As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!
Thursday, October 07, 2010
What is Old is New Again?
I got a tip this morning from a reader, and have been able to confirm some of it, but am still looking into more. Apparently Jason Bermas, from the increasingly inaccurately titled Loose Change trilogy, has now given up his career as an Alex Jones lackey and moved back home to Oneonta, New York, where it all started. Supposedly he is back working at a pizza place, like when his whole New World Order crushing fantasy began, which I have not been able to entirely confirm, but his Facebook page does mention "flipping pies" as his status a couple of times.
Apparently fighting the power has not been good for him financially because he is now begging for money to get some equipment to start his own Internet radio station. Didn't know it cost $5,000. I thought you just needed some broadband and a couple of good microphones.
Over on 9/11 Flogger it has been announced that the CIT no-plane kooks are following in the footsteps of David Ray Griffin and touring Europe. This of course has woken up their sleepy little burg and led to the usual battles over whether they are government disinfo plants.
As part of this argument someone posted a video called the CIT-Deception mocking them, but ironically they included the audio of me lecturing Jason Bermas about the book Firefight. The ironic thing is though, Bermas is not in any way affiliated with the CIT kooks, he belongs to the more mainstream part of the kookery!
Update: This is the original video that they lifted the audio of me from.
Note that the JFK quote about secret societies and secret oaths, so popular among conspiracy nutbars, is exhumed once again. It comes from this speech gave on the topic of the press (to the American Newspaper Publishers Association. The speech is basically an exhortation to the media to consider what stories they should run in the interests of national security, in light of the communist threat. Nobody who lived through those tense times would mistake it for a speech about the Illuminati, but because Kennedy used carefully vague terms, it can be read that way by the kooks.
I made a short YouTube of the part in our debate where I give Bermas a hard time for the fact that he has not read any of the top books on 9/11. But at least he saw the Charlie Wilson's War. And yes, I know I confused Ghost Soldiers with Ghost Wars, both excellent books, and Rick Newman's name. Not that Bermas has read any of them anyway.
Is available here. It's a honking 149 megs in size; I have not yet checked to see if it's better audio quality than the web stream, but I will as soon as it finishes downloading and report.
Update: Moderately better, although I do think they could easily drop the bitrate down to 64 bps given the talk format and the mediocre sound from the phones.
LOL! At about 12 minutes in Bermas mentions going back to his old high school and being appalled at seeing a urinal target with Bin Laden's face on it. And that's what sparked his interest in 9-11 Troof!
Joe Biden, who will probably be our next vice president, gets truth-squadded by Luke Rudkowski. Luke is relying on that one, un-sourced article in the Times of India, that claims Mahmoud Ahmed financed the hijackers. Biden uses the occasion to remember some tough talking he laid on Ahmed.
Jason does a review of what "we have just learned":
Hijackers had ties to US military installations (false). Israel and Pakistan have classified roles in 9-11 (almost certainly false in the case of the former).
Then Bermas does a sideline into the comic book version of the 9-11 Commission Report. I don't know why he added that part; perhaps to imply that the original report was of comic book quality? We hear that NORAD lied to the 9-11 Commission (this is true, unfortunately), but we don't hear what they lied about. They lied and claimed that they knew about the hijacking of Flight 93 well before they actually did know about it. Of course, this doesn't fit in with the kooky conspiracy theories in any way, shape or form, but it's an admitted lie so the fruitcakes can't let go of it.
Max Cleland's resignation from the 9-11 Commission is brought up; again unmentioned is that Cleland resigned because he wanted the commission to look into the pre-Iraq War intelligence, which was well outside the commission's mandate. Also ignored is that Cleland was later nominated to the Ex-Im Bank by President Bush. Cleland is on Wolf Blitzer talking about the deal the administration cut to allow only certain members (one Republican and one Democrat) to review classified information. This strikes me as a reasonable compromise between national security and the right of the people to know.
Cynthia McNinney gets trotted out to say her usual convoluted stuff:
"So how can you start with a document that you know is false, and and take that to the American people, as a document by which Congress' accomplishment should be measured?"
Dennis Kookcinich's articles of impeachment are mentioned. Bermas notes that it took Kucinich hours to read the articles into the congressional record; listening to his slow, halting delivery it's easy to see that he could turn The Cat In the Hat into a tedious stemwinder.
