17-07-2018, 07:27 AM
Though I think both your comments, and the comments by Peter here, are smart and well researched and convincing, to be honest I'm really not that fussed.
This is a bit of a rant, and sadly a negative one, but I'll post it rather than just deleting it as I sometimes do after writing these.
I don't really feel the need to attack or defend the various camps re the Pentagon attack, as I don't really care what hit it. I care strongly that it was hit, and I care even more strongly that the perpetrators are still walking free, and that an overall coverup has been ignored or missed by much of the public, but at this point I really don't care whether it was a plane, or a missile.
The same thing happened with JFK research. Years have been spent looking at frame by frame blow ups of photos from Dealey Plaza, wondering who is over the fence and whether a bullet trajectory could have travelled from point A to point B. When David Talbot covered the case, he ignored all that, and instead did a volume on RFK's activities in the years following the murder, and then a second volume on the probable involvement of Allan Dulles. Zapruder film analysis didn't really get a look in.
The perpetrators of 9/11 would like nothing better than to see dedicated researchers spend the rest of their lives going back and forth over the properties of nanothermite, watching videos of WTC7 falling, discussing blow ups of the Pentagon wreckage and talking about explosive puffs appearing out the sides of the twin towers as they drop. When a consensus is finally reached in 2030, those who are still alive will say, see, this proves conspiracy, so now we want to argue for a new investigation.
I think that 'new investigation' that (honourable) guys like Richard Gage ask for in their interviews is actually achievable by the same researchers I've alluded to above, and would be well underway if everyone stopped getting involved in arguments about the Pentagon and WTC7, and instead spent just maybe four or five months going back over the activities of Booz Allen Hamilton, looking at Neocon personnel with links to Lockheed Martin, checking out which Air Force bigwigs later received cushy weapons industry jobs after 9/11, and digging through official government records to clarify the activities of Rumsfeld, Woolsey, Wolfowitz, Perle and others in the half decade up to the day of the attacks. I decided to do this myself one day and - as far as I can tell, and I ran it all past a longtime 9/11 researcher here in Melbourne who has read all the same books and articles that we have - in a couple of months found more new 9/11 info than the movement had itself seemingly dug up in the handful of years prior - and I re-check 9/11 Blogger and follow Shoestring's articles and keep up to date with all the new books. The movement really needs to take a step back and see the woods for the trees.
Pretty much every 9/11 book and film to date talks about the Project for a New American Century and their 'Rebuilding America's Defences' document. The document was written by Thomas Donnelly, who later became a director of strategic communications at Lockheed Martin. In William Hartung's book PROPHETS OF WAR Hartung quotes attendees at a weapons conference during the final year of the Clinton admin - the head of Lockheed was boasting to various groups that 'their guy' had written the foreign policy statement for the incoming Bush administration - namely, the PNAC document. Lockheed then made billions from the war on terror. James Woolsey, from the Operation Dark Winter anthrax drill, was a long term Lockheed asset and lobbyist. Norm Augustine, later the CEO of Lockheed, took part in COG drills with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and served as an advisor to Frank Gaffney's Centre for Security Policy. Lockheed is also noted in Hartung's book as having their own private intelligence agency, and having being involved in numerous corrupt activities. Maybe Lockheed could be a topic for further research? Or Boeing, which has a similar bunch of striking links to 9/11 related figures c/o later Boeing Vice President David Ivry (a friend of Dick Cheney who was involved in the USS Liberty incident) and also made huge cash from weapons contracts after the event? I would have thought so, but most 9/11 researchers are still stuck on the same five topics that caught their attention 15 years ago, so I'm not holding my breath.
