Educators, Holocaust group join Sept. 11 museum in ‘teaching’ children official 9/11 lies
By Craig McKee | Truth and Shadows | May 15, 2014
The 9/11 official story is rooted in deception, distortion, and misdirection. Now all of its lies have been dressed up and put on display in an expensive federally funded monument for paying customers.
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is more of a walk-in indoctrination center than a tribute to the victims of 9/11. It’s a piece of propaganda made of glass and steel that plays on emotions and on the sincere desire of people to honor those who sacrificed their lives in this false flag event.
The Memorial and Museum’s web site not only reiterates all the same lies, but it even explains a framework that educators will be using to indoctrinate children so they can grow up to be believers in the war on terror and the need for more wars and greater and greater security and surveillance. Even as the mainstream media turn their attention to misrepresenting other events, the museum and accompanying “lesson plans” for school children will continue to do their work.
On the site, we learn that: “The National September 11 Memorial & Museum has partnered with the New York City Department of Education and the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education to develop a robust set of 9/11 lessons for K-12 classrooms.”
The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education (created by the State of New Jersey) is involved in creating lessons that teach children that Muslims are the bad guys and that they attacked America? Oh wait, I forgot – they are making it clear that it’s not all Muslims, just the “extreme” ones. These lessons are directed at all age groups, and the content will be used within a wide array of subjects and courses.
Through its exhibits, the museum purports to tell the story of what happened on September 11, 2001 – that 19 Muslim extremists led by Osama bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people by hijacking four airliners and crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. We will even be shown photographs of the 19 alleged hijackers” (although I guarantee they won’t use the word “alleged”), which will be interesting since several of those turned out to be alive after 9/11, and no proof has been presented that establishes that any of the 19 ever boarded any of the planes.
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth has produced brochures in the same style as the official ones that teams of volunteers pass out to visitors to the museum, which it calls “an elaborate, taxpayer-funded, public relations campaign to forever cement the fantastic claims of the official conspiracy theory into the history books.”
I wish I’d written that.
In a fundraising email, AE describes what it wants to do in response to this PR campaign: “This historical revisionism needs to be countered with an all-out effort of the truth of 9/11. By printing thousands of educational flyers and distributing them via teams of AE911Truth volunteers at the memorial grounds entry, we can inform the public as to why the 9/11 Memorial Museum is largely a fraud.”
Muslim Americans have been the victims of increased bigotry and hate since they were tagged as the perpetrators of 9/11 more than 12-and-a-half years ago. Now, Muslim- and Arab-American groups fear this will happen all over again as a result of a seven-minute video called “The Rise of al-Qaeda” that is shown as one of the exhibits.
The film, they charge, perpetuates the myth that Muslims were responsible for 9/11, using terms like “Islamists” and “jihad” in the presentation. They say it fails to offer any nuance that would help people to understand that blaming Muslims in general for what happened is unjust and inaccurate. Based on the protest in New York in 2010 over the plan to open a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero, their concerns appear justified.
“The Rise of al-Qaeda” is even being protested by the Memorial’s own Interfaith Advisory Committee, which reacted with alarm when it was allowed to watch the short film last year. The committee’s only Imam resigned in protest in March. As quoted in the New York Times, Sheikh Mostafa Elazabawy, the imam of Masjid Manhattan, wrote in a letter to the museum’s director: “Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site.”
The museum responded with some unintentional self-parody when they stated that they are standing by the film because it has been vetted by scholars of Islam and terrorism. What a relief to hear that scholars of the very lies that 9/11 represents are on the job, making sure the film sends the “proper” message.
A coalition of groups, including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), wants changes to the video so that it is made clear that the extremist Muslims who it agrees carried out 9/11 are not portrayed as being representative of the more than 1.6 billion Muslims around the world.
In a letter to museum president Joe Daniels and director Alice Greenwald, the coalition raised concerns about the video, which neither they nor the media have been allowed to see. The letter states:
“We have learned that you have been aware, since at least June 2013, that viewers have found this video confusing and possibly inflammatory. The museum’s own interfaith religious advisory group has repeatedly asked that this video be edited, with their concerns being dismissed.”
According to their testimony, the video:
- Deploys haphazard and academically controversial terminology, in particular “Islamic” and “Islamist”, to generalize, unnecessarily, about al-Qaeda’s acts of terrorism.
- Does not properly contextualize al-Qaeda as a small organization in comparison to the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
- Uses stereotypical, accented English for speakers of Arabic in translation.
- May give some viewers, especially those not familiar with the subtleties of the terminology being used, the impression that Islam, as a religion, is responsible for September 11.
I completely support the Muslim- and Arab-American groups in their protest of the stereotyping that it appears that the film contains. But I’m concerned about the fact that the big lie – that any kind of Muslims pulled off 9/11 – is being accepted by these groups. I think they concede too much when they accept the premise that an extremist Muslim group called al-Qaeda was actually behind the alleged terrorist attacks when the evidence shows that this is just a smokescreen to disguise the real culprits and to hide their real motives.
The truth of the matter is that Muslims were not responsible for 9/11 – period. The evidence simply isn’t there to show otherwise. By putting the focus on the idea that Muslims as a whole are not violent and that al-Qaeda is not representative of what Islam is all about just falls into the trap set by the actual perpetrators.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say: I’m not a Muslim and I have not been victimized in the way that they have since 9/11. For them to argue that the official story is false would be very tricky and would certainly result in more hostility coming their way. And, of course, they may genuinely believe the official story. After all, Muslim Americans are subject to the same disinformation and propaganda that everyone else is.
The real purpose of the museum
A tour around the web site of the Memorial and Museum offers a good summary of the language of the 9/11 official story and its accompanying talking points. On the page “9/11 FAQ,” we get all the key elements of the story fed to us by the 9/11 Commission, NIST, and other official agencies. But they get the year of the London bombings wrong (it was 2005, not 2007), they offer the lie that al-Qaeda took responsibility for several terrorist attacks including 9/11 (the “confession” video features an Osama bin Laden “double” and contains serious inconsistencies).
The Memorial and Museum’s announced mission is to honor the victims and to “educate” future generations. It will not succeed in doing either, however. In fact, by perpetuating the 9/11 lie, it does exactly the opposite. The only way to meaningfully honor the victims is by telling the truth about what happened. And no one in officialdom is willing to do that more than a dozen years after the fact.
The memorial’s web site is full of “information” about the artifacts contained within its walls (actual twin WTC girders, an exposed portion of the “slurry wall” that keeps the site from being flooded, an actual staircase that was used to escape one of the towers). But the most disturbing thing the site addresses is the museum’s effort to direct its propaganda at children who have no choice in the matter. I wonder what kind of mark a student will get if they write an essay questioning whether the official story is true?
On the surface, the site has some useful and positive things to suggest: including pointing out how destructive it can be to “compare the suffering of one person to another” or to “assign blame to an entire group.”
Sounds good, but what is suggested is that parents and educators focus on the heroic efforts of both victims and rescuers on 9/11, because 9/11 is “actually thousands of individual stories.” That’s true: everyone who was in New York, and particularly those who had a connection to the World Trade Center site in some way experienced the event in their own way. Some were true heroes, risking and even giving their lives to help others. Some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid with their lives.
But there is a bigger picture. And they don’t want you to look at that. They want you to stick to the emotion of the event, the stories, the courage, and the loss. Don’t look at whether the official explanation of the event fits with the evidence. Don’t “disrespect the victims” by questioning anything you’ve been told.
By the way, victims’ family members and recovery workers don’t have to pay the $24 adult entrance fee to the museum, while firefighters, the group that has paid a more terrible price than just about any other, gets a discount. That’s right, a discount.
Here are 10 things about 9/11 that deserve more attention – and 5 that deserve less
People need to know just how absurd the official story of the Shanksville “crash” is
By Craig McKee | Truth and Shadows | October 2, 2014
Let’s face it: the 9/11 Truth Movement is all over the place. But that’s not surprising – nor necessarily bad.