Since Jason has always been cordial with me, I decided I would take on his newest film. It is one of the oddball ironies of our position vis-a-vis the "Truthers" that our attention gives credibility to some of these projects. I'll take on the film ten minutes at a time, provided I don't lose interest:
General comments: After Dylan's nasal twang and Sofia's ice goddess voice, Bermas' narration is something of a relief. I do think he's a little too matter-of-fact in tone, but that may change at some point in the film. There are many places where there is annoying repetitive noise in the background, such as right at the very beginning, when we see the Naudet Brothers footage. I checked the high-quality Google video and found the same problem. It's incredibly annoying.
Points argued:
1. The networks were too eager to nominate Osama Bin Laden as the mastermind of the attacks. Of course, it's like back in the 1980s when a bomb went off in London, of course the IRA was going to be the first suspect on everybody's list.
2. The FBI doesn't want Osama for 9-11. This nonsense continues. Bermas claims that Rex Tomb said this; we don't know that. We know that Ed Haas says that Rex Tomb said this, but we also know that the FBI is furnishing evidence to the military tribunals currently getting underway of KSM, Ramzi Bin-al-Shibh, and others involved in the planning.
3. Many of the hijackers were trained within US military bases. Simply a case of similar names. Note that as usual, the sources are mainstream media reports from the first days after the attacks.
4. Colonel Stephen Butler, of the Defense Language Institute, said Bush knew in advance of the attacks.
Butler's a clear case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Here's the text of his letter:
It's about time conservative idiots like Steve Kelly and Rod Musgrove got a dose of reality. Of course President Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama.
His presidency was going nowhere. He wasn't elected by the American people, but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative supreme court. The economy was sliding into the usual Republican pits and he needed something on which to hang his presidency.
For them to accuse Democrats of being "sleazy" is laughable. Isn't it ironic that Kelly begins his inane babble with a reference to Monica Lewinsky? How many people died because of Monica Lewinsky? And for Musgrove to call the assertions "contemptible" is another joke. Funny how he manages to make disparaging remarks about President Clinton, as well.
Face it people, Bill Clinton was a great president. This guy is a joke. What is sleazy and contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain. The Democrats asking pertinent questions is their duty as public servants.
Steve Butler
Note the lack of evidence presented in the letter. Bermas claims Butler is an authority because one or more of the hijackers purportedly attended his school, and yet Butler fails to mention that fact.
5. A woman named Diane Albritten (ph) called the CIA on some of her hijacker neighbors living at 502 Orrin Street. This appears to be true:
Fed up with the parking problem, and suspicious of activities at the house, the neighbor across the street at 503 Orrin St., John E. Albritton, called federal authorities, according to his wife. She says they observed a van parked outside the home at all hours of the day and night. A Middle-Eastern man appeared to be monitoring a scanner or radio inside the van, she says.
But reading the article it's pretty clear that the neighbors suspected drug-dealing and that there were too many people living in the house, not exactly the kind of thing that the CIA investigates.
6. J. Michael Springmann claims he was told to issue visas to unqualified applicants. Bermas overlays Mohamed Atta's passport on the screen, but of course Springmann is talking about 1986-1987, more than a decade before Atta came to the United States. Springmann rattles on about some Sudanese guy; of course, none of the hijackers were from the Sudan. Springmann managed to imply that the guys he was pushed to let in were CIA assets, like "the guys I let in a couple years previously." Of course it was not a couple of years previously, it was well over a decade previously.
7. Springmann gets into deeper waters with his claim that he had met some people who told him that the CIA was working with Osama Bin Laden. This claim has been repeated endlessly, mostly by people who have not looked into Osama's activities in the 1980s.
8. Bermas claims "It is now known that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset, under the codename, Tim Osman."
9. Cynthia McKinney comes on to talk about how the US government paid the Bin Laden family $300 million to construct "the camps". McKinney claims that these camps were located in Afghanistan. I will have to look further into this claim; it's a new one on me.
Jason Bermas, Korey Rowe and Alex Jones are collaborating on this film. Here's a clip:
Jennings is, of course, just plain wrong about the time. The Office of Emergency Management was not evacuated until 9:30. If a bomb had exploded in WTC 7 shortly after 9:00, why is Jennings the only person who describes it. There were many people in WTC-7 after 9:00, as described by the firefighters and EMS people like John Peruggia.
What he describes as an explosion is simply the collapse of the North Tower. The Terror Timeline gets this one right:
Among them are Barry Jennings, a City Housing Authority worker, and Mike Hess, New York’s chief lawyer who is also a longtime friend of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The two had gone up to the 23rd floor headquarters of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management some time before 10 a.m., but found it empty. (It was evacuated at 9:30 a.m.; see (9:30 a.m.) September 11, 2001.) They headed downstairs but became trapped around the sixth floor by smoke and debris that filled the staircase as a result of the North Tower collapsing at 10:28 a.m.
