The 7/22 Truth Movement

Will probably turn out much like the 9/11 Truth Movement, riddled with Jew-bashers, Israel haters, and Holocaust Deniers. The 9/11 Oz forums get things going:

Conspicuously absent from the mainstream coverage of these twin attacks is this Israeli connection with the bomber clearly being a pro-Israel supporter.

One must also take note of the fact that Norway has officially backed a Palestinian bid for statehood in the United Nations, something which made Israel quite unhappy.

Norway has also said they will pull out of the bombing campaign in Libya, all of which will undoubtedly irk the banking and industrial defense contracting interests that fund and profit from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Libyan bombing campaign, and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

This is just the beginning; the coincidences here, if they are coincidences and nothing more, are uncanny.

Webster Tarpley sees another false-flag attack, only he sees NATO as the culprit:

The tragic terror attacks in Norway display a number of the telltale signs of a false flag provocation. It is reported that, although the world media are attempting to focus on Anders Behring Breivik as a lone assassin in the tradition of Lee Harvey Oswald, many eyewitnesses agree that a second shooter was active in the massacre at the Utøya summer youth camp outside of Oslo. It has also come to light that a special police unit had conducted drills or exercises near the opera house in downtown Oslo which involved the detonation of bombs during 2010– exactly what caused the bloodshed a few hundred meters away this Friday. Further research reveals that United States intelligence agencies had been conducting a large-scale program of recruiting retired Norwegian police officers with the alleged purpose of conducting surveillance inside the country. This program, known as SIMAS Surveillance Detection Units, provided a perfect vehicle for the penetration and subversion of the Norwegian police by NATO.

This is typical conspiracy theory thinking; initial, rushed reports were correct, and the subsequent corrections when all the facts are in are evidence of the coverup.

Note as well that the "false-flag" aspect is bogus; as far as I know, Breivik wasn't flying any flag at all during his rampage.

Hat Tip: Paul W, in the comments.

Update: Should have guessed that Kevin Barrett would be quick to hop aboard the Blame Israel First bandwagon:

Israelis have a long history of dressing up as Arabs, or fabricating Arab patsies, to take the blame for their mayhem. Just about all of the most notorious "Arab terrorist attacks" in history have been revealed as Mossad operations, often by former Mossad officers themselves.

Err, except that the Norway attacks weren't pulled off by someone dressed up as an Arab. Not to worry that doesn't change Barrett's conclusion:

So if Israel was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Norway, as many credible observers suspect, why didn't they set up the usual Muslim patsy to take the fall? Why use a guy whose background pointed straight to the Zionists themselves?

Maybe they wanted to send a message.

Another Troofer Book Attacking Obama

Jerome Corsi is apparently not the only truther with a thing against Barrack Obama, with former Larouche and permanent conspiracy nut Webster Tarpley having his own contribution, with the title of Obama - The Postmodern Coup


Obama is bizarrely described in the Amazon blurb as:

Obama's economics are pure Skull & Bones/Chicago school austerity and sacrifice for American working families, all designed to bail out the bankrupt Wall Street elitist financiers who own Obama. Obama's lemming legions and Kool-Aid cult candidacy hearken back to Italy in 1919-1922, and raise the question of postmodern fascism in the United States today.

Huh? The only thing Obama has in common with Alex P. Keaton's favorite economist is geography. Among other examples, Obama has repeatedly said he will raise taxes, regardless of what economists say and that fairness, not economic freedom is the primary concern, a philosophy which could not be farther from that of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. But as you all know, facts and logic mean nothing to a conspiracy theorist.

Hey, I am no fan of Obama, but I don't want these idiots on my side.

A Carnival of Woo

It doesn't get any wooier, than this. Former Larouche cultist Webster Tarpley was on Kevin "Hang 'em High" Barrett's Internet radio show last night. Among other things we learned that Barack Obama is the appointed candidate of the media, Wall Street, and the powers that be, and his foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzenzinski, is manipulating him in order to achieve his long desired plans for a throw down with Russian. As a result, Obama is ever more dangerous than the neo-cons who are in power now! Ron Paul even comes in for a bashing becaust Tarpley believes that a strong state must exist to crush the evil corporations.

