New Egyptian President is a Truther

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As it happens, Morsi's chief rival was also a Truther:

Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, formerly a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, led the field of 13 candidates with 32 percent of the vote in a survey released Monday by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.

Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:

“It was too big an operation …. They [the United States] didn’t bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it’s part of a conspiracy.”

That makes two heads of state in the region who are nutters; Morsi joins Ahmadinejad.

Cheney Lied... Or Maybe He Didn't

Here's a classic example of why you have to read the source documents.  Raw Story and 9-11 Truth News both run with misleading headlines:

Declassified document contradicts Cheney’s claim of Iraqi connection to 9/11

Dick Cheney Lied About Iraq Connection To 9/11 Attacks

A document declassified this week by the National Security Archive reveals that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) delivered a briefing to the Bush administration which directly contradicts former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta visited an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague.

The document (PDF), dated Dec. 1, 2001 and delivered to the White House on the 8th, claims that Atta “did not travel to the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000,” and adds that “the individual who attempted to enter the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000… was not the Atta who attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.”

Despite this briefing, just days later on Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney told the late Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, that the meeting in Prague had been “pretty well confirmed.”

What are they both leaving out of their accounts that appears in the source document (PDF)?

That Atta did in fact travel to Prague on June 2, 2000, two days after he did not travel there. Unfortunately, the document in question, prepared by the CIA, is heavily redacted and thus I cannot tell if this completely rules out the possibility of Atta meeting with the Iraqi intelligence agent or not. It is apparent that at some point in time, quite possibly after Cheney's interview with Tim Russert, the administration decided that the meeting had not taken place. It is not apparent that was the case in December of 2001.

Update: And here's another example of why you have to read carefully:

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him.

(Italics added for emphasis).

Still, the drone program began in September 2000. One drone swiftly twice observed an individual “most likely to have been Bin Laden.” But since the CIA only had permission to use the drones for intelligence gathering, it had no way to act on its findings.

So they had him in his crosshairs shortly after September 2000? But was Bush the president then? No, of course not, Bill Clinton was the president. The writer gets around this problem by implying that they could have had bin Laden in its crosshairs again later, and taken him out, if only Bush had funded it. But... if you read the article carefully, it becomes apparent that the funding issue predated the Bush administration as well:

“Budget concerns … CT [counterterrorism] supplemental still at NSC-OMB [National Security Council – Office of Management and Budget] level,” an April 2000 document reads. “Need forward movement on supplemental soonest due to expected early recess due to conventions, campaigning and elections.” In addition, the Air Force told the CIA that if it lost a drone, the CIA would have to pay for it, which made the agency more reluctant to use the technology.

April 2000. Not under Bush's watch.

Scootle Not Bound, Just Lazy....

Here's an update on the Free Scootle post I put up a week or so ago:

....the reason I never finished the "Red chips or Blue Pills" post and haven't responded to the leak until now is simple: procrastination. I've been suffering from blogger burnout recently and keep starting posts and never finishing them. On my other blog, Skeptic Denialism, I haven't published anything since December and have unfinished posts going back to last August! I was also going to write about Basile's study in my Blue Pills post and wanted to wait until it was officially going ahead before I finished it.

 Hey, it's quite understandable, although given this:

The last three years, I've emphasized the red-gray chips as a key piece of evidence in most of my YouTube videos^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]} - even my song^[8] - and have uploaded both videos of chip ignitions to my channel^{[9] [10]} and devoted entire videos to debunking paint claims^{[11] [12]}. On this blog, Adam, JM and myself have written over fifty articles defending the work of the idiot Harrit et al against debunker criticisms. We've all invested a lot of time into promoting and defending this work, and I doubt you'll find more passionate endorsers of it than us.

Contrasted with this:

But since reading Millette's report and some of Oystein's JREF posts, doubts have formed in my mind. I haven't switched sides just yet, but I am more neutral. I think Oystein makes an interesting point about the similarity in composition to LaClede primer...

I think it's time to get off your duff and let people know that you've begun to worry that your eight YouTube videos and your "over fifty articles" might be wrong.  James and I make an effort to correct the occasional posts where we make a mistake (although with thousands of posts I am sure we have failed to correct something somewhere).

Clueless in Seattle

Truther extraordinaire Jim Fetzer recently visited Seattle to give a speech, and apparently it had to be moved to due to a bomb threat.

In an ironic turn of events, a Scholars for 9/11 Truth presentation had to be relocated to a new venue after the speaker and founder of the organization, Dr. James Fetzer, received terror threats.

The presentation was to occur at 7:00 pm this evening at the University Heights Community Center. However, when UHCC received a letter containing numerous threats to "kill" Dr. Fetzer and to "firebomb" the school facilities, the event was cancelled.

According to a Meetup email message from We Are Change Seattle, the decision to cancel was made collaboratively between UHCC and 9/11 Truth Seattle, as they did not want to risk the lives of any students who may be in the facilities.

Not sure exactly what moving it a few blocks to a nearby church accomplishes.  Maybe they figure any potential bomber is as lazy as they are?  A bit of a far-fetched story, but who knows?  There are enough other mentally unstable nutcases in the Truth movement who consider this particular mentally unstable nutcase to be some sort of government disinfo agent, that it could have happened.

Why Are Truthers So Lazy?

One of the things I have always genuinely wondered about Truthers, is how deeply they actually believe their own crap.  The wackier nutcases like Kevin Barrett and Alex Jones may be out there on the sanity scale, but at least they actually act most of the time like they truly believe in their theories.  Most of the Truthers are so lazy and complacent about their theories that they act like a bunch of teenagers arguing who would win a fight between Batman and Superman.

A perfect example of this is Journal of 9/11 Studies editor Frank Legge, quoted here in the Asia Times

VF: Where are the live hijackers? 