When you have an official story that is so clearly false in so many ways, there are going to be a multitude of valid angles from which to examine and expose the deception. There are also going to be many directions the movement can take to advance the cause and to awaken the uninitiated.
But all these ways are not created equal. When you have many thoughtful and intelligent truthers, some not-so-intelligent and not-so-thoughtful truthers, and an undetermined number of outright disinformation agents, you’re bound to get a “diversity of opinion” that would make Cass Sunstein very happy indeed.
So how do we decide what is important and was is not? How do we know where our efforts are best directed? It’s clear that we must keep our focus on things that will advance the cause, which is to expose the lies of 9/11 and other false flag operations. To this end, there are clearly some areas of 9/11 research that deserve all the attention they get and more. Meanwhile, there are areas that are getting attention to the detriment of the cause. Below, I list the areas I feel deserve more attention and those that deserve less, or none, especially when it comes to awakening newcomers. I know that readers will have their own items that they feel should be included. Some will also want to contest the items on my two lists.
We need to be fighting this battle on a multitude of fronts because the movement as a whole has to expose all elements of the 9/11 lie. When you look at the entirety of the bogus official story, the case for inside job becomes overwhelming. For the movement as a whole, picking just one area to concentrate on is not the best approach. What convinced me was an accumulation of all the evidence. The twin towers, Building 7, the Pentagon, Shanksville, the military stand down, the absence of proof that any alleged hijackers boarded any planes, the bogus Bin Laden “confession” video. And so much more.
Of course, individuals and organizations can be extremely effective by specializing – Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth continues to be very valuable by focusing on the controlled demolition of the twin towers and Building 7. It is also doing a great job reaching out to the public and the media with the Rethink 9/11 campaign and other efforts in an effort to advance the cause.
And, no, it’s not as simple as saying let’s avoid obvious disinformation. Yes, overcoming disinformation is one of the greatest challenges we face, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease – or perceived disease. We’ll never be able to eradicate all the ideas we don’t like, especially if those ideas are being promulgated by fake truthers, because they’ll never get tired and go away. If we turn our attention away from our best evidence and instead spend all our time trying to crush bad ideas and attack those who may or may not sincerely believe them, we risk bringing more attention to those ideas than they really deserve. And the idea that if we don’t obliterate everything we think is disinfo then “we’ll look stupid to the world” is overstated, in my opinion.
We can’t destroy disinformation completely but we can expose the mechanisms that make it function and in doing so, marginalize it. And we can stay on message with the strongest and most undeniable evidence.
And there’s so much to choose from.
MORE ATTENTION SHOULD GO TO…
1. Shanksville and the self-burying plane: Without a doubt, the single major area of 9/11 study that has received the least attention is the impossible tale of Flight 93, which is supposed to have crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The plane, so the absurd story goes, is supposed to have crashed into the field and buried itself in the “soft” soil with the hole covering itself in. That’s right, the government claims (without a shred of proof offered to the world) that the plane ended up completely underground. They had to dig the whole thing up (except for the drivers license of one of the alleged hijackers, which was suitably singed and found above ground). It’s really more accurate to say that most people – at least 99 out of 100 – have no idea that this is what the official story says. How many have a clue, for example, that the scar in the field that was supposedly made by the wings penetrating the ground could be seen in aerial photographs taken by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1994? The only thing added on 9/11 was the nice round crater in the middle that represented the supposed impact of the hollow, aluminum fuselage. And people actually believe this…
2. Evidence that a 757 did not hit the Pentagon: The claim that annoys me more than any other is that we should ignore the Pentagon evidence because it is “too controversial” and “too divisive.” This is nonsense and plays right into the hands of the perpetrators. The only reason it appears controversial is because some misguided members of the Truth Movement, along with some real live disinfo agents, are trying to convince us that the part of the official story that says a plane crashed into the Pentagon – and plowed through three of its five rings – is actually true.
I get why disinfo agents would want us to ignore the overwhelming evidence that a plane crash was faked there, because a faked crash would positively implicate the Pentagon itself, but I have never understood why any sincere truther would do so. The justification given – that if it proves untrue later it will embarrass the movement – is paper thin. Some even use the demonstrably faked video images as proof that a real plane zipped along the lawn, parallel to the ground. They point to pictures of scraps of metal as proof of the crash (Look! There’s a piece painted with American Airlines colors!). They’ll even resort to claiming that the DNA evidence proved that a real plane crashed.
When did these people forget that this was an event designed to look like one thing (terrorist hijackings and crashing of commercial planes into specific targets) when it was actually another? The World Trade Center “attack” was supposed to create the impression that plane impacts caused so much damage that the buildings collapsed. But we know that the buildings were destroyed by explosives, not jet fuel and not plane impacts.
So why do we want to toss out the overwhelming evidence that the Pentagon event was not what it appeared to be? When you combine: the wreckage (or lack of it), the damage to the building (or lack of it), the absence of trenches dug in the lawn and building foundation by the engines; the two video views that are incompatible with each other; the withheld video from 85 other Pentagon cameras, the aviation evidence, the highly credible witnesses interviewed by CIT, the Flight Data Recorder (which, whether the data is fake or not still discounts the official story), and quite a lot more, you get a very clear picture that no airliner crashed into the Pentagon.
3. The absence of evidence that any “hijackers” ever boarded any planes: This is a hugely important area that needs a great deal more attention (It will be the subject of a future post). The fact is that there is not a shred of hard, verifiable evidence that any one of the 19 alleged hijackers ever boarded any of the four alleged 9/11 flights. Not one.
There is no video footage that proves any of them boarded. All we have is video showing Mohamed Atta and Abdul al-Omari in the Portland airport earlier that morning, and we have the five alleged hijackers of Flight 77 in Washington’s Dulles International Airport (with no time stamp or camera identification number that would authenticate the footage).
There are no witnesses that can positively place any of them on any of the planes. There are no authenticated flight manifests that place any of them on any planes. Nor are there any authenticated boarding passes. We can add to that the fact that several alleged hijackers turned up alive after 9/11 and that the 19 alleged hijackers’ identities have changed numerous times without an explanation being given for how the replacement names were arrived at.
4. Positive initiatives to advance the cause: it’s easy to dismiss some of the public awareness and legal efforts to punch holes in the official 9/11 lie, but I think we do so to our own detriment. Yes, we might think that one initiative or another may not succeed, but I believe we need to continue to hack away at the official story until we find a vulnerable point that will begin unravelling the public’s trust in that story. Certainly the worst thing we can do is nothing. To be sure, we have all been frustrated by the court failures of Ellen Mariani, April Gallop, and others. But there have also been hopeful signs, including video of the destruction of Building 7 is showing on a huge digital screen in New York City’s Times Square as we speak. We also have the rest of the Rethink 9/11 campaign; the High-Rise Safety Initiative; the recent documentaries September 11: The New Pearl Harbor by Massimo Mazzucco and The Anatomy of a Great Deception by David Hooper; Richard Gage’s appearance on C-Span and on Jesse Ventura’s Off the Grid, the opportunity afforded by the 9/11 Memorial and Museum to focus opposition and reach the public, and many other developments. In fact, we should be thinking of new and creative ways every day to shine a light on 9/11.
The 9/11 Truth Movement appears to be revitalized and making progress. We even saw a mainstream newspaper, the Fresno Bee, publish an opinion piece calling for a new investigation into 9/11. We could be discouraged by the fact that 13 years have passed, but I think people are starting to notice that we’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.
5. The workings of disinformation: There is no question that the 9/11 Truth Movement has been under assault from agents, infiltrators, and shills since very early in its existence. It is also clear that this assault has had a damaging effect on the movement. As a result, it has become essential that we discuss and come to understand how disinformation works, how it is being used against us, and how best to react to it (and when not to react at all).