Note the editing; there are several places where the film clearly jumps. Note as well that Bermas claims they were "trapped there for the rest of the afternoon". Obviously this is incorrect; the Terror Timeline notes they were rescued between 12:10 and 12:15 PM; had they been trapped there all afternoon they would have died when the building collapsed.
Jason says he hopes to have the movie ready by September 1. Of course if you go to the website, it says "Coming in June", so they've already missed one deadline.
Jason Drops Apology for Saying the Firefighters Were Paid Off
I didn't catch this when it happened, but Walter Ego put it in video form for us. It's the Alex Jones show from about two weeks ago, where Bermas was the guest in the studio. The caller starts out asking whether Jason, Korey and Dylan have ever apologized for accusing Bernard Brown of murdering his son. Jason tries to muddy the waters by saying that Dylan just blogged about the guy, but in fact it happened during an interview between Dylan and the Wing TV fruitcakes, and appeared in the famed Markyx production, 9-11 Deniers speak:
The Bernard Brown story begins at about 1:43 into that latter video. As you can see, Dylan says he "sent his son off to die", and certainly implies strongly that he was involved in the plot.
Well, Dylan has apologized on several occasions for the foolish things he's said in that interview and the one with Jack Blood, and my attitude with guys of that age is that they're going to make mistakes, if they apologize for it, fine, let's move on. But Jason appears to be trying to take back that apology. K, Jason doesn't speak for Dylan, but it's still a foolish thing to say. And then Jason caps it by reneging on his own apology for saying the firefighters were paid off.
Pardon me if I blink a few times in surprise. Was it only a year and a half ago that Jason issued a contrite-sounding apology for saying that?
I would just like to apologize for the comment I made to one Abby Scott on September 9th of this past year. I made the MISTAKE of saying that the firefighters were paid off, I did not mean this, and am convinced some sort of Jedi Mind trick was pulled on me. I was discussing how if you have a government job and want to keep it, aka Controlled Demolition Inc. you keep your mouth shut. It then moved to the firefighters and some how I said "The firefighters are paid off", and then cited how many of them discussed the bombs in the days after.
I DO NOT BELIEVE THE FIREFIGHTERS WERE PAID OFF! I hold them as heroes in the highest regard, and I truly believe that they were threatened in the aftermath of the event that not only traumatized a country, but still affect their lives deeply to this very day. Many of these men have families, and would do anything to keep them safe. I also believe many of them do not, and can not think the worst of their country. I know it was very difficult for me.
Well, I guess we know where we can cash Jason's future apologies: the bank of insufficient funds.
Hat Tip on the Alex Jones vid to Walter Ego. Doing a great job, Walter!
Just what the world needs, new movies from both Alex Jones and Jason Bermas. Jones unbelievably still brings up the prepositioned troops in Central Asia thing.
We haven't heard much on this lately, so I was surprised to hear this bit on the Jeff Farias show from the 15th.
Farias: Hey one more thing, on a more personal note. A few months ago we were getting reports that the military was going after Korey Rowe, trying to get him, saying that he was being called back in, stop loss, whatever. What's his status, what's going on with his case?
Bermas: Well I really can't comment on what Korey's case is, I just hope that it is hurried along, and that we can find a resolution to it. Korey is a veteran, he served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and I really don't think it is fair that they are trying to send him back to the Middle East.
The Three Stooges have been rather quiet lately, but I came across this recent interview of Jason Bermas by the Ireland chapter of We Are Idiots. In it Jason rehashes the same old stories about his glory days working at a pizza parlor, before going back into his conspiracy theories. Once again he faces the Osama Paradox, where Osama is a CIA shill, yet the CIA had to get someone who looks nothing like Osama to make a confession video. Then Bermas lets loose this unbelievable bit of idiocy.
For instance, bin Laden is accused of the 98 bombings, alright? Who gets the contract to reconstruct the Cole? Bin Laden Construction does.
Huh? Bin Laden Construction is the largest construction firm in Saudi Arabia, but they are a construction company, they build roads, airports and such. Incidently, they probably have 100 times more structural engineers than the truth movement. In any case they are not a shipyard. The Cole, which was bombed in 2000, and had no direct connection to the 1998 embassy bombings (well, other than the fact that Al Qaeda did both) was repaired in a shipyard in Passagoula, Mississippi.
Bermas then goes on to announce that they have sold a couple thousand streams, maybe 3,000 and the movie cost nearly a quarter of a million to make. At $7 a download, that means they should break even sometime in the next two to three years, if they can keep this up.
