let's disconnect these cables - Bob Dylan

On the other hand.

I think I need to perform an intervention on myself here, and admit that I'm burned out. There are only so many nights in a week I can sit up until 5AM and still not have found the words for what I'm trying to say. It's not good.

So I need to take April off, and I suppose that's starting now. I'd rather not, but if I want water in the well that's how it has to be. Not to mention that this still needs, shall we say, attention.

I see the archive needs a lot of updating, and I'd like to refresh the links, so I'll do that and then slip out. But don't let me stop you. I won't lock the door behind me.

Here's hopes for an Apocalypse-free April, and I'll see you May 1.

I'm blogging as fast as I can...

Honest.

New post up soon.

Really.

It's the Real Thing

He drank Coca-Cola, he was eating Wonder Bread,
Ate Burger Kings - he was well fed - Bob Dylan

I really want to leave this subject alone, and you probably wish I would, too, but unfortunately I have a few more things to winge about before moving on.

You may have seen this by now: the trailer for The Ultimate Con ("the 9/11 Documentary you can't debunk"). It's creator is "Lucus," about whom all I know is that he says "Dave Vonkleist, Jack Blood, and Alex Jones are going to help me promote it," which almost says enough for me right there. It's ten minutes of mostly "I heard explosions" footage shot during the attacks, though to its credit there are some clips I hadn't seen before, such as real-time reports of an alleged bomb-laden van in the WTC garage and rumours of suspected "devices."

I don't mean to open up another can of thermate here, so I won't comment on the merit of the quadruple redundancy of car bombs, planted explosives in the basement, cutting charges and demolition squibs, except to say I wish some of those who defend the accuracy of eyewitness testimony with respect to the World Trade Center would apply the same standard to the Pentagon crash. (Consider, for instance, these 87 accounts of having seen a passenger jet, and not a cruise missile or a fighter aircraft, overfly DC and strike the building.)

Instead, let's do like the Jimmy Castor Bunch. What we're going to do right here is go back. Waaay back; back into time. When 9/11 Truth could look like the 2004 9/11 Citizens' Commission.

Go ahead, and watch The Ultimate Con. But then watch anti-fascist researcher John Judge deconstruct the official Commission report, beginning with the simple question, "Who wrote it?" Authorship is unascribed, but it's written in a "lucid, almost novelistic" fashion, with a single voice. Judge mentions the Warren Commission Report also had a single, anonymous author, brought over from the Pentagon's Army Historical Division. Otto Winnacker's previous employer had been Adolph Hitler, as one of 26 official historians of Nazi Germany.

Watch Michael Springmann, former State Department diplomat, testify that the CIA were running the Jeddah consulate, instructing officials to issue visas to terrorists for reasons of "national security." Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah.

Watch Indira Singh describe her discovery of PTech's deep black links to both US security infrastructure and global narco-terror ("When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me," says Singh), the sheltering of al qaeda financier Yassin al-Qadi (he "talked very highly of his relationship" with Dick Cheney, claims PTech's CEO Oussama Ziade), and the two years PTech spent with Mitre in the "FAA's basement" prior to 911.

Watch Paul Thompson rattle off ignored intelligence, the Randy Glass story (which some may find of particular interest since Glass claims he was told by Pakistani intelligence prior to 9/11 that "those towers are coming down"), and the triangulation of the ISI, the CIA and al Qaeda. Then there are the wargames, the reconstruction of Cheney's command and control, Sibel Edmonds.....

Any wagers on how often controlled demolition is mentioned?

It's a bit wistful and over the shoulder, viewing these now: this Truth Movement moment seems much longer ago than a mere three years. Is this the same 9/11 I hear about today? Because I hear none of these things anymore. Is this the same "Truth Movement"? Because today's sounds nothing like this. Is this even the same truth?

A tough question. It's like asking Coke drinkers in the mid-80s, What is this shit?