Disinformation, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is:
“The dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it; false information so supplied.”
DELIBERATELY false information.
So when someone who purports to be a 9/11 truther shares information that he or she knows to be false, this is disinformation. This does NOT mean that all incorrect information and poorly supported arguments are disinformation.
6. The connection between the Anthrax attacks and 9/11: This one is excellent timing considering the recent publication of Graeme MacQueen’s new book The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. MacQueen shows how the original official story of the anthrax attacks – that it was the same Muslim extremists who supposedly perpetrated 9/11 – had to be tossed when it became clear that al-Qaeda did not have the means to produce or acquire highly sophisticated and weaponized anthrax. MacQueen shows us the role the media played in raising the fear level of a biological attack (and specifically an anthrax attack) even before the first case was reported. He also explains how the targeting of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy helped facilitate passage of the Patriot Act. MacQueen has done his part to reveal the depth of this deception, now it’s up to the rest of us to make sure everybody hears about it and understands its implications.
7. The links between 9/11 and the advancing police state: The intelligence apparatus of the United States (and those of other Western countries, including my native Canada), has grown massively since 9/11, and this is no accident. The Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act and many other legal (and illegal) initiatives are steadily hacking away at the U.S. Constitution. And it’s all done under the guise of protecting the population against terrorists. The problem is that most of these supposed terrorists and their groups end up having ties to Western intelligence (and this was going on before 9/11: Try Googling operations Gladio and Northwoods). The war on terror is a deception that is designed to scare us into surrendering our freedom, our privacy, our safety, and our right to determine our own future.
We’ve seen recently how local police forces have been equipped with military equipment that they could not – under any reasonable conditions – ever need. But they are using it against the population. People are no longer to be served and protected, they are the enemy to be controlled.
It seems very clear that the infrastructure is being put in place for complete martial law. This includes FEMA camps and Fusion Centers and immigration checkpoints and Constitution free zones. Add to that, the erosion of the sovereignty of nations being orchestrated by a global elite through the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, and other organizations, and you have a very disturbing picture of where our future is headed.
8. The links between 9/11 and past deceptions and false flags: 9/11 is not unique, except maybe in its scope and its audacity. Operations like the Kennedy and King assassinations, the London 7/7 bombings, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Operation Northwoods, Operation Gladio, MK-Ultra, Pearl Harbor, and a host of other events and programs fit into a historical context that includes 9/11 and recent events like the Boston Marathon bombing (which was a dress rehearsal for martial law). The more we educate the public about the history of false flag operations and other deceptions that trick us into supporting things we otherwise would not, the better chance we have of waking some people up and reaching a critical mass.
And a major part of this, of course, is looking at who was and is responsible for all of these events. Who benefited? Who had foreknowledge? Who picked the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 to be out of their office because his wife made an appointment for him with his dermatologist?
9. Why the “let it happen on purpose” position is untenable: Some people cling to the notion that incompetence was the reason for the “success” of the 9/11 operation. This is the position that the U.S. government itself would like us to take. But it holds no water at all.
Others are willing to believe that the government found out about a coming terrorist attack and decided to allow it to happen. This is known as the “let it happen on purpose” or LIHOP position. But the position that the evidence points to is that 9/11 was an inside job involving the U.S. government (and likely other governments). This is known as the “made it happen on purpose” or MIHOP position.
On a moral level, LIHOP and MIHOP amount to the same thing: mass murder for political gain. But the critical difference – and the reason we must expose the full spectrum of the lie – is that the LIHOP position allows the myth of the Muslim terrorist threat to stand. It accepts that real terrorists wanted to attack the United States (presumably for its “freedoms”) and that they remain a real threat. The truth, of course, is that the terrorist threat is manufactured and groups like al-Qaeda are really instruments of Western intelligence.
10. Eliminating language that supports the official story: We must carefully consider the words we use to describe what happened on 9/11 so that we don’t inadvertently reinforce the official story. This means we should never refer to “what hit the Pentagon” or “the terrorist attacks of 9/11” or “the plane that crashed in Shanksville” or “the 9/11 hijackers.” I know it means using “allegedly” and “supposedly” a lot, but it has to be done. As Barrie Zwicker says, each of these phrases carries the DNA of the 9/11official story.
AND LESS ATTENTION SHOULD GO TO…
1. Judy Wood and Directed Energy Weapons: I just don’t get it. With so much strong evidence available to the Truth Movement, I see no value in arguing about Judy Woods and her non-theory about directed energy weapons and dustified steel. Yes, she has raised some questions. And yes, she authored the glossiest textbook that has been produced about 9/11, but fighting about her won’t bring new and constructive attention to the movement or the effort to tell people that this event was an inside job. To Woods’ opponents, stop obsessing about her.
2. Nukes at the World Trade Center: Even mentioning this (or no planes) is going to get me into trouble with somebody. The nuclear position has been getting a lot of attention lately with the efforts of Jim Fetzer, Don Fox, Gordon Duff, and others to raise the profile of the issue and to take on established figures in the movement like Richard Gage of AE911Truth, Steven Jones, and Niels Harrit over their position that thermite (or nano-thermite) played an important, although not exclusive, role in destroying the three WTC towers. (It is important to note that AE does not claim that thermite destroyed the towers on its own; their position is that it was combined with explosives of some kind.) The proponents of the nuke position say they have already proven their case. Their opponents say there’s no evidence at all to support their claim.
I can’t see how this fight at this time can help us to advance our cause, particularly since AE911Truth has been making some real progress with its public outreach initiatives. Why would we want to work against those efforts when they seem to be bearing some fruit? There is just so much evidence that these buildings were blown up that I think our focus should be on bringing this truth the widest audience possible.
3. Excessive preoccupation with disinformation: This case has been made in the article already. And I mean “excessive” preoccupation. I’m not saying we ignore all disinformation, but I am saying that we have to try and reduce its power to dominate the agenda.
4. Excessive cynicism about the future of 9/11 Truth: it’s an uphill battle and it won’t be won in a year or two. And yes, the deck is stacked against us. But we have to see the positives in small victories and keep pushing forward. Telling each other that it’s hopeless and that we’re tired of making this argument or that argument is not going to help us achieve our goals. If you’re tired and fed up with fighting, take a break. Recharge the batteries. Don’t discourage others from the efforts they are making.
5. The incompetence defense: We have seen a lot of supposed 9/11 truthers like Abby Martin of Russia Today talk about the Aug. 6 memo “warning” the Bush administration about Bin Laden’s intention to attack the U.S. and all the other supposed warnings that an attack was coming. But all of this supports the lie that 9/11 was a real terrorist event that could have been prevented by a stronger and more alert defense. The incompetence theory is the worst thing that anyone who calls themself a truther should ever push. It reinforces the terrorist threat and justifies the continued war on terror.
9/11 researcher exposes failure of 2001 false flag ‘Anthrax attacks’
Review by Barrie Zwicker | Truth and Shadows | November 27, 2014
The “anthrax attacks” that followed on the heels of the “9/11 attacks” have receded into memory for most people, even including those of us who were extremely skeptical about alleged al-Qaeda biowarfare at the time.
Prof. Graeme MacQueen, in his latest book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, [1] sheds light on why most of us have all but forgotten the sensational “anthrax attacks.” They’ve been dropped down the memory hole as a touchstone to justify the “war on terror” because the “anthrax attacks” fraud fell apart.
In his tight (just 214 pages) but definitive account, MacQueen proves beyond doubt that the “anthrax attacks” were a false flag operation. Those who need to be persuaded need look no further than this overdue book.
The “anthrax attacks” were intended as a powerful evil twin of the 9/11 terror fraud. Taken together these ops were to be a one-two punch that would launch the “war on terror,” while simultaneously justifying the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan because allegedly Osama bin Laden directed 9/11 from a cave there. The invasion of Iraq because allegedly Iraq provided al-Qaeda with the anthrax.
