Steve Alten: Back Pimping the Troof

Despite the failure of his 2008 novel, the unreadable thriller, Shell Game, novelist Steve Alten is now back trying to promote another novel for the troof, called Grim Reaper: End of Days.

A bit of it was posted over at 911 flogger, and it appears as cheesy and poorly researched as before:

Unnerved, Patrick Shepard turns away, staring coldly out the driver's side backseat window. Somewhere in the distance is FDR Drive, beyond that the East River. There is only darkness out there, save for two towering infernos -- the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn Bridge to the south. The two expanses had been destroyed seventeen hours earlier, yet the incendiary thermite used in the blasts still burns, the chemical compound melting right through the steel girders-

I am always perplexed in how troofers seem to think that thermite has some sort of magical properties. Seventeen hours!? OK, I suppose that isn't much, considering they seem to think it burns for up to 6 weeks. I thought it was cool when the Mythbusters guys tried to cut a car in half with a half ton of thermite, and that only lasted a minute or so.



How much freaking thermite would you need to keep burning for 17 hours?

Homeland Security had shutdown all access to Ground Zero effectively preventing any close inspection of the debris; still, resourceful engineers managed to collect plenty of particle samples -- their analysis revealing the presence of a foreign substance that should not have been in the wreckage: Thermite. A pyrotechnic material used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures, thermite generated temperatures at a super hot 4,500 degrees. Thermite also burned for extended periods of time. And it could be applied as a paint.

Nevermind that there was no such thing as "Homeland Security" in 2001, now, of course, thermite is no longer an incendiary, but a pyrotechnic material "used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures". Aside from the fact that construction engineers don't normally do this, Thermite is not used in building demolition! It never has been. If it were, you can guarantee it would be in every YouTube video the troofers made.

So Steve, go back to the giant sharks.

Steve Alten's Other Theory

You may remember this guy for his novel, The Shell Game, which the Troofers pushed during the infamous "Week of Truth" last year. Turns out Alten (who's appearing at Sander Hicks' 9-11 Festival) has another interesting theory:

In March of 2005, two University students from the mid-western U.S. traveled to the United Kingdom on Spring Break. On their last day at Loch Ness, they
hired a local to take them around by boat, where they discovered a half-eaten
deer carcass...and the 4-inch barbed palate tooth of the water predator that had
attacked and ravaged the deer! Their discovery flies in the face of the
legendary creature the Scottish Highlanders have proclaimed to be a plesiosaur, and
confirms the theories generated by author Steve Alten's amazing new thriller,
The LOCH!

Steve Alten Begs Press to Pay Attention To Him

As if pimping yourself out to the troofers to promote your career wasn't lame enough, now the guy is begging talk show hosts to pay attention to him:

New York Times best-selling author Steve Alten, whose recently released novel, The SHELL GAME has served as a rallying cry for tens of thousands of 9/11 truth activists, has issued a public challenge to conservative talk show hosts Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and anyone else who still believes the official story of September 11th, 2001.

“I am not a liberal democrat, nor am I an activist or conspiracy theorist," says Alten, "I am a proud American who loves his country. I was the last person ever to believe our own government was involved in September 11th. Now that I have looked at the evidence...I’d have to be a 'pinhead' to believe such outlandish lies!”

Alten’s novel, The Shell Game, is about the end of oil and the next 9/11 event – a false flag attack using a nuclear suitcase bomb that will give the neoconservatives the excuse they seek to launch an attack on Iran. Paul Craig Roberts, a former Wall Street senior editor and the father of Reagenomics says the book is an absolute “must read.” Activists challenging the official story of the Bush Administration have rallied around Alten’s novel, calling it a cautionary tale in the same vein as 1984.

Alten appeared as a guest on Mike McConnell’s radio show last Thursday morning and by many accounts “whipped” the conservative talk show host into a corner using facts about the 9/11 wargames, overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney, that simulated hijacked commercial jetliners.

I am not sure who thinks he whipped Mike McConnell, by my account he came off looking like a complete idiot. The idea that Cheney oversaw any exercises is a complete lie he picked up from Michael Ruppert, and Alten knows it is a lie, because I explained it to him in an e-mail exchange I had with him over a month ago.

