Tag: 911

Another black motorist killed by police


Walter Scott on the left, Michael Slager on the right
Walter Scott on the left, Michael Slager on the right

It happens with too much regularity in today’s America and it has to stop.  Walter Scott was killed, some say assassinated, I say executed by a white North Charleston, SC police officer…shot at 8 times with nothing in his hands and no weapons on his person while he was running away from the officer.  That it sounds like what happened to Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri who too was shot at while running from police, is eery at best and horrible that it happens so close.  Scott’s murderer seems to have a history of using force in his encounters with motorists and officer Michael Slager is now in jail, charged with manslaughter in Scott’s death.  All of this wouldn’t have come to light were it not for the video that was captured by a passerby who said at the point he began videoing the killing the police officer  had the situation under control and was in no threat from Scott.  To the State of South Carolina’s credit they have charged Slager with a felony and this is the third time law enforcement officers in that state have been disciplined for excessive force when dealing with black motorists but this is the deadliest.  Last year 2014 more African-Americans were killed by police than were killed in the 911 attacks over a decade ago! When will it stop America?

Destroying the hallowed ground myth


Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog does an awesome job of destroying the race baiting Islamophobes’ objections to the Cordoba House being built in close proximity to the 911 disaster because it somehow will upset the sensitivity of those who suffered loss there.  And while there really were never any legitimate  objections to this project to begin with, and each one that the opponents have raised has been seriously knocked down or derailed they keep popping up because there are some in America who want to ascribe any and all failure to the present administration or want to maintain an obstructionist agenda in order to win elections in November.

So here we go again……the hallowed ground scenario.  This is also what’s going up in and around the “sacred” ground of the World Trade Center complex, some would say the same distance from it as the Cordoba House.   The New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club on 59 Murray Street, where you can have all of your emotional needs met.  If you want to reflect on what happened at WTC on 911 the New York Dolls club is the place to go to do just that.  No doubt the likes of the one above will be glad to give you a hand, at a price of course, to come to grips with what took place on that awful day and hold the memories of loved and cherished ones who died on that day.  A titty bar, that’s what we call them down South, is more deserving of occupying that holiest of ground in the American psyche than an interfaith institution that wants to bridge gaps and promote brother/sisterhood among people.  That’s just what the country needs.

Hat tip to Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog

The Jesse Ventura op-ed Huffington Post refused to publish


For some, the search for what happened on 9/11 isn’t over
Jesse Ventura

You didn’t see anything about it in the mainstream media, but two weeks ago at a conference in San Francisco, more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.

That’s right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy because they don’t buy the government’s version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible – or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the twin towers and Building 7.

Richard Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, put it like this: “The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.” He’s especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 447 stories came down in “pure free-fall acceleration” that afternoon – even though it was never hit by an aircraft.

This is a subject I take up in my new book, American Conspiracies, published this week by Skyhorse. An excerpt follows:

Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour.

Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife Terry. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he’s convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby Building 7:

“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.”

Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: “Once you get to the science, it’s indisputable.”

Another Face of Terrorism


There’s no doubt about it in this observer’s mind Joe Stack was a terrorist, and his act of flying an airplane into a building which contained the offices of a government agency (and I don’t care which acronym like agency it was) was straight out of the book of terror that this Nation went through a decade ago, yet very few people in corporate media or in government want to label him as such. Wonder why?

There’s been a certain amount of self-righteous discussion among media types why this is the case but in the end those who are self-indulgent simply say Stack doesn’t meet the criteria of a terrorist. There are even some who claim, such as Stack’s daughter that he was a hero of sorts, protesting against government. Wonder why?

Stack’s singular act of protest doesn’t even begin to meet the definition of the legally acceptable form of dissent, but it fits perfectly into the definition of terrorism. Yet there are people who are determined to not call it that and the simple reason why is because the West has been gripped by a virulent form of racism that is ethnocentric in nature towards people of color.  This indignation attempts to dress itself in a cloak of preserving a Judeo-Christian ethic, but when the results of such preservation have included diminishing the progress of that ethic, subversion of the rights of those who enjoy that ethic, such as privacy rights, free speech, et.al that excuse too falls by the wayside and is as hypocritical as media’s refusal to be inclusive in the terrorism appellation.