But the wheels fell off of the anthrax wagon. MacQueen tracks the twists and turns of the official narrative to show how that happened.
This book, so long overdue, is also most contemporary. The “war on terror” now has been ramped up to the deadly and costly status of a permanent global “war,” a Manichean struggle between “the West” on one side and “the Islamic State” (IS) on the other. The “Islamic State” is a creation of “Western intelligence” serving the corporate militarists of “the West.”
MacQueen could not get deeply into this, since he had to keep his focus on the “anthrax attacks.” But the evidence obliged him to deal with 9/11 because they were twinned at the time. And he has the historical perspective that enables him to write:
… the documentary evidence […] when studied critically, raises serious questions not only about the FBI’s account of the anthrax attacks but also about the U.S. government’s account of what happened on September 11, 2001. Taken together, these sets of evidence erode the rationale for the Global War on Terror.
MacQueen is the founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he taught for 30 years. He’s a leader among the few academics who dare joust with the 800-pound Gorilla of Deception known as 9/11 – and its spinoffs. [2]
The 2001 Anthrax Deception shows how academically-sound evidence, marshaled in plain language in a rational framework, can be a counterforce against any deception.
And what a whack of deceptions MacQueen has to deal with. Take the intentions of the perpetrators, Cheney & Co. MacQueen invented the term the “Double Perpetrator hypothesis” to describe the intendedly clever deception.
The Double Perpetrator hypothesis had advantages over the simple al-Qaeda hypothesis. Spreading anthrax through mailed letters was a primitive and ineffective means of dispersing anthrax if the goal was multiple casualties. This crudity was reinforced by the text of the letters, with their misspellings and unidiomatic English. In the Double Perpetrator hypothesis these primitive elements could be laid at the feet of al-Qaeda, while the source of the sophisticated B. anthracis spores in the envelopes to the senators had to be a state, Iraq, which was known to have once possessed a stockpile of anthrax. A peculiar paradox was thus resolved.
Adding to the credibility of MacQueen’s Double Perpetrator hypothesis is the fact that the twinning effort had already been launched by George Bush. “…on the day of 9/11 there were plenty of allusions to the possibility of a state sponsor of the attacks,” MacQueen writes. “The formal warning to state sponsors occurred at 8:30 p.m. on September 11 with Mr. Bush’s words: ‘We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.’”
Then, addressing a joint session of the 107th Congress on September 20, Bush said: “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
MacQueen notes that “what Bush said formally, many others said crudely. Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer explained on September 28 that the war against terrorism was not about chasing Osama bin Laden or other terrorists. The war was about getting rid of regimes.”
This theme was echoed by columnist George Will. He wrote that the choice to be given to state sponsors of terrorism was “reform or extinction.” Both Krauthammer and Will “spoke openly about Iraq as a target.”
But it was not just columnists’ opinions that were part of what MacQueen calls “a grand plan, not an opportunistic foray.” He writes:
Already in their surprisingly timely book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, published in early October of 2001, Judith Miller and co-authors William Broad and Stephen Engelberg explained that Iraq might use a “surrogate, a terrorist group” to deliver a bioweapon to its target.
My wish is that MacQueen would be stating outright that Miller was clearly a CIA asset planted within the New York Times. She was subsequently disgraced when her 37-year career at the paper was terminated on November 9, 2005. This was, as I wrote in my book Towers of Deception, “six months after the Times found itself obliged to examine some of her work…” and found that 10 of 12 “flawed stories” on explosive issues had been written or co-written by Miller, including those infamously reporting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). All of her journalism, I suggested in my book, bear the “hallmarks [of] extreme dependence on official sources, especially within the national security state apparatus, a dearth of supporting evidence for numerous assertions, and an ideological through-line in perfect sync with that of the White House, just as her … through-line on alleged WMDs in Iraq matched that of the White House.”
It will not surprise anyone reading The 2001 Anthrax Deception who is knowledgeably critical of the grotesque output of mainstream media (MSM) on issues of war, peace and “intelligence” that much of MacQueen’s book, perhaps a third of it, is devoted to MSM lies and propaganda. Without the almost blanket collusion of “news” outlets, the likes of Bush and Cheney would have been revealed as pathetic emperors with no clothing.
But the wheels fell off Cheney & Co.’s wagon when it became too widely known that the weaponized anthrax could only have come from one of the 15 sophisticated labs in the USA making this deadly stuff.
This is when the perps had to switch gears, change the narrative. “Suddenly,” MacQueen writes, “the White House began retreating not only from the Iraq hypothesis but also from the al-Qaeda hypothesis. Ari Fleischer, making an about-face, said on October 26 that, in the words of the Washington Post, ‘a skilled microbiologist and a small sophisticated lab would be capable of producing’ the Daschle anthrax.” (Thomas Daschle was an influential anthrax-targeted U.S. senator.)
This in turn cleared the way for the Plan B “lone wolf” theory, the eventual frame-up of Bruce Ivins, his almost-certainly-not “suicide” and the subsequent dispatch down the memory hole of the entire botched “anthrax attacks” illusion.
It turned out not to be much of a loss for the Machiavellian perps, however, because Cheney & Co. could go head and launch war on Afghanistan and Iraq as they intended all along without the aid of this substance-abusing false flag op. The monster 9/11 deception was alone enough to do the heavy lifting there.
The general brainwashing was easily accomplished through a surplus of media-megaphoned lies, propaganda and spin. These greased the skids for the illegal and bloody aggressions of the USA and its “allies,” including in the case of Afghanistan, Canada.
Perhaps my favourite chapter is eight, in which the author traces the origin and uses of the term “the unthinkable.” Numerous quotes from establishment figures and media pundits show that their use of the term serves radical right wing ideological fear-mongering purposes.
“Why does this matter?” MacQueen asks. “It matters because ‘the unthinkable’ is an expression that functioned to help launch a new conflict framework, the Global War on Terror.”
Part of chapter eight is devoted to a “simple word study” of the language of the infamous document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, released in the year 2000 by the extreme pro-military right wing Project for the New American Century. MacQueen notes that although the term “security” occurs 94 times in the document, the term “Security Council” does not occur at all. Nor does the term “international law.” Keyword counts count, even when they’re zero.
MacQueen’s admirable critique of language leads me to a shortcoming, in my estimation, of The 2001 Anthrax Deception. This may be minor compared to the book’s strengths, but still is worth mentioning.
The author should in my view have drawn more attention throughout the text to the multitudinous and ongoing abuses of language by the perpetrators and the MSM, particularly their abuse of the word “attack” (as applied to 9/11 or the anthrax situation). Any conceivable attack – the word clearly denotes an assault from outside – is severely at odds with “a domestic conspiracy,” as the book’s title has it. The conspiracy of this book unmistakably is an inside phenomenon. A feigned attack should never be called “an attack.” Period.
In fairness, MacQueen addresses the language issue at the outset, but only briefly and in part, and in my view mistakenly. At the end of the Introduction, under the sub-head “A Note on the Hijackers,” he explains:
The alleged hijackers of four planes on September 11, 2001 play an important role in the anthrax story and will be mentioned frequently. To avoid repeated use of the word “alleged” or annoyingly frequent scare quotes (“the hijackers’” I will capitalize the term: Hijackers.
This to me is an odd way to downplay the reality that the alleged hijackers never boarded any of the planes, as Elias Davidsson painstakingly proves in his book Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence.
In other words, for a book such as The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy to be as effective a counterforce against deception as it can be, the language bombs of the perpetrators must be defused before they can explode. Each. And. Every. One. Even within the pages of a dissenting academic activist’s book such as MacQueen’s.
The tools of word bomb dismantling include, besides a robust disquisition on the power of language, a plethora of synonyms such as alleged, supposed, claimed, asserted, made out to be, so-called, professed, purported, ostensible, putative, unproven, charged, declared, stated, contended, argued, maintained – and this is not a complete list.