Had Truth Classic's market share plateaued? Was its flavour too complex to break out of a niche market, or were there other reasons for finessing its formula? Because New Truth certainly goes down differently. "Smoother, rounder, yet bolder," in the stammering nonsense of Coca Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta. And in my experience it comes back up just the same.

Can you taste the difference, and can you tell what's missing? New Truth is now 100% Jihadist free.

Something less than 100% would be true enough, and would have served as a corrective to the official comic book which informs Americans that their enemy has dark skin and strange beliefs. But entirely erasing bin Laden and al Qaeda from the 9/11 equation makes no more sense - not even polemical sense - than trying to talk sensibly about the JFK assassination without mention of the Mafia or the anti-Castro Cubans. And was it any less an "inside job" for their involvement and manifold reasons for wanting him dead?

But it's impossible not to ascribe some such sentiments to racism, and sometimes something more. (For instance, neo-Nazi Curt Maynard writes, "there is considerably more tangible evidence to suggest that the United States government and Israel carried out the crime, not 19 troglodytes, i.e. cave dwellers from the Middle East.") And then there's the executive producer of Loose Change and Afghanistan war vet, Korey Rowe, who told CNN "I met my enemy and the people who supposedly pulled off this attack, and these people are not strong enough and they're not, uh, advanced enough." However, I think there is also something else happening here.

Some of the most damning evidence presented by Classic Truth is that which ties state power to supra-state terror and criminality. Peter Dale Scott's definition of Deep Politics is "the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government." Al Qaeda, a creature of intelligence agencies, is one such node of contemporary deep politics. As recently as the mid-90s its Mujahadeen were NATO's unambiguous partner in Bosnia, helping to secure and profit by the Balkan trade route of Afghan heroin into Europe. The CIA were demanding visas for al Qaeda operatives in the consulate of bin Laden's hometown, and an al Qaeda financier was also hardwired into Washington's security apparatus. 9/11 cells were hosted by FBI informants and their flight schools were up to their altimeters in Iran-Contra-like narco-dollars. Al Qaeda's structure was penetrated up to the senior operational level, possibly including assets of ambiguous loyalty who helped plan and fund the attacks. (For instance Fort Bragg instructor and FBI informant Ali Mohammed, who trained those involved in the 1993 WTC bombing, oversaw al Qaeda's relocation to Afghanistan and taught hijackers how to smuggle box cutters onto aircraft.)

New Truth hamstrings itself - and perhaps on the part of some, that's the entire point of New Truth - by clearing the table of everything pertaining to al Qaeda and defining "inside job" as merely "inside the Beltway." Because it is by their parapolitical linkages to, and patronage of, the very forces of violence which appear to be their enemy, that governments most condemn themselves.

Doing away with all that does away with much of the High Crime, which a few might think a good thing. Watch the 2004 videos. How does the health and rigor and scope of New Truth compare? Which do you think the High Criminals prefer?

Someone told me recently that "common sense shows that CD is the 'back and to the left' of 9/11." That's the problem. It is. Look at where 40 years of "back and to the left" has got John Kennedy.

Outside the Box

Can you please crawl out your window?
Use your arms and legs it won't ruin you - Bob Dylan

Though it's hard to think outside the box, once you do, you may need to think outside that box as well.

The box of Gerry Irwin

On February 28, 1959, Private First Class Gerry Irwin was en route from Nampa, Idaho back to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he served as a Nike missile technician. Late that evening, as he turning southeast on Route 14 around Cedar City, Utah, the sky was illuminated by a brilliant object crossing the sky in front of him. He pulled to the side of the road, got out of his car and watched it disappear behind a nearby ridge. Irwin thought he had witnessed an aircraft in trouble. Writing "Stop" on the side of his car with shoe polish he left a note attached to the steering wheel: "Have gone to investigate possible plane crash. Please call law enforcement officers."

On March 2, Irwin awoke in Cedar City Hospital, with no idea of what had happened to him or how he had got there. He had been unconscious since he was found, only an hour and a half after leaving his car, occasionally mumbling about a "jacket on the bush." His temperature and respiration were normal; it was simply as though Irwin were asleep and couldn't be woken. At last when he did, he felt fine, though his first words upon sitting up in bed were, "Were there any survivors?"