This interview is definitely two Paxil pills up.

The Troofernomic Recovery Program

Conspiracy theorist and former Lyndon Larouche followed Webster Tarpley posts his economic recovery plan on Rense.com. There is so much wrong with this that one could write a PhD dissertation on it, but I will just touch on some lowlights. Even more incredible is the fact that the truthers consider this nutjob some sort of intellectual.

1. Stop all foreclosures immediately for at least five years and for the duration of the depression by means of a compulsory federal law carrying criminal penalties. No foreclosures on homes, family farms, factories, public utilities, hospitals, transportation and other infrastructure. Outlaw adjustable rate mortgages.

Woot! Five years of free rent. I am buying a BMW tomorrow!

2. Raise the federal minimum wage immediately to a living wage of at least $15 per hour, with the short-term goal of attaining a federal minimum wage of at least $20 per hour.

Why stop at $20, let's just raise it to $100 while we are at it. Everyone can afford to retire at 40 and live on their yacht!

3. Immediate enactment of a securities transfer tax (STT) or Tobin tax of 1% to be imposed on all financial turnover in all financial markets to include the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, the Amex, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the market in federal securities, the foreign exchange market, the New York Mercantile Exchange, and all other financial markets. This tax will be paid by the seller. This tax will be extended to the notional value of all derivatives, including over-the-counter derivatives, exchange traded derivatives, structured notes, designer derivatives and all other financial paper. Derivatives will become reportable under penalty of law. It is conservatively estimated that the securities transfer tax will yield approximately $5 trillion of new revenue in its first year of application.

Conservatively estimated? Considering that would be around 40% of GDP, and about twice what the federal government gets from every other tax combined, I am dying to hear what their more wild estimates are. Of course what anyone with more than a 10th grade education realizes, is this would lead to an immediately seize-up of the markets, and zero liquidity. Yeah, that is a great recipe for a recovery.

Sorry, I can't go on, I can feel brain cells dying by the word...

Tarpley Wows Them In Merry Olde England

Our buddies at 9-11 Cultwatch were at a London appearance where he apparently hawked the fourth version of Synthetic Terror and provided thrilling insights:

Whilst most people associate the 1999 US attack on Serbia with Bill Clinton, to WGT this was ordered by Al Gore, to impress Prince Charles! What next - was the US invasion of Grenada an attempt to impress Prince Edward? Moving forward, he stated that the 2004 train bomb attacks in Madrid were carried out by NATO intelligence, to allow the 'neo-fascist" Aznar the opportunity to install himself as dictator. No evidence for this was cited, but then again the reader should not be expecting any by now.

Terrific post, highly recommended!

Update: In the comments on that post, Paul notes that several of London's big hitters were noticeably absent from Websterpalooza; I speculated that perhaps it was due to the Kennebunkport Bunk. Jenny over at 9-11 Blogger begs for a link to some stuff she's been posting over at the UK Indymedia site, but then plays coy when I ask for a URL, apparently believing as usual that I came across the 9-11 Cultwatch post by shadowing her every move. In fact, I came across the post virtue of Dylan Unsavory in our comments section. Whatsamatter, Jen? Chip Berlet not paying you enough to make my life easier?

Update II: Fun is fun, but I don't want to smear Chip by associating him with Col. Jenny Sparks.

Webster Tarpley, You're Fired!

The Troofer wars continue. Jenny Sparks pink-slips Websteroonius:

This, sir, is another example of your irresponsible judgment. Considering you used the end of your Cooper Union hall speech to attack 9/11 activists as Cointelpro with no evidence worthy of a court of law, this wild call for various groups to "track down" and "isolate" individuals, is likely to result in irresponsible and dangerous witch hunts. Neither you, nor Actindependent.org have the faintest understanding of how Cointelpro worked if you believe tracking down individuals you don't is going to stop the actions of a present day reincarnation of the organization. This, sir, is a thinly veiled call to attack persons you and those who support you disagree with. We can no longer be responsible for the out come of these ill conceived words.

Of course, the problem with a canning like this is that it has no effect. I'm sure that 90% of the 9-11 Troof movement would like to fire Uncle Fetzer as a leader, and yet there he is, representing the kooks in virtually every TV program on the topic.