Some of the better 9/11 articles mention that Philip Zelikow put together a document on Catastrophic Terrorism in 1997 with John Deutch and Ashton Carter. I had to do a lot of reading to realise that Zelikow's paper was actually based on an 8 month study group he led with those guys through '97-'98. Unlike the PNAC document, which was a statement signed by a bunch of people presumably in a single afternoon, or approved with a phone call, Zelikow's group worked for months and months. It had several senior members and a key staff. In an interview I found with Zelikow, he briefly mentioned during the group's work that he had communicated with John Hamre, who was leading the Pentagon reconstruction program (reinforcing the section that was later hit by a plane) at the time. Maybe Zelikow's study group could be a topic for research? I would have thought so, so I researched it and found the main staff were all listed in a footnote of a book that Ashton Carter had published in 2000. The staff included a NATO head, an anthrax expert, several senior neoconservative figures, the former head of Enron, an academic who was infamous for writing a piece justifying the use of ethnic stereotyping to prevent terrorism events, plus folks linked to numerous suspicious companies I've seen discussed in 9/11 articles by others, and in the books by Kevin Ryan and Michael Ruppert. I spent three weeks researching names and connections that I thought were suspicious, and by the end of it had a document of new info that ran to about 200 pages. One of the figures in the group had put his name to a PNAC style statement pushing for a 'transforming event' as far back as 1979, and then wrote a later piece justifying the government using psychological warfare against the public in 1989. Other than a few pieces that I've written on weekends by myself here on this board however, you'll find little on the web about it, as I'm apparently the only one who has cared enough to bother to look and spend time Googling the connections, and - with respect - everyone else in the movement is still getting involved in debates about what hit the Pentagon. As I said above, I'm sure those debates will still be going in 2030.
Shoestring did a piece on Wolfowitz back in February. He either didn't know or didn't bother to mention that Wolfowitz had written a piece discussing the strategic value of attacking Iraq in the late 70's - classified, then released to a journalist a year or two ago after a FOIA request - and that Wolfowitz was on a commission with Rumsfeld in the late 90's that had close dealings with a bunch of guys I mentioned above in my discussion of Zelikow's group. Shoestring does great work so I'm not blaming him, but - again - if researchers would take maybe just 6 months off from going over the Pentagon and WTC7 discussion and what wreckage was left at Shanksville, they could dig out more of the connections, and we'd all benefit. But I don't expect them to do this. I'm expecting them to still be arguing over what hit the Pentagon 12 years from now, when most of the perpetrators are in retirement homes or long dead.
I have a lot of respect for everyone involved - deeply, or just tangentially - in serious 9/11 research and discussion, but I really feel that a lot of it is covering the same old ground, and I think there are probably other topics that are way overdue for scrutiny.
This is a bit of a rant, and sadly a negative one, but I'll post it rather than just deleting it as I sometimes do after writing these.
I don't really feel the need to attack or defend the various camps re the Pentagon attack, as I don't really care what hit it. I care strongly that it was hit, and I care even more strongly that the perpetrators are still walking free, and that an overall coverup has been ignored or missed by much of the public, but at this point I really don't care whether it was a plane, or a missile.
The same thing happened with JFK research. Years have been spent looking at frame by frame blow ups of photos from Dealey Plaza, wondering who is over the fence and whether a bullet trajectory could have travelled from point A to point B. When David Talbot covered the case, he ignored all that, and instead did a volume on RFK's activities in the years following the murder, and then a second volume on the probable involvement of Allan Dulles. Zapruder film analysis didn't really get a look in.
The perpetrators of 9/11 would like nothing better than to see dedicated researchers spend the rest of their lives going back and forth over the properties of nanothermite, watching videos of WTC7 falling, discussing blow ups of the Pentagon wreckage and talking about explosive puffs appearing out the sides of the twin towers as they drop. When a consensus is finally reached in 2030, those who are still alive will say, see, this proves conspiracy, so now we want to argue for a new investigation.
I think that 'new investigation' that (honourable) guys like Richard Gage ask for in their interviews is actually achievable by the same researchers I've alluded to above, and would be well underway if everyone stopped getting involved in arguments about the Pentagon and WTC7, and instead spent just maybe four or five months going back over the activities of Booz Allen Hamilton, looking at Neocon personnel with links to Lockheed Martin, checking out which Air Force bigwigs later received cushy weapons industry jobs after 9/11, and digging through official government records to clarify the activities of Rumsfeld, Woolsey, Wolfowitz, Perle and others in the half decade up to the day of the attacks. I decided to do this myself one day and - as far as I can tell, and I ran it all past a longtime 9/11 researcher here in Melbourne who has read all the same books and articles that we have - in a couple of months found more new 9/11 info than the movement had itself seemingly dug up in the handful of years prior - and I re-check 9/11 Blogger and follow Shoestring's articles and keep up to date with all the new books. The movement really needs to take a step back and see the woods for the trees.