Steve Alten Starts Off "Promote Me Week" Poorly

Steve Alten starts off his week of trying to get troofers to bail out his flagging career by appearing on Mike McConnell's radio show. To sum it up, he gets spanked like a red-headed step-child. The whole interview is pretty good, but this part left me shaking my head, about 16:15 in.

Mike: The normal rate of speed for those buildings to have come down would have taken 9 seconds. It took 15. Now if in your mind 15 is less than 9 than you are right it did fall faster than gravity, but 15 is more than 9.

Steve: Who said that 15 seconds is the normal speed that a building that's on fire would collapse?

Mike: It's not. Nine seconds it how long it would take in free fall.

Steve: If it was imploded...

Mike: In a free fall for those buildings to come down.

Steve: Yeah, but why?

Mike: Instead, it took 15.

Steve: But Mike, why were those buildings falling at free fall speed? There's never been in the history of steel structures...

Mike: Wait a minute. You're having a problem with this. Fifteen seconds is not free fall speed. They did not do what you say they did. Fifteen is not 9.

Steve: The buildings fell in 10 seconds, if you go back... even if they fell in 15, which is a matter of semantics at this point...

Mike: No, no, they are not semantics, they are real numbers.

Steve: Mike, why are you determining that the World Trade Centers should have fallen in 15 seconds?

Mike: I didn't say it should.

Steve: Why are you determining?

Mike: I said it did, not that it should.

Steve: And what I am saying is that World Trade Center 7, which was a 50 story building which wasn't hit by any plane fell in 15, 10 to 15 seconds, at free fall speed.

This guy should give up on thrillers and become a comedy writer.

Steve Alten Continues to Lie

Steve Alten is out promoting his book "The Shell Game", after it dropped like a rock despite his publisher spending a fortune promoting it. This of course necessitates him lying about the event of 9/11. Here he is in a radio interview.

Atlen[sic], "The World Trade Center, the World Trade Center represented a crime scene, a federal crime scene. All of the evidence from that federal crime scene was kept from FEMA, kept from police, kept from the FBI. Homeland Security came in, took it and shipped it to China and buried [that evidence]"

You would think in his years of research he would have come across a mention of the Fresh Kills landfill, where over 1,000 FBI agents worked for months pouring over evidence. But then again, honesty and truthers do not go along.

Shell Game Battles

I've kind of been enjoying the way the "Truthers" have been pushing Steve Alten's new book, The Shell Game. At least, enjoying it more than I have actually reading it, which is quite a struggle. Kevin Barrett has been pushing it as a way to reach more people, even though he admits that (for him) it's Islamophobic and cringe-worthy in parts.

He had Wendy Campbell, a nutty anti-Israel kook on one of his many radio shows after her post about how the book is "Just Another Zionist Scam to Stop 9/11 Investigation of Israel". You can get a flavor for the piece from this bit of rambling:

I became suspicious that this book was just another misleading Arab-bashing, Israel-pleasing work which only points fingers at the Zionist-approved list of “usual subjects” including the puppet king Bush. Many of us have come to the realization that Israel has played a major role in 9-11 (PNAC, dancing Israeli spies, Odigo, Wolfowitz Doctrine, The Clean Break, Netanyahu and Silverstein phone buddies, Israeli security in charge of US airports, Marvin Bush in charge of security of WTC at time of attacks, implosions, explosions, Silverstein said on video “they decided to pull it” with regards to WTC building 7 which was not even hit by a jet, and it takes weeks to set up an implosion, the resulting “war on terror” based on false info provided by Israel’s Mossad, and so on and so forth....

This is how she talks as well. She seems to have memorized the phrase "apartheid, racist, Jewish-supremacist Israel," because she can never just say "Israel". It's all about the Zionist warmongers at PNAC, and Larry Silverstein, etc. At points Kevin almost seems like the reasonable person on the show, but then he manages to reassert himself as a kook of the first water by trying to convince Wendy that "Hey, he mentions neocons, and what are neocons?"

At one point, Sofia from 9-11 Mysteries gets on the line, and while she agrees with much of the criticism of the book, she approaches it from the standpoint of how does it work as fiction. She talks about how the book is far too layered to succeed as fiction, with excerpts from some future book interspersed with the "real" fiction. She also notes that the book contains far too much speechifying.

And here I have to agree. I have read about five chapters of the book, and don't intend to read any further. The book opens with a hearing before Congress with the lead character delivering a lecture to the senators on Peak Oil. It's dull and tedious and you can almost sense the parts where the spectators are supposed to cheer for the heroism of the guy speaking Troof to power.