At the very end he then proclaims that Dylan is making some changes to the Loose Change Final Cut (uhh, if you are recutting it, shouldn't you change the name?) and that he is making a movie on the New World Order. Oh joy, welcome to the Alex Jones' fan club.
I mentioned the other day that the FAA and the military both thought that American Airlines Flight 11 was still airborne well after the North Tower was struck and that there were concerns that it was headed to Washington, and that this was what an Air Force officer was referring to when he said "We chased many phantoms that day" and that it did not refer to "insertions" onto the radar screens of air traffic controllers.
Jason Bermas, on his show yesterday (mostly devoted to trashing our criticisms of Final Cut) claimed that the Air Force was chasing a real blip on the screen. Not true.
The plane's course, had it continued south past New York in the direction it was flying before it dipped below radar coverage, would have had it headed on a straight course toward D.C. This was all controllers were going on; they were never tracking an actual plane on the radar after losing American 11 near Manhattan, but if it had been flying low enough, the plane could have gone undetected. "After talking to a supervisor, I made the call and said [American 11] is still in the air, and it's probably somewhere over New Jersey or Delaware heading for Washington, D.C.," Scoggins told me.
Bolding added for emphasis.
Jason also talked a lot about what we didn't mention, like the fact that two of the hijackers lived with an FBI informant in 2000. Jason, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the things you actually got right. That Khalid al-Midhar and another hijacker lived with an FBI informant is well-established. We could talk a lot about the missed opportunities, and the fact that al-Midhar was not put on a terrorist watch list until after he was in the country, even though the CIA knew he attended a terrorist meeting in 2000. Nobody is denying that mistakes were made; that one in particular was costly.
Jason Bermas was on Alex Jones' radio show yesterday promoting the new movie, evidently it is going to be earth shattering. Sometimes I wonder whether these people are liars, idiots or both. Alex Jones went off on a 5 minute rant about how all his opponents do is set up "straw man" arguments.
They say that we claim the firefighters blew the buildings up! They walk up to me on the streets of New York, you know these hired hacks, and go "how dare you say the firefighters killed the people!"
And I go no, "the firefighters are on record saying there were bombs in the buildings, they were told to get back, it was going to be brought down. They were ordered to back off".
"How dare you attack our firefighters!" Another straw man, they cannot really debate us.
Once again, and this time pay attention Alex, from your very own website, Prisonplanet.com:
Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC complex, admitted on a September 2002 PBS documentary, 'America Rebuilds' that he and the NYFD decided to 'pull' WTC 7 on the day of the attack. The word 'pull' is industry jargon for taking a building down with explosives.
Update: World Trade Center 7 Imploded by Silverstein, FDNY and others
Update: People Died in WTC 7: This Makes Silverstein and the FDNY guilty of AT LEAST Manslaughter
Last year I posted on how the Loose Change boys attended a conference sponsored by an organization called the Freedom Law School, which is not an actual law school, but one of those organizations that teaches you (for a price of course) that you do not have to pay income taxes. They are also affiliated with various anti-Semitic groups, and are even on the ADL's and Southern Poverty Law Center's watchlist.
Well they must not be selling enough DVDs and need the money, because at least one of them is back this year to attend the "2007 Texas Justice, Peace, and Freedom Conference" (co-sponsored by the American Free Press), along with a host of other truthers, including Dave von Kleist, William Rodriguez and April Gallop. Ron Paul, they report, could not make it because of a scheduling conflict, although he has apparently spoken to the group in the past.
What Really happened on 9/11? Come and hear from director of the most widely seen alternative 9/11 documentary: Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe or Jason Bermas
One of the creators' from Loose Change 9/11 will share how over two years of research took what started out as a Fictional Story and turned it into a Documentary. Loose Change has become the most Internet Watched documentary about 9/11.
Don't ask me why fictional story and documentary are capitalized.
Jason Bermas was on with Kevin "Death List" Barrett this evening and disclosed some more information about the Final Cut. The film that will be shown in New York is reportedly "90%" of the total movie; the only part that won't be shown is the last chapter of the movie. Jason is hoping to release it on the internet by November 11, with DVDs shipping in December. Of course, we know what happens with these guys and timeframes; I think the original delivery date for this movie was September 11th. 2006. Jason indicated that there will probably be no movie in the theaters with the possible exception of some European distributor, probably Mercury Media.
We already had a couple of threads discussing the recent BBC radio show, but some of the comments, particularly those by Jason Bermas, were so incredibly idiotic that they deserved to be pointed out specifically.
