Friday, May 30, 2008
No words can describe this Moron
Pictured: The moment George Bush 'chest bumps' an airman
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There are still eight months to go until George Bush hands over his presidency but it seems he already feels like celebrating.
After greeting US Air Force Academy cadets at a graduation ceremony in Colorado, he started horsing about with one graduate.
The president shocked onlookers when he decided to give one soldier, Theodore Shiveley from Plano, Texas, the most bizarre salute - a 'chest bump'.
Bizarre: President Bush and graduate Theodore Shiveley get ready to bump chests at the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs
Bump: The president embraces the strapping young graduate
Silver-haired Bush stretched out his arms and bounded into the strapping, uniformed soldier.
Wearing a long black coat over his suit the president looked uncomfortable as he prepared to embrace the graduate.
But that didn't deter him.
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Strain: George Bush recovers from his exertions
He looked straight into the soldier's eyes as they jumped towards each other.
But the president looked slightly deflated after his hearty exchange and he was spotted puffing out his cheeks as the young recruit just smiled.
President Bush strikes a Heisman trophy pose with a graduate in front of the crowd and well placed photographers
The behaviour was just one example of a series of bizarre exchanges with the cadets including joining them to blow kisses to the crowd, sharing cigars, and even speaking on the phone to their family members.
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President Bush flexes his arms in unison with another U.S. Air Force Academy cadet
President Bush grabs U.S. Air Force Second Lt. Jonathon Collin Reynolds' mobile telephone and chats with family members in the crowd after handing him his diploma
US President George W. Bush does his best to pose with a graduate during the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado Springs
Ever more challenges to the 911 mythology
USA Military Officers Challenge Official Account of September 11
By News Report
Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They include former commander of U.S. Army Intelligence, Major General Albert Stubblebine, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Col. Ronald D. Ray, two former staff members of the Director of the National Security Agency; Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, and Major John M. Newman, PhD, and many others. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, engineers, and architects challenging the government’s story. The officers’ statements appear below, listed alphabetically.
Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD
“A lot of these pieces of information, taken together, prove that the official story, the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a bunch of hogwash. It’s impossible,” said Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret). With doctoral degrees in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering, Col. Bowman served as Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
“There’s a second group of facts having to do with the cover up,” continued Col. Bowman.
“Taken together these things prove that high levels of our government don’t want us to know what happened and who’s responsible. Who gained from 9/11? Who covered up crucial information about 9/11? And who put out the patently false stories about 9/11 in the first place? When you take those three things together, I think the case is pretty clear that it’s highly placed individuals in the administration with all roads passing through Dick Cheney.”
Regarding the failure of NORAD to intercept the four hijacked planes on 9/11, Col. Bowman said, “I'm an old interceptor pilot. I know the drill. I've done it. I know how long it takes. I know the rules. … Critics of the government story on 9/11 have said: ‘Well, they knew about this, and they did nothing’. That's not true. If our government had done nothing that day and let normal procedure be followed, those planes, wherever they were, would have been intercepted, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive.”
During his 22-year Air Force career, Col. Bowman also served as the Head of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and Assistant Dean at the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology. He also flew over 100 combat missions in Viet Nam as a fighter pilot.
Lt. Jeff Dahlstrom
Former U.S. Air Force pilot Lt. Jeff Dahlstrom wrote in a 2007 statement to this author, “When 9/11 occurred I bought the entire government and mainstream media story line. I was a lifelong conservative Republican that voted for Bush/Cheney, twice. Curiosity about JFK’s death, after a late night TV re-run of Oliver Stone’s movie, got me started researching and digging for the truth about his assassins.
“My research led me to a much more important and timely question: the mystery of what really did happen on 9/11. Everything that seemed real, turned out to be false. The US government and the news media, once again, were lying to the world about the real terrorists and the public murder of 2,972 innocents on 9/11.
“The ‘Patriot Act’ was actually written prior to 9/11 with the intention of destroying the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was passed by Congress, based upon the government's myth of 9/11, which was in reality a staged hoax. 9/11 was scripted and executed by rogue elements of the military, FAA, intelligence, and private contractors working for the US government.
“In addition to severely curtailing fundamental rights of Americans, the 9/11 crime was then used by this administration, the one I originally voted for and supported, to justify waging two preemptive wars (and most likely a third war), killing over 4,500 American soldiers, and killing over one million innocent Afghan and Iraqi people.
“It was all premeditated. Treason, a false flag military operation, and betrayal of the trust of the American people were committed on 9/11 by the highest levels of the US government and not one person responsible for the crimes, or the cover-up, has been held accountable for the last six years.
“After reading fifteen well-researched books, studying eight or nine DVD documentaries, and devoting months of personal research and investigation, I have arrived at one ultimate conclusion: The American government and the US Constitution have been hijacked and subverted by a group of criminals that today are the real terrorists. They are in control of the US government and they have all violated their oaths of office and committed treason against their own citizens.”
Capt. Daniel Davis
Capt. Daniel Davis is a former U.S. Army Air Defense Officer and NORAD Tac Director. After his military service, Capt. Davis served for 15 years as a Senior Manager at General Electric Turbine (jet) Engine Division and then devoted an additional 15 years as founder and CEO of Turbine Technology Services Corp., a turbine (jet engine) services and maintenance company.
In a statement to this author, Capt. Davis wrote, “As a former General Electric Turbine engineering specialist and manager and then CEO of a turbine engineering company, I can guarantee that none of the high tech, high temperature alloy engines on any of the four planes that crashed on 9/11 would be completely destroyed, burned, shattered or melted in any crash or fire. Wrecked, yes, but not destroyed. Where are all of those engines, particularly at the Pentagon? If jet powered aircraft crashed on 9/11, those engines, plus wings and tail assembly, would be there.”
Decorated with the Bronze Star and the Soldiers Medal for bravery under fire and the Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Viet Nam, Capt. Davis also served in the Army Air Defense Command as Nike Missile Battery Control Officer for the Chicago-Milwaukee Defense Area.
Capt. Davis continued, “Additionally, in my experience as an officer in NORAD as a Tactical Director for the Chicago-Milwaukee Air Defense and as a current private pilot, there is no way that an aircraft on instrument flight plans (all commercial flights are IFR) would not be intercepted when they deviate from their flight plan, turn off their transponders, or stop communication with Air Traffic Control. No way! With very bad luck, perhaps one could slip by, but no there's no way all four of them could!
“Finally, going over the hill and highway and crashing into the Pentagon right at the wall/ground interface is difficult for even a small slow single engine airplane and no way for a 757. Maybe the best pilot in the world could accomplish that but not these unskilled ‘terrorists’. Attempts to obscure facts by calling them a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ does not change the truth. It seems, ‘Something is rotten in the State’.”
Major Jon I. Fox is a former U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and a retired commercial airline pilot for Continental Airlines with a 35-year commercial aviation career. In 2007, in support of the Architects and Engineers[3] petition to reinvestigate 9/11, he wrote, “On hearing the military (NORAD/NEAD) excuses for no intercepts on 9/11/2001, I knew from personal experience that they were lying. I then began re-checking other evidence and found mostly more lies from the ‘official spokesmen’. Jet fuel fires at atmospheric pressure do not get hot enough to weaken steel. Structures do not collapse through themselves in free fall time with only gravity as the powering force.”
Commander Ralph Kolstad
Retired U.S. Navy ‘Top Gun’ pilot Commander Ralph Kolstad started questioning the official account of 9/11 within days of the event. In a statement to this author, he wrote, “It just didn’t make any sense to me,” he said. And now six years after 9/11 he says, “When one starts using his own mind, and not what one was told, there is very little to believe in the official story.”
Commander Kolstad was a top-rated fighter pilot during his 20-year Navy career. Early in his career, he was accorded the honor of being selected to participate in the Navy’s ‘Top Gun’ air combat school, officially known as the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School. The Tom Cruise movie “Top Gun” reflects the experience of the young Navy pilots at the school. Eleven years later, Commander Kolstad was further honored by being selected to become a ‘Top Gun’ adversary instructor.
Commander Kolstad had a second career after his 20 years of Navy active and reserve service and served as a commercial airline pilot for 27 years, flying for American Airlines and other domestic and international careers. He flew Boeing 727, 757 and 767, McDonnell Douglas MD-80, and Fokker F-100 airliners. He has flown a total of over 23,000 hours in his career.
Commander Kolstad is especially critical of the account of American Airlines Flight 77 that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. He says, “At the Pentagon, the pilot of the Boeing 757 did quite a feat of flying. I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757’s and 767’s and I could not have flown it the way the flight path was described.”
Commander Kolstad adds, “I was also a Navy fighter pilot and Air Combat Instructor and have experience flying low altitude, high speed aircraft. I could not have done what these beginners did. Something stinks to high heaven!”
He points to the physical evidence at the Pentagon impact site and asks in exasperation,
“Where is the damage to the wall of the Pentagon from the wings? Where are the big pieces that always break away in an accident? Where is all the luggage? Where are the miles and miles of wire, cable, and lines that are part and parcel of any large aircraft? Where are the steel engine parts? Where is the steel landing gear? Where is the tail section that would have broken into large pieces?”
But no major element of the official account of 9/11 is spared from Commander Kolstad’s criticism. Regarding the alleged impact site of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, PA, he asks, “Where is any of the wreckage? Of all the pictures I have seen, there is only a hole! Where is any piece of a crashed airplane? Why was the area cordoned off, and no inspection allowed by the normal accident personnel? Where is any evidence at all?”
Commander Kolstad also questions many aspects of the attack on the World Trade Center. “How could a steel and concrete building collapse after being hit by a Boeing 767? Didn’t the engineers design it to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707, approximately the same size and weight of the 767? The evidence just doesn’t add up.”
“Why did the second building collapse before the first one, which had been burning for 20 minutes longer after a direct hit, especially when the second one hit was just a glancing blow? If the fire was so hot, then why were people looking out the windows and in the destroyed areas? Why have so many members of the New York Fire Department reported seeing or hearing many ‘explosions’ before the buildings collapsed?”
Commander Kolstad summarized his frustration with the investigation and disbelief of the official account of 9/11, “If one were to act as an accident investigator, one would look at the evidence, and then construct a plausible scenario as to what led to the accident. In this case, we were told the story and then the evidence was built to support the story. What happened to any intelligent investigation? Every question leads to another question that has not been answered by anyone in authority. This is just the beginning as to why I don’t believe the official ‘story’ and why I want the truth to be told.”
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
A Pentagon eye-witness and a former member of the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret), is a severe critic of the official account of 9/11. A contributing author to the 2006 book 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, she wrote, “I believe the [9/11] Commission failed to deeply examine the topic at hand, failed to apply scientific rigor to its assessment of events leading up to and including 9/11, failed to produce a believable and unbiased summary of what happened, failed to fully examine why it happened, and even failed to include a set of unanswered questions for future research.”
She continued, “It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics.”
Col. Kwiatkowski was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 in her capacity as Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when Flight 77 allegedly hit the Pentagon. She wrote, “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the Secretary of Defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a ‘missile.’ [Secretary Rumsfeld also publicly referred to Flight 93 as the plane that was "shot down" over Pennsylvania.]
“I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact - no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. ... [A]ll of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.
“The same is true with regard to the kind of damage we expected. ... But I did not see this kind of damage. Rather, the facade had a rather small hole, no larger than 20 feet in diameter. Although this facade later collapsed, it remained standing for 30 or 40 minutes, with the roof line remaining relatively straight.
“The scene, in short, was not what I would have expected from a strike by a large jetliner. It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon. ... More information is certainly needed regarding the events of 9/11 and the events leading up to that terrible day.”
The improbability of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 is a major concern of these officers and a growing number of scientists, engineers and architects. The building was 610 feet tall, 47 stories, and would have been the tallest building in 33 states. Although it was not hit by an airplane, it completely collapsed into a pile of rubble in less than 7 seconds at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11. In the 6 years since 9/11, the Federal government has failed to provide any explanation for the collapse. In addition to the failure to provide an explanation, absolutely no mention of Building 7’s collapse appears in the 9/11 Commission's “full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”
Lt. Col. Shelton Lankford
Lt. Col. Shelton Lankford, U.S. Marine Corps (ret), an attack pilot with over 300 combat missions, wrote in 2007 to the Michigan Daily, “Our government has been hijacked by means of a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ and a lot of otherwise good and decent people who are gullible enough to think that the first three steel-framed buildings in history fall down because they have some fires that the fire fighter on the scene said could be knocked down with a couple of hoses and through which people walked before they were photographed looking out the holes where the plane hit. One of these, Building 7, was never hit by a plane and even NIST is ashamed to advance a reason for its collapse. And, miracle of miracles, these three buildings just happened to be leased and insured by the same guy who is on tape saying they decided to ‘PULL’ the last one to fall.”
During his 20 year military career, Col. Lankford's decorations include the Distinguished Flying Cross, and 32 awards of the Air Medal.