Irwin was informed he had been found alone, jacketless, and there was no sign of a crash. He was diagnosed with "hysteria" and flown to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under medical observation for four days, after which he returned to active duty but with his security clearance revoked. Several days later he fainted, though quickly recovered, and did again a few days later in El Paso, and was taken to hospital. Early the next morning he woke up and again said, "Were there any survivors?" He could not believe it was March 16; he thought it was still February 28.

Once more he returned to base, this time in psychiatric care for a month. He was discharged April 17, with test results showing "normal," but the next day gave in to an uncontrollable impulse to depart the base without leave, and caught a bus in El Paso for Cedar City, from where he walked to the spot of his sighting, left the road and went straight to a branch upon which his jacket still hung. And something was on his jacket. A pencil was stuck in a buttonhole, and a piece of paper was wound tightly around it. Irwin took the paper and burned it, and then seemingly snapped out of his entrancement. He had difficulty finding the road again, and not knowing what he was doing there, turned himself in to the local sheriff, who told him the story of his earlier episode.

Back at Fort Bliss he again underwent psychiatric examination, with identical results. Upon being released from camp hospital, he failed to report for duty August 1. He hasn't been seen since.

Irwin's story has been called "one of the strangest, most baffling cases in UFO folklore," but I disagree. Not only have I read stranger, I don't think this is even a UFO story.

Every UFOlogical account I've read of Irwin's case treats the military backstory to it as incidental. But Irwin was a missile technician on the base which, post-war and and Cold War, was a hub for Paperclip scientists, including Werner Von Braun, who integrated Nazi innovations into US military technologies. (Here's a class picture of Fort Bliss's German rocket team, which initially was restricted to base without military escort.) And we know, as well as rocketry, the Nazi scientists also brought to American proving grounds their advanced work in mind control.

Irwin "snapped out of it" after burning the paper, as though releasing himself from a hypnotic suggestion that had driven him to return to Cedar City (where, for what it's worth, alleged mind control survivor "Mauri" claims began her abuse by a privileged cult of Satanic Nazis). The only tenuous UFO connection is Irwin's claim to have seen a bright object transversing the sky, though it looked to him no stranger than an aircraft in trouble. And given the tricks his mind was playing, or the tricks someone was playing on his mind, perhaps we shouldn't assume there was anything to see at all. There were no other witnesses, and no evidence of a landing.

Was Irwin the unwitting subject of an experiment in mind control? Could be. Even though I'm persuaded of a UFOlogical reality that transcends hoaxes and cover stories, I think the confluence of military research and psychological trauma in the Irwin case are far more suggestive of a fairly sinister and secretive human agency. UFO researchers are probably guilty of confirmation bias by counting this story as legitimately one of theirs, and it may be hard to let it go, but I think the Irwin episode more likely belongs to a different, though often parallel, narrative.

The box of Fatima

Fatima is an interesting set of nested puzzle boxes that naturally predates any attempt to incorporate it into a military mind control narrative. But what is it?

To the Roman Catholic faithful it represents a Marian miracle. Skeptics, outside that box, regard it as mass hysteria. Joe Nickel, Senior Research Fellow of CSICOP, says of Fatima's dramatic "Miracle of the Sun" that "the effects were surely optical ones. For example, because one cannot focus on an object so bright, the eyes may dart back and forth, thus creating, by the effect of image and after-image, the appearance that the sun is 'dancing,' or the eyes may attempt to focus, retreat, again attempt, and so on, thereby giving the illusion that the sun was 'pulsating.'"

CSICOP's rational box will not allow for a third interpretation, which I considered two years ago in this post, and that I think makes better sense of the evidence by being honestly strange enough to account for it.