Deployment of the many synonyms available plus quote marks would not, to me, be “annoyingly frequent” but rather refreshingly combative. They necessarily and importantly must be repeated. This is standard operating procedure required when de-fusing word bombs.
Notwithstanding my rant about language use, I fervently hope for more books from Graeme MacQueen. The world needs his assiduous research skills, his courageous tackling of the really big deceptions, his astute analyses and his clear thinking and writing. (Obviously, I don’t mean to attack him.
[1] From Clarity Press, Inc., Ste. 469, 3277 Roswell Rd. NE, Atlanta GA USA 30305, www.claritypress.com. Available in paper and as an e-book 978-0-9860731-3-7
[2] Graeme MacQueen makes a substantial contribution in Adnan Zuberi’s superb 2013 documentary 9/11 in the Academic Community. McQueen is the first person to be seen in a preview of the doc. The preview runs 3:15 and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFzVKDdCa6s
Terror-scaremongering designed to erode freedoms, stamp out dissent
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | October 18, 2014
As expected, the recent fabricated ISIS terror scare that swept the headlines of Canada’s Zionist-owned media is being used by the neocon regime in Ottawa to give Canada’s spy agency CSIS more sweeping powers to spy on citizens and protect the identities of informants.
“The federal government will face intense scrutiny – perhaps even a constitutional challenge – when it introduces legislation to give its spies more legal powers,” reported the Ottawa Citizen.
Proposed amendments to the act governing CSIS will grant the Canadian spy agency more wiggle room to collaborate with the “Five Eyes” spy network comprised of US, UK, Australia and New Zealand espionage agencies. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the Five Eyes network has been neck-deep in illegal espionage activities targeting millions of their own citizens.
“A second measure,” the Citizen continued, “would give CSIS informants the same anonymity that already exists for police sources, who are not subject to cross-examination and can have their identities hidden, even from trial judges.” The Canadian government’s informants are more than likely responsible for spurring or otherwise concocting the very ‘terror’ plots CSIS claims to have foiled — just like its counterpart in the US has been caught doing time and time again. (See The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson) Problem, reaction, solution — the Machiavellian methodology never fails.
Like Canada, Australia and Britain are endeavoring to empower their spook agencies as well as stiffen their fraudulent “anti-terror” laws in the face of phony ISIS ‘terror plots’ that bear all the hallmarks of intelligence psyops.
That is what the ISIS sham threat is all about — creating a bogus pretext so our governments can strip us of our liberties and stamp out dissent.
British PM David Cameron unveiled the real agenda behind ISIS terrorism fear-mongering — silencing critics of the war on terror and skeptics of the US and UK government versions of 9/11 and 7/7. In September, Cameron delivered a bizarre speech at the UN in which he said with unreserved hubris:
“As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by preachers who claim not to encourage violence, but whose world view can be used as a justification for it. … The peddling of lies: that 9/11 was a Jewish plot and the 7/7 London attacks were staged. The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy. The concept of an inevitable clash of civilizations. We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism – not just violent extremism.”
More and more people are awakening to the truth that 9/11, 7/7 and other major terrorist incidents in the West were staged by US, UK and Israeli intelligence services to provide said countries a pretext to launch the pre-planned Zionist-contrived war on terror against Israel’s enemies. Innumerable masses of people are learning about the dark legacy of Zionism and are starting to speak out about it.
The public’s growing interest in alternative theories about 9/11, 7/7 and other false-flags has alarmed the Western powers-that-be whose present foreign policies hinge upon the big lies surrounding those events. If the true story of 9/11 and 7/7 emerged, the American and British public would rise up in revolt against the unjust and criminal regimes occupying their capitals. The perfidious elites cannot allow that to happen, hence Cameron’s insistence that “non-violent extremists” — 9/11 and 7/7 truthers, anti-Zionists, etc. — are akin to the head-chopping Takfiri marauders of ISIS and should be treated as such.
The manufactured ‘civil war’ in Syria, like the preceding one in Libya, is a deliberate Zionist policy of destabilization. Syria, like Iran, is one of the last bastions of resistance against Israeli hegemony in the region, and has therefore been earmarked for extinction by the usual suspects and their Western lapdogs.
Aside from being impediments to Israel’s imperium, countries like Syria, Iran, Libya, Iraq and other target states have been resilient to globalist attempts to import a degenerate American monoculture into their jurisdictions. These countries affirmed their sovereignty against the globalist cultural imperialists — headquartered in Washington — who seek to export MacDonalds, Burger King and Wal-Mart to the four corners of the earth. The globalists want to erect a global shopping mall on the ruins of traditional cultures.
Unlike in America and much of the deracinated West, the peoples of the Middle East have been widely educated about the Zio-American world menace. Instead of chowing down Big Macs or listening to the putrid rhymes of Kanye West, Middle Easterners are being informed on issues of global importance. Instead of reading trashy gossip mags and stewing over celebrity degeneracy, Iranians are perusing The Protocols of Zion and holding conferences questioning the veracity of ‘the holocaust.’
Neocon Zionists like Daniel Pipes, David Aaronovitch and Jonathan Kay have routinely decried the “conspiracy” culture emanating from homogenous Muslim societies. That’s what Pipes’ book The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy was all about; Aaronovitch’s Blaming the Jews documentary is of a similar vein. The reality is that the Muslim world has figured out the Zionists’ Machiavellian game plan and is therefore being punished for failing to succumb to their decrepit exceptionalist mythology.
A dumbed down, atomized mass of materialistic consumers is what the Zionists and their Big Money cohorts want. A pitiful populace comprised of tattooed, chain-smoking, money-chasing, burger-munching airheads is what pleases the moneyed elite.
The Frankfurt School Zionists conquered much of the West through the promotion of degenerate and dysgenic social norms, thereby weakening the traditional culture of their host nations and effectively taking them over. Since the nation-states of the Middle East have largely thwarted the cultural imperialists’ internal plots, the globalist armies of the West have besieged them.
But there is still a glimmer of hope in the West as more people come to terms with the truth about 9/11, 7/7 and the ‘war on terror’ hoax. Only time will tell if that will be enough to stop the globalist menace from devouring what’s left of our broken world.
Copyright 2014 Brandon Martinez
New Horizon Conference: Meeting of Minds in Tehran
By Eric Walberg | Dissident Voice | October 8, 2014
The 2nd conference “New Horizon: the International Conference of Independent Thinkers” was held in Tehran, September 29–October 1 2014, including over 30 journalists, writers and academics from around the world presenting papers and arguing issues of world geopolitics, with a focus on the Middle East. I came from Canada, along with University of Lethbridge Globalization Studies Professor Anthony Hall, author of Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (2010). It was greeted in western media by hysterical denunciations; firstly, by the American Jewish Committee which accused it of “promoting hatred of Jews and Israel”, and the Anti-Defamation League which accused it of “promoting anti-Semitic propaganda”. The conference almost didn’t take place at all, having been officially cancelled, supposedly as a gesture to the West, after the new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was elected last year. But after a flood of criticism on Iranian websites sympathetic to the organizers, the Iranian Foreign Ministry reversed itself. Nader Talebzadeh, the principle organizer, had had to lobby hard to reinstate the conference, calling the cancellation of the conference “a major mistake on the part of our government”.
“Have our leaders given in so much to the world that they are even afraid of a conference that might hurt Mr Obama’s feelings?” asked one blogger sarcastically.
The 1st New Horizon Conference in September 2012 was denounced in the West when it was addressed by the previous president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, probably best remembered in the West for his 2005 soundbyte that Israel should be “wiped off the map”, referring to Ayatollah Khomeini’s prediction that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” The translation of the Persian text was later corrected but this was ignored in the West, where Ahmedinejad was further accused of “holocaust denial” for suggesting the figure of six million as the number of Jews who died in the holocaust was exaggerated, and he was mocked for suggesting that 9/11 was a conspiracy.