In a statement to this author, Col. Lankford wrote,
“September 11, 2001 seems destined to be the watershed event of our lives and the greatest test for our democracy in our lifetimes. The evidence of government complicity in the lead-up to the events, the failure to respond during the event, and the astounding lack of any meaningful investigation afterwards, as well as the ignoring of evidence turned up by others that renders the official explanation impossible, may signal the end of the American experiment. It has been used to justify all manners of measures to legalize repression at home and as a pretext for behaving as an aggressive empire abroad. Until we demand an independent, honest, and thorough investigation and accountability for those whose action and inaction led to those events and the cover-up, our republic and our Constitution remain in the gravest danger.”
Lt. Col. Jeff Latas
Another harsh critic of the official account of 9/11 is Lt. Col. Jeff Latas, U.S. Air Force (ret). A former combat fighter pilot, Col. Latas is currently a commercial airline pilot.
Col. Latas is a member of Pilots for 9/11 Truth. In 2007 he was interviewed by the group’s founder, commercial airline pilot, Rob Balsamo, regarding the group’s documentary video, Pandora's Black Box, Chapter 2, Flight of American 77, which focuses on the 9/11 Commission's account of the impact of Flight 77 at the Pentagon and discrepancies with the data from the Flight Data Recorder alleged by the NTSB to be from Flight 77.
In the interview, Col. Latas said, “After I did my own analysis of it, it's obvious that there's discrepancies between the two stories; between the 9/11 Commission and the flight data recorder information. And I think that's where we really need to focus a lot of our attention to get the help that we need in order to put pressure on government agencies to actually do a real investigation of 9/11. And not just from a security standpoint, but from even an aviation standpoint, like any accident investigation would actually help the aviators out by finding reasons for things happening.”
A highly decorated fighter pilot, Col. Latas was awarded the Distinguish Flying Cross for Heroism, four Air Medals, four Meritorious Service Medals, and nine Aerial Achievement Medals. His combat experience includes Desert Storm and four tours of duty in Northern and Southern Watch. During his 20-year Air Force career, he also served as Pentagon Weapons Requirement Officer, as a member of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, and as President, U.S. Air Force Accident Investigation Board.
Col. Latas concluded, “And I think that we Americans need to demand further investigation just to clarify the discrepancies that you've [Pilots for 9/11 Truth] found. And I think that we need to be getting on the phone with our Congressmen and women and letting them know that we don't accept the excuses that we're hearing now, that we want true investigators to do a true investigation.”
Commander Ted Muga and Capt. Eric H. May
Capt. Eric H. May, U.S. Army (ret), is a former Army Intelligence Officer who also served as an inspector and interpreter for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty team. He is one of many signers of a petition requesting a reinvestigation of 9/11. In 2005, he wrote: “As a former Army officer, my tendency immediately after 911 was to rally 'round the colors and defend the country against what I then thought was an insidious, malicious all-Arab entity called Al-Qaida. In fact, in April of 2002, I attempted to reactivate my then-retired commission to return to serve my country in its time of peril. ...
Now I view the 911 event as Professor David Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor, views it: as a matter that implies either
A) passive participation by the Bush White House through a deliberate stand-down of proper defense procedures that (if followed) would have led US air assets to a quick identification and confrontation of the passenger aircraft that impacted WTC 1 and WTC 2, or worse ...
B) active execution of a plot by rogue elements of government, starting with the White House itself, in creating a spectacle of destruction that would lead the United States into an invasion of the Middle East ...”
Commander Ted Muga, U.S. Navy (ret), is a Navy aviator, who, after retirement, had a second career as a commercial airline pilot for Pan-Am.
In a 2007 interview on the Alex Jones Show, Commander Muga stated,
“The maneuver at the Pentagon was just a tight spiral coming down out of 7,000 feet. And a commercial aircraft, while they can in fact structurally somewhat handle that maneuver, they are very, very, very difficult. And it would take considerable training. In other words, commercial aircraft are designed for a particular purpose and that is for comfort and for passengers and it's not for military maneuvers. And while they are structurally capable of doing them, it takes some very, very talented pilots to do that. ... I just can't imagine an amateur even being able to come close to performing a maneuver of that nature.
“And as far as hijacking the airplanes, once again getting back to the nature of pilots and airplanes, there is no way that a pilot would give up an airplane to hijackers. ... I mean, hell, a guy doesn't give up a TV remote control much less a complicated 757. And so to think that pilots would allow a plane to be taken over by a couple of 5 foot 7, 150 pound guys with a one-inch blade boxcutter is ridiculous.
“And also in all four planes, if you remember, none of the planes ever switched on their transponder to the hijack code. There's a very, very simple code that you put in if you suspect that your plane is being hijacked. It takes literally just a split-second for you to put your hand down on the center console and flip it over. And not one of the four planes ever transponded a hijack code, which is most, most unusual.
“Commercial airplanes are very, very complex pieces of machines. And they're designed for two pilots up there, not just two amateur pilots, but two qualified commercial pilots up there. And to think that you're going to get an amateur up into the cockpit and fly, much less navigate, it to a designated target, the probability is so low, that it's bordering on impossible.”
Col. George Nelson
“In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft -- and in most cases the precise cause of the accident,” wrote Col. George Nelson, MBA, U.S. Air Force (ret), a former U.S. Air Force aircraft accident investigator and airplane parts authority.
“The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view,” continued Col. Nelson, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force War College and a 34-year Air Force veteran.
“With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. Similarly, with all the evidence available at the Pennsylvania crash site, it was most doubtful that a passenger airliner caused the obvious hole in the ground and certainly not the Boeing 757 as alleged. …
“As painful and heartbreaking as was the loss of innocent lives and the lingering health problems of thousands more, a most troublesome and nightmarish probability remains that so many Americans appear to be involved in the most heinous conspiracy in our country's history.”
Maj. John M. Newman, PhD, Capt. Omar Pradhan and Col. Ronald D. Ray
Maj. John M. Newman, PhD, U.S. Army (ret), is the former Executive Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency. In testimony before a 2005 Congressional briefing, he said,
“It falls to me this morning to bring to your attention the story of Saeed Sheikh, whose full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and his astonishing rise to power in Al Qaeda, his crucial role in 9/11, which is completely, utterly, missing from the 9/11 Commission report…
“The 9/11 Commission which studied US intelligence and law enforcement community performance in great detail, (maybe not so much great detail, but they did), neglected to cover the community’s performance during the weeks following the attacks to determine who was responsible for them, not a word about that in the Report.
“The Report does discuss the immediate US responses but the immediate investigation is never addressed, and anyone who has closely studied the post-9/11 investigation knows that the first breakthrough came two weeks into the investigation when the money transfers from the United Arab Emirates to the hijackers were uncovered.
“Furthermore, if you have studied that investigation, you know there is no disputing that while investigators may have struggled with the identity of the paymaster, they were clear about one thing, he was Al Qaeda’s finance chief. For this reason alone you have to ask why the 9/11 Commission Report never mentions the finance chief’s role as the 9/11 paymaster.”
Capt. Omar Pradhan, U.S. Air Force, is a former AWACS command pilot and Flight Instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In a 2007 statement to this author, Capt. Pradhan wrote, “As a proud American, as a distinguished USAF E-3 AWACS Aircraft Commander (with 350+ hours of combat time logged over Afghanistan and Iraq), and as a former U.S. Air Force Academy Flight Instructor, I warmly endorse the professional inquiry and pursuit of comprehensive truth sought by the Pilots for 911 Truth organization and the PatriotsQuestion911 website.”
Another senior officer questioning the official account of 9/11 is Col. Ronald D. Ray, U.S. Marine Corps (ret), Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran (two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart), he was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve on the American Battle Monuments Commission (1990 – 1994), and the 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. He was Military Historian and Deputy Director of Field Operations for the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C. (1990 – 1994).
In an interview on Alex Jones’ radio show on June 30, 2006, Col. Ray described the official account of 9/11 as “the dog that doesn’t hunt”, meaning it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In response to Alex Jones’ question, “Is it safe to say or is the statement accurate that you smell something rotten in the state of Denmark when it comes to 9/11?” Col. Ray replied,“I'm astounded that the conspiracy theory advanced by the administration could in fact be true and the evidence does not seem to suggest that that's accurate. That's true.”
“After 4+ years of research since retirement in 2002, I am 100% convinced that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned, organized, and committed by treasonous perpetrators that have infiltrated the highest levels of our government. It is now time to take our country back,” wrote Lt. Col. Guy S. Razer, MS, U.S. Air Force (ret), in a statement to this author.
A retired fighter pilot, Col. Razer served as an instructor at the U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School and NATO’s Tactical Leadership Program and flew combat missions over Iraq. He continued, “The ‘collapse’ of WTC Building 7 shows beyond any doubt that the demolitions were pre-planned. There is simply no way to demolish a 47-story building (on fire) over a coffee break. It is also impossible to report the building’s collapse before it happened, as BBC News did, unless it was pre-planned. Further damning evidence is Larry Silverstein's video taped confession in which he states ‘they made that decision to pull [WTC 7] and we watched the building collapse.’
“We cannot let the pursuit of justice fail. Those of us in the military took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’. Just because we have retired does not make that oath invalid, so it is not just our responsibility, it is our duty to expose the real perpetrators of 9/11 and bring them to justice, no matter how hard it is, how long it takes, or how much we have to suffer to do it,” he concluded.
Maj. Scott Ritter, Maj. Douglas Rokke, PhD, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer
Maj. Scott Ritter, U.S. Marine Corps, is a former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer who also served as Chief Weapons Inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq 1991 - 1998. In 2005, he said: “I, like the others, are frustrated by the 9/11 Commission Report, by the lack of transparency on the part of the United States government, both in terms of the executive branch and the legislative branch when it comes to putting out on the table all facts known to the 9/11 case.”
Maj. Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army (ret), former Director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project and 30-year veteran, had this to say about the explosion at the Pentagon on 9/11, “When you look at the whole thing, especially the crash site void of airplane parts, the size of the hole left in the building and the fact the projectile's impact penetrated numerous concrete walls, it looks like the work of a missile. And when you look at the damage, it was obviously a missile.”
The 9/11 Commission Report asserts that only three of the alleged hijackers were known to U.S. intelligence agencies prior to 9/11: Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Mihdar. There is no mention in the Report that the names and photographs of alleged hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and alleged ring-leader Mohamed Atta had been identified by the Department of Defense anti-terrorist program known as Able Danger more than a year prior to 9/11 and that they were known to be affiliates of al-Qaida. Able Danger also identified Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in 2006, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, U.S. Army Reserve, former Chief of the Army’s Controlled HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Program, overseeing Army Intelligence and Security Command’s global controlled HUMINT efforts, stated:
“[B]asic law enforcement investigative techniques, with 21st Century data mining and analytical tools ... resulted in the establishment of a new form of intelligence collection – and the identification of Mohammed Atta and several other of the 9-11 terrorists as having links to Al Qaeda leadership a full year in advance of the attacks. ...
“After contact by two separate members of the ABLE DANGER team, … the 9-11 [Commission] staff refused to perform any in-depth review or investigation of the issues that were identified to them. … It was their job to do a thorough investigation of these claims – to not simply dismiss them based on what many now believe was a ‘preconceived’ conclusion to the 9-11 story they wished to tell. … I consider this a failure of the 9-11 staff – a failure that the 9-11 Commissioners themselves were victimized by – and continue to have perpetrated on them by the staff as is evidenced by their recent, groundless conclusion that ABLE DANGER’s findings were ‘urban legend’.”
A 23-year military intelligence veteran, Col. Shaffer was recently awarded the Bronze Star for bravery in Afghanistan. In a 2005 interview on Fox News, Col Shaffer asked, “Why did this operation, which was created in '99 to target Al Qaeda globally, offensively, why was that turned off in the Spring of 2001, four months before we were attacked? I can't answer that, either. I can tell you I was ordered out of the operation directly by a two-star general.”
Supporting Col. Shaffer’s statement, Capt. Scott J. Phillpott, U.S. Navy, currently Commanding Officer of the guided-missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf and former head of the Able Danger data mining program, stated in 2005: “I will not discuss this outside of my chain of command. I have briefed the Department of the Army, the Special Operations Command and the office of (Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence) Dr. Cambone as well as the 9/11 Commission. My story has remained consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger in January/February 2000.” Capt. Phillpott is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, who during his 23 years of Navy service has been awarded the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, three Meritorious Service Medals, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, two Navy Commendation Medals, and the Navy Achievement Medal.
Joel Skousen and Gen. Albert Stubblebine
Former U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot Joel M. Skousen also questions the official account of 9/11. After his military service, Mr. Skousen served as Chairman of the Conservative National Committee in Washington DC and Executive Editor of Conservative Digest.