The refusal of corporate media to label Stack the terrorist he was has allowed all the other fringe groups to come out in support of his action in their opposition to the Nation’s first black president.    The Tea Party movement is nothing more than the 21st century Ku Klux Klan dressed up with the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, et.al who are used to give such a movement legitimacy.  There is this symbiotic relationship, therefore, between corporate media and these racists.  They give rationale  to one another; the racist relish the media attention to their cause of opposing the first black, “foreign born”, “Muslim” president and the media loves the sound bites such idiots the likes of Stack, and Scott Roeder (the murderer/terrorist who stalked legally licensed American physicians) give them ignoring  their, media’s,  own responsibility to this collective hypocrisy and morass.   At the same time corporate media plunges headlong into their racist diatribe against Muslims, Arabs and especially Palestinians justifying any and all forms of state sponsored oppression against them because to media types the designation “terrorist” is appropriate and they have no hesitation at all using that term to describe them.

This way of doing business means the  Joseph Stack story is merely a mention in the headlines of the day, social titillation at best not worthy of any real consideration or reflection about the role of government, the impact of violence in society, the responsibility of citizens to social cohesion, the role of media if any in all of this, nothing to see just move along.  We should now expect this social irresponsibility from a upper middle class mostly white media with a strong affection for power and those who wield it in defense of their, corporate media’s interest.  However, the public, infinitely smarter than given credit by that same media, has to realize the impact media’s dereliction has on the over all society, in the form of their, corporate media’s, justification for wars of occupation and the sublimation of the rights of citizens, legal residents, and yes, even foreigners living in America to the wishes of government and corporate entities.

A Nation that is immersed in healthy not stifled debate is much more informed and enlightened.  Corporate media mimics its forefathers of old who sought to keep people in the dark by allowing only those deemed worthy the right or ability to read and get an education.  That dispensation of rights and responsibilities by the wealthy and often oppressor class became a rejected standard of living, and societies were better off for doing away with such notions.   Joseph Stack was a terrorist, no more and no less, who committed the same heinous act as those on 911, in his rejection of government policy and it resulted in the loss of human life, his and other(s) and that’s that.  Corporate media’s refusal to simply say that says more about them than Stack.  Perhaps its time we did away with them.

More terrorism news


The terror attack of December25, 2009 was meant to force the hand of the US to go to war in or with Yemen.  Thankfully the attack failed, but that hasn’t stopped the beating of war drums to attack and Joe Lieberman an ardent war supporter was one of the first to make that call.

Lieberman, the neoconservative solon who wanted to be the Secretary of Defense in the administration of John McCain (his 2008 candidate for president) and who would gladly play the same role in the administration of a Sarah Palin or any other saber-rattling Republican, is proposing the launch of a new preemptive war on Yemen……

Referencing his own travels to Yemen, and meetings with unnamed U.S. officials, the senator chirped: “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”

Lieberman, whose refusal to serve in the military when he could have during the Vietnam era has never prevented him from spouting hawkish views………….

Lieberman was also a sponsor of the Senate bill S.J. Res.46 which called for war with Iraq and never met a war he didn’t like, as long as he doesn’t have to fight it himself. Just what we need, a mini-Bush. Everyone is jumping on the blame the Obama administration bandwagon and that is no doubt one of the planned consequences of this failed attack, which was really meant to be Obama’s 911 trial by fire. There are some other rather interesting sidebars to this terror attack.

The name ICTS has surfaced again. You know who they are don’t you? The same people who were responsible for airport security at Logan International Airport, the departure point for two of the fatal aircraft of 911 were responsible for security at the Amsterdam airport, despite their statement to the contrary.  If anyone should be made to squirm under the light of scrutiny it should be ICTS who has been at the security helm during terrorist attacks on 911 and 12/25.  Don’t let the phony debate about technology divert you from the responsibility this company has for what happened on December, 25.  The airport in Amsterdam has 15, count them 15 full body image scanners which AbdulMuttaleb managed to evade under the watchful eye of ICTS personnel. There’s also the claim that the terrorist got on the plane without a passport or had someone speak on his behalf with gate agents to have him board without proper credentials.   That seems plausible, for if he had a passport with his name it should have set off alarm bells throughout the aviation community because his name was also attached to a terrorist watch list generated by the UK government and American CIA. Government officials have managed to deflect that criticism by pointing out there is more than one terrorism list.