Rick Moran: We have demolition teams wiring up the World Trade Centers, you say in a matter of weeks. Pulling down the walls, putting the charges in, and than putting the walls back up. And then covering them very nicely so that they look just the way they did when people left for work.
Jason Bermas: Once again I just want to point out that never in our movie do we say that demolition teams came in and rigged the building up. We say that the buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition, and we need an investigation to find out how that happened.
Huh? So they never claimed that demolition teams rigged up the building? Well how the hell did the buildings get rigged for demolition then Jason? Magic? Was it gremlins? Star Trek transporter technology? What at idiotic argument.
Anyway, to continue, they ask the obvious question:
Host: Well how is that controlled demolition organized? How is that controlled demolition organized?
Dave vonKleist: Jason, that is a trap question, don't even try to bother answering that! That is a trap question!
Host: Well let's just cool it down here, because Jason it does seem to me you have got a number of people here asking you the same question. You've got... you believe that these buildings were brought down, but you can't explain at all how this is possible.
Dave vonKleist: He can't. He can't explain it.
Jason Bermas: I am not the Attorney General of New York City. I don't have subpoena power. I can't call people in for hearings and ask them questions.
No, you are not an Attorney General. You are in fact, an idiot. You can't even massage your theories enough that they make sense when you explain them, so you have to avoid actually explaining them.
He continues to dig the hole deeper.
Jason Bermas: However, it is curious to me, that Securacom, which was the company in charge of security at the World Trade Center, and one of Bush's brothers was the head of it at one time and then one of his cousins, was on the board.
Wow, that is just an amazing sentence. Let us count the errors. 1. Securacom (actually Stratesec at the time, I will give him a pass on that error) was never in charge of security, they merely had a contract for electronic security. 2. That contract ended in 1998, three years before 9/11. 3. Marvin Bush was never the head of Stratesec, he was only on the board of directors. 4. Wirt Walker, who actually was CEO of Stratesec, is not known to be related in any way to the Bush family. This guy has been studying 9/11 for over 4 years (he is the researcher, remember) and he actually manages to make 4 errors of fact in one sentence. Simply amazing.
But he doesn't even stop there, after refusing a couple of more times to answer how many people it would take to wire up the WTC:
Bermas: The United States has managed to invade two sovereign nations, take over their oil supplies, build an oil pipeline along the Caspian Sea, and put permanent military installation bases around them. I think that is their motivation.
Yeah OK Jason, why don't you ask your buddy Korey, as soon as he gets out of the stockade, how many oil pipelines he saw running through Afghanistan alongside all those "permanent military installation bases".
Some of the truthers I think are just egotistical, or naive. I have said it before and I will say it again, this guy is just a moron.
It was certainly an entertaining half-hour as predicted. Kudos to the host who kept things on track despite the best derailment efforts by one of the participants (more about him later).
I was pleased to hear my good buddy Rick Moran on the show, and a Dutch blogger also joined in; I believe but am not certain it was one of our friends from Complot Denkers. Jason was well-prepared as always, courteous and responsive while representing his side well.
Unfortunately, Dave Von Kleist was a thorough pill. Have you ever noticed on these discussion shows that the guy who spends the most time interrupting is also the one who screams "Let me finish!" when you try to get a word in edgewise? Whether it was yelling at Jason not to answer that question or moaning that everybody calls them crackpots, Von Kleist was thoroughly annoying. I've half a mind to rip apart his crockumentary, 9-11 Ripple Effect, and half a mind that it would be more damaging not to tackle the subject. One of the oddball effects of debunking is that when we tackle something it automatically gives it a little more credibility among the conspiracy theorist crowd, and no, I'm not kidding.
You can listen in to the program here for the next day or so. There is a brief intro to the 9-11 argument and then a segment on the Greek fires, and the second half-hour is solid 9-11 debate.
I tried to interject into the argument about how many people who were involved in the 9-11 plot that Von Kleist himself earlier in the show accused the mainstream media of covering up the facts about 9-11.
Enjoyed everything else about doing the show, especially the help from Bill Shedd of KJZZ. Bill's a real pro and made me feel quite a home in the studio.
I will be appearing on the Have Your Say program next Monday, tentatively for a debate with Jason Bermas of the Loose Change crew. Have Your Say is a BBC World Service program. It will be an entertaining half hour and I'll post details about how and where to listen in as they become available.
Update: Latest word is that you'll be able to listen in to the segment sometime later today (still haven't recorded it) and that Jason and I will be joined by Dave Von Kleist of In Plane Sight and 9-11 Ripple Effect.