Pretty much every 9/11 book and film to date talks about the Project for a New American Century and their 'Rebuilding America's Defences' document. The document was written by Thomas Donnelly, who later became a director of strategic communications at Lockheed Martin. In William Hartung's book PROPHETS OF WAR Hartung quotes attendees at a weapons conference during the final year of the Clinton admin - the head of Lockheed was boasting to various groups that 'their guy' had written the foreign policy statement for the incoming Bush administration - namely, the PNAC document. Lockheed then made billions from the war on terror. James Woolsey, from the Operation Dark Winter anthrax drill, was a long term Lockheed asset and lobbyist. Norm Augustine, later the CEO of Lockheed, took part in COG drills with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and served as an advisor to Frank Gaffney's Centre for Security Policy. Lockheed is also noted in Hartung's book as having their own private intelligence agency, and having being involved in numerous corrupt activities. Maybe Lockheed could be a topic for further research? Or Boeing, which has a similar bunch of striking links to 9/11 related figures c/o later Boeing Vice President David Ivry (a friend of Dick Cheney who was involved in the USS Liberty incident) and also made huge cash from weapons contracts after the event? I would have thought so, but most 9/11 researchers are still stuck on the same five topics that caught their attention 15 years ago, so I'm not holding my breath.
Some of the better 9/11 articles mention that Philip Zelikow put together a document on Catastrophic Terrorism in 1997 with John Deutch and Ashton Carter. I had to do a lot of reading to realise that Zelikow's paper was actually based on an 8 month study group he led with those guys through '97-'98. Unlike the PNAC document, which was a statement signed by a bunch of people presumably in a single afternoon, or approved with a phone call, Zelikow's group worked for months and months. It had several senior members and a key staff. In an interview I found with Zelikow, he briefly mentioned during the group's work that he had communicated with John Hamre, who was leading the Pentagon reconstruction program (reinforcing the section that was later hit by a plane) at the time. Maybe Zelikow's study group could be a topic for research? I would have thought so, so I researched it and found the main staff were all listed in a footnote of a book that Ashton Carter had published in 2000. The staff included a NATO head, an anthrax expert, several senior neoconservative figures, the former head of Enron, an academic who was infamous for writing a piece justifying the use of ethnic stereotyping to prevent terrorism events, plus folks linked to numerous suspicious companies I've seen discussed in 9/11 articles by others, and in the books by Kevin Ryan and Michael Ruppert. I spent three weeks researching names and connections that I thought were suspicious, and by the end of it had a document of new info that ran to about 200 pages. One of the figures in the group had put his name to a PNAC style statement pushing for a 'transforming event' as far back as 1979, and then wrote a later piece justifying the government using psychological warfare against the public in 1989. Other than a few pieces that I've written on weekends by myself here on this board however, you'll find little on the web about it, as I'm apparently the only one who has cared enough to bother to look and spend time Googling the connections, and - with respect - everyone else in the movement is still getting involved in debates about what hit the Pentagon. As I said above, I'm sure those debates will still be going in 2030.
Shoestring did a piece on Wolfowitz back in February. He either didn't know or didn't bother to mention that Wolfowitz had written a piece discussing the strategic value of attacking Iraq in the late 70's - classified, then released to a journalist a year or two ago after a FOIA request - and that Wolfowitz was on a commission with Rumsfeld in the late 90's that had close dealings with a bunch of guys I mentioned above in my discussion of Zelikow's group. Shoestring does great work so I'm not blaming him, but - again - if researchers would take maybe just 6 months off from going over the Pentagon and WTC7 discussion and what wreckage was left at Shanksville, they could dig out more of the connections, and we'd all benefit. But I don't expect them to do this. I'm expecting them to still be arguing over what hit the Pentagon 12 years from now, when most of the perpetrators are in retirement homes or long dead.
I have a lot of respect for everyone involved - deeply, or just tangentially - in serious 9/11 research and discussion, but I really feel that a lot of it is covering the same old ground, and I think there are probably other topics that are way overdue for scrutiny.