It's COINTELPRO!!

ln a sidenote to the troofer wars we have been discussing between the Webster Tarpley led Kennebunkport Warning group, and... well... just about everyone else as far as I can tell, old Web is now putting out warnings of government counter intelligence campaigns against them. Now just our government, apparently all of them!

It has come to our attention that certain scurrilous, obscene, abusive, harassing, and threatening emails, blog postings, and videos are being fabricated, circulated, sent, and posted on the internet by anonymous provocateurs who are evidently working for the pro-Cheney factions of the US intelligence community. An effort is being made in some quarters to falsely attribute these faked and counterfeit postings, emails, and videos to Webster G. Tarpley, Bruce Marshall, Captain Eric May, and to other persons sympathetic to the Philadelphia Platform and/or the Kennebunkport Warning. Any such attempted attribution is a lie. Actindependent.org and its supporters, including but not limited to the persons named, have no responsibility for these items, and repudiate and condemn them in every way. The internet items in question represent the dirty tricks, provocations, and poison pen sabotage and disruption tactics associated with a world-wide chaos and confusion campaign of cointelpro orchestrated by the Cheney faction as we approach a possible US attack on Iran, Syria and other countries. Anyone who gives credence to these counterfeit items or is responsible for spreading or publicizing them is either a conscious stooge for Cheney, or else is stupidly playing into the hands of the Cheney war faction at a most critical time.

The goal of this crude campaign of low-grade internet fakes, forgeries, and slanders is to sow dissension, fear, conflict, and hysteria so as to prevent the emergence of a unified mass resistance to the Cheney war party and its Democratic Party backers. Actindependent.org is in the process of tracking down and analyzing a global pattern of coordinated cointelpro deployments in Australia, Canada, Austria, and Germany, in addition to the United States. Actindependent.org calls on all anti-war, impeachment, anti-globalization, 9/11 truth, civil liberties, honest vote count, labor, civil rights, ethnic minority, and other groups and persons of good will everywhere to help identify, denounce, expose, and isolate the anonymous provocateurs who are behind this campaign of falsification and harassment.

Yeah, I am sure Webster Tarpley is so important he has an entire department at Langley dedicated to him, much less at the Austrian intelligence service (does Austria even have one?). I have just one question though, what could you possibly do to make Eric May look any more insane than he already does?

Troofer Wars Continue

Looks like the No-Planers are aligning themselves with Webster Tarpley and against the Truth Action group (Arabesque, Woolsey, Jo (Jenny Sparks) Cressy and Cosmos):



Discussion of this video here.

Only for those who understand the above:



Nico says he's not dog4tree and I believe him. This seems like his style, but just a bit too polished an attempt to look like something he'd produce.

Sigh. Sometimes I feel like the equivalent of an announcer at the Special Olympics chess competition.

The Continuing Disintegration of Webster Tarpley

It's actually quite amusing to watch him surround himself with thorough nutters like Captain Eric (Jews run Hollywood) May, and Morgan Stack, and think that this is somehow improving his position. They're trying to figure out who Jenny Sparks is (jeez, Web, you should read Screw Loose Change, or Nico's bloglines), and fruitcake May claims she must be part of some disinfo cell.



Hat Tip: Nico's bloglines.

Kennebunkport Nuttery Continues

Jeez, if only we could be as effective as Webster Tarpley has been at dividing the Truther Movement into two camps! A new, very slick cartoon has been produced:



(Click on that to see it full-size)

Apparently Tarpley's minions want the Troofers to believe that Cosmos, Woolsey, Arabesque and Jenny are all in the pay of Chip Berlet and the Ford Foundation, and getting their marching orders from the FBI.

Meanwhile, over at the Truth Action Forums, a Tarpley supporter named Leland Lehrman shows up:

The Kennebunkport Warning was and is a well-stated, timely message to a groggy but searching American public on the dangers our country and world now face. Even if the signers weren't clear on what the warning really said, the fact that it was assigned Hoax Status on the internet when it was a very supportable document, with masses of evidence far in excess of the cited Yuval Aviv story, meant that Tarpley and Marshall immediately felt sabotaged, although there is still some uncertainty about where that actually comes from.

