You Have Got to Love What They Consider "Research"

I caught another episode of Kevin Barrett's "Truth Jihad" radio show, although I still haven't figured out why he calls it that, since Barrett seems to think that in the history of Islam, not one Muslim has ever carried out a "holy war" against anyone. In this week's show he has on Barbara Honegger, whom he calls a leading researcher in the 9/11 truth movement. Barbara's claim to fame is apparently that she is a "Senior Military Affairs Correspondent" at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, which probably says more about DoD hiring standards than anything.

Both her and Barrett repeatedly cite a "white paper" she has written titled rather awkwardly, "The Pentagon Attack Papers Seven Hours in September: The Clocks that Broke the Lie". Although this paper repeats a series of truther myths, such as automated missile batteries at the Pentagon, the crux of the paper seems to be, as indicated in the title, that the plot is revealed by the time shown on a couple of damaged clocks at the Pentagon. Honegger alleges that a cordite bomb (whatever that is) went off several minutes before an aircraft hit the Pentagon, and caused those clocks to stop. The fact that there is not a single witness to this event, in contrast to the numerous witnesses who saw a plane hit, is not discussed.

This interview, is full of just as many errors and outright falsehoods, but if I had to pick a section, it would be the following:

Honegger: The people who are following the $2.3 trillion that Rumsfeld himself admitted in a press conference before 9/11, September 10th that they couldn't find $2.3 trillion, that is half the GNP of the United States, the Gross National Product of the United States. You don't just lose half the Gross National Product out of the Pentagon budget.

Barrett: Yeah. It was well timed.

Honegger: They said the day before 9/11 they were going to track the money and on 9/11, the Army auditors, the financial management area of the Army offices were the very ones taken out by the explosions, which in my paper, the Pentagon attack paper, go read it, proves was the result of bombs inside the building to take out the Pentagon auditors who were following that 2.3 trillion.

Caller: Oh my Goodness.

Barrett: 2.3 trillion will buy quite a few bombs I would imagine. That would buy a lot of cordite.

We have alreay addressed this $2.3 trillion thing several times. First of all, it was not a press conference where Rumsfeld "admitted" this, it was mentioned in passing during a speech to a conference of DoD logisticians titled rather boringly"DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield ". Furthermore, the reason they couldn't "find" the money, was not because it was stolen, but because of the antiquated accounting and IT systems, which is what Rumsfeld was complaining about in the speech! Anyway, read our previous posts if you want more on this subject.

The rest is just bad economics, $2.3 trillion is not "half the GNP of the United States" or GDP, she incorrectly interchanges the two. The GNP of the US in 2001 was around $10.2 trillion.

Finally, the idea that Rumsfeld would criticize the Pentagon's accounting systems, call for a change, and then launch a bomb attack to kill a couple of dozen accountants in order to stop these reforms is just idiotic. The truthers point to the number of accountants and finance people who were killed in the attack, as if it were anomalous, but just imagine how many of them work at the Pentagon? The Defense Finance and Accounting Service alone has around 16,000 employees. If a bunch of finance people were not killed, they would have used that as a sign of a conspiracy.

They continue:

Honegger: The real question is what the hell were they doing and had they been doing with half the GDP of the United States? That's the real question.

Barrett: Yeah. Where are they putting all that money?

Honegger: Well I think it is huge numbers of underground bases and in particular we know that Osama bin Laden father's company drilled the tunnels into the hills of Afghanistan when the CIA was paying them to do it to fight the Soviets there.

Barrett: You think they are using this money on underground bases?

Honegger: Yes, in part.

Barrett: Umm what’s your, well you see I don’t know too much about that, can you give me sources of information?

Honegger: Well that is a different program. The general question I want to get out here is what the hell have they been doing with one half the GDP 2.3 trillion, half the Gross National Product of the United States?

And these are the leading Truther researchers?