You can download the interview here; it's the 2-12-08 show, second hour. Wendy has an incredibly irritating voice, aside from the disgusting things she says.

Buy My Book, Or We're All Gonna Die!

I got this as part of a ridiculously long e-mail from a troofer e-mail group I subscribe to. The Shell Game, apparently did top out on the NY Times list at 31, but is falling, so the author has turned up the heat trying to get truthers to keep his writing career afloat.

Guys, in the last 11 years I have published eight books, hit every best seller list, optioned a book as a movie (twice), sold two scripts, and have two more books set for publication in 2009. To be honest, I knew little about the 9/11 Truth Movement until sometime around October/November when The SHELL GAME went to print. I quickly realized that this loosely-connected group of people, often vilified by the media, were in fact ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things. They were the Davids facing off against the Goliaths. THEY were America’s true Patriots.

And suddenly The SHELL GAME took on a new meaning for me. Because I knew it could break through a barrier that has held your movement back. Because the book is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I also knew from insider sources that the fiction could become true.

Bush's statement scares the shit out of me. In publishing, success is measured by the N.Y. Times best seller's list. Hit the top 15 and your book receives special buy-ins,
special placement on shelves...special media attention. It's like launching a rocket...spots 1-15 push you into orbit. The list is the masses. It’s their shopping list. It gets published in EVERY TOP 100 newspaper every week! Last week, because of the 9/11 movement and my fan base, The SHELL GAME hit # 31 on the N.Y. Times list. This week we hit #33. It feels like the air is slowly hissing out of the balloon.

DON'T LET IT! Back when I was earning my doctorate degree at Temple University, I remember a framed saying on the wall of my advisor’s office. I must have read it a thousand times. It said, “On the Plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless thousands who…upon reaching the dawn of victory chose to rest …and there resting were slaughtered.”

Please do not rest. There is a huge opportunity coming as early as March 1st.

To use an analogy, the TRUTH behind 9/11 is being dammed up by the powers that be. George W. Bush Dam. Your efforts to date have been heroic and incredible, but you only caused surface cracks in the dam, nothing deep enough to reach the water on the other side and crack open the floodgates. You want to know how to crack open a dam? You keep hitting it and hitting it and hitting it as you certainly have ben doing...but The SHELL GAME is a sledgehammer.

I’ve been on TODAY show and was interviewed by Matt Lauer. I’ve been on Kathleen Crier. In fact, I’ve been on over 70 morning shows and 300 radio shows, major newspapers and magazines. Get me to spot 10-15 and I will give that dam a body blow it never felt before. On March 1st, I begin the first of a four week book tour, this one in the DC/Virginia corridor. March 14-15 I am in West FL. March 18-23 in Philly and NYC. March 31 – April 7 Chicago and the Midwest. April 21 – 30 in California and Oregon. Each day I will have 2-3 local radio shows, a morning TV news show, and a signing at night. Many of these venues are booked at the last moment...based on (you guessed it ) that darn NY Times list.

Essentially we have 2 weeks to boost this rocket into orbit in order to secure BIG venues like THE DAILY SHOW, ANDERSON COOPER, and DAVE LETTERMAN. It's a small window, but the difference between # 33 and # 15 is about 12,000 sales
in a week.

Of course I once again have to point out that Alten's PhD... is in physical education.

The Shell Game on Best Seller List?

Steve Alten is claiming that his truther novel, The Shell Game, is on the New York Times best seller list:

Congratulations! Your efforts have caused The SHELL GAME to hit the NY Times best seller list, debuting at # 31 in only its second week! Here's what is really exciting: Barnes & Noble and Borders front table space only began Feb. 1. If we can continue to push it up the list into the top 10, the following dominoes will fall:

He must have access to a different list though, because it does not show up on their website.

30 THE CHASE, by Clive Cussler (Putnam)
31 CAPITOL CONSPIRACY, by William Bernhardt (Ballantine)
32 BLEEDING KANSAS, by Sara Paretsky (Putnam)

USA Today lists the top 150 books, and it doesn't show up there either. It does currently have a respectable 33 spot on Amazon in the non-fiction and literature in the US spot, currently right behind All the Pretty Horses, and novel published in 1993, so maybe there is something to be said about marketing to the stupid and gullible. As for the rest though, well, we will see.