“In the March 2005 issue, PM [Popular Mechanics] magazine singled out 16 issues or claims of the 9/11 skeptics that point to government collusion and systematically attempted to debunk each one. Of the 16, most missed the mark and almost half were straw men arguments - either ridiculous arguments that few conspiracists believed or restatements of the arguments that were highly distorted so as to make them look weaker than they really were. ...
“I am one of those who claim there are factual arguments pointing to conspiracy, and that truth is not served by taking cheap shots at those who see gaping flaws in the government story ... There is significant evidence that the aircraft impacts did not cause the collapse [of the Twin Towers] ...
The issues of the penetration hole [at the Pentagon] and the lack of large pieces of debris simply do not jive with the official story, but they are explainable if you include the parking lot video evidence that shows a huge white explosion at impact. This cannot happen with an aircraft laden only with fuel. It can only happen in the presence of high explosives.”
Major General Albert Stubblebine, U.S. Army (ret), former Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), is a strong critic of the official account of 9/11
In a 2006 video documentary he said,
“One of my experiences in the Army was being in charge of the Army’s Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence during the Cold War. I measured pieces of Soviet equipment from photographs. It was my job. I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole’. So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What's going on?”
During his 32-year Army career, Gen. Stubblebine also commanded the U.S. Army’s Electronic Research and Development Command and the U.S. Army’s Intelligence School and Center. Gen. Stubblebine is one of the inductees into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
“There is a well-organized cover-up of the events of 11 Sep 2001. The 9/11 Commission was a white-washed farce. There is evidence that US Government officials had advance knowledge of and are probably implicated in the events of 9/11,” wrote retired military physician, Col. James R. Uhl, MD, U.S. Army (ret), in a statement to this author.
“A huge body of physical evidence has been ignored, suppressed, and ridiculed by the media and by our Government. Why did WTC 7 collapse? It was never hit by an airplane and was apparently brought down by explosives. How could Al-Qaida terrorists have had access and time to plant bombs in a top secret installation? Why did the 9/11 Commission fail to seek the reason for the WTC 7 collapse?” continued Col. Uhl, a 38-year Army veteran, who served in several theaters of operations, from Viet Nam through Iraq.
Capt. Russ Wittenberg
Capt. Russ Wittenberg, U.S. Air Force, is a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions and a retired commercial pilot, who flew for Pan Am and United Airlines for 35 years.
According to Capt. Wittenberg, “The government story they handed us about 9/11 is total B.S., plain and simple.
In the 2007 documentary video, 9/11 Ripple Effect, he said
“I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower.
“I don't believe it's possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist, to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding its design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding -- pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's. And the aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it.”
Regarding Flight 77, which allegedly hit the Pentagon, Capt. Wittenberg said,
”The airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles. … To expect this alleged airplane to run these maneuvers with a total amateur at the controls is simply ludicrous ... It’s roughly a 100 ton airplane. And an airplane that weighs 100 tons all assembled is still going to have 100 tons of disassembled trash and parts after it hits a building. There was no wreckage from a 757 at the Pentagon. … The vehicle that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77. We think, as you may have heard before, it was a cruise missile.”
Col. Ann Wright and Capt. Gregory Zeigler
Another senior officer questioning the official account of 9/11 is Col. Ann Wright, U.S. Army (ret), who said in a 2007 interview with Richard Greene on the Air America Radio Network, “It's incredible some of these things that still are unanswered. The 9/11 Report -- that was totally inadequate. I mean the questions that anybody has after reading that.”
Col. Wright is one of three U.S. State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. She served for 13 years on active duty and 16 additional years on reserve duty in the U.S. Army. She joined the Foreign Service in 1987 and served for 16 years as a U.S. Diplomat. She served as Deputy Chief of Mission of U.S. Embassies in Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Afghanistan and she helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December, 2001.
She continued in her interview:
“How could our national intelligence and defense operations be so inept that they could not communicate; that they could not scramble jets; that they could not take defensive action? And I totally agree. I always thought the Pentagon had all sorts of air defense sort of equipment around it; that they could take out anything that was coming at it. And for a plane to be able to just fly low right over Washington and slam into that thing is just -- I mean, you still just shake your head. How in the world could that happen?”
Capt. Gregory M. Zeigler, PhD, is a former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer. In a 2006 statement to this author, Capt. Zeigler wrote,
“I knew from September 18, 2001, that the official story about 9/11 was false. That was when I realized that the perpetrators had made a colossal blunder in collapsing the South Tower first, rather than the North Tower, which had been hit more directly and earlier.
“Other anomalies poured in rapidly: the hijackers' names appearing in none of the published flight passenger lists, BBC reports of stolen identities of the alleged hijackers or the alleged hijackers being found alive, the obvious demolitions of WTC 1 and 2 and WTC 7, the lack of identifiable Boeing 757 wreckage at the Pentagon, the impossibility of ordinary cell phone (as opposed to Airfone) calls being made consistently from passenger aircraft at cruising altitude, etc., etc., etc.”
Shortly after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, a group of over 100 prominent Americans signed a petition urging Congress to immediately reinvestigate 9/11. In addition to two former senior CIA officials and several U.S. State Department veterans, the signers included Lt. Col. Robert Bowman and Capt. Eric H. May, both mentioned above.
The petition stated, in part, “We want truthful answers to questions such as:
1. Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
2. Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
3. Why did the Secret Service allow Bush to complete his elementary school visit, apparently unconcerned about his safety or that of the schoolchildren?
4. Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
5. Why haven't authorities in the U.S. and abroad published the results of multiple investigations into trading that strongly suggested foreknowledge of specific details of the 9/11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of traceable gains?”
These questions and many others still remain unanswered three years after the petition was submitted and six years after the terrible events of 9/11. As the statements of these twenty-five former U.S. military officers demonstrate, the need for a new thorough, and independent investigation of 9/11 is not a matter of partisan politics, nor the demand of irresponsible, deranged, or disloyal Americans. It is instead a matter of the utmost importance for America’s security and the future of the entire world.
Original article posted here.
By News Report
Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They include former commander of U.S. Army Intelligence, Major General Albert Stubblebine, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Col. Ronald D. Ray, two former staff members of the Director of the National Security Agency; Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, and Major John M. Newman, PhD, and many others. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, engineers, and architects challenging the government’s story. The officers’ statements appear below, listed alphabetically.
Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD
“A lot of these pieces of information, taken together, prove that the official story, the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a bunch of hogwash. It’s impossible,” said Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret). With doctoral degrees in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering, Col. Bowman served as Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
“There’s a second group of facts having to do with the cover up,” continued Col. Bowman.
“Taken together these things prove that high levels of our government don’t want us to know what happened and who’s responsible. Who gained from 9/11? Who covered up crucial information about 9/11? And who put out the patently false stories about 9/11 in the first place? When you take those three things together, I think the case is pretty clear that it’s highly placed individuals in the administration with all roads passing through Dick Cheney.”
Regarding the failure of NORAD to intercept the four hijacked planes on 9/11, Col. Bowman said, “I'm an old interceptor pilot. I know the drill. I've done it. I know how long it takes. I know the rules. … Critics of the government story on 9/11 have said: ‘Well, they knew about this, and they did nothing’. That's not true. If our government had done nothing that day and let normal procedure be followed, those planes, wherever they were, would have been intercepted, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive.”
During his 22-year Air Force career, Col. Bowman also served as the Head of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and Assistant Dean at the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology. He also flew over 100 combat missions in Viet Nam as a fighter pilot.
Lt. Jeff Dahlstrom
Former U.S. Air Force pilot Lt. Jeff Dahlstrom wrote in a 2007 statement to this author, “When 9/11 occurred I bought the entire government and mainstream media story line. I was a lifelong conservative Republican that voted for Bush/Cheney, twice. Curiosity about JFK’s death, after a late night TV re-run of Oliver Stone’s movie, got me started researching and digging for the truth about his assassins.
“My research led me to a much more important and timely question: the mystery of what really did happen on 9/11. Everything that seemed real, turned out to be false. The US government and the news media, once again, were lying to the world about the real terrorists and the public murder of 2,972 innocents on 9/11.
“The ‘Patriot Act’ was actually written prior to 9/11 with the intention of destroying the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was passed by Congress, based upon the government's myth of 9/11, which was in reality a staged hoax. 9/11 was scripted and executed by rogue elements of the military, FAA, intelligence, and private contractors working for the US government.
“In addition to severely curtailing fundamental rights of Americans, the 9/11 crime was then used by this administration, the one I originally voted for and supported, to justify waging two preemptive wars (and most likely a third war), killing over 4,500 American soldiers, and killing over one million innocent Afghan and Iraqi people.
“It was all premeditated. Treason, a false flag military operation, and betrayal of the trust of the American people were committed on 9/11 by the highest levels of the US government and not one person responsible for the crimes, or the cover-up, has been held accountable for the last six years.
“After reading fifteen well-researched books, studying eight or nine DVD documentaries, and devoting months of personal research and investigation, I have arrived at one ultimate conclusion: The American government and the US Constitution have been hijacked and subverted by a group of criminals that today are the real terrorists. They are in control of the US government and they have all violated their oaths of office and committed treason against their own citizens.”
Capt. Daniel Davis
Capt. Daniel Davis is a former U.S. Army Air Defense Officer and NORAD Tac Director. After his military service, Capt. Davis served for 15 years as a Senior Manager at General Electric Turbine (jet) Engine Division and then devoted an additional 15 years as founder and CEO of Turbine Technology Services Corp., a turbine (jet engine) services and maintenance company.
In a statement to this author, Capt. Davis wrote, “As a former General Electric Turbine engineering specialist and manager and then CEO of a turbine engineering company, I can guarantee that none of the high tech, high temperature alloy engines on any of the four planes that crashed on 9/11 would be completely destroyed, burned, shattered or melted in any crash or fire. Wrecked, yes, but not destroyed. Where are all of those engines, particularly at the Pentagon? If jet powered aircraft crashed on 9/11, those engines, plus wings and tail assembly, would be there.”
Decorated with the Bronze Star and the Soldiers Medal for bravery under fire and the Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Viet Nam, Capt. Davis also served in the Army Air Defense Command as Nike Missile Battery Control Officer for the Chicago-Milwaukee Defense Area.
Capt. Davis continued, “Additionally, in my experience as an officer in NORAD as a Tactical Director for the Chicago-Milwaukee Air Defense and as a current private pilot, there is no way that an aircraft on instrument flight plans (all commercial flights are IFR) would not be intercepted when they deviate from their flight plan, turn off their transponders, or stop communication with Air Traffic Control. No way! With very bad luck, perhaps one could slip by, but no there's no way all four of them could!
“Finally, going over the hill and highway and crashing into the Pentagon right at the wall/ground interface is difficult for even a small slow single engine airplane and no way for a 757. Maybe the best pilot in the world could accomplish that but not these unskilled ‘terrorists’. Attempts to obscure facts by calling them a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ does not change the truth. It seems, ‘Something is rotten in the State’.”
Major Jon I. Fox is a former U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and a retired commercial airline pilot for Continental Airlines with a 35-year commercial aviation career. In 2007, in support of the Architects and Engineers[3] petition to reinvestigate 9/11, he wrote, “On hearing the military (NORAD/NEAD) excuses for no intercepts on 9/11/2001, I knew from personal experience that they were lying. I then began re-checking other evidence and found mostly more lies from the ‘official spokesmen’. Jet fuel fires at atmospheric pressure do not get hot enough to weaken steel. Structures do not collapse through themselves in free fall time with only gravity as the powering force.”
Commander Ralph Kolstad
Retired U.S. Navy ‘Top Gun’ pilot Commander Ralph Kolstad started questioning the official account of 9/11 within days of the event. In a statement to this author, he wrote, “It just didn’t make any sense to me,” he said. And now six years after 9/11 he says, “When one starts using his own mind, and not what one was told, there is very little to believe in the official story.”
Commander Kolstad was a top-rated fighter pilot during his 20-year Navy career. Early in his career, he was accorded the honor of being selected to participate in the Navy’s ‘Top Gun’ air combat school, officially known as the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School. The Tom Cruise movie “Top Gun” reflects the experience of the young Navy pilots at the school. Eleven years later, Commander Kolstad was further honored by being selected to become a ‘Top Gun’ adversary instructor.
Commander Kolstad had a second career after his 20 years of Navy active and reserve service and served as a commercial airline pilot for 27 years, flying for American Airlines and other domestic and international careers. He flew Boeing 727, 757 and 767, McDonnell Douglas MD-80, and Fokker F-100 airliners. He has flown a total of over 23,000 hours in his career.
Commander Kolstad is especially critical of the account of American Airlines Flight 77 that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. He says, “At the Pentagon, the pilot of the Boeing 757 did quite a feat of flying. I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757’s and 767’s and I could not have flown it the way the flight path was described.”
Commander Kolstad adds, “I was also a Navy fighter pilot and Air Combat Instructor and have experience flying low altitude, high speed aircraft. I could not have done what these beginners did. Something stinks to high heaven!”
