA crowd,” in Karen DeYoung’s biography of Powell, Soldier, did not stir any of the latter to reconsider their positions.

Going back to the first US war on Iraq, all of the sanctions put in place against governments viewed by Israel as its enemies, have largely been the work of AIPAC and its sister organizations such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. WINEP or TWI (its current acronym) was spawned by AIPAC in 1985 in order to make the step from lobbying for Israel to actually making policy itself. It has become arguably the most influential of the Beltway think tanks whose “experts” routinely appear before Congressional committees and whose op-ed pieces invariably find their way into the opinion sections of our leading newspapers and the inboxes of members of Congress.

To enforce the sanctions, after 9/11, President Bush set up a special department in the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence which, beginning with the appointment of pro-Israel zealot, Stuart Levey, became the exclusive provenance of pro-Israel Jews, the latest of whom, Sigal Mandelker, is actually an Israeli. It is this department, in essence, an arm of the Israeli government, that determines what countries and companies are adhering to or breaking sanctions on Iran and Syria and which organizations should be placed on the terrorist watch list.

When Obama took office, the Israeli press reported that Levey had made a special trip to Israel to assure Netanyahu that under the new president, nothing would change.

Were there not sanctions on Iraq and on Iran, the major US oil companies would have been more than happy to do business with both countries. The last company that tried, Conoco, was obliged to cancel a deal it had made with Tehran in March, 1995.

The only way the Obama Administration was able to sign the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran and the other members of the UN Security Council plus Germany was to declare it to be an agreement, not a treaty, thus avoiding having a vote on it by the Senate where it would surely have been defeated. Not to be denied, Israel’s friends in Washington had the Senate pass a bill requiring Obama and succeeding presidents to ratify US participation in the agreement every 90 days. This was the equivalent of a poison pill and a perfect set-up for Donald Trump.

There is far too much evidence of Israel’s control of Washington to include in this short article but two more items should seal the debate.

The first begins in 2015 in Las Vegas when Jewish multi billionaire Sheldon Adelson held two auditions for prospective Republican presidential candidates at his Venetian Hotel to determine which one would be the best for Israel. Adelson was at the time and still is the owner of the most widely read newspaper in Israel, Israel Hayom, which is provided free and has been seen, until recently, as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu. On the day he opened his newspaper, he apologized to his Israeli audience for having “worn the uniform of the US army and not the Israeli Defense Forces,” a clip of which can still be seen on You Tube.

Adelson’s choices after the auditions were first Ted Cruz and then Marco Rubio. When both failed to attract the voters, Adelson switched to Trump, pumping tens of millions of dollars into his campaign and, judging from Trump’s gifts to Israel, not the least of which was moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, it is safe to say that Adelson bought himself a president.

Cut now to last December, in Florida, at the annual convention of the relatively new Israeli American Council, the major funder of which happens to be Adelson. On the stage as the host was Israeli-American Haim Saban, one of the Democratic Party’s major funders who once boasted to a New Yorker writer that he was a “one issue man and that issue is Israel.”

It was shortly after the November mid-term elections and Saban was interviewing the returning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, the Senate’s top ranking Democrat. As Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) described it on Dec. 2:

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who likely will be speaker of the new US House of Representatives, listed pro-Israel lawmakers she plans to name to key committee positions and said her party remained fundamentally pro-Israel.

’We have people very well placed to share our values,’ Pelosi, a California Democrat, said in addressing the final event Sunday of the annual Israeli-American Council conference, after listing planned assignments.

Pelosi said she would name Rep. Nita Lowey, D-New York, to chair the Appropriations Committee; Eliot Engel, D-New York, to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee; Ted Deutch, D-Florida, to chair the Middle East subcommittee; Adam Schiff, D-California, to chair the Intelligence Committee; Alcee Hastings, D-Florida, to chair the human rights-monitoring Helsinki Committee; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, to a key Appropriations Committee position; and Lois Frankel, D-Florida, to a key Foreign Affairs Committee position.

All have longstanding pro-Israel records and all but Hastings are Jewish.”1

Pelosi’s exchange with Saban can still be viewed on You Tube but don’t look for any report on that conference outside of the Jewish press. The corporate media, like Congress, is under the thumb of the Israel Lobby.

Notes

  1. Wasserman-Schultz had been the chair of the DNC who was forced to resign after the release by WikiLeaks of the DNC’s emails exposed the DNC’s efforts to sabotage Bernie Sanders on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Obviously, that did not hurt her in Pelosi’s eyes.

Jeffrey Blankfort can be reached at: jblankfort@earthlink.net.

September 12, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 10 Comments

Condoleeza Rice wants the US to stay in Afghanistan, and this time it’s for ‘the women’

RT | September 11, 2019

Former National Security Advisor and State Secretary Condoleeza Rice appeared on a late-night comedy show, calling for a continued US presence in Afghanistan, this time for apparently feminist reasons. She was swiftly called out.

After some de-rigeur Trump-bashing, host Stephen Colbert and Rice got down to the topic at hand: President Donald Trump’s decision to host, and then cancel, a meeting with the Afghan Taliban at Camp David last week.

Speculating that Trump might cut a deal with the Islamic militants to wrap up the war in Afghanistan –which turns 18 next month– by any means necessary, Rice made the case for continued American involvement in the country. “I hope we’re not going to abandon the women of Afghanistan,” she proclaimed, to cheers from the audience.

“We’ve gone a long way toward helping to create a decent place for the Afghan people to live,” she continued, without mentioning that an estimated 38,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, along with more than 2,400 US troops, 4,000 US contractors and 58,500 Afghan military and police personnel.