Alten Takes on Kevin "Hang 'em All" Barrett

The author Steve Alten was on Kevin Barrett's radio show last night. It frequently got quite weird, because although Barrett was trying to push his book, Alten, who is Jewish and a supporter of Israel, was obviously uncomfortable talking to someone who doesn't believe Israel has a right to exist, and that there is no such thing as Islamic extremism.

The whole interview has this surreal quality, but probably no part more so than when Barrett declares that the Islamic Wahabbi sect, known even among most Muslims as an extreme interpretation was in fact the pro-Western faction.

Actually, as an Islamologist, I have been studying this stuff, and actually they have nothing against the west at all. The Wahhabi movement is actually pretty conservative in supporting this nasty corrupt Saudi monarchy that you depict fairly accurately I am afraid to say, but the Wahhabi movement is far from radical, it is extremely conservative, and it is extremely pro-US.

While he may be semantically correct in that it is more accurate to call them conservative than radical, in this case it makes little difference. To somehow conclude from this that this makes them pro-western is just bizarre. As Globalsecurity.org describes the history of Wahhabism:

Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab's emphasis on the oneness of God was asserted in contradistinction to shirk, or polytheism, defined as the act of associating any person or object with powers that should be attributed only to God. He condemned specific acts that he viewed as leading to shirk, such as votive offerings, praying at saints' tombs and at graves, and any prayer ritual in which the suppliant appeals to a third party for intercession with God. Particularly objectionable were certain religious festivals, including celebrations of the Prophet's birthday, Shia mourning ceremonies, and Sufi mysticism. Consequently, the Wahhabis forbid grave markers or tombs in burial sites and the building of any shrines that could become a locus of shirk.

His instructions in the matter of extending his religious teaching by force were strict. All unbelievers (i.e. Moslems who did not accept his teaching, as well as Christians, &c.) were to be put to death. Immediate entrance into Paradise was promised to his soldiers who fell in battle, and it is said that each soldier was provided with a written order from Ibn 'Abd ul-Wahhab to the gate-keeper of heaven to admit him forthwith. In this way the new teaching was established in the greater part of Arabia until its power was broken by Mehemet Ali. Ibn'Abd ul-Wahhab is said to have died in 1791.

Shilling the Shell Game

James talked in the post below this one about Kevin Barrett's nutty comments about Hezbollah and Hamas being heroes, in the context of Barrett's endorsement (with reservations) of The Shell Game. Barrett mentioned some other criticism of Alten's book, and for the fun of it, I checked out the site he referenced. Wow, it's almost enough to make me feel sorry for a fruitcake like Alten.

I am glad that you believe Israeli agents were following the hijackers before 9-11, but I am surprised that you don’t seem to be aware of the Israeli spies high-fiving it while taping the attacks themselves (google “dancing Israeli spies”) which pretty much proves they had foreknowledge and were actually probably taping the results of their own efforts while working for the Mossad— as in it is very likely that they planted the explosives themselves in the World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 (which was not even hit by a jet)– all buildings owned by Larry Silverstein, who is best friends with super Zionist hawk Netanyahu— one of the writers of PNAC (Project for New American Century— the blueprint for 9-11 and rolling out the war on the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan as called for in this document which was based on “A Clean Break” which was based on “The Wolfowitz Doctrine”). As you can probably see by now, I firmly believe that the Israelis and Israeli-Americans, such as Silverstein, such as Netanyahu, such as Wolfowitz, such as Perle, and their colleagues actually orchestrated 9-11. In their PNAC doctrine, they stated that they needed a “Pearl Harbor-style event” to happen to start on the empire building, and so that was 9-11.

But even if the Israeli agents were just “following” the hijackers as you believe, then doesn’t that make them complicit collaborators? Or at the very least, why didn’t they directly tell authorities which could have prevented 9-11 from happening? Please don’t tell me they wanted not to reveal that they were Israeli spies! Surely there could be a way around that! At the very least, like for instance when the Israeli company Odigo (actually a front for the Mossad) headquartered in WTC got the warnings that there was going to be a hit— couldn’t any of the Mossad agents who knew what was about to happen have at least anonymously called into the building authorities and the NYC police and NY fire dept to warn people of a bomb or something (instead of just calling their own pals at Odigo)?