He points to the physical evidence at the Pentagon impact site and asks in exasperation,
“Where is the damage to the wall of the Pentagon from the wings? Where are the big pieces that always break away in an accident? Where is all the luggage? Where are the miles and miles of wire, cable, and lines that are part and parcel of any large aircraft? Where are the steel engine parts? Where is the steel landing gear? Where is the tail section that would have broken into large pieces?”
But no major element of the official account of 9/11 is spared from Commander Kolstad’s criticism. Regarding the alleged impact site of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, PA, he asks, “Where is any of the wreckage? Of all the pictures I have seen, there is only a hole! Where is any piece of a crashed airplane? Why was the area cordoned off, and no inspection allowed by the normal accident personnel? Where is any evidence at all?”
Commander Kolstad also questions many aspects of the attack on the World Trade Center. “How could a steel and concrete building collapse after being hit by a Boeing 767? Didn’t the engineers design it to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707, approximately the same size and weight of the 767? The evidence just doesn’t add up.”
“Why did the second building collapse before the first one, which had been burning for 20 minutes longer after a direct hit, especially when the second one hit was just a glancing blow? If the fire was so hot, then why were people looking out the windows and in the destroyed areas? Why have so many members of the New York Fire Department reported seeing or hearing many ‘explosions’ before the buildings collapsed?”
Commander Kolstad summarized his frustration with the investigation and disbelief of the official account of 9/11, “If one were to act as an accident investigator, one would look at the evidence, and then construct a plausible scenario as to what led to the accident. In this case, we were told the story and then the evidence was built to support the story. What happened to any intelligent investigation? Every question leads to another question that has not been answered by anyone in authority. This is just the beginning as to why I don’t believe the official ‘story’ and why I want the truth to be told.”
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
A Pentagon eye-witness and a former member of the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret), is a severe critic of the official account of 9/11. A contributing author to the 2006 book 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, she wrote, “I believe the [9/11] Commission failed to deeply examine the topic at hand, failed to apply scientific rigor to its assessment of events leading up to and including 9/11, failed to produce a believable and unbiased summary of what happened, failed to fully examine why it happened, and even failed to include a set of unanswered questions for future research.”
She continued, “It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics. The collapses of the World Trade Center buildings clearly violate the laws of probability and physics.”
Col. Kwiatkowski was working in the Pentagon on 9/11 in her capacity as Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when Flight 77 allegedly hit the Pentagon. She wrote, “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the Secretary of Defense [Donald Rumsfeld], who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a ‘missile.’ [Secretary Rumsfeld also publicly referred to Flight 93 as the plane that was "shot down" over Pennsylvania.]
“I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact - no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. ... [A]ll of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.
“The same is true with regard to the kind of damage we expected. ... But I did not see this kind of damage. Rather, the facade had a rather small hole, no larger than 20 feet in diameter. Although this facade later collapsed, it remained standing for 30 or 40 minutes, with the roof line remaining relatively straight.
“The scene, in short, was not what I would have expected from a strike by a large jetliner. It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon. ... More information is certainly needed regarding the events of 9/11 and the events leading up to that terrible day.”
The improbability of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 is a major concern of these officers and a growing number of scientists, engineers and architects. The building was 610 feet tall, 47 stories, and would have been the tallest building in 33 states. Although it was not hit by an airplane, it completely collapsed into a pile of rubble in less than 7 seconds at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11. In the 6 years since 9/11, the Federal government has failed to provide any explanation for the collapse. In addition to the failure to provide an explanation, absolutely no mention of Building 7’s collapse appears in the 9/11 Commission's “full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”
Lt. Col. Shelton Lankford
Lt. Col. Shelton Lankford, U.S. Marine Corps (ret), an attack pilot with over 300 combat missions, wrote in 2007 to the Michigan Daily, “Our government has been hijacked by means of a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ and a lot of otherwise good and decent people who are gullible enough to think that the first three steel-framed buildings in history fall down because they have some fires that the fire fighter on the scene said could be knocked down with a couple of hoses and through which people walked before they were photographed looking out the holes where the plane hit. One of these, Building 7, was never hit by a plane and even NIST is ashamed to advance a reason for its collapse. And, miracle of miracles, these three buildings just happened to be leased and insured by the same guy who is on tape saying they decided to ‘PULL’ the last one to fall.”
During his 20 year military career, Col. Lankford's decorations include the Distinguished Flying Cross, and 32 awards of the Air Medal.
In a statement to this author, Col. Lankford wrote,
“September 11, 2001 seems destined to be the watershed event of our lives and the greatest test for our democracy in our lifetimes. The evidence of government complicity in the lead-up to the events, the failure to respond during the event, and the astounding lack of any meaningful investigation afterwards, as well as the ignoring of evidence turned up by others that renders the official explanation impossible, may signal the end of the American experiment. It has been used to justify all manners of measures to legalize repression at home and as a pretext for behaving as an aggressive empire abroad. Until we demand an independent, honest, and thorough investigation and accountability for those whose action and inaction led to those events and the cover-up, our republic and our Constitution remain in the gravest danger.”
Lt. Col. Jeff Latas
Another harsh critic of the official account of 9/11 is Lt. Col. Jeff Latas, U.S. Air Force (ret). A former combat fighter pilot, Col. Latas is currently a commercial airline pilot.
Col. Latas is a member of Pilots for 9/11 Truth. In 2007 he was interviewed by the group’s founder, commercial airline pilot, Rob Balsamo, regarding the group’s documentary video, Pandora's Black Box, Chapter 2, Flight of American 77, which focuses on the 9/11 Commission's account of the impact of Flight 77 at the Pentagon and discrepancies with the data from the Flight Data Recorder alleged by the NTSB to be from Flight 77.
In the interview, Col. Latas said, “After I did my own analysis of it, it's obvious that there's discrepancies between the two stories; between the 9/11 Commission and the flight data recorder information. And I think that's where we really need to focus a lot of our attention to get the help that we need in order to put pressure on government agencies to actually do a real investigation of 9/11. And not just from a security standpoint, but from even an aviation standpoint, like any accident investigation would actually help the aviators out by finding reasons for things happening.”
A highly decorated fighter pilot, Col. Latas was awarded the Distinguish Flying Cross for Heroism, four Air Medals, four Meritorious Service Medals, and nine Aerial Achievement Medals. His combat experience includes Desert Storm and four tours of duty in Northern and Southern Watch. During his 20-year Air Force career, he also served as Pentagon Weapons Requirement Officer, as a member of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, and as President, U.S. Air Force Accident Investigation Board.
Col. Latas concluded, “And I think that we Americans need to demand further investigation just to clarify the discrepancies that you've [Pilots for 9/11 Truth] found. And I think that we need to be getting on the phone with our Congressmen and women and letting them know that we don't accept the excuses that we're hearing now, that we want true investigators to do a true investigation.”
Commander Ted Muga and Capt. Eric H. May
Capt. Eric H. May, U.S. Army (ret), is a former Army Intelligence Officer who also served as an inspector and interpreter for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty team. He is one of many signers of a petition requesting a reinvestigation of 9/11. In 2005, he wrote: “As a former Army officer, my tendency immediately after 911 was to rally 'round the colors and defend the country against what I then thought was an insidious, malicious all-Arab entity called Al-Qaida. In fact, in April of 2002, I attempted to reactivate my then-retired commission to return to serve my country in its time of peril. ...
Now I view the 911 event as Professor David Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor, views it: as a matter that implies either
A) passive participation by the Bush White House through a deliberate stand-down of proper defense procedures that (if followed) would have led US air assets to a quick identification and confrontation of the passenger aircraft that impacted WTC 1 and WTC 2, or worse ...
B) active execution of a plot by rogue elements of government, starting with the White House itself, in creating a spectacle of destruction that would lead the United States into an invasion of the Middle East ...”
Commander Ted Muga, U.S. Navy (ret), is a Navy aviator, who, after retirement, had a second career as a commercial airline pilot for Pan-Am.
In a 2007 interview on the Alex Jones Show, Commander Muga stated,
“The maneuver at the Pentagon was just a tight spiral coming down out of 7,000 feet. And a commercial aircraft, while they can in fact structurally somewhat handle that maneuver, they are very, very, very difficult. And it would take considerable training. In other words, commercial aircraft are designed for a particular purpose and that is for comfort and for passengers and it's not for military maneuvers. And while they are structurally capable of doing them, it takes some very, very talented pilots to do that. ... I just can't imagine an amateur even being able to come close to performing a maneuver of that nature.
“And as far as hijacking the airplanes, once again getting back to the nature of pilots and airplanes, there is no way that a pilot would give up an airplane to hijackers. ... I mean, hell, a guy doesn't give up a TV remote control much less a complicated 757. And so to think that pilots would allow a plane to be taken over by a couple of 5 foot 7, 150 pound guys with a one-inch blade boxcutter is ridiculous.
“And also in all four planes, if you remember, none of the planes ever switched on their transponder to the hijack code. There's a very, very simple code that you put in if you suspect that your plane is being hijacked. It takes literally just a split-second for you to put your hand down on the center console and flip it over. And not one of the four planes ever transponded a hijack code, which is most, most unusual.
“Commercial airplanes are very, very complex pieces of machines. And they're designed for two pilots up there, not just two amateur pilots, but two qualified commercial pilots up there. And to think that you're going to get an amateur up into the cockpit and fly, much less navigate, it to a designated target, the probability is so low, that it's bordering on impossible.”
Col. George Nelson
“In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft -- and in most cases the precise cause of the accident,” wrote Col. George Nelson, MBA, U.S. Air Force (ret), a former U.S. Air Force aircraft accident investigator and airplane parts authority.
“The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view,” continued Col. Nelson, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force War College and a 34-year Air Force veteran.
“With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. Similarly, with all the evidence available at the Pennsylvania crash site, it was most doubtful that a passenger airliner caused the obvious hole in the ground and certainly not the Boeing 757 as alleged. …
“As painful and heartbreaking as was the loss of innocent lives and the lingering health problems of thousands more, a most troublesome and nightmarish probability remains that so many Americans appear to be involved in the most heinous conspiracy in our country's history.”
Maj. John M. Newman, PhD, Capt. Omar Pradhan and Col. Ronald D. Ray
Maj. John M. Newman, PhD, U.S. Army (ret), is the former Executive Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency. In testimony before a 2005 Congressional briefing, he said,
“It falls to me this morning to bring to your attention the story of Saeed Sheikh, whose full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and his astonishing rise to power in Al Qaeda, his crucial role in 9/11, which is completely, utterly, missing from the 9/11 Commission report…
“The 9/11 Commission which studied US intelligence and law enforcement community performance in great detail, (maybe not so much great detail, but they did), neglected to cover the community’s performance during the weeks following the attacks to determine who was responsible for them, not a word about that in the Report.
“The Report does discuss the immediate US responses but the immediate investigation is never addressed, and anyone who has closely studied the post-9/11 investigation knows that the first breakthrough came two weeks into the investigation when the money transfers from the United Arab Emirates to the hijackers were uncovered.
“Furthermore, if you have studied that investigation, you know there is no disputing that while investigators may have struggled with the identity of the paymaster, they were clear about one thing, he was Al Qaeda’s finance chief. For this reason alone you have to ask why the 9/11 Commission Report never mentions the finance chief’s role as the 9/11 paymaster.”
Capt. Omar Pradhan, U.S. Air Force, is a former AWACS command pilot and Flight Instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In a 2007 statement to this author, Capt. Pradhan wrote, “As a proud American, as a distinguished USAF E-3 AWACS Aircraft Commander (with 350+ hours of combat time logged over Afghanistan and Iraq), and as a former U.S. Air Force Academy Flight Instructor, I warmly endorse the professional inquiry and pursuit of comprehensive truth sought by the Pilots for 911 Truth organization and the PatriotsQuestion911 website.”
Another senior officer questioning the official account of 9/11 is Col. Ronald D. Ray, U.S. Marine Corps (ret), Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran (two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart), he was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve on the American Battle Monuments Commission (1990 – 1994), and the 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. He was Military Historian and Deputy Director of Field Operations for the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C. (1990 – 1994).
In an interview on Alex Jones’ radio show on June 30, 2006, Col. Ray described the official account of 9/11 as “the dog that doesn’t hunt”, meaning it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In response to Alex Jones’ question, “Is it safe to say or is the statement accurate that you smell something rotten in the state of Denmark when it comes to 9/11?” Col. Ray replied,“I'm astounded that the conspiracy theory advanced by the administration could in fact be true and the evidence does not seem to suggest that that's accurate. That's true.”
“After 4+ years of research since retirement in 2002, I am 100% convinced that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned, organized, and committed by treasonous perpetrators that have infiltrated the highest levels of our government. It is now time to take our country back,” wrote Lt. Col. Guy S. Razer, MS, U.S. Air Force (ret), in a statement to this author.