On the subject of LaRouche, I have never seen a more complex situation reduced to such an unbelievably useless caricature as Mr. LaRouche and his network. Anyone who has actually taken the time to read their intelligence reports from around the world, their analyses of philosophical, political and financial situations and their work on the cultural infiltration by the CIA into the postwar era would never for a moment reduce their value to zero even if there are grave problems with their tactics, other positions or egos.

LOL! But it gets even better; Imgstacke over there has some recollection of Lehrman's contributions to the collected wisdom of the planet; this piece over at Rense:

The Absolute Best Authentications Of The Protocols Of Zion

Yep, hell of a reference there, Webster!

Update: Nico points out in the comments that Lehrman is the original "Butter Brain".

“I was thinking, perhaps it is possible for an object to pass through a hole and make a hole smaller than itself. Say for example, a semi-soft object hit a slightly harder object. Imagine that the semi soft object is a long butter stick, and the slightly harder object is a piece of plastic or so. Is it not possible that the butter, when hitting the plastic could fold at the outer edges and slip through a hole that was not as large as itself? “

“An object can in fact pass through another object and make a hole smaller than itself, in particular if the object is softer than the one it is passing through, and in particular if the object is measured lengthwise, and subsequently bends as a result of impact.” Leland Lehrman

It is also claimed by Nico (although I am unsure on this one) that Lehrman is the son of Lewis Lehrman, who (according to Wikipedia) was an original board member of.... PNAC!

Kennebunkport Fiasco Continues to Divide the Kooks

I enjoy this rundown of the entire nonsense over at Winter Patriot. It appears to be for the most part factual if deranged. For an example of the latter, WP describes the dustup between the 9-11 crackpots and the Peace Movement as involving one side which he calls the "Paranoid Lunatics". Now you and I might say, oh, that's obviously the Troofers, right?

Nope.

You just can't put the Paranoid Lunatics in with the Conspiracy Theorists and expect them to stay there. As a matter of half-joking convenience, I refer to the anti-Iraq-war people, the election-reform advocates, and every other single-issue or narrow-focus dissident group which doesn't want to talk about 9/11 as Lunatics because they think if they play their cards right they will be granted serious credibility by the mainstream media any day now. And I call them Paranoid because of their apparent belief that they will jeopardize such imminent credibility if they consort with Conspiracy Theorists, those disreputable types who don't believe the official government explanation of what happened on 9/11.

Like I say he does run down the issues well, but obviously with an axe to grind as well. Webster Tarpley does no wrong in this version of events. And that whole Lyndon LaRouche thing gets swept under the rug:

[A]s I've said all along, who cares who he used to work for? What matters is what he's saying now, and whether it makes sense. We don't have time to argue about who people used to work for. We have to consider what they're saying and doing right now.

And of course at least two other figures in the middle of the whole Kennebunkport mess are also former (or present) LaRouchees:

Bruce Marshall who actually collected the supposed signatures cited LaRouche's foreign policy nuttery when he was running for Congress as the Green Party candidate from Vermont. In 2006, not in 1997, when Tarpley claims he was forced out of the LaRouche organization.

Laurie Dobson was a LaRouchee who ran for the Connecticut Legislature in 2002. Dobson claims to have an email from one of the women in question in which she admits that she may have signed the document without reading it.

So okay, now we've got three LaRouche kooks at the center of this incident, including two of fairly recent vintage and one who claims to have been booted out of the organization a decade ago.

Hat Tip to Nico's bloglines which divulges some information about our old buddy Jenny Sparks, like her real name. Jenny also draws one of the inevitable charts showing who's connected to whom. For what it's worth I think Jenny's been basically right throughout this affair but like all kooks she mistakes some fellow kooks (Fetzer and Nico for example) for operatives.

The Truther Wars Continue

The Truther Wars continue, with Webster Tarpley striking back at his perceived enemies, which he believes are supported by the Ford Foundation:

The following scurrilous attack constitutes a declaration of war by the Ford Foundation, the flagship foundation of the US ruling elite and the foundation most engaged in the suppression of domestic political opposition, against the Philadelphia Platform of July 4, 2007, and the Kennebunkport Warning, published on August 26, 2007. These documents can be viewed at actindependent.org. The author of the following screed is the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet, the leading figure of Political Research Associates of Massachusetts, an entity which, according to published accounts, received some $325,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation between 2002 and 2006.