Lotsa fish in that barrel, let me get my shotgun! To take the easy ones first, Benjamin Netanyahu was not one of the writers of PNAC; it would be strange indeed for an Israeli politician to be writing for the Project for a New American Century. PNAC did not say they needed a "Pearl Harbor-style event"; they said that their goals would have to be achieved over a period of time absent a new Pearl Harbor.

Odigo was not headquartered in the WTC. The warning they received was sent to two Israeli employees of the company, and was not anywhere near as specific as is commonly claimed:

Diamandis today in a telephone interview also said the warning message did not identify the World Trade Center as the attack target. Diamandis declined to reveal any other information contained in the message, including whether the warning named the targets for the attack.

"Providing more details would only lead to more conjecture," he said.

He did confirm that soon after the terrorist attacks on New York, the Odigo employees notified their management, who contacted Israeli security services. In turn, the FBI was informed of the instant-message warning.

Note as well the comments on Barrett's post, which contain the usual "Israelophobia" from the anti-semitic wing of the Troofers:

what kind of neocons? if they are of the Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld ilk only and not of the Zakheim/Zelikow/Feith/Netanyahu ilk, then i have no desire to read this book.

Wendy Campbell at the above URL engages in an email exchange with anti-Semitic, Zionist shill Steve Alten and gets him to reveal his True Shillness, and who he is really working for (Israel and their American “fifth column”). I know the other day I was being all nice and mellow, and saying how we should not overly concentrate on calling out the shills, but some people are so damn transparent that you could pretty much spray paint “SHILL” on their front lawns, and do so with little guilt or doubt.

A democracy that allows it's military to censor the news or anything else ? Sorry, but Israel is a bandit-nation.

Like I say, it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Alten, but then again he is a nutcase himself.

Kevin Barrett Praises Hamas, Criticizes Steve Alten

As you probably know, I have criticized the novel (coming out today I guess) the Shell Game for its factual errors, and the cluelessness displayed by its author, but most of his flak is coming from his fellow truthers. Last night the author, Steve Alten, was on with Avery and Bermas on their radio show, but tonight he is on with Kevin "The Holocaust was a Myth" Barrett. Barrett ironically, is promoting this interview, while largely attacking Alten.

Steve Alten's new thriller The Shell Game promises to take 9/11 truth to the bestseller lists. It's about a neocon plot to stage a mega-9/11 to trigger martial law and an attack on Iran. It's studded with quotations from David Ray Griffin, Mike Ruppert, and other well-known truth advocates. What's more, it's got its own terrific 9/11 truth website: http://www.theshellgame.net/ What 9/11 truthseeker could argue with that?

Well, a few have. Alten has recently taken some heat for ignoring Israeli connections to 9/11: http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=624 And some of my Muslim and Muslim-friendly friends have found parts of the book painfully Islamophobic. One friend--a well-known 9/11 truth movement figure--found the book too painful to read.

My two cents: Let's not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The Shell Game isn't perfect, either artistically (Shakespeare it ain't) or politically (the author doesn't have the good taste to share all of my views about everything). But it's a gripping read that packs a huge 9/11 truth wallop, and if we're smart we'll help push it to the top of the NY Times bestseller list.

I disagree with Alten on some important issues. For example, Alten casts Hamas and Hezbullah as among the villains, while for me--as for virtually all of the planet's 1.5 billion Muslims, and everyone else who supports the right to resist illegal occupation and aggression, a right granted by international law--those groups are heroes.

Alten also apparently believes that "Israel is one of our most important allies, the one true democracy in the Middle East" (http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=624) which I think is a load of hooey. As I told a shocked Sandra Lubarsky, Jewish co-editor of 9/11 & American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out http://www.amazon.com/11-American-Empire-Christians-Muslims/dp/156656660...comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is an insult to the Afrikaaners.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I Warned Him He Would Get Dirty...

I posted earlier regarding author Steve Alten's claim of being harassed, and pointed out that he was not being harassed by those in opposition to the truther movement, but by members of the movement themselves. At first I kind of felt sorry for him, but then I realized that he brought this whole thing upon himself, and besides, it is just too funny to watch others accuse him of being some sort of government agent, while he accuses them of the exact same thing, while neither seems to realize the irony.