A retired fighter pilot, Col. Razer served as an instructor at the U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School and NATO’s Tactical Leadership Program and flew combat missions over Iraq. He continued, “The ‘collapse’ of WTC Building 7 shows beyond any doubt that the demolitions were pre-planned. There is simply no way to demolish a 47-story building (on fire) over a coffee break. It is also impossible to report the building’s collapse before it happened, as BBC News did, unless it was pre-planned. Further damning evidence is Larry Silverstein's video taped confession in which he states ‘they made that decision to pull [WTC 7] and we watched the building collapse.’
“We cannot let the pursuit of justice fail. Those of us in the military took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’. Just because we have retired does not make that oath invalid, so it is not just our responsibility, it is our duty to expose the real perpetrators of 9/11 and bring them to justice, no matter how hard it is, how long it takes, or how much we have to suffer to do it,” he concluded.
Maj. Scott Ritter, Maj. Douglas Rokke, PhD, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer
Maj. Scott Ritter, U.S. Marine Corps, is a former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer who also served as Chief Weapons Inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq 1991 - 1998. In 2005, he said: “I, like the others, are frustrated by the 9/11 Commission Report, by the lack of transparency on the part of the United States government, both in terms of the executive branch and the legislative branch when it comes to putting out on the table all facts known to the 9/11 case.”
Maj. Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army (ret), former Director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project and 30-year veteran, had this to say about the explosion at the Pentagon on 9/11, “When you look at the whole thing, especially the crash site void of airplane parts, the size of the hole left in the building and the fact the projectile's impact penetrated numerous concrete walls, it looks like the work of a missile. And when you look at the damage, it was obviously a missile.”
The 9/11 Commission Report asserts that only three of the alleged hijackers were known to U.S. intelligence agencies prior to 9/11: Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Mihdar. There is no mention in the Report that the names and photographs of alleged hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and alleged ring-leader Mohamed Atta had been identified by the Department of Defense anti-terrorist program known as Able Danger more than a year prior to 9/11 and that they were known to be affiliates of al-Qaida. Able Danger also identified Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in 2006, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, U.S. Army Reserve, former Chief of the Army’s Controlled HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Program, overseeing Army Intelligence and Security Command’s global controlled HUMINT efforts, stated:
“[B]asic law enforcement investigative techniques, with 21st Century data mining and analytical tools ... resulted in the establishment of a new form of intelligence collection – and the identification of Mohammed Atta and several other of the 9-11 terrorists as having links to Al Qaeda leadership a full year in advance of the attacks. ...
“After contact by two separate members of the ABLE DANGER team, … the 9-11 [Commission] staff refused to perform any in-depth review or investigation of the issues that were identified to them. … It was their job to do a thorough investigation of these claims – to not simply dismiss them based on what many now believe was a ‘preconceived’ conclusion to the 9-11 story they wished to tell. … I consider this a failure of the 9-11 staff – a failure that the 9-11 Commissioners themselves were victimized by – and continue to have perpetrated on them by the staff as is evidenced by their recent, groundless conclusion that ABLE DANGER’s findings were ‘urban legend’.”
A 23-year military intelligence veteran, Col. Shaffer was recently awarded the Bronze Star for bravery in Afghanistan. In a 2005 interview on Fox News, Col Shaffer asked, “Why did this operation, which was created in '99 to target Al Qaeda globally, offensively, why was that turned off in the Spring of 2001, four months before we were attacked? I can't answer that, either. I can tell you I was ordered out of the operation directly by a two-star general.”
Supporting Col. Shaffer’s statement, Capt. Scott J. Phillpott, U.S. Navy, currently Commanding Officer of the guided-missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf and former head of the Able Danger data mining program, stated in 2005: “I will not discuss this outside of my chain of command. I have briefed the Department of the Army, the Special Operations Command and the office of (Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence) Dr. Cambone as well as the 9/11 Commission. My story has remained consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger in January/February 2000.” Capt. Phillpott is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, who during his 23 years of Navy service has been awarded the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, three Meritorious Service Medals, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, two Navy Commendation Medals, and the Navy Achievement Medal.
Joel Skousen and Gen. Albert Stubblebine
Former U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot Joel M. Skousen also questions the official account of 9/11. After his military service, Mr. Skousen served as Chairman of the Conservative National Committee in Washington DC and Executive Editor of Conservative Digest.
“In the March 2005 issue, PM [Popular Mechanics] magazine singled out 16 issues or claims of the 9/11 skeptics that point to government collusion and systematically attempted to debunk each one. Of the 16, most missed the mark and almost half were straw men arguments - either ridiculous arguments that few conspiracists believed or restatements of the arguments that were highly distorted so as to make them look weaker than they really were. ...
“I am one of those who claim there are factual arguments pointing to conspiracy, and that truth is not served by taking cheap shots at those who see gaping flaws in the government story ... There is significant evidence that the aircraft impacts did not cause the collapse [of the Twin Towers] ...
The issues of the penetration hole [at the Pentagon] and the lack of large pieces of debris simply do not jive with the official story, but they are explainable if you include the parking lot video evidence that shows a huge white explosion at impact. This cannot happen with an aircraft laden only with fuel. It can only happen in the presence of high explosives.”
Major General Albert Stubblebine, U.S. Army (ret), former Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), is a strong critic of the official account of 9/11
In a 2006 video documentary he said,
“One of my experiences in the Army was being in charge of the Army’s Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence during the Cold War. I measured pieces of Soviet equipment from photographs. It was my job. I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole’. So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What's going on?”
During his 32-year Army career, Gen. Stubblebine also commanded the U.S. Army’s Electronic Research and Development Command and the U.S. Army’s Intelligence School and Center. Gen. Stubblebine is one of the inductees into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
“There is a well-organized cover-up of the events of 11 Sep 2001. The 9/11 Commission was a white-washed farce. There is evidence that US Government officials had advance knowledge of and are probably implicated in the events of 9/11,” wrote retired military physician, Col. James R. Uhl, MD, U.S. Army (ret), in a statement to this author.
“A huge body of physical evidence has been ignored, suppressed, and ridiculed by the media and by our Government. Why did WTC 7 collapse? It was never hit by an airplane and was apparently brought down by explosives. How could Al-Qaida terrorists have had access and time to plant bombs in a top secret installation? Why did the 9/11 Commission fail to seek the reason for the WTC 7 collapse?” continued Col. Uhl, a 38-year Army veteran, who served in several theaters of operations, from Viet Nam through Iraq.
Capt. Russ Wittenberg
Capt. Russ Wittenberg, U.S. Air Force, is a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions and a retired commercial pilot, who flew for Pan Am and United Airlines for 35 years.
According to Capt. Wittenberg, “The government story they handed us about 9/11 is total B.S., plain and simple.
In the 2007 documentary video, 9/11 Ripple Effect, he said
“I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11; the Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower.
“I don't believe it's possible for, like I said, for a terrorist, a so-called terrorist, to train on a [Cessna] 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding its design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns, exceeding -- pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's. And the aircraft would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it.”
Regarding Flight 77, which allegedly hit the Pentagon, Capt. Wittenberg said,
”The airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles. … To expect this alleged airplane to run these maneuvers with a total amateur at the controls is simply ludicrous ... It’s roughly a 100 ton airplane. And an airplane that weighs 100 tons all assembled is still going to have 100 tons of disassembled trash and parts after it hits a building. There was no wreckage from a 757 at the Pentagon. … The vehicle that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77. We think, as you may have heard before, it was a cruise missile.”
Col. Ann Wright and Capt. Gregory Zeigler
Another senior officer questioning the official account of 9/11 is Col. Ann Wright, U.S. Army (ret), who said in a 2007 interview with Richard Greene on the Air America Radio Network, “It's incredible some of these things that still are unanswered. The 9/11 Report -- that was totally inadequate. I mean the questions that anybody has after reading that.”
Col. Wright is one of three U.S. State Department officials to publicly resign in direct protest of the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. She served for 13 years on active duty and 16 additional years on reserve duty in the U.S. Army. She joined the Foreign Service in 1987 and served for 16 years as a U.S. Diplomat. She served as Deputy Chief of Mission of U.S. Embassies in Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Afghanistan and she helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December, 2001.
She continued in her interview:
“How could our national intelligence and defense operations be so inept that they could not communicate; that they could not scramble jets; that they could not take defensive action? And I totally agree. I always thought the Pentagon had all sorts of air defense sort of equipment around it; that they could take out anything that was coming at it. And for a plane to be able to just fly low right over Washington and slam into that thing is just -- I mean, you still just shake your head. How in the world could that happen?”
Capt. Gregory M. Zeigler, PhD, is a former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer. In a 2006 statement to this author, Capt. Zeigler wrote,
“I knew from September 18, 2001, that the official story about 9/11 was false. That was when I realized that the perpetrators had made a colossal blunder in collapsing the South Tower first, rather than the North Tower, which had been hit more directly and earlier.
“Other anomalies poured in rapidly: the hijackers' names appearing in none of the published flight passenger lists, BBC reports of stolen identities of the alleged hijackers or the alleged hijackers being found alive, the obvious demolitions of WTC 1 and 2 and WTC 7, the lack of identifiable Boeing 757 wreckage at the Pentagon, the impossibility of ordinary cell phone (as opposed to Airfone) calls being made consistently from passenger aircraft at cruising altitude, etc., etc., etc.”
Shortly after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, a group of over 100 prominent Americans signed a petition urging Congress to immediately reinvestigate 9/11. In addition to two former senior CIA officials and several U.S. State Department veterans, the signers included Lt. Col. Robert Bowman and Capt. Eric H. May, both mentioned above.
The petition stated, in part, “We want truthful answers to questions such as:
1. Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
2. Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
3. Why did the Secret Service allow Bush to complete his elementary school visit, apparently unconcerned about his safety or that of the schoolchildren?
4. Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
5. Why haven't authorities in the U.S. and abroad published the results of multiple investigations into trading that strongly suggested foreknowledge of specific details of the 9/11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of traceable gains?”
These questions and many others still remain unanswered three years after the petition was submitted and six years after the terrible events of 9/11. As the statements of these twenty-five former U.S. military officers demonstrate, the need for a new thorough, and independent investigation of 9/11 is not a matter of partisan politics, nor the demand of irresponsible, deranged, or disloyal Americans. It is instead a matter of the utmost importance for America’s security and the future of the entire world.
Original article posted here.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Very effective way to discredit those who seek answers behind tough questions
Conspiracy theorists
AKA 'conspiraloons', 'tinfoil hatters', 'loonspuds', 'fruit'n'jobs' etc.
10 characteristics of conspiracy theorists
A useful guide by Donna Ferentes
1. Arrogance. They are always fact-seekers, questioners, people who are trying to discover the truth: sceptics are always "sheep", patsies for Messrs Bush and Blair etc.
2. Relentlessness. They will always go on and on about a conspiracy no matter how little evidence they have to go on or how much of what they have is simply discredited. (Moreover, as per 1. above, even if you listen to them ninety-eight times, the ninety-ninth time, when you say "no thanks", you'll be called a "sheep" again.) Additionally, they have no capacity for precis whatsoever. They go on and on at enormous length.
3. Inability to answer questions. For people who loudly advertise their determination to the principle of questioning everything, they're pretty poor at answering direct questions from sceptics about the claims that they make.
4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. These include Cicero's "cui bono?" (of which it can be said that Cicero understood the importance of having evidence to back it up) and Conan Doyle's "once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth". What these phrases have in common is that they are attempts to absolve themselves from any responsibility to produce positive, hard evidence themselves: you simply "eliminate the impossible" (i.e. say the official account can't stand scrutiny) which means that the wild allegation of your choice, based on "cui bono?" (which is always the government) is therefore the truth.
5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. Aided by the principle in 4. above, conspiracy theorists never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account.
6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources. The fact that a claim has been made by anybody, anywhere, is enough for them to reproduce it and demand that the questions it raises be answered, as if intellectual enquiry were a matter of responding to every rumour. While they do this, of course, they will claim to have "open minds" and abuse the sceptics for apparently lacking same.
7. Inability to withdraw. It's a rare day indeed when a conspiracy theorist admits that a claim they have made has turned out to be without foundation, whether it be the overall claim itself or any of the evidence produced to support it. Moreover they have a liking (see 3. above) for the technique of avoiding discussion of their claims by "swamping" - piling on a whole lot more material rather than respond to the objections sceptics make to the previous lot.
8. Leaping to conclusions. Conspiracy theorists are very keen indeed to declare the "official" account totally discredited without having remotely enough cause so to do. Of course this enables them to wheel on the Conan Doyle quote as in 4. above. Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the "official" account clearly and definitively discredited. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to prove that these inconsistencies are either relevant, or that they even definitely exist.
9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it's “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.