The "sun," which appeared out of a small cloud and had the appearance of a dull silvery disc, descended in "slow zigzags," according to Father Alves Vieira, quoted in Basiago and Thompson's Heavenly Lights. The object, which unlike the sun could be looked at without discomfort, moved in the rhythm "of a dry leaf that falls from trees in Autumn." Vieira could not know that he was also describing a maneuver which would become common to UFO sightings before the mid-1970s. For instance, on September 19, 1952, an RAF squadron observed a silver disk in the sky above one of their fighters. In a report submitted by Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn, he described it beginning to descend, "swinging in a pendular motion similar to a falling sycamore leaf" before accelerating into the west at "unbelievable" speed. (Curiously, the bizarre entities of the "Hopkinsville incident" were said to float gently to the ground in a falling leaf fashion after being shot, to no other effect, by members of the terrified Sutton family.)

The box of 9/11

9/11 has so many boxes, and more all the time, those might as well have been FedEx planes spilling Lament Configurations all over Lower Manhattan.

One of the arguments that something other than Flight 77 struck the Pentagon is the report of elevated levels of radiation downwind of the site following September 11. It was first proposed by nuclear weapons professionals and the former head of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project, who allege the readings suggest that impacting object was a DU-tipped missile.

"I'm not an explosives or crash site expert," says Leuren Moret, former staff scientist at Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, "but I am highly knowledgeable in causes and effects related to nuclear radiation contamination. What happened at the Pentagon is highly suspicious, leading me to believe a missile with a depleted uranium warhead may have been used."

And to missile proponents, that's good enough to confirm a missile. After pulling themselves free of the Official Box, they think they're in the clear. But freethinkers, as much as anyone, need to ask themselves whether their thoughts are their their own, or if they find themselves in yet another box.

The crash of El Al Flight 1862 into an Amsterdam apartment block created a similarly toxic site, when its secret cargo, containing the equivalent of 270 kilograms of sarin gas and at least 800 kilograms of depleted uranium was disgorged. Thousands of rescue and recovery workers experienced health complaints, including symptoms of radiation sickness. Yet no one, in my reading, has used this as an argument that a cruise missile struck the building.

So what accounts for the elevated radiation readings at the Pentagon? Well, perhaps Flight 77 departed Washington bearing something that wasn't supposed to be there. Commercial aircraft, even passenger aircraft, have been co-opted by military to serve as mules before. Or perhaps the Pentagon wall which was struck - the only wall which had just then been reconditioned to better withstand terrorist attack - actually incorporated the extremely hard and dense metal in its composition. Either could be possible, and other explanations as well, which are more likely than the boxed-in assumption of a DU-tipped missile. (An assumption, as we've noted, that is championed by veterans of military intelligence. And if that doesn't make you at least wary that the hypothesis may serve another purpose than the truth, what is it going to take?)

Then there's the "fat Osama" video. It could be, maybe, he wasn't that fat after all. Perhaps the discrepancy in his appearance is accounted for by a failure to correct the aspect ratio of PAL to NTSC video conversion. If so, perhaps "fat Osama" has been a box for us all along, to keep us from considering the implications of the video's content and the circumstances of its creation. Bryan Sacks makes an interesting case here why "the true backstory of the tape's creation may provide smoking-gun evidence of US foreknowledge and complicity in the 9/11 attack." If so, then while we've been clucking over the obvious artifice of "fat Osama," we've missed its point, which was its purpose all along. And if so, and we're too enamored of fat Osama to ever let him go, then we'll keep on missing it, too.

So what's my point?

Critical thinking isn't instinctual. We shouldn't presume, in our disdain of the official story (whatever story that may be, and however official), that we've reached the truth once we stand with it's official opposition, because we may be either boxing ourselves in with rigid either/or thinking, or be boxed in by the authorities who mean to control both thesis and antithesis.

We should know that some boxes feel like home. They're meant to feel that way.

A Dot Too Far

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you,
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it's true. - Bob Dylan

It seems appropriate enough that that old Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times," isn't Chinese at all, but American. What's more, it may have been coined by Robert Kennedy, which makes it so appropriate it hurts. And as interesting as our times are, and may even be beyond our imagining, it astonishes me how much attention is paid to the far less compelling and unconvincing distractions.

