Follow Your Own Advice

In a a humorous twist of logic, troofer activist "Arabesque" has done a series of posts imploring others to start even more troofer blogs. Because there is nothing the New World Order fears more than a bunch of self referential cut and paste websites.

I was rather amused by this suggestion though:

Of course, if you use this, you have to evaluate the credibility of any information you come across. A good way to learn how to research is to look at the work of 9/11 researchers like David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and others.

Because the next tip he gives, one I actually agree with is this:

Fact checking and corroborating sources is essential. Although this may be a tedious process, by being careful you are less likely to promote misinformation. What is misinformation? Misinformation is the unintentional promotion of false, inaccurate, or misleading information.

Here is what I consider to be a classic example of 9/11 misinformation. It is often reported that “no hijacker names” appear on the flight manifests. From the 911 research website, Jim Hoffman writes:

“According to the official story, teams of four and five Islamic hijackers took over Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93. Victims lists for the four planes published by CNN and elsewhere are free of Arab names… This fact has been highlighted as suspicious by some researchers describing the lists as passenger manifests. However, these lists are not passenger manifests, but lists of victims… CNN describes its criteria for including persons in its memorial in a pop-up window labelled ‘About this site’… ‘(Those identified by federal authorities as the hijackers are not included)… In July of 2006 a large collection of documents was published on a website containing prosecution and defense exhibits for the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui… The faxes, reproduced below, include the names of the alleged hijackers.’”

This is a perfect example of misinformation. As you can see, referring to “victim lists” as if they were “passenger lists” is significantly misleading.

Yes, this is completely true. In fact, I would agree with him that anyone who makes this argument is engaging in misinformation. For example, the aforementioned, David Ray Griffin, in his on-line essay The 9/11 Commission Report:A 571-Page Lie:

4. The omission of the fact that the publicly released flight manifests contain no Arab names (23).

If you follow the footnote you get the very same CNN articles that Jim Hoffman was talking about.

So what does Michael Ruppert have to say on this subject?

Another easy and non-debatable hole is with the passenger lists and the hijackers. Gary North, Ph.D. - a history professor - has done a detailed, line-by-line analysis of the passenger lists of the four airliners hijacked on September 11. He relied on lists published by CNN and notes two major discrepancies on all four flights. First, by comparing the number of reported fatalities on each flight - as reported by CNN and AP, he discovers that the list of passenger names - on every one of the flights - between six and twelve names are missing. The total number of all missing names for all four flights is 35. Official reports state that there were only 19 hijackers. Second, none of listed passenger names are Arabic, Muslim or even close. The government needs to provide an explanation for this glaring discrepancy.

So if you are going to accuse people of using this as misinformation, I would suggest that you check and make sure that the authors you recommend, as examples of stellar researchers, don't use this same bit as part of their argument.