10. It's always a conspiracy. And it is, isn't it? No sooner has the body been discovered, the bomb gone off, than the same people are producing the same old stuff, demanding that there are questions which need to be answered, at the same unbearable length. Because the most important thing about these people is that they are people entirely lacking in discrimination. They cannot tell a good theory from a bad one, they cannot tell good evidence from bad evidence and they cannot tell a good source from a bad one. And for that reason, they always come up with the same answer when they ask the same question.
A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.
Original article posted here.
AKA 'conspiraloons', 'tinfoil hatters', 'loonspuds', 'fruit'n'jobs' etc.
10 characteristics of conspiracy theorists
A useful guide by Donna Ferentes
1. Arrogance. They are always fact-seekers, questioners, people who are trying to discover the truth: sceptics are always "sheep", patsies for Messrs Bush and Blair etc.
2. Relentlessness. They will always go on and on about a conspiracy no matter how little evidence they have to go on or how much of what they have is simply discredited. (Moreover, as per 1. above, even if you listen to them ninety-eight times, the ninety-ninth time, when you say "no thanks", you'll be called a "sheep" again.) Additionally, they have no capacity for precis whatsoever. They go on and on at enormous length.
3. Inability to answer questions. For people who loudly advertise their determination to the principle of questioning everything, they're pretty poor at answering direct questions from sceptics about the claims that they make.
4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. These include Cicero's "cui bono?" (of which it can be said that Cicero understood the importance of having evidence to back it up) and Conan Doyle's "once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth". What these phrases have in common is that they are attempts to absolve themselves from any responsibility to produce positive, hard evidence themselves: you simply "eliminate the impossible" (i.e. say the official account can't stand scrutiny) which means that the wild allegation of your choice, based on "cui bono?" (which is always the government) is therefore the truth.
5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. Aided by the principle in 4. above, conspiracy theorists never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account.
6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources. The fact that a claim has been made by anybody, anywhere, is enough for them to reproduce it and demand that the questions it raises be answered, as if intellectual enquiry were a matter of responding to every rumour. While they do this, of course, they will claim to have "open minds" and abuse the sceptics for apparently lacking same.
7. Inability to withdraw. It's a rare day indeed when a conspiracy theorist admits that a claim they have made has turned out to be without foundation, whether it be the overall claim itself or any of the evidence produced to support it. Moreover they have a liking (see 3. above) for the technique of avoiding discussion of their claims by "swamping" - piling on a whole lot more material rather than respond to the objections sceptics make to the previous lot.
8. Leaping to conclusions. Conspiracy theorists are very keen indeed to declare the "official" account totally discredited without having remotely enough cause so to do. Of course this enables them to wheel on the Conan Doyle quote as in 4. above. Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the "official" account clearly and definitively discredited. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to prove that these inconsistencies are either relevant, or that they even definitely exist.
9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it's “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.
10. It's always a conspiracy. And it is, isn't it? No sooner has the body been discovered, the bomb gone off, than the same people are producing the same old stuff, demanding that there are questions which need to be answered, at the same unbearable length. Because the most important thing about these people is that they are people entirely lacking in discrimination. They cannot tell a good theory from a bad one, they cannot tell good evidence from bad evidence and they cannot tell a good source from a bad one. And for that reason, they always come up with the same answer when they ask the same question.
A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.
Original article posted here.
More on ENMOD (environmental modification)
Modifying the Weather for Military Warfare
Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.
Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’.
During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.
Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’
In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.’ It defined ‘environmental modification techniques’ as ‘any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.’
While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are focused on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neither is the possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices.
The HAARP Programme
Established in 1992, HAARP, based in Gokona, Alaska, is an array of high-powered antennas that transmit, through high-frequency radio waves, massive amounts of energy into the ionosphere (the upper layer of the atmosphere). Their construction was funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Operated jointly by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating ‘controlled local modifications of the ionosphere’. According to its official website, www.haarp.alaska.edu, HAARP will be used ‘to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so physical reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site’.
But Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, says HAARP operates as ‘a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet’. Physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund called it ‘the largest ionospheric heater ever built’.
HAARP is presented by the US Air Force as a research programme, but military documents confirm its main objective is to ‘induce ionospheric modifications’ with a view to altering weather patterns and disrupting communications and radar. According to a report by the Russian State Duma: ‘The US plans to carry out large-scale experiments under the HAARP programme [and] create weapons capable of breaking radio communication lines and equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines, and have a negative impact on the mental health of entire regions.’
An analysis of statements emanating from the US Air Force points to the unthinkable: the covert manipulation of weather patterns, communications and electric power systems as a weapon of global warfare, enabling the US to disrupt and dominate entire regions.
Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or ‘friendly nations’ without their knowledge, used to destabilise economies, ecosystems and agriculture. It can also trigger havoc in financial and commodity markets. The disruption in agriculture creates a greater dependency on food aid and imported grain staples from the US and other Western countries.
HAARP was developed as part of an Anglo-American partnership between Raytheon Corporation, which owns the HAARP patents, and British Aerospace Systems (BAES). The HAARP project is one among several collaborative ventures in advanced weapons systems between the two defence giants.
The HAARP project was initiated in 1992 by Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO). APTI (including the HAARP patents) was sold by ARCO to E-Systems Inc, in 1994.
E-Systems, on contract to the CIA and US Department of Defense, outfitted the ‘Doomsday Plan’, which ‘allows the President to manage a nuclear war’. Subsequently acquired by Raytheon Corporation, it is among the largest intelligence contractors in the World.
BAES was involved in the development of the advanced stage of the HAARP antenna array under a 2004 contract with the Office of Naval Research. The installation of 132 highfrequency transmitters was entrusted by BAES to its US subsidiary, BAE Systems Inc. The project, according to a July report in Defense News, was undertaken by BAES’s Electronic Warfare division. In September it received DARPA’s top award for technical achievement for the design, construction and activation of the HAARP array of antennas.
The HAARP system is fully operational and in many regards dwarfs existing conventional and strategic weapons systems. While there is no firm evidence of its use for military purposes, Air Force documents suggest HAARP is an integral part of the militarisation of space. One would expect the antennas already to have been subjected to routine testing.
Under the UNFCCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a mandate ‘to assess scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of climate change’. This mandate includes environmental warfare. ‘Geo-engineering’ is acknowledged, but the underlying military applications are neither the object of policy analysis or scientific research in the thousands of pages of IPCC reports and supporting documents, based on the expertise and input of some 2,500 scientists, policymakers and environmentalists.
Original article posted here.
Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.
Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’.
During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.
Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’
In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.’ It defined ‘environmental modification techniques’ as ‘any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.’
While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are focused on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neither is the possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices.
The HAARP Programme
Established in 1992, HAARP, based in Gokona, Alaska, is an array of high-powered antennas that transmit, through high-frequency radio waves, massive amounts of energy into the ionosphere (the upper layer of the atmosphere). Their construction was funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Operated jointly by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating ‘controlled local modifications of the ionosphere’. According to its official website, www.haarp.alaska.edu, HAARP will be used ‘to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so physical reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site’.
But Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, says HAARP operates as ‘a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet’. Physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund called it ‘the largest ionospheric heater ever built’.
HAARP is presented by the US Air Force as a research programme, but military documents confirm its main objective is to ‘induce ionospheric modifications’ with a view to altering weather patterns and disrupting communications and radar. According to a report by the Russian State Duma: ‘The US plans to carry out large-scale experiments under the HAARP programme [and] create weapons capable of breaking radio communication lines and equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines, and have a negative impact on the mental health of entire regions.’
An analysis of statements emanating from the US Air Force points to the unthinkable: the covert manipulation of weather patterns, communications and electric power systems as a weapon of global warfare, enabling the US to disrupt and dominate entire regions.
Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or ‘friendly nations’ without their knowledge, used to destabilise economies, ecosystems and agriculture. It can also trigger havoc in financial and commodity markets. The disruption in agriculture creates a greater dependency on food aid and imported grain staples from the US and other Western countries.
HAARP was developed as part of an Anglo-American partnership between Raytheon Corporation, which owns the HAARP patents, and British Aerospace Systems (BAES). The HAARP project is one among several collaborative ventures in advanced weapons systems between the two defence giants.
The HAARP project was initiated in 1992 by Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO). APTI (including the HAARP patents) was sold by ARCO to E-Systems Inc, in 1994.
E-Systems, on contract to the CIA and US Department of Defense, outfitted the ‘Doomsday Plan’, which ‘allows the President to manage a nuclear war’. Subsequently acquired by Raytheon Corporation, it is among the largest intelligence contractors in the World.
BAES was involved in the development of the advanced stage of the HAARP antenna array under a 2004 contract with the Office of Naval Research. The installation of 132 highfrequency transmitters was entrusted by BAES to its US subsidiary, BAE Systems Inc. The project, according to a July report in Defense News, was undertaken by BAES’s Electronic Warfare division. In September it received DARPA’s top award for technical achievement for the design, construction and activation of the HAARP array of antennas.
The HAARP system is fully operational and in many regards dwarfs existing conventional and strategic weapons systems. While there is no firm evidence of its use for military purposes, Air Force documents suggest HAARP is an integral part of the militarisation of space. One would expect the antennas already to have been subjected to routine testing.
Under the UNFCCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a mandate ‘to assess scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of climate change’. This mandate includes environmental warfare. ‘Geo-engineering’ is acknowledged, but the underlying military applications are neither the object of policy analysis or scientific research in the thousands of pages of IPCC reports and supporting documents, based on the expertise and input of some 2,500 scientists, policymakers and environmentalists.
Original article posted here.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
More bad news for Hill, but, nevermind, it won't stop her in the slightest
Democrats Advised to Seat Half of Disputed Delegates
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Democratic Party lawyers have determined that no more than half the delegates from Florida and Michigan can be seated at the party’s August convention, dealing a blow to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efforts to seat the full delegations from those states.
The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee meets on Saturday to determine whether to seat the delegates from these states, which were penalized for holding early primaries.
In asking that the full delegations from these states be seated, Mrs. Clinton hopes to narrow Senator Barack Obama’s delegate edge and make the case that by including the votes from these states, she will have more of the popular vote in the nominating contests, an assertion that has come under some dispute. But the party’s legal analysis, contained in a 38-page memo to the committee, says the committee can either seat only 50 percent of the delegates or seat them all but give them only half a vote, which amounts to the same thing.
Whatever the committee decides about the delegates may not be a big factor in Mrs. Clinton’s pursuit of the nomination. Even if she were awarded all the delegates in proportion to her popular vote in those states — her best-case scenario — she could not overtake Senator Obama’s delegate lead.
It is not entirely clear what the Obama campaign intends to ask for at the meeting but Mr. Obama has said he wants the delegates seated. His top aide, David Axelrod, has said that the campaign could go “half-way” on any compromise.
The important goal for the Clinton campaign is to include the popular votes from those two disputed states in its overall vote tally. The Clinton campaign is already doing this, but because Michigan and Florida have been stripped of their delegates, an air of illegitimacy hangs over their votes and her opponents do not recognize their popular vote.
If the rules committee seats even half the delegates from those states, that could confer some legitimacy on the Clinton’s inclusion of those votes in their overall tally, although a Clinton aide said that the campaign does not feel it needs the seating of the delegates to legitimize the popular vote. Those votes have been counted and certified by the secretaries of state in both states, the aide said, and the rules committee cannot alter that.
The rules committee’s meeting is important because it needs to address the decisions by Michigan and Florida to move up their primaries in violation of party rules. The committee stripped the states of their delegates as punishment for doing so. If it restores the delegates, even at half strength, it may send a message to other states that next time they can violate the calendar without serious consequences, in effect a license for chaos.
So the committee is in a box in trying to figure out how to respect the voters in Florida and Michigan, who were not responsible for this potential disenfranchisement, while still honoring voters in 48 other states where officials followed the rules.
Original article posted here.
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Democratic Party lawyers have determined that no more than half the delegates from Florida and Michigan can be seated at the party’s August convention, dealing a blow to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efforts to seat the full delegations from those states.
The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee meets on Saturday to determine whether to seat the delegates from these states, which were penalized for holding early primaries.
In asking that the full delegations from these states be seated, Mrs. Clinton hopes to narrow Senator Barack Obama’s delegate edge and make the case that by including the votes from these states, she will have more of the popular vote in the nominating contests, an assertion that has come under some dispute. But the party’s legal analysis, contained in a 38-page memo to the committee, says the committee can either seat only 50 percent of the delegates or seat them all but give them only half a vote, which amounts to the same thing.
Whatever the committee decides about the delegates may not be a big factor in Mrs. Clinton’s pursuit of the nomination. Even if she were awarded all the delegates in proportion to her popular vote in those states — her best-case scenario — she could not overtake Senator Obama’s delegate lead.
It is not entirely clear what the Obama campaign intends to ask for at the meeting but Mr. Obama has said he wants the delegates seated. His top aide, David Axelrod, has said that the campaign could go “half-way” on any compromise.
