Richard Falk: I Was Just Asking Questions

Or as we fondly refer to it, JAQing off.

For anyone who read the blog post in its entirely it should be plain that the reference to the 9/11 issues is both restrained and tangential. What is stressed in the blog is the importance of carefully examining evidence before drawing conclusions about political and legal responsibility for highly sensitive public acts, and the importance for the serenity of the society of achieving closure in a responsible manner. I never endorsed doubts about the official version of 9/11 beyond indicating what anyone who has objectively examined the controversy knows– that there remain certain gaps in the official explanation that give rise to an array of conspiratorial explanations, and that the 9/11 Commission unfortunately did not put these concerns to rest. My plea was intended to encourage addressing these gaps in a credible manner, nothing more, nothing less. I certainly meant no disrespect toward the collective memory of 9/11 in the country and elsewhere. On the contrary, my intention was to encourage an investigation that might finally achieve closure with respect to doubts that remain prevalent among important sectors of the public, including among some 9/11 families.

No, of course he never endorsed doubts about the "official version of 9/11"; he just endorsed "devoted scholars of high integrity" like, heh, David Ray Griffin.

David Ray Griffin, who believes "9-11 was an inside job by the US government"? Here's Grifter in 2006:

Specifically, Griffin believes that the U.S. government orchestrated the attacks.... When asked what the most compelling facts are to make the case that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks, Griffin names three things. The behavior of Bush at the schoolhouse in Florida ("Secret Service should have whisked him out immediately if we're under attack but he stayed over 30 minutes. ... It's pretty clear evidence that they knew they wouldn't be attacked"), the strange pyrotechnics that brought down the World Trade Center ("fire has never brought down a steel high-rise building") and the poorly planned targeting of the West Wing of the Pentagon ("all the important people are in the East Wing -- it doesn't make any sense").

Griffin believes in all the nuttiest stuff in the 9-11 Troof Movement: that the cellphone/Airfone calls were faked via voice-morphing, that the hijackers are alive, that a missile hit the Pentagon, etc.

UN Secretary General to Troofers: Falk You

Well done. Falk's future rests with the Human Rights Council, a subsidiary group of 47 nations inside the UN umbrella.

Troofer Falk Denied Entry to Israel

9-11 Troofer and UN envoy Richard Falk gets turned away:

Israel's Foreign Ministry said in September that it would not allow Falk to enter the country, after the BBC quoted Falk as defending statements he made last year equating Israel's treatment of Palestinians with Nazi treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Falk told BBC that Israel had been unfairly shielded from international criticism.

Israel has also complained that Falk's mandate as an investigator was confined to human rights violations by Israel toward Palestinians and did not encompass violations by Palestinians toward Israelis.

This should enhance Falk's standing among the Troofers who rail about the Zionists.

Hat Tip: Commenter Adversity1

Update: Our buddy Walter Ego reminds us of this video featuring our buddy Stephen Lemons confronting the Troofers at the 9-11 Denial of Accountability Conference on Eric D. Williams:



Walter does get one label wrong; the guy who asks Eric if people got killed as a result of state policy in World War II is not Kent "Cow-Killer" Knudson, but Jim Marrs. But a great job otherwise, Walter!

BTW, has anybody seen the closing of that conference video, where they invited Eric Williams up onto the stage for a show of unity? I've been looking for that one for awhile now, but (not surprisingly) it doesn't seem to be around.

Richard Falk: Still A Crackpot

And still a Princeton professor and a UN appointee. He's just published a new article on his 9-11 nuttery:

From this perspective, and given the dark cloud of doubt that lingers over the official 9/11 narrative, why was the issue not even discussed during the many months of presidential campaigning? As far as I know it was never mentioned. And the explanation is not the urgency associated with the widening economic crisis or the tactical interest of the Democrats to avoid offending Republicans in their search for support across party lines. The truth is deeper, and far more disturbing.

As far as I can tell, the real explanation is a widely shared fear of what sinister forces might lay beneath the unturned stones of a full and honest investigation of 9/11. Ever since the assassinations in the 1960s of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X there has been waged a powerful campaign against “conspiracy theory” that has made anyone who dares question the official story to be branded as a kook or some kind of unhinged troublemaker. In this climate of opinion, any political candidate for high office who dared raise doubts about the official version of 9/11 would immediately be branded as unfit, and would lose all political credibility. It is impossible to compete in any public arena in the United States if a person comes across as a “9/11 doubter.”