The interesting issue about the hot potato of 12/25 is despite all the security we were told we needed after 911 and for all the reasons given for that increased security here we are  eight years later, with the same excuses given for the lapse in security and with the same response for our vulnerability, that of going to war in a foreign nondescript country, Yemen.  What happened to the increased efficiency we were told would result under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security that was supposed to facilitate communications between the various agencies responsible for America’s security so that the moment the suspect’s father informed the American embassy in his country of his suspicions about his son’s inclinations that message would go to the very top of the nation’s security apparatus? Instead we’re mired in the various degrees of watch lists and the distinction between watches and no-fly lists and suspects and terrorists.  Does anyone think increased expenditures  to a bloated federal agency will fine tune even this mess called Homeland Security?   How did a “security” company with all the latest up to date technological equipment at its disposal fail to use it on this  suspect?   Why the obvious ruse at the boarding gate, witnessed by two American lawyers, who have gone on record to say other far more incriminating things about the nature of security at the Amsterdam airport.

The only terror unleashed on 12/25 was the realization that despite all the country has gone through, and all the dollars spent, and all the experience those responsible for security should have gained over the last eight years, government is no more serious now about its security of citizens than it was  in 2001.  The event was just another in a long line of deceptions initiated to start another military campaign in some far region of the world and enrich the coffers of the 21st century’s welfare recipient, security companies.  Colin Powell, with whom I have serious misgivings at times said it best

are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. … The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

We are well on the road to such a relationship between catastrophic events and burgeoning government contracts to the likes of ICTS whose existence depends on their own ineptitude, planned or chance.  Watch for another round of “security” individuals to pop up with their cures for a problem that was cured even well before 911.  We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be manipulated this way.

War Crimes-A mounting body of evidence


FlightSuitWe the people have had placed before us a mounting body of evidence that suggests the war in Iraq was not fought for the purposes stated, was executed illegally and perhaps for the interests of a foreign power, and all the players from the President on down knew every mechanism they would use to get the country to accept war would be deceptive and illegal.

The latest news is that a biographer for George W. Bush claims Bush told him, Mickey Herskowitz in 1999, if elected he would invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. Herskowitz supposedly had a personal relationship with Bush and had worked with him on several projects before so it’s significant Bush would confide in someone about something so imminent.  It’s apparent Bush had already signed on to the idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein long before 911 and in keeping with both Bill Clinton’s Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 and Project for a New American Century’s plans to overthrow Iraq; all he needed was an excuse.  Did one just happen to fall into his hands, i.e. 911 or was it created for the excuse to invade Iraq?  Everything we now know about Iraq is a lie.  There were no weapons of mass destruction despite the persistent claims to the contrary, there was no link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein or any global terror organization, despite the best efforts of the US to torture such information out of people, but there was Bush’s strong desire to initiate a war to overthrow  a toothless dictator made so by a decades old sanction regimen which depleted Hussein’s power and decimated his countrymen……for what?

According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars…..

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”………

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter’s political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush’s father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents – Grenada and Panama – and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

In other words to make candidate Bush look good, presidential.  Wars were resume enhancers, according to some in George Bush’s Republican party.  There was no issue of national security, national interests, protection of the “homeland”; wars were a way to get ahead, and the everyday soldier was the one on whose backs such wars were a key to politicians’ success.  In other words, as Christopher Hedges has realized and aptly written about, ‘war is a force that gives us meaning’.  We find glory in war and fight them because it defines us, not because we need to preserve freedom or security.  Today’s politician uses war as a way to shape a nation’s identity, not its borders or save its citizens.  Such an attitude leads me to wonder how much of what we see today is really us against them, or is it all just “us”?