The important goal for the Clinton campaign is to include the popular votes from those two disputed states in its overall vote tally. The Clinton campaign is already doing this, but because Michigan and Florida have been stripped of their delegates, an air of illegitimacy hangs over their votes and her opponents do not recognize their popular vote.
If the rules committee seats even half the delegates from those states, that could confer some legitimacy on the Clinton’s inclusion of those votes in their overall tally, although a Clinton aide said that the campaign does not feel it needs the seating of the delegates to legitimize the popular vote. Those votes have been counted and certified by the secretaries of state in both states, the aide said, and the rules committee cannot alter that.
The rules committee’s meeting is important because it needs to address the decisions by Michigan and Florida to move up their primaries in violation of party rules. The committee stripped the states of their delegates as punishment for doing so. If it restores the delegates, even at half strength, it may send a message to other states that next time they can violate the calendar without serious consequences, in effect a license for chaos.
So the committee is in a box in trying to figure out how to respect the voters in Florida and Michigan, who were not responsible for this potential disenfranchisement, while still honoring voters in 48 other states where officials followed the rules.
Original article posted here.
The plans for a new Middle East go on just like all of the other of the Moron's plans
As Bush Policy Crumbles, Allies Pick Up the Pieces
by Khody Akhavi and Jim Lobe
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
As the White House agenda for the Middle East continues to unravel, events over the past 24 hours seem to suggest that US allies in the region are determined to construct a new edifice based on diplomacy, with or without Washington's help.
In spite of the President George W. Bush administration's efforts to isolate and defeat "terrorists and radicals" – as Bush himself put it in a controversial speech to the Israeli Knesset last week – US-backed local actors are engaging precisely with those "forces of evil."
Indeed, engagement – known as "appeasement" in the neoconservative lexicon – is bursting out all over the Middle East; in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and between two nations that have existed in a state of "no war, no peace" for more than 40 years – Israel and Syria.
For the first time since President Bush took office, some of the pieces for peace may finally be falling into place.
"It's not the case that anti-US forces are 'taking over' the Middle East," according to Helena Cobban, a Middle East analyst at the Washington-based Friends Committee on National Legislation. "But it is the case that Washington, which has long succeeded in exercising complete control over all the region's 'peace diplomacy,' has now lost the ability to do that."
One former Bush administration official agreed. "Most of this is happening essentially because of people's fear of our lack of leadership and our fecklessness in dealing with a hornet's nest that we stirred up in the first place," said retired Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
After an outburst of deadly sectarian clashes last week threatened to push Lebanon into a second civil war, the Hezbollah-led opposition and US-backed government finally reached an agreement Wednesday to end the political impasse that has paralyzed the country for the past 18 months.
The Qatari-mediated deal resolves – at least temporarily – a dispute over the electoral law and paves the way for the election of Lebanese Army chief Michel Suleiman to the presidency. US and Saudi-backed factions also conceded to the long-held opposition demand for veto power in the cabinet.
The Bush administration, which has long tended to substitute strong rhetoric for coherent strategy in Lebanon, sought Wednesday to put the Doha talks in a positive light. Even though the deal will give Hezbollah – which Washington considers a terrorist organization – more influence and power in the government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she viewed the agreement as "a positive step," and called upon all Lebanese leaders to implement the agreement.
Israel and Syria also announced Wednesday that they were engaged in Turkish-mediated negotiations for a comprehensive peace treaty, the first time in eight years such talks have occurred. In contrast to the news out of Lebanon, the Bush administration, which has long resisted any engagement of Syria by its allies, offered a more tepid response.
"What we hope is that this is a forum to address various concerns that we all share about Syria," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, citing Syria's alleged support for Hamas and Hezbollah. "We believe it could help us to further isolate Iran..."
But evidence that Iran can be effectively isolated was belied not only by the clear gains made by Hezbollah at the Doha talks but also by events this week in Baghdad where the Iraqi army encountered no resistance in taking control of Sadr City.
The peaceful entry of the Iraqi troops was reportedly made possible by a secret agreement between Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the man Washington blames for the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq, none other than Iran's Quds Force commander, Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. The deal explicitly barred US ground forces from entering the area, which has been the main stronghold of anti-occupation Shi'a leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
After meeting with Soleimani, Talabani told the Christian Science Monitor that Iran's Quds Force leader was willing to "send a small team" to "discuss any issue" with the US, an offer which appears to reflect Iran's perception that it can now deal with the US from a position of strength.
Meanwhile, there is growing speculation that an Egyptian mediated ceasefire between Israel and another group of "extremists and radicals" supported by Iran – Hamas – is imminent. The Gaza Strip was plunged into a humanitarian crisis following the Hamas takeover in June 2007. Since then, Palestinian militants and Israeli forces traded rocket attacks and retaliatory raids, triggering a US-backed economic blockade and continued isolation.
The US and Israeli strategy of isolating Hamas suffered another blow when France confirmed Monday that it had been in contact with the leadership of Hamas, another breach by a US ally of Bush's policy of isolating groups linked to Iran.
Indeed, the events of the last several days appear to have confirmed that Washington's strategy, to the extent that it was coherent, if not simple-minded, has pushed the region to the brink. Recognizing that, local actors and US allies are finding ways to reach agreement in spite – if not in defiance – of White House wishes.
"If you look at the Lebanon deal, Syria-Israeli resumption, Egyptian mediation of a potential ceasefire, either this all got the US green light, and it's a major reversal, or it hasn't, and it's a rather major slap in the face," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation.
"I think it shows US weakness rather than a turnaround in the US position," Levy told IPS.
Some analysts were prepared to give Bush more credit.
"Maybe the really good news out of all this is that whether [the US] played a positive or constructive role, it's pretty clear that they haven't tried to prevent it," said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served in the White House under former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Original article posted here.
by Khody Akhavi and Jim Lobe
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
As the White House agenda for the Middle East continues to unravel, events over the past 24 hours seem to suggest that US allies in the region are determined to construct a new edifice based on diplomacy, with or without Washington's help.
In spite of the President George W. Bush administration's efforts to isolate and defeat "terrorists and radicals" – as Bush himself put it in a controversial speech to the Israeli Knesset last week – US-backed local actors are engaging precisely with those "forces of evil."
Indeed, engagement – known as "appeasement" in the neoconservative lexicon – is bursting out all over the Middle East; in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and between two nations that have existed in a state of "no war, no peace" for more than 40 years – Israel and Syria.
For the first time since President Bush took office, some of the pieces for peace may finally be falling into place.
"It's not the case that anti-US forces are 'taking over' the Middle East," according to Helena Cobban, a Middle East analyst at the Washington-based Friends Committee on National Legislation. "But it is the case that Washington, which has long succeeded in exercising complete control over all the region's 'peace diplomacy,' has now lost the ability to do that."
One former Bush administration official agreed. "Most of this is happening essentially because of people's fear of our lack of leadership and our fecklessness in dealing with a hornet's nest that we stirred up in the first place," said retired Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
After an outburst of deadly sectarian clashes last week threatened to push Lebanon into a second civil war, the Hezbollah-led opposition and US-backed government finally reached an agreement Wednesday to end the political impasse that has paralyzed the country for the past 18 months.
The Qatari-mediated deal resolves – at least temporarily – a dispute over the electoral law and paves the way for the election of Lebanese Army chief Michel Suleiman to the presidency. US and Saudi-backed factions also conceded to the long-held opposition demand for veto power in the cabinet.
The Bush administration, which has long tended to substitute strong rhetoric for coherent strategy in Lebanon, sought Wednesday to put the Doha talks in a positive light. Even though the deal will give Hezbollah – which Washington considers a terrorist organization – more influence and power in the government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she viewed the agreement as "a positive step," and called upon all Lebanese leaders to implement the agreement.
Israel and Syria also announced Wednesday that they were engaged in Turkish-mediated negotiations for a comprehensive peace treaty, the first time in eight years such talks have occurred. In contrast to the news out of Lebanon, the Bush administration, which has long resisted any engagement of Syria by its allies, offered a more tepid response.
"What we hope is that this is a forum to address various concerns that we all share about Syria," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, citing Syria's alleged support for Hamas and Hezbollah. "We believe it could help us to further isolate Iran..."
But evidence that Iran can be effectively isolated was belied not only by the clear gains made by Hezbollah at the Doha talks but also by events this week in Baghdad where the Iraqi army encountered no resistance in taking control of Sadr City.
The peaceful entry of the Iraqi troops was reportedly made possible by a secret agreement between Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the man Washington blames for the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq, none other than Iran's Quds Force commander, Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. The deal explicitly barred US ground forces from entering the area, which has been the main stronghold of anti-occupation Shi'a leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
After meeting with Soleimani, Talabani told the Christian Science Monitor that Iran's Quds Force leader was willing to "send a small team" to "discuss any issue" with the US, an offer which appears to reflect Iran's perception that it can now deal with the US from a position of strength.
Meanwhile, there is growing speculation that an Egyptian mediated ceasefire between Israel and another group of "extremists and radicals" supported by Iran – Hamas – is imminent. The Gaza Strip was plunged into a humanitarian crisis following the Hamas takeover in June 2007. Since then, Palestinian militants and Israeli forces traded rocket attacks and retaliatory raids, triggering a US-backed economic blockade and continued isolation.
The US and Israeli strategy of isolating Hamas suffered another blow when France confirmed Monday that it had been in contact with the leadership of Hamas, another breach by a US ally of Bush's policy of isolating groups linked to Iran.
Indeed, the events of the last several days appear to have confirmed that Washington's strategy, to the extent that it was coherent, if not simple-minded, has pushed the region to the brink. Recognizing that, local actors and US allies are finding ways to reach agreement in spite – if not in defiance – of White House wishes.
"If you look at the Lebanon deal, Syria-Israeli resumption, Egyptian mediation of a potential ceasefire, either this all got the US green light, and it's a major reversal, or it hasn't, and it's a rather major slap in the face," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation.
"I think it shows US weakness rather than a turnaround in the US position," Levy told IPS.
Some analysts were prepared to give Bush more credit.
"Maybe the really good news out of all this is that whether [the US] played a positive or constructive role, it's pretty clear that they haven't tried to prevent it," said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served in the White House under former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Original article posted here.
Never ending call for war
Bush 'plans Iran air strike by August'
By Muhammad Cohen
NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.
Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.
The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.
Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.
An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration's declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that "all options remain on the table".
Rockin' and a-reelin'
Senators and the Bush administration denied the resolution and terrorist declaration were preludes to an attack on Iran. However, attacking Iran rarely seems far from some American leaders' minds. Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain recast the classic Beach Boys tune Barbara Ann as "Bomb Iran". Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised "total obliteration" for Iran if it attacked Israel.
The US and Iran have a long and troubled history, even without the proposed air strike. US and British intelligence were behind attempts to unseat prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who nationalized Britain's Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and returned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in 1953. President Jimmy Carter's pressure on the Shah to improve his dismal human-rights record and loosen political control helped the 1979 Islamic revolution unseat the Shah.
But the new government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the US as "the Great Satan" for its decades of support for the Shah and its reluctant admission into the US of the fallen monarch for cancer treatment. Students occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. Eight American commandos died in a failed rescue mission in 1980. The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran during the hostage holding and has yet to restore them. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric often sounds lifted from the Khomeini era.
The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.
Sense in the senate
Details provided by the administration raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill, the source said. After receiving secret briefings on the planned air strike, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said they would write a New York Times op-ed piece "within days", the source said last week, to express their opposition. Feinstein is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lugar is the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Senate offices were closed for the US Memorial Day holiday, so Feinstein and Lugar were not available for comment.
Given their obligations to uphold the secrecy of classified information, it is unlikely the senators would reveal the Bush administration's plan or their knowledge of it. However, going public on the issue, even without specifics, would likely create a public groundswell of criticism that could induce the Bush administration reconsider its plan.
The proposed air strike on Iran would have huge implications for geopolitics and for the ongoing US presidential campaign. The biggest question, of course, is how would Iran respond?
Iran's options
Iran could flex its muscles in any number of ways. It could step up support for insurgents in Iraq and for its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran aids both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Israel's Occupied Territories. It is also widely suspected of assisting Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.
Iran could also choose direct confrontation with the US in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, with which Iran shares a long, porous border. Iran has a fighting force of more than 500,000. Iran is also believed to have missiles capable of reaching US allies in the Gulf region.
Iran could also declare a complete or selective oil embargo on US allies. Iran is the second-largest oil exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and fourth-largest overall. About 70% of its oil exports go to Asia. The US has barred oil imports from Iran since 1995 and restricts US companies from investing there.
China is Iran's biggest customer for oil, and Iran buys weapons from China. Trade between the two countries hit US$20 billion last year and continues to expand. China's reaction to an attack on Iran is also a troubling unknown for the US.