Indeed, most Iranians see 9/11 as involving some degree of conspiracy by the US and/or Israel, but then so do, for instance, 55% of Egyptians. So, not surprisingly, prominent at the New Horizon Conference this year was the world’s leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist, France’s Theirry Meyssan, who in 2002 published what is still considered the classic work on the topic, 9/11: The Big Lie (L’Effroyable imposture), translated into 28 languages, arguing that the attacks were organized by a faction of “the US military industrial complex in order to impose a military regime.” Meyssan also argues that the attack against the Pentagon was not carried out by a commercial airliner but by a missile. Also present was American filmmaker Art Olivier, who produced the feature film Operation Terror (2012), whose scenario followed Meyssan’s.
In a YouGov poll last year, 60% of Americans rejected the official explanation as published in the 9/11 Commission Report (2004), so Meyssan’s call for a UN investigation of 9/11 and the recent petition signed by 100,000 New Yorkers for an investigation of the collapse of World Trade Center building 7 are surely legitimate, though they have been blocked by politicians as “absolutely ridiculous” and “wild fantasies”.
Iran’s current President Rouhani was not associated directly with this year’s conference. Instead he was embroiled in a controversy with UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who both extended his hand in friendship to Rouhani at the UN General Assembly in a “historic meeting”, and then slapped him in the face from the UN General Assembly podium, attacking Iran for its “support for terrorist organizations, its nuclear program, its treatment of its people”, calling it “part of the problem in the Middle East”.
“On the contrary,” said a peeved Rouhani in his address to the UN, blaming the West and Saudi Arabia for sowing the seeds of extremism in the Middle East with “strategic blunders” that have given rise to the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. He also criticized the West’s sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program and reiterated his government’s desire to resolve the dispute, stating that no cooperation with the West against ISIS is possible until the sanctions are lifted. He called Cameron’s comments at the UN “wrong and unacceptable.”
Appropriately, the New Horizon Conference opened with the book launch of the Persian edition of US journalist Gareth Porter’s Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (2014). Porter told me:
Through painstaking checking with experts and an IAEA official, I discovered that the documents submitted to the IAEA, which supposed showed Iranian plans to put nuclear warheads on their missiles, were fabricated by the terrorist group People’s Mojahedin of Iran and were passed on the IAEA by Mossad. They were contradictory—clearly doctored blueprints for an obsolete missile system.
Porter was awarded the UK Gellhorn Prize for investigative journalism in 2012 for exposing official lies concerning US policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. With this latest expose, Porter did for the Iranian nuclear dossier what he and others did after 2003 in exposing the lies that prompted the US invasion of Iraq.
The sessions were varied. “The Gaza War and the BDS Movement Strategies” was addressed by Code Pink activist Medea Benjamin, who has been arrested dozens of time for her plucky protests at Congressional hearings against the war in Iraq, and who famously interrupted a speech by President Barack Obama in May 2013 protesting his continued use of drones against civilians. (She is barred from entering Canada.) Benjamin suggested a new project to highlight illegal Israeli settlements: activists hope to target one of the largest US-based real estate firms, RE/MAX, which “operates in over 90 countries, including Israel, where it sells homes complete with swimming pools in the West Bank to Israeli settlers in defiance of international law.” Every Sunday tens of thousands of “open houses” are held by RE/MAX around the world. Benjamin hopes activists will picket these open houses to embarrass RE/MAX into ceasing their West Bank activities. A session on Islam and the West, “Postsecularism and its Discontents”, emphasized the importance of ethics in Islamic civilization which makes subservience to market diktat unacceptable, and is a major stumbling block to understanding between the West and the Muslim world. “There is no teleology in western society, no guiding morality, only an obsession with materialism, with logos,” argued organizer Arash Darya-Bandari. “We believe it is necessary to control the negative tendencies in culture, such as pornography, alcohol, drugs, prostitution, to strive towards a more moral and justice society.”
“The ‘Islamic’ State Meme, its Precursors, and the US-Israel-Saudi Triangle” heard frontline reports from Meyssan and others about the intentional destruction of the Iraqi and Syrian states by the invasion of Iraq and ongoing western and Israeli support for insurgents in Syria, directly resulting in ISIS’s phenomenal success. “The West has abetted Sunni-Shia differences in the process to keep Muslims divided and allow continued western penetration and control of the growing chaos there,” charged Meyssan. Rouhani’s comment at the UN—“Certain intelligence agencies [who] have put blades in the hands of madmen, who now spare no one,”—is hard to argue with.
In the session “The Israeli Lobby in England”, Stephen Sizer, Anglican vicar and author of Christian Zionism—Road Map to Armageddon? (2004), explained that the vast majority of Zionists are not Jewish, but Christian. This prompted him in 2006 to draft what became known as the Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism, signed by four of the Heads of Churches, declaring Christian Zionism a heretical belief, both immoral and a contradiction of faith. The rector of the University of Middlesex was pressured to rescind Sizer’s PhD but the examination committee wouldn’t budge. Nor has Sizer been cowed by constant harassment, including a break-in and the theft of his computer. At the same time, on his visits to Tehran, Sizer lobbies on behalf of Iranian religious minorities and always brings Persian-language New Testaments as “gifts”. “My intent is to show the Iranians that genuine Christians are not a threat to anyone, but bring the message of peace and love.”
Contrary to the shrill cries in the western media that the conference was anti-Semitic, it was unique in my experience in addressing Zionism and US imperialism forthrightly and intelligently, without a hint of racism. The issue of anti-Semitism was addressed and dismissed, as “There is no issue with Jewish people or the Jewish religion,” explained Darya-Bandari, “but rather with Zionism, that secular distortion of Judaism that itself is racist, and has been used as a pretext to dispossess and kill Palestinians.”
The American Defense League loudly attacked the conference for focusing on Zionist control of western media and the outsize influence of the Zionist Lobby in the US and around the world. So what’s wrong with that? There is more than enough documented proof of this, as I discover when I researched Postmodern Imperialism. The ADL labelled several of the delegates as anti-Semitic, including ex-US Marine Ken O’Keefe, who has led several relief convoys to Gaza, has appeared several times on BBC’s Hardtalk in support of Gaza, and famously renounced his US citizenship in view of US crimes around the world. It should be remembered that the ADL was successfully sued in the 1990s for false accusations of anti-Semitism.
The conference issued a resolution condemning ISIS, Zionism, US unconditional support of Israel, Islamophobia, and calling for activism locally to boycott Israeli goods and to promote understanding between the West and the Muslim world, and to fight sectarianism. “This was a great opportunity to meet anti-imperialist activists from around the world, to bring Russians, Poles, western Europeans, North Americans together with Iranians and other Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, in a forum without sectarianism, truly supporting peace and understanding,” said delegate Mateusz Piskorski, director of the European Centre of Geopolitical Analysis in Warsaw and former MP in the Polish Sejm.
~
The 9/11 Museum’s Biggest Oversight: No Mention of WTC Building 7
By Les Jamieson | sf911truth.org | June 6, 2014
I toured the recently opened 9/11 Museum last night. There is quite a bit to report. The size and scale of the building and many sections are actually impressive. One can see how the general public will be very taken by the entire presentation, and therefore, take what they see as truth.
However, if the original intent of the museum was to pay homage to those who perished, the exhibits are far off the mark. Instead, the creators have co-opted the tragedy to substantiate the official narrative. The museum just solidifies the shock & awe of the events of 9/11, and gives the public a visual and auditory experience that will be firmly etched in their memory far into the future.
There are exhibits on each of the towers. There are photos of their original construction. There were sections of steel columns, elevator parts, and parts of the foundation. There were displays of personal items of those who perished. There were many audio recordings with slide shows being projected of pictures of victims, survivors, and onlookers in a state of terror. There are film clips, and transcripts of conversations from that day. There is an ambulance and a fire truck, which show the damage from the debris. There are videos of the towers on fire. There are even photos of people jumping. Then there are even large videos of the demolition of each tower. But by the time people view these, they’ve been thoroughly distracted and emotionally overcome by the magnitude of the horror people experienced that day, so they cannot recognize the implications of the disintegration and free-fall of 110 stories of steel-framed structures.