More explosive news?


wtc-dustThere are so many theories about what happened on September 9,2001 it’s hard to sort it all out at times.  One thing I am certain is that a man in an Afghanistan cave did not coordinate the pinpoint precision attacks on NYC on that day.  That was a fete not even superpowers of the day, i.e. Russia, Israel, UK, France, et.al could not do.  That there was complicity of the physical attack with other “forces” in my mind is no doubt.  Equally of no doubt in my mind is the fact that evidence has been tampered with, withheld, changed, compromised to keep the real facts obscured until the end of time.  Well it doesn’t always work out that way that things are concealed until the end of time and the news that explosive residue was found in the particles following the explosion is as explosive as the blasts on that day.

Investigators found red-grey plates in the dust found after the destruction of the “twins”, which scientists identified as the remains of an active high quality substance created via nanotechnology, whose characteristics reveal that a high energy pyrotechnic or explosive material is in question, which falls into the thermite category.

The international sale and distribution of super-thermite is strictly supervised and limited. Dr. Niels Harrit participated in the investigation of the fall of the WTC towers. He is a professor of chemistry at the Copenhagen University. After a study by international scientists was published, their discovery about the fall of the towers was broadcast by Danish national television, at prime time, in a show where dr. Niels Harrit was a guest.

“Scientific research showed that the two airplanes were not the cause of the fall of the WTC towers in 2001. Nano-thermite explosives were found in the rubble, which could not have been in the planes. Scientists believe that a number of tonnes of explosives were placed in the buildings” said the show host on Danish national television before his guest came on, who was the scientist dr. Niels Harrit.

Harrit says that they cannot claim that only thermite was in question, which dates back to 1893. He described the behaviour of the reactive substance and said that it creates iron heated to 2,500 degrees Celsius.

“Nano-thermite is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When they react, the heating occurs much faster. Thermite can serve as the perfect explosive, and it contains much more energy than ordinary dynamite” explains the scientist.

When asked why he thinks that nano-thermite caused the twin towers to fall, Harrit said that probably because that substance was there. “There were only two planes, and three towers fell. We know how much dust there was after the fall. We also know how much inactivated thermite we found. That is like a loaded pistol, the material did not react for a reason. We are talking about tonnes, probably 100 tonnes of the material” explains Harrit.

You can check out the youtube video interview with Dr. Harrit below.  George Bush’s hand was forced on September 9, 2001 by a political ruling class that wanted expansion of US power in the Middle East and the “stans”, an expansion which is continuing till this day, but with each passing “revelation” about 911 it becomes apparent to me it was a contrived event with tentacles reaching back into the bowels of the federal government.

Agenda driven politics at the expense of human misery


pistolI knew it wouldn’t take long before the hue and cry for some type of government control on citizen behavior would start, led of course by a compliant mainstream media, and so it has with the issue of gun control.  Excuse me while I  gloat and say I told you this would happen when we embarked on our outrageous WOT  and our discrimination against Muslims the world over because particularly some segments of American society wanted to settle a centuries old feud with their Muslim cousins/brothers. It was easy to use 911 to incite passions against a targeted group of people, just as it probably, over time, will be easy to inflame the public for more “gun control” as MSM focuses on those occasions in social interaction where some people just loose their handle on reality and go crazy.  Why don’t we have a war on mental illness or on human insanity, or better yet, a war on evil, which is colorless, stateless and sexless.  But the latter is just the reason why we don’t wage such wars; they are not sexy enough, not divisive enough to sustain and so we suffer at the hands of kooks who commit crimes and kooks who profit from the commission of crimes who go on to advance their own political agendas.   Outrageous crimes of passion, murder and mayhem course through the veins of humanity and date back to the beginning of time and Cain and Able, or further. None of us are immune from this genetic imprint on our behavior; the rule of Law is what keeps some of us in line more than others of us, but even when that doesn’t work, the punishment of the law equally applied to all lawbreakers should.  Of course, there is a group of people, notably lawyers, whose job it is to make sure that doesn’t always happen.  They too are agenda driven, but humanity has been smart enough to erect, over time, a legal system capable of  dealing with almost any human transaction that insures social cohesion and the continuation of the species.  Piling on that system of laws, as has happened at the proclamation of every other War we have waged,  is draconian at best, oppressive at worse, and not the role of government.