 FL: If there were hijackers, which I think is likely, they are all dead of course. It is not the real hijackers but the "named hijackers" who are still alive. This comes about due to identity theft. Where the live ones are is of no consequence. 

 No consequence? Really? Other than, I don't know... winning a Pulitzer prize, changing history as we know it and proving your idiotic theories correct, showing that the hijackers were not who we thought they were and are in fact still alive would have "no consequence"?

Really?

 REALLY?

Why Do They Keep Asking Stupid Questions?

Truthers like to claim that they are "Just Asking Questions", but it is amazing that after 10 plus years they keep on asking the same stupid questions.  A perfect example is this recent post over at 911 Flogger regarding the Pentagon:

A few of the more compelling unanswered questions are as follows.
1. How could American Airlines Flight 77 have hit the building as it did, considering that the evidence shows the alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, was a very poor pilot?
2. Why did the aircraft make a 330-degree turn just minutes before hitting the building?
3. Why did the aircraft hit the least occupied one-fifth of the building that was the focus of a renovation plan and how was it that the construction in that exact spot just happened to be for the purpose of minimizing the damage from a terrorist explosion?
4.  Why was the company that performed the renovation work, just for that one-fifth of the building, immediately hired in a no bid contract to clean-up the damage and reconstruct that area of the building? (Note: The same company was also immediately hired to clean-up the WTC site within hours of the destruction there.)
5. What can explain the damage to the building and the aircraft debris or lack thereof?
6 Why were the tapes from the surveillance videos in the area immediately confiscated by the FBI and never released?

Uhh, none of these questions are particularly compelling, all of them are idiotic.

1.  Because the Pentagon is one of the largest buildings in the world, and crashing into it is hardly a feat of aviation.  This is a little like saying, "How did that drunk man manage to crash a Corvette into the side of that parking garage?"

2.  Because Hanjour, not being a particularly good pilot, came in too high and needed to bleed off altitude.  Why do Truthers ignore the obvious answers?

3.  Because the west side of the building was the side the plane came in from.  If the plane would have hit the east side of the building, now THAT would have been suspicious.  This question is a bit like asking "Richard Gage drove from San Francisco to Portland on I-5 North?  Why did he do that, could it be because he was smuggling lemons and wanted to avoid the agricultural checkpoints on the California border which are only on I-5 South?  I find that suspicious..."

4.  Maybe because construction and demolition companies are often intertwined and share much of the same equipment?  The fact that they were already there shows that they have the experience and knowledge of the building.  If they would have been kicked out and some company from far off were brought in, now THAT would have been suspicious.

5.  A large passenger liner crashing into it.  NEXT!

6.  Why is it suspicious that the FBI collects evidence of a crime?  I never have figured out why that is somehow ominous.  If the FBI had shown no interest in the video footage, the truthers would be asking why not?

Nearly 11 years have gone by, and they have learned nothing.  Sad.

Alex Jones and Subliminal Messaging

I haven't been blogging much lately, and have kind of missed that special brand of nuttery that Alex Jones brings to the table.




And one point in this bit he actually accused Fox TV of taking instructions from the CIA.  Strange, I always thought it was the other way around.  I really need to get my copy of the New World Order flowchart updated.

Free Scootle!

I've been rather critical of the folks over at the rebunking 9-11 blog, but it appears that Scootle Royale is actually beginning to realize that perhaps some elements of 9-11 Trutherism are counterproductive.  He wrote a longish post over there warning his fellow Truthers that perhaps it was time to say ix-nay on the ermite-thay.

Unfortunately, if you surf over there, you won't find it.  Why?  Well, there are two possible explanations.  One is that he wasn't quite done with it (which appears true).  The other is that he's been gagged (which appears more likely).

On May 3 and May 15, Scootle published a post entitled "Red Chips or Blue Pills; A Warning to AE911 Truth."  In the post, he noted the results of the Millette report, which proved pretty conclusively that the red and grey chips claimed by the idiot Harritt and Jones to be nanothermite, were not.  Instead they are quite likely a form of primer paint, although Millette was unable to definitively establish that.

Each time, the post had only partially finished sections, and thus seemed like a draft, and each time, the post was fairly quickly "pulled".  I was advised of this post by several commenters and by an emailer who shall remain anonymous.  It was decided to allow Scootle some additional time to finish off the post.  But at this point it's been five weeks since the first version was posted over there, and three weeks since the second one, and it wasn't that incomplete.

What's more, since then 9-11 Rebunkers have prominently promoted Box Boy Gage's latest opus, 9-11 Explosive Evidence: Experts Speak Out, which relies heavily on the nanothermite claim, even though Scootle's May 15 version of his post concluded with this warning:

Red-gray chips could, if debunked, discredit Expert's [sic] Speak Out, and therefore AE911Truth and 9/11 Truth as a whole.

You can read Scootle's post as it appeared May 15 here (click on the image to enlarge it to viewable size).  When will his post return on 9-11 Rebunking?

Fan Mail

It is amusing to get e-mails from readers who have just discovered our blog, and act like they have unveiled our nefarious plot forever.  That is so 2006.  Also amused by the ironic resemblance of his name to a famous FBI agent turned spy.

What is your motivation for creating this blog? Why put time and effort into discrediting a silly 911 twoofer movie? Screw Loose Change is a forgotten waste of time...unless you are being compensated to help destroy the credibility of a low budget film. Ultimately, your blog makes me wonder why people would care enough, on a personal level, to create it to begin with. If you are sponsored to discredit 2fas...WHY?

Just Curious
Robert Hanson
PS: Do you ever have internet privacy concerns? Every move you make online can be used as evidence against you now. (IE: I know who you work for you fucking treasonous coward.)