Three for the money
The Islamic world could also react strongly against a US attack against a third predominantly Muslim nation. Pakistan, which also shares a border with Iran, could face additional pressure from Islamic parties to end its cooperation with the US to fight al-Qaeda and hunt for Osama bin Laden. Turkey, another key ally, could be pushed further off its secular base. American companies, diplomatic installations and other US interests could face retaliation from governments or mobs in Muslim-majority states from Indonesia to Morocco.
A US air strike on Iran would have seismic impact on the presidential race at home, but it's difficult to determine where the pieces would fall.
At first glance, a military attack against Iran would seem to favor McCain. The Arizona senator says the US is locked in battle across the globe with radical Islamic extremists, and he believes Iran is one of biggest instigators and supporters of the extremist tide. A strike on Iran could rally American voters to back the war effort and vote for McCain.
On the other hand, an air strike on Iran could heighten public disenchantment with Bush administration policy in the Middle East, leading to support for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.
But an air strike will provoke reactions far beyond US voting booths. That would explain why two veteran senators, one Republican and one Democrat, were reportedly so horrified at the prospect.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.
Original article posted here.
By Muhammad Cohen
NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.
Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.
The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.
Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.
An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration's declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that "all options remain on the table".
Rockin' and a-reelin'
Senators and the Bush administration denied the resolution and terrorist declaration were preludes to an attack on Iran. However, attacking Iran rarely seems far from some American leaders' minds. Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain recast the classic Beach Boys tune Barbara Ann as "Bomb Iran". Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton promised "total obliteration" for Iran if it attacked Israel.
The US and Iran have a long and troubled history, even without the proposed air strike. US and British intelligence were behind attempts to unseat prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who nationalized Britain's Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company, and returned Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in 1953. President Jimmy Carter's pressure on the Shah to improve his dismal human-rights record and loosen political control helped the 1979 Islamic revolution unseat the Shah.
But the new government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the US as "the Great Satan" for its decades of support for the Shah and its reluctant admission into the US of the fallen monarch for cancer treatment. Students occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. Eight American commandos died in a failed rescue mission in 1980. The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran during the hostage holding and has yet to restore them. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric often sounds lifted from the Khomeini era.
The source said the White House views the proposed air strike as a limited action to punish Iran for its involvement in Iraq. The source, an ambassador during the administration of president H W Bush, did not provide details on the types of weapons to be used in the attack, nor on the precise stage of planning at this time. It is not known whether the White House has already consulted with allies about the air strike, or if it plans to do so.
Sense in the senate
Details provided by the administration raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill, the source said. After receiving secret briefings on the planned air strike, Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, said they would write a New York Times op-ed piece "within days", the source said last week, to express their opposition. Feinstein is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lugar is the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Senate offices were closed for the US Memorial Day holiday, so Feinstein and Lugar were not available for comment.
Given their obligations to uphold the secrecy of classified information, it is unlikely the senators would reveal the Bush administration's plan or their knowledge of it. However, going public on the issue, even without specifics, would likely create a public groundswell of criticism that could induce the Bush administration reconsider its plan.
The proposed air strike on Iran would have huge implications for geopolitics and for the ongoing US presidential campaign. The biggest question, of course, is how would Iran respond?
Iran's options
Iran could flex its muscles in any number of ways. It could step up support for insurgents in Iraq and for its allies throughout the Middle East. Iran aids both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Israel's Occupied Territories. It is also widely suspected of assisting Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.
Iran could also choose direct confrontation with the US in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, with which Iran shares a long, porous border. Iran has a fighting force of more than 500,000. Iran is also believed to have missiles capable of reaching US allies in the Gulf region.
Iran could also declare a complete or selective oil embargo on US allies. Iran is the second-largest oil exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and fourth-largest overall. About 70% of its oil exports go to Asia. The US has barred oil imports from Iran since 1995 and restricts US companies from investing there.
China is Iran's biggest customer for oil, and Iran buys weapons from China. Trade between the two countries hit US$20 billion last year and continues to expand. China's reaction to an attack on Iran is also a troubling unknown for the US.
Three for the money
The Islamic world could also react strongly against a US attack against a third predominantly Muslim nation. Pakistan, which also shares a border with Iran, could face additional pressure from Islamic parties to end its cooperation with the US to fight al-Qaeda and hunt for Osama bin Laden. Turkey, another key ally, could be pushed further off its secular base. American companies, diplomatic installations and other US interests could face retaliation from governments or mobs in Muslim-majority states from Indonesia to Morocco.
A US air strike on Iran would have seismic impact on the presidential race at home, but it's difficult to determine where the pieces would fall.
At first glance, a military attack against Iran would seem to favor McCain. The Arizona senator says the US is locked in battle across the globe with radical Islamic extremists, and he believes Iran is one of biggest instigators and supporters of the extremist tide. A strike on Iran could rally American voters to back the war effort and vote for McCain.
On the other hand, an air strike on Iran could heighten public disenchantment with Bush administration policy in the Middle East, leading to support for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is.
But an air strike will provoke reactions far beyond US voting booths. That would explain why two veteran senators, one Republican and one Democrat, were reportedly so horrified at the prospect.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.
Original article posted here.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Will Howard be up for the job?
Burden on Dean to bring harmony
Set to mediate Fla., Mich. issue 
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in Manchester, N.H., last week. (Cheryl Senter/Associated Press)
Set to mediate Fla., Mich. issue
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in Manchester, N.H., last week. (Cheryl Senter/Associated Press) MANCHESTER, N.H. - Howard Dean arrived at this month's New Hampshire Democratic Party convention with the purposeful brusqueness that has marked his years on the national stage, climbing out of his rental car with hardly a word for anyone before retreating into a holding area.
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee was there to deliver another of his famous red-meat speeches, exhorting the party faithful to evict the Republicans from the White House. But even amid the applause, there were signs of the Democratic Party's current discord in the room. Supporters of Hillary Clinton held up signs proclaiming: "Gov. Dean, count all the votes in Florida and Michigan!"
After the speech, Dean slipped out a back door and, disappointing a small crowd angling for a word or an autograph, strapped on his seat belt and left.
These are challenging days for Dean, the former family physician and Vermont governor who has run the national committee with a strong hand, helping his party win both houses of Congress during his 3 1/2 years as chairman. Now he finds himself in a familiar position - the center of a controversy - though in an unfamiliar role: peacemaker.
On Saturday, the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee will meet to decide whether to seat the delegations from Florida and Michigan at the party's August national convention in Denver. The two states were barred from representation because they moved their primaries ahead of a DNC-imposed timetable; but now their votes are crucial to Clinton's dwindling chances at the presidential nomination.
Whether Dean can broker a compromise and amicably resolve the Florida and Michigan crisis - and then stitch together his party after this year's bruising nomination battle - could go a long way toward determining who is the next president. Some are skeptical about his ability to finesse such a delicate, high-stakes situation.
"Howard's a doctor - doctors don't listen to people, they tell people what's going to happen, and that's part of the problem," said Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont and a longtime critic of Dean. "That has always been Howard's style."
Even Joe Trippi, who managed Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, said Dean is usually better at taking charge than persuading.
"You come in the room, and he's pretty set on who should be the best guy at this, or where the party's money is going to go," he said.
But Trippi said Dean has surprised him this year.
"I think he's become a better mediator, a bit more conciliatory on this whole issue," he said.
Dean today is a more refined version of the presidential candidate of 2004, a man who relished blunt, off-the-cuff repartee with voters and reporters. (His "scream" speech after the 2004 Iowa caucuses is still the top video that comes up after a Google search of his name.) Even a few years ago, prudence was not his specialty.
"I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for," he said in 2005. Republicans, he also said back then, are "pretty much a white, Christian party."
Lately Dean has carefully contained his spontaneity, straining to avoid diverting attention away from Clinton and Barack Obama or to appear biased in the closely fought race. Earlier this month in New Hampshire, he read a large portion of his speech. On television, he often looks as if he is holding his breath; so sober was his recent "Tonight Show" appearance that the lively audience fell silent for long stretches.
David Berg, a close friend since their days as students at Yale, said Dean understands that his role has changed from insurgent to referee and party builder.
"I think he takes the job very seriously," he said. "He's not just being a political functionary, he actually thinks this grass-roots democracy is important to the future of this country."
State-party leaders backed Dean for chairman because he promised to rebuild the party from the grass roots up. In 2005, he dispatched a team to visit each state party and determine its needs, and the national committee then sent three to five new staff to each state to work on fund-raising, organizing, communications, or technology. Massachusetts, a state so blue that presidential candidates rarely campaign here in a general election, got four workers, as did Mississippi, a bastion of Bible Belt conservatism.
Public spats over the strategy erupted between Dean and Representative Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who wanted every dollar for closely contested midterm races. Democratic strategist Paul Begala scoffed on CNN that Dean had hired people to "wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose." Even after Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, James Carville, a Democratic strategist, called for Dean's resignation, declaring that the gains should have been greater.
But Democratic leaders outside Washington hail Dean's approach, calling it essential to the party's long-term success, and credit him with making a critical difference in the 2006 elections.
"Building a party that's in a difficult circumstance is a tough, tough job that's not something that can be done in six months to a year," said Don Fowler, a former DNC chairman from South Carolina.
Dean's strategy never looked better than it did earlier this month, when Democrat Travis Childers won a special congressional election in a conservative Mississippi district. Because of Dean, the Mississippi state party was prepared to help, including Terry Cassreino, a veteran Mississippi political columnist who became the state party's communications director.
"They didn't have anything back when I was covering the capitol, politics, and government," Cassreino said. "They had maybe one staff person, and the Republican Party had a full staff. This obviously gives us a chance to compete."
Dean has withstood even harsher criticism for his handling of Florida and Michigan. He appears to have taken a hands-off approach to the Rules and Bylaws Committee's initial decision to punish the states by stripping them of their delegates, but once it was made, he supported it.
Despite the urging of the national committee, the states did not hold alternative nominating contests. Whether this was a result of Dean's diplomatic shortcomings or the state party leaders' stubbornness is unclear. Karen Thurman, chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, said Dean became more personally engaged this spring but before that left most of the negotiations to national committee staff and rules committee leaders, who, she said, came up with no feasible alternatives.
"I don't think he wanted this to happen to Florida, but I think he was also pretty dug-in about the rules," she said, adding that she and Dean see eye to eye on most other issues.
But James Roosevelt Jr., cochairman of the rules committee, said Dean worked quietly but intensively to try to resolve the dispute, and that he and DNC representatives labored for days on end to devise alternatives and to find ways to fund them. "Howard believed he could be most effective trying to work behind the scenes," he said.
Some say the dispute may jeopardize the Democrats' ability to compete in two important states. Kenneth M. Curtis, a former governor of Maine who was chairman of the DNC in the late 1970s and is now a superdelegate living in Florida, said Dean should "step down and let somebody new come in who wasn't tainted by this whole mess."
Dean has no intention of doing that. But much is riding on his ability to help broker a compromise this weekend. All he has to do is come up with a solution that will satisfy two scofflaw states, two warring campaigns, and a few million people who want their votes to count - without a Democratic president in the White House to back him up.
James Blanchard, a former Michigan governor and cochairman of Clinton's campaign in his state, said, "I trust Howard Dean to get this worked out."
Castro's take on Obama
Castro calls Obama speech "formula for hunger"
Original article posted here.
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HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban leader Fidel Castro on Monday called Democrat Barack Obama the candidate most advanced on social issues running for U.S. president but said his speech on Cuba last week was a "formula for hunger."
In one of his periodic newspaper columns published in Communist Party newspaper Granma, Castro said he had "no personal rancor" toward Obama, but "if I defended him I would do a huge favor for his adversaries."
Obama, speaking before an influential Cuban-American group in Miami, said Cuba deprived its people of civil liberties and free elections, and vowed to maintain, with modifications, a 46-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the island.
Obama has called for lifting restrictions on travel to Cuba and the amount of money people in the United States can send to relatives in Cuba.
"Obama's speech can translate into a formula of hunger for the nation (Cuba), the remittances like alms and the visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable lifestyle that he sustains.
"How is the very grave problem of the food crisis going to be confronted? Grains must be distributed among human beings, domestic animals and fish, which year by year are smaller and more scarce in the over-exploited seas," Castro said. "It's not easy to produce meat from gas and oil."
"Obama overestimates the possibilities of technology in the struggle against climate change, although he is more conscious than (President George W.) Bush of the risks and the little time available," he said.
Obama "without doubt is, from the social and human point, the most advanced candidate" running for the U.S. presidency, Castro said. But he accused him of reviving the Monroe Doctrine, which stated in 1823 the United States would not permit European countries to further colonize or interfere in the Americas.
Last week, Castro blasted Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a newspaper column for their criticisms of the Cuban government. McCain, he said, showed why he finished near the bottom of his class in college.
Castro, 81 and not fully recovered from intestinal surgery in July 2006, took power in a 1959 revolution but stepped aside in February and was succeeded as president by his younger brother Raul Castro. He is still head of the Communist Party and said to be involved in governing.Original article posted here.
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