Actually it did come up during the campaign on several occasions, Richard. Remember, Ron Paul being asked about the Truthers during a Republican debate?



It also came up indirectly when Bill Clinton was campaigning for his wife and got interrupted by the fruitcakes. Remember that one, Richard?



I am not Bill Clinton's biggest fan, but that was a moment that I stood up and cheered for him.

As for Falk, if the UN were capable of being embarrassed by their endorsement of idiots like him, they'd thank him for his service, give him a gold watch, and hustle him off the stage. But it is the UN, after all.

Update: I thought I'd take another couple whacks at the Falk pinata, and by extension, David Ray Griffin. Falk notes in his introduction that:

David Ray Griffin and others have analyzed and assessed these discrepancies in such an objective and compelling fashion that only wilful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book, and that the public should move on to address the problems of the day.

But he also claims:

What has not been established by the “9/11 Truth Movement” is a convincing counter-narrative – that is, an alternate version of the events that clears up to what degree, if at all, the attacks resulted from incompetence, deliberate inaction, and outright complicity.

Ah, but here Falk is not up to date. Griffin has assembled a counter-narrative (convincing or not). Griffin clearly believes in outright complicity, not deliberate inaction. For example, consider his continued insistence that the phone calls from the planes were faked. If Griffin believed in LIHOP (deliberate inaction), he would not deny the phone calls, because the phone calls do not disprove LIHOP. LIHOP assumes that the hijackers were Arab terrorists, but that the government knew about their planned attacks ahead of time and allowed them to go forward. It is only MIHOP proponents who have trouble with the phone calls.

Griffin also believes in the vast conspiracy; this is not some small operation. As James pointed out last week, he apparently believes that the bodies of the passengers of Flight 77 "could have been transferred to that middle building from somewhere else and to the people at the pathology institute they would assume they all came from the Pentagon."

I'm starting to think we should assemble a list of all the wacky things that David Ray Griffin believes. He's such a slippery customer that it's easy to forget that he endorses some of the nuttiest stuff in 9-11 Denial.

Richard Falk Gets More Flak

And claims that David Ray Griffin "doesn't take a so-called conspiracy view".

In 2004, Falk wrote the forward to “The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11,” a book written by David Ray Griffin, a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist.

Griffin’s book argues that the Twin Towers may have been brought down by a “controlled demolition” — not by two airliners hijacked by Al Qaeda operatives — and that the Pentagon may not have been hit by a plane at all.

Griffin “doesn’t take a so-called conspiracy view and he raises questions that haven’t been answered,” Falk told FOXNews.com. “I think [the book] deserved to be published and I have no regrets about that.”

Falk said that while he supports alternative theories behind the World Trade Center attack, he doesn't claim the U.S. government was responsible.

“I’m an agnostic on the issue,” he said.

Yes, and I would like to say for the record that I don't claim Richard Falk is an alcoholic who dresses up in women's clothing and hangs around in bars trying to pick up drunken sailors. I'm an agnostic on the issue.

Hat Tip: Commenter Hev.

UN Troofer Makes the News

This is a bit of a follow up to Pat's post on Richard Falk. Falk was on Kevin Barrett's radio show a couple of weeks ago, I listened to about 10 minutes of it, that was all I could stand, but apparently someone at the NY Sun actually bothered to listen to it, approximately doubling his audience:

On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk’s specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the “9-11 official version.”

On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is
a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.”

This is no big surprise of course, Falk is a longtime nutjob who wrote the foreword, and blurbs for David Ray Griffin's books.

Troofer Appointed by UN to Monitor Human Rights in Israel

Kudos to Joel Pollack for picking this up:

I can't believe I overlooked this--and that everyone else has, as well: Princeton prof Richard Falk, newly-appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as its "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967," is also a devoted supporter of the crackpot "9/11 Truth" movement, which denies that Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001.

I haven't paid a lot of attention to Falk around here. Noam Chomsky has mentioned him several times as somebody who's dabbled in Trutherism and not seen his career suffer for it.

In fact, this is one of the safest forms of dissidence and activism I know of; the Griffin-Falk examples are typical.

Hat Tip: JREF Forum member Sword of Truth, who found it at Little Green Footballs.