I am a mainstream author who now believes that Bush and Cheney let/made it succeed. I have read Michael C. Ruppert's incredible book and continue to research the truth sites. Am I a truther? YES. At the ame time, I have come to learn that there is a 9/11 front that is well-funded and targets the real truthers. These groups are paid to create chaos within the movement, discrediting individuals and organizations...AND ALL OF US MUST STAND AGAINST THEM!

Read The SHELL GAME. I promise that if you are a real truther, you will LOVE the book, and if you like pageturners, you will LOVE the book. Then help us spread the word about te book...because MAINSTREAM FICTION can influence mainstream readers in ways that picket signs and rallies will never achieve.

Finally, do not allow anti-9/11 truthers like this Amanda to attack thoe of us who are to carry teh message above the radar or the movement will wilter. WE CAN MAKE POSITIVE CHANGES!

Steve Alten

I couldn't make up this stuff if I tried.

Why Weren't They Complaining Before?

According to Bill Douglas, who has been promoting Steve Alten's upcoming Shell Game so much even the other troofers on 911 Blogger are complaining, Mr. Alten has become the victim of harassment, where someone, among other things, "put a map of his home and his personal private phone number and home address up on the internet".

Now I of course condemn such behavior, but where have I heard this before, where someone put up the personal information of people they don't like on the Internet? Oh yeah, Kevin Barrett, in fact he created a web site http://www.wheretheylive.org/, solely for that purpose. And strangely enough, I don't recall a single truther ever questioning this in any way, or characterizing it as "harassment". In fact, when we did several posts on this, the troofer community completely ignored it.

Now the ironic thing is, Steve Alten is scheduled to appear on Barrett's radio show on January 22nd to promote his book. I am sure we can expect Steve to demand that Barrett renounce all such behavior.

Update: I e-mailed Mr. Alten to get his response, and he blamed this on a "bogus 9/11 group that claims Israel is behind 9/11". Of course, given the huge number of people in the 9/11 truth movement who blame Israel, there is absolutely no reason to think that they are "bogus", these are just the people in the 9/11 truth movement! The ironic thing is, I warned Mr. Alten about getting involved with these people in the comments of the original thread I made on this book.

Shell Game: The Trailer

Steve Alten (do I have to call him doctor because of his PhD in physical education?) has now posted a trailer for Shell Game. Actually probably not a bad idea given that a large percentage of his target demographic for this book are functionally illiterate. The trailer indicates that he is a proponent of LIHOP, both for Pearl Harbor and 9/11, but he will doubtless be embraced by the troof movement on the theory that LIHOP is the gateway drug to full blown trooferism. Well, except for those who have already denounced him as COINTELPRO. Well, when you play with the pigs, you are going to get dirty.

Incidentally Alten defended himself in the comments of my previous post by claiming that what I reviewed was an unedited draft. He did send me the first chapter of his edited book via e-mail though, and other than a few corrected misspellings, none of the mistakes had been changed, so it make no difference. He then sent me another section of the book, and it was even worse. Including this jaw dropping ahistorical claim:

In July of 1979, President Carter had begun a secret campaign to provide military aid to the Mujahideen – Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviets in Kabul. The Soviets took the bait and crossed the border into Afghanistan, and suddenly the USSR had its own Vietnam War. The House of Saud embraced this guerilla action, for it supported both Islam and the West against the atheist Soviets. When the Reagan Administration took office, the White House increased aid to these “freedom fighters,” causing the Soviets to expend even more resources into the conflict.

The leader of these Afghan rebels? Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden of course, was not the leader of the Afghan rebels. For obvious reasons, he is not even Afghan. In fact there was not even a leader of the Afghan rebels, but several tribal leaders instead, Hekmatyar, Massoud, Dostum and Khan, among others. Bin Laden, who once again WAS NOT AN AFGHAN did not really even become a prominent figure among the Arab fighters until the mid-80s (in 1979 when the war started he was a college student), and then only because he was a member of a prominent family, who was a significant fundraiser and motivator for the cause. His entire reputation as a fighter is really only based off of one battle, the Battle of Jaji in 1987.

Not really helping your cause there Steve. Might want to go back to writing about fish.

Update: I don't think there is any humanly way I could get around to pointing out all the factual errors in the chapter posted on-line, much less the book, but here is another idiotic one. From the section titled "Washington, DC November 23, 2007".