There is a section on Osama Bin Laden, the alleged hijackers, Kaleed Sheikh Mohammed, and Al Qaeda. There were two film clips of hijackers passing through the airports. However, the one from Dulles has no time stamp and I think the only other one is actually taken from Portland, ME, not Logan Airport. Nevertheless, people viewing this display were shown exactly who the official narrative wants the blame to be attributed to.
To my surprise, there was even a small section on the public’s questioning of the events. This included photos of people calling for investigations, protestors claiming 9/11 was an inside job, and the cover of Popular Mechanics which supposedly debunked all those “conspiracy theories”. At least the museum planners can attempt to say they were thorough in addressing all of the “focus groups”. But this small section did nothing to go into the broad scope of alternative research based on science and journalistic analysis. If only they had a copy of “The New Pearl Harbor” by David Ray Griffin next to a copy of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses“.
Then, of course, there were quilts, photos, and artifacts that good hearted Americans created in tribute to those who suffered and died. There were photos and statements about how we all came together and rose above the tragedy because we’re resilient and won’t be defeated. After all, we have to keep up our “American exceptionalism”. The framers of the official account took an unspeakable tragedy and turned it into a cause for patriotism.
There was a digital presentation showing the flight paths. There where photos of Shanksville and the Pentagon. But by now you may be noticing there’s a glaring omission to this report. There is nothing on WTC7! I still can’t believe it when the museum covers so much of everything else.
To add further weight to this proposition, just think how the truth about WTC7 actually changes the meaning of everything in the museum! Just think how the entire official narrative caves in on itself. It boggles the mind…
The alternative flyer by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is an essential educational tool. The cover looks similar to the official pamphlet, except it says “9/11 Reality: Welcome to the other story about 9/11.” This is the Visitor Guide For Truth Seekers. With the thousands of people visiting the 9/11 Memorial and 9/11 Museum daily, distributing these flyers is a huge opportunity to open the eyes of the public. This is our chance to counter the deliberate distortion of history. I urge us all to meet the challenge.
(sf911truth editor’s note: The headline above was in response to a June 5, 2014 article in Newsweek called “The 9/11 Museum’s Biggest Oversight: The World Trade Center’s Neighborhood“, written by Alexander Nazaryan, which laments the museum’s oversight of including any mention of the historical arabic roots of the part of New York City where the museum now resides. However, we think the oversight of mentioning WTC Building 7, a 47-story tall building that suddenly collapses at free fall speed on 9/11, even though it wasn’t hit by a plane, is the more egregious example of the museum omitting evidence, especially evidence that could lead to people questioning the official narrative.)
Hillary Clinton and the Weaponization of the State Department
By JP Sottile | News Vandal | June 5, 2014
On May 23, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) trade show in Tampa, Florida to share her vision of “smart power” and to explain the State Department’s crucial role in extending the reach and efficacy of America’s growing “international counterterrorism network.”
First, there is such a thing as a “Special Operations Forces Industry Conference trade show.” Without some keen reporting by David Axe of Wired, that peculiar get-together might’ve flown completely under the radar—much like the shadowy “industry” it both supports and feeds off of like a sleek, camouflaged lamprey attached to a taxpayer-fattened shark.
Second, “special operations” have officially metastasized into a full-fledged industry. United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and, therefore, conveniently located near the special operations trade show, which happened again this year at the Tampa Convention Center. The theme was “Strengthening the Global SOF Network” and the 600,000-square-foot facility was filled with targets of opportunity for well-connected and well-heeled defense contractors.
According to the SOFIC website, this year’s conference afforded attendees “the opportunity to engage with USSOCOM Program Executive Officers, Science and Technology Managers, Office of Small Business Programs and Technology & Industry Liaison Office representatives, and other acquisition experts who will identify top priorities, business opportunities, and interests as they relate to USSOCOM acquisition programs.”
Third, Hillary’s widely-ignored speech marked a radical departure from the widely-held perception that the State Department’s diplomatic mission endures as an institutional alternative to the Pentagon’s military planning. Instead, Secretary Clinton celebrated the transformation of Foggy Bottom into a full partner with the Pentagon’s ever-widening efforts around the globe, touting both the role of diplomats in paving the way for shadowy special ops in so-called “hot spots” and the State Department’s “hand-in-glove” coordination with Special Forces in places like Pakistan and Yemen.
Finally, with little fanfare or coverage, America’s lead diplomat stood before the shadow war industry and itemized the integration of the State Department’s planning and personnel with the Pentagon’s global counter-terrorism campaign which, she told the special operations industry, happen “in one form or another in more than 100 countries around the world.”
If this isn’t entirely unexpected, consider the fact that under then-Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the State Department fought attempts by the Pentagon to trump its authority around the globe and, as reported by the Washington Post, “repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors’ formal approval.”
But that was before Hillary brought her “fast and flexible” doctrine of “smart power” to Foggy Bottom and, according to her remarks, before she applied lessons learned from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which she modeled on the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. That Pentagon-style review spurred the creation of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations to “advance the U.S. government’s foreign policy goals in conflict areas.”
According to a Congressional Research Service analysis, the initial intent of the Conflict Bureau was to replace the ineffectual Office of the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was created in 2004 to help manage “stabilization” efforts in two nations the U.S. was actively destabilizing—Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the new, improved bureau does more than just react to messes made by unlawful invasions or direct costly remediation efforts in war zones—it also collaborates with “relevant partners” in the Department of Defense and NATO “to harmonize civilian and military plans and operations pertaining to conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization.”
This integrated relationship between State and Defense was confirmed by U.S. Special Operations chief Admiral William McRaven shortly after Hillary’s speech. When asked about the “unlikely partnership,” McRaven assured DefenseNews that SOCOM has “an absolutely magnificent relationship with the State Department” and that SOCOM doesn’t “do anything that isn’t absolutely fully coordinated and approved by the U.S. ambassador and the geographic combatant commander.”
As David Axe aptly described it in Wired, “Together, Special Operations Forces and State’s new Conflict Bureau are the twin arms of an expanding institution for waging small, low-intensity shadow wars all over the world.”
In fact, during Hillary’s time as America’s chief diplomat, the State Department embraced the shadowy edge of U.S. foreign policy where decision-makers engage in activities that look like war, sound like war and, if you were to ask civilians in places like Yemen and Pakistan, feel a lot like war, but never quite have to meet the Constitutional requirement of being officially declared as war.
The Whole-of-Government Shift
Once upon a time, “low-intensity shadow wars” were the Congressionally-regulated bailiwick of the Central Intelligence Agency. But 9/11 changed everything. However, the excesses of the Bush Administration led many to hope that Obama could and would change everything back or, at least, relax America’s tense embrace of “the dark side.”
Although the new administration did officially re-brand “The War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations,” Team Obama employed an increasingly elastic interpretation of the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force and expanded covert ops, special ops, drone strikes and regime change to peoples and places well-beyond the law’s original intent, and certainly beyond the limited scope of CIA covert action.
Obama’s growing counter-terrorism campaign—involving, as Secretary Clinton said, “more than 100 countries”—took flight with a new, ecumenical approach called the “Whole-of-Government” strategy. Advanced by then-Secretary of Defense Bill Gates and quickly adopted by the new administration in early 2009, this strategy catalyzed an institutional shift toward inter-agency cooperation, particularly in the case of “state-building” (a.k.a. “nation building”).
During remarks to the Brookings Institution in 2010, Secretary Clinton explained the shift: “One of our goals coming into the administration was… to begin to make the case that defense, diplomacy and development were not separate entities, either in substance or process, but that indeed they had to be viewed as part of an integrated whole and that the whole of government then had to be enlisted in their pursuit.”