While she trumpeted the fact that women may now join Afghanistan’s military and police force, Rice did not mention the near-weekly attacks on these forces, like the Taliban bombings that killed at least 179 security personnel in one week at the beginning of this month.

Commenters were quick to call out the former Bush administration official. “‘Women of Afghanistan’ is a strange euphemism for defense contractors,” one wrote. “[I] Love late night comedy,” another sarcastically quipped.

And while life for these women under the Taliban was certainly repressive and cruel, life with American boots on the ground and drones in the sky can be nasty, brutish and short, too. A joint American/Afghan airstrike killed seven civilians on Monday, obliterating a crowd reportedly on their way to a wedding party in the Sayed Abad district. Furthermore, a UN report revealed in July that Afghan government forces and their US and international partners had killed more civilians in the first half of 2019 than the Taliban, Islamic State, and other anti-government fighters.

Colbert, however, did not press Rice on any of this. Instead he took a moment to plug Rice’s new book, unironically entitled ‘To Build a Better World.’ Colbert’s show was just one stop on a recent media blitz for Rice, who told CBS on Tuesday that “No one but the US” can guarantee stability in Afghanistan.

September 11, 2019 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , | 2 Comments

More Americans Questioning Official 9/11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative

By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | September 11, 2019

Today the event that defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice.

While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter.

Yet, with 18 years having come and gone — and with the tireless efforts from victims’ families, first responders, scientists and engineers — the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the “official story” of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil. 

For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks.

While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to “never forget,” the commissioners’ call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause:

Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries — not just airplanes and the ensuing fires — caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;”

In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as “conspiracy theorists” for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.

Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting’s conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway.

“We’re a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force,” Gioia said. “We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won’t be the last,” he added.

While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was “set up to fail” from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day.

For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the “official” report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks.

Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the “official story” say were deliberately kept from them.

Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in

Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners’ call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building — World Trade Center Building 7 — also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or “Building 7,” was never struck by a plane.

It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a “secret office” in WTC 7 and that, after the building’s destruction, “a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers.” WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers.

Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites “uncontrolled building fires” as leading to the building’s destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and released on Monday.

WTC 7 fall animation GIF

Source | Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building’s fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn’t know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed.

Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public “goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to ‘office fires,’ everyone in the country would have heard about it.”

The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that “the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them,” as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.

Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported,  while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District’s recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7’s collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.

The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7’s collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires.

The study, currently available as a draft, concluded that “uncontrolled building fires” did not lead the building to fall into its footprint — tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse — as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study — authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan — found that “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse,” while also concluding “that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

This “near-simultaneous failure of every column” in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7’s collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.

Still “crazy” after all these years?

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal.

Yet, this 9/11 anniversary — with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation — is it still “crazy” to be skeptical of the official story?

Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more “off limits,” it was often first responders, survivors and victims’ families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades — not wild-eyed “conspiracy theorists,” as many have claimed.

The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American.

However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims’ families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, “Never Forget” has been nearly synonymous with “Never Question.”

Yet, failing to ask those questions — even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7’s collapse — is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

September 11, 2019 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism | , | 6 Comments

Media, Democrats lament Trump firing national security hawk

RT – September 10, 2019

Within hours of his firing by President Donald Trump, the hawkish national security adviser John Bolton was embraced by mainstream media outlets and even some Democrats, even if only as an excuse to criticize the White House.

Trump announced Bolton’s ouster via Twitter on Tuesday morning, stunning even those in Washington who have reported on the possibility of such a move for months. As the shock wore off, however, reporters and lawmakers figured they would offer their thoughts – which, unsurprisingly, went along the usual lines.

“Can’t wait for the Resistance, led by Maddow & O’Donnell & Hayes, to embrace John Bolton as their hero,”quipped commentator George Szamuely. While the trio he named have so far been silent, their colleague “Morning Joe” Scarborough chimed in along those very lines.

“John Bolton has been fiercely critical of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and North Korea for years,” he tweeted, adding that it never made sense for Bolton to work for Trump, because he “has never been cozy with those who count Americans as their enemy.”

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and Oliver Darcy of CNN raced each other to present Bolton as someone who “felt uncomfortable defending” the administration on various issues, from tariffs to – of course – Russia.

“Putin ordered Trump to fire Bolton. Tune in tonight for our all-star FBI/CIA panel!” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted mockingly, alluding to CNN and MSNBC having hired a number of Obama administration spy officials.

To hear the senior Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say it, Bolton was a valuable counterweight to Trump. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) argued that Trump only appreciated “yes-men” and that Bolton at least “presented counterviews at times.” He would not explain how Bolton stayed in his post for nearly 18 months.

“Mr. Bolton and I didn’t agree on a lot of issues. But he was a straight shooter. He knows the circumstances. I’m sure he told the president what was going on. The president may not have liked to hear it. And it’s unfortunate if the president won’t accept professional advice,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland).

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) used the opportunity to denounce Trump for “government-by-chaos approach and his rudderless national security policy,” alleging that Bolton’s “extreme views” weren’t enough for the president.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the same approach, saying Bolton’s sudden departure “is a symbol of the disarray that has unnerved our allies since day one of the Trump Administration.”

Disagreeing with the party leadership once more, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) called Bolton’s firing “good riddance,” describing him as “one of the leading proponents of making the world a more dangerous place.”

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) praised Bolton as a friend who provided “wise counsel to multiple administrations,” and expressed hope that his departure does not mean Trump will not “go soft on Iran.”

September 10, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 2 Comments