The conclusion of the Libby trial tells me I was right to have tuned it out a long time ago for expecting nothing but a Black Fitzmas. Juror Denis Collins can now say the jury wondered a "number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove... where are these other guys?"' The investigation is inactive, says Fitzgerald, and has been for some time, and all the liberal blogosphere has to show for its years of better-not-pout best behaviour is the head of a failed pornographer most of it wouldn't have heard of before he became what unhappy jurors are calling the "fall guy." And a head still attached to its body at that, since Libby just jumped the queue for a presidential pardon in another year and a half.

I wish conspiracy culture had some higher authority which could hold accountable the voices who said things would prove so different. I don't mean those who merely speculated incorrectly, but the ones who claimed the prerogative of inside information and "unnamed sources." Perhaps some of them did, and what they were told was simply wrong (or more likely, not so simply). But I hope at least the trial's end helps expose the disinfotainers, and separates honest truth seekers from mere consumers of conspiratainments.

Remember the 28 indictments, including Cheney and Bush? Remember, good God, the MI-6 agents caught trying to blow up the Chicago subway? And I've always been curious, and increasingly suspicious, about the intentions of Fitzgerald's oft-cited and seemingly well-informed anonymous cheerleader "Citizenspook" ("Libby was just an appetizer," he wrote last month. "The plot thickens. Be patient. FITZ!"). The one time he turned away from fanning expectations for "Treasongate" was to bizarrely slag Daniel Hopsicker as a "damage control mole messiah for the government.... They are grooming him as the atom bomb to destroy the 911 truth movement." And why did the only 9/11 researcher left who could be called a legitimate investigator deserve such approbation? Naturally, because he doesn't believe the towers were "laced with explosives," and "How could anybody with even half a brain look at the Pentagon footage and not have serious questions about what hit [it]?" In other words, the wedge issues. And who do you think might be driving the wedge?

There seems a prevailing consensus that a concession of uncertainty is a sign of soft-headedness, or even indicative of complicity in disinformation and cover-up. At the risk of being tagged a disinfo artist, I don't think so. When I'm unsure of something - and I'm unsure of a lot of things - I like a nice maybe or perhaps. In fact, I think an admission that one might be wrong should be the price of serious appraisal. Not only am I disinclined to heed those who claim to have solved the puzzles of our time's hidden riddles, but I'm likely to red-flag them with suspicion. And the same should go for me if I ever say, unreservedly, that This is the way things are.

I'm going to try not to write any more on this subject, because after I'm done I feel like I've only helped feed the energy sink, but here I go again: I'm not on board with demolitions and Pentagon missiles, partly because I find the physical evidence unpersuasive. Though "physical" is a misnomer, since it's almost entirely based upon selective video clips and cherry-picked testimony. (For instance, that the first thoughts of a witness in a tower's sub-basement was not unreasonably of bombs somehow becomes "proof of pre-planted explosives.") But also, and more deeply, because I'm suspicious of how these narratives have acted like cancer cells to effectively ingest, mutate and bury the chance for a credible and effective 9/11 Movement. The most recent example may be the flap over BBC "foreknowledge" of building 7's collapse, which has wound up a lot of people for, I think, some pretty poor reasons.

To many, it's an unchallenged assumption that no one expected WTC 7, and so Aaron Brown's report that "we're getting information that one of the other buildings... Building 7... is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing" is received as confirmation that someone pre-released the "script," rather than as evidence that its fall may be yet unexplained but was not a surprise. That is why so many cameras were fixed on it to capture its fall, and yes, that is why the fire team was "pulled." The day was full of confused, false and conflicting news, and that's the nature of reporting an unprecedented catastrophic event in real time. Yet the medium is not the message here.

But you know what? I could be wrong. I just wish 9/11's demolition experts could make similar admissions.