Essentially, the Whole-of-Government approach is a re-branded and expanded version of Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full-Spectrum Dominance.” Coincidentally, that strategy was featured in the Clinton Administration’s final Annual Report to the President and Congress in 2001. It defined “Full-Spectrum Dominance” as “an ability to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with forces tailored to specific situations and possessing freedom to operate in all domains—space, sea, land, air, and information.”
In 2001, Full-Spectrum Dominance referred specifically to 20th Century notions of battlefield-style conflicts. But the “dark side” of the War on Terror stretched the idea of the battlefield well-beyond symmetrical military engagements. “Irregular warfare” became the catchphrase du jour, particularly as grinding campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the reality that the full spectrum still wasn’t enough.
An assessment by the Congressional Research Service identified the primary impetus for the Whole-of-Government “reforms” embraced by Team Obama as the “perceived deficiencies of previous inter-agency missions” during the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those missions failed to address a myriad of problems created—culturally, economically and politically—by the wholesale bombing and occupation of those countries. The Full-Spectrum was half-baked. Lesson learned.
But the lesson wasn’t that the U.S. should avoid intervention, regime change or unleashing nascent civil, ethnic or religious conflicts. Instead, the lesson was that the “Whole-of-Government” must be marshaled to fight a worldwide array of Overseas Contingency Operations in “more than 100 countries.”
This Whole-of-Government shift signaled a renewed willingness to engage on variety of new fronts—particularly in Africa—but in a “fast and flexible” way. With other agencies—like the State Department—integrated and, in effect, fronting the counter-terrorism campaign, the military footprint becomes smaller and, therefore, easier to manage locally, domestically and internationally.
In some ways, the Whole-of-Government national security strategy is plausible deniability writ-large through the cover of interagency integration. By merging harder-to-justify military and covert actions into a larger, civilian-themed command structure, the impact of the national security policy overseas is hidden—or at least obfuscated—by the diplomatic “stabilization” efforts run through the State Department—whether it’s the Conflict Bureau working against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, “stabilizing” post-Gaddafi Libya or spending $27 million to organize the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime.
The Pass Key
The cover of diplomacy has traditionally been an effective way to slip covert operators into countries and the State Department’s vast network of embassies and consulates still offers an unparalleled “pass-key” into sovereign nations, emerging hot spots and potential targets for regime change. In 2001, the Annual Report to the President and Congress foresaw the need for more access: “Given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full-spectrum dominance.”
Having the way “pre-paved” is, based on Hillary’s doctrinal shift at State, a key part of the new, fuller-spectrum, Whole-of-Government, mission-integrated version of diplomacy. At the SOFIC’s Special Operations Gala Dinner in 2012, Hillary celebrated the integration of diplomatic personnel and Special Operations military units at the State Department’s recently created Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications—a “nerve center in Washington” that coordinates “military and civilian teams around the world” and serves “as a force multiplier for our embassies’ communications efforts.”
As with most doors in Washington, that relationship swings both ways and mission-integrated embassies have served as an effective force multiplier for the Pentagon’s full spectrum of activities, particularly around Africa.
In his 2011 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Africa, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Don Yamamoto noted that State had “significantly expanded the number of DoD personnel who are integrated into embassies across the continent over the past three years,” and read a surprisingly long laundry list of collaborative efforts between State and the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), including: “reduction of excess and poorly secured man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS); Defense Sector Reform in Liberia, DRC, and South Sudan; counterpiracy activities off the Somali coast; maritime safety and security capacity building; and civil-military cooperation.”
It seems that “civil-military cooperation” is a primary focus of the State Department in Africa. Most notably, Yamamoto told Congress that “embassies implement Department of State-funded Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs, which further U.S. interests in Africa by helping to professionalize African militaries, while also assisting our African partners to be more equipped and trained to work toward common security goals.”
As the ever-vigilant Nick Turse recently reported, U.S. presence on the continent has only grown since that testimony was given in 2011. On TomDispatch.com, Turse identified the infamous attack on Benghazi on September 11, 2012 as the catalyst for “Operation New Normal”—the continent-wide response to, quite ironically, the political potboiler still simmering around Secretary Clinton. Whether or not Congressional Republicans find anything more than incompetence at the root of Benghazi, the U.S. military certainly finds itself in a “new normal” of increased activity in response to the forces—and the weaponry—unleashed by U.S.-led regime change in Libya. According to Turse, the U.S. is “now conducting operations alongside almost every African military in almost every African country and averaging more than a mission a day.”
Those missions are, of course, integrated with and augmented by the State Department’s Conflict Bureau which has used a variety of state-building programs and its diplomatic “pass key” in places like Libya, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and six other African nations, all to develop a growing roster of “host country partners.”
Establishing “host country partners” is the nexus where the State Department, its Conflict Bureau and the AFRICOM meet—implementing the Whole-of-Government strategy in emerging or current conflict zones to fuse a mounting counter-terrorism campaign with stabilization, modernization and state-building initiatives, particularly in oil and resource-rich areas like the Niger River Delta, Central Africa and around AFRICOM’s military foothold on the Horn of Africa.
As Richard J. Wilhelm, a Senior Vice President with defense and intelligence contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, pointed out in a video talk about “mission integration,” AFRICOM’s coordination with the Departments of State and Commerce, USAID is the “most striking example of the Whole-of-Government approach.”
And this is exactly the type of “hand-in-glove” relationship Secretary Clinton fostered throughout her tenure at State, leveraging the resources of the department in a growing list of conflict areas where insurgents, terrorists, al-Qaeda affiliates, suspected militants or uncooperative regimes threaten to run afoul of so-called “U.S. interests”.
Ultimately, it became a hand-in-pocket relationship when Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates developed the Global Security Contingency Fund (GSCF) to “incentivize joint planning and to pool the resources of the Departments of State and Defense, along with the expertise of other departments, to provide security sector assistance for partner countries so they can address emergent challenges and opportunities important to U.S. national security.”
Although he’s been criticized as feckless and deemed less hawkish than Secretary Clinton, President Obama’s newly-proposed Counterterrorism Partnership Fund (CTPF) is the logical extension of the Clinton-Gates Global Security Contingency Fund and epitomizes the Whole-of-Government shift.
The $5 billion Obama wants will dwarf the $250 million pooled into the GSCF and will, the President said at West Point, “give us flexibility to fulfill different missions including training security forces in Yemen who have gone on the offensive against al Qaeda; supporting a multinational force to keep the peace in Somalia; working with European allies to train a functioning security force and border patrol in Libya; and facilitating French operations in Mali.”
That “flexibility” is exactly what Hillary Clinton instituted at State and touted at the SOFIC conference in 2012. It also portends a long-term shift to less invasive forms of regime change like those in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, and an increased mission flexibility that will make the Authorization for the Use of Military Force functionally irrelevant.
Normalizing the War on Terror
The ultimate outcome of this shift is, to borrow from Nick Turse, yet another “new normal”—the new normalization of the War on Terror. What the adoption of the Whole-of-Government/mission integration approach has done is to normalize the implementation of the re-branded War on Terror (a.k.a. Overseas Contingency Operations) across key agencies of the government and masked it, for lack of the better term, under the rubric of stabilization, development and democracy building.
It is, in effect, the return of a key Cold War policy of “regime support” for clients and “regime change” for non-client states, particularly in strategically-located areas and resource-rich regions. Regimes—whether or not they actually “reflect American values”—can count on U.S. financial, military and mission-integrated diplomatic support so long as they can claim to be endangered… not by communists, but by terrorists.
And because terrorism is a tactic—not a political system or a regime—the shadowy, State Department-assisted Special Ops industry that fights them will, unlike the sullen enthusiasts of the Cold War, never be bereft of an enemy.
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From the Archives
Is America behind the massive surge in Kiev regime’s child trafficking?
By Drago Bosnic | August 10, 2023
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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