Ryan Gessaman, a rugged man in his forties, wearing a dark suit and matching bow tie, is a senior assistant to Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Perle, known around Washington power circles as the "Prince of Darkness," is himself a close personal advisor to former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and a major investor in a number of defense companies.

Just one problem though, Perle resigned from this position, over 4 years earlier.

Shell Game: The Next Messiah

It appears the troofers are all excited over the imminent publication of a novel by Steve Alten titled "The Shell Game", as it builds a fictional plot around 9/11 conspiracy theories. Several prominent troofers have even taken the bizarre step of signing a letter of support saying that people should buy it. This apparently is going to be the medium that will finally deliver the promised land of 9/11 truth. Not that I can blame them for supporting yet one more Messiah, after the complete bomb that is Loose Change: The Final Cut. I have been rather busy lately and haven't had much of a chance to blog, but fortunately, there hasn't been much to blog about. This movie has been the biggest flop since Gigli. I swear, Korey Rowe was out in public more when he was in the stockade for desertion, than the Three Stooges are now. A Google News search for "Loose Change Final Cut" turns up just 7 mentions, and that is only if you include Prison Planet, which just happens to be run by Alex Jones, the Executive Producer. Not a single mention is from any major news source. Looking at the page hits for loosechange911.com in Alexa shows the same story.

Anyway, so this brings us back to the original subject, which is the expectation that "The Shell Game" will somehow save the day. Indicative of this is one of several posts on this subject on 911 Blogger, reposted from OpEdNews, this one ironically titled "Why Would REAL 9/11 Truth Activists Advocate a Work of FICTION?". Uhh, because most of what they advocate is fiction to begin with?

Alten at least, is an established writer, or as he titles himself at every opportunity, a "New York Times Best-selling author", so they at least won't have to read horribly bad prose like in American Truth, which only seems to manage a high rating on Amazon through the author repeatedly voting for himself. You can actually download the first chapter here, and it is not as badly written (although one hopes they will correct all the misspellings in the published version) it has the normal fact-checking and accuracy that one would expect from a truther. That is, he is horrible at both.

Some examples, he didn't manage to get through the prologue before rehashing the same anti-military rumors started during the Vietnam War about how soldiers drop out of society in mass.

It is a Federal budget that invests billions into weapons of mass destruction and pennies into its fighting soldiers, hiding the grim reality that one in three adult homeless males are combat vets, that one in four veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer mental health problems – that our nation’s warriors have been left behind by an Administration that wraps itself in the stars and stripes but refuses to provide adequate funding for our soldiers’ needs.

It only takes a few minutes to find out where he mutated this claim from, an advocacy group called the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, here reported by FoxNews:

U.S. veterans face a greater chance of becoming homeless than the general population, say experts. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans , a study released in 1999 found that while veterans count for 9 percent of the entire population, they are nearly 23 percent of the homeless population and 33 percent of the adult male homeless population.

If you read it carefully though, you notice it states that 1 in 3 adult males are "veterans", not combat veterans. Given the relatively high percentage of adult males who have served in the military, this is not that far out of their statistical likelihood for their demographic. You can read more about these studies in this excellent article by Michael Fumento, or read the equally fine Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett.

When you get into the narrative it also becomes apparent that Mr. Alten has not even done the most basic research into the military. He evidently has been getting his military history from Korey Rowe, from just the second page.

“Since the beginning. I started in Afghanistan with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, the ‘Rakkasans.’ We were the first boots on the ground. Same for Iraq. Ne Desit Virtus--”

The 187th, part of the 101st Airborne Division, was not the first unit into Afghanistan, as I pointed out over a year ago when Loose Change producer Korey Rowe, who served in that unit, made the same claim. Alten then continues:

“–let valor not fail.” The woman translates. “When did Military Intelligence recruit you?”

“The day Psy Ops found out I spoke fluent Arabic.”

“So you were with M.I. two years, then Counterintelligence. Looks like you were quite busy. . . over one hundred interrogations.” The woman’s eyes narrow. “Tell me, Colonel, what’s the most interesting thing you ever learned from these ‘sessions.’?”

I can count at least 2 errors just in that exchange. First of all, Psy Ops is not part of military intelligence, it is part of the Special Operations branch. Secondly, Counterintelligence actually is part of military intelligence, so you could not transfer out of MI into it.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Somehow, I don't see this bringing about revolution either. Next...