This article represents a strategic decision on the part of Berlet's Ford Foundation paymasters that the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport documents represent a threat to the political hegemony of the financier elite who are betting on synthetic terrorism, new false flag operations, and a nuclear attack on Iran to clear the way for totalitarian rule in the US. The Ford Foundation is now committing considerable resources, not just to maintain the US peace, impeachment, and anti-globalization movements in their current fragmented and ineffective form, but also specifically to sabotage the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport initiatives.

Now I was aware that Tarpley used to be a follower of felon and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche, but this is the first time that I recall him talking about it.

Instead, Berlet suggests that I am a sock-puppet for LaRouche. LaRouche drove me out of his organization in 1997, more than ten years ago. I have nothing in common with LaRouche, whose supporters have repeatedly slandered me, albeit in terms slightly different from those used by Berlet. LaRouche is a border guard for the sinister Hillary Clinton-Rahm Emanuel neocon warmonger machine in the Democratic Party. He is currently trying to combine that with the notion that Bush is a force for peace with Putin's Russia ­ a manifest absurdity, since Bush is promoting aggression against Russia in the form of a nuclear first-strike capability. Contrary to what Berlet writes, LaRouche has no commitment to 9/11 truth and has contributed nothing to the 9/11 truth movement. LaRouche has rather sponsored a personality cult complete with a youth movement which is a parody of Chairman Mao's Red Guards of the mid-1960s.

Who will next be called out as an enemy of the people? As I have long maintained, the favorite book of the truthers should not be Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, but his parody of Soviet Communist paranoia and backstabbing, Animal Farm.

Tarpley Delivers Stem-Winder

Heheh, sometimes the Deniers punish themselves. At the Vancouver 9-11 Conference, Webster Tarpley got up to deliver the keynote address, which went on for an hour. Then another hour. Then 30 minutes more.

Synthetic Terror Chapter 5

At last, we get into some stuff that is actually 9-11 related. In this chapter, Tarpley focuses on the hijackers. Predictably, we get the discussion about Atta's fondness for alcohol, cocaine, strippers and pork, all unfortunately drawn from Hopsicker's notorious interview with Amanda Keller, and thus all debunked.

We get a lot of the "six degrees of separation" stuff. For example, Atta and Shehhi supposedly rented a plane from Kemper Aviation in August 2001. Kemper Aviation's chief pilot instructor until 1999 was Jean-Francois Buslik, who apparently was a criminal in Belgium involved in a series of murders. This claim comes from Hopsicker, but appears confirmed here.

Tarpley repeats the claim that some of the hijackers had trained at Pensacola. The website 9-11 Myths covers this well:

One oddity for these three is that none of them are suggested as being pilots, in the official 9/11 account. Why would the plotters bother training Jarrah for Flight 93, say, when he would be accompanied by two more experienced, military-trained pilots on 9/11?

We hear the usual glowing reports about Hani Hanjour's amazing 270 (officially now 330) degree turn, as if this kind of maneuver is not considered routine when a pilot realizes he's a little too high for his approach. We hear about his failure to successfully convince instructors at Freeway Airport that he was qualified enough to rent one of their Cessnas, without hearing that he later succeeded in renting a Cessna and flying it down to Maryland.

We get the warnings bit again from foreign countries, to which I always have to respond, warnings of what? That the US was about to stage a false-flag terrorist attack against itself, or that Al-Qaeda was determined to strike? Of course, I guess Tarpley's kind of in the middle, believing that some of the hijackers actually existed and planned an attack, even if they could not have done what they are claimed to have done. In other words, it appears he believes that at some point the US government took over the operation.

Tarpley gets the passport at the WTC wrong, attributing it to Atta (it was Suqami's passport that was found). We then get Tarpley's theory of remote control and Global Hawk, which has been discussed to death.

Webster Tarpley on Hannity & Colmes

Wingnut Webster Tarpley appears on Hannity & Colmes, mostly discussing John Kerry's comments on WTC7. Even for a truther he comes off incredibly ignorant. First he claims twice that WTC7 was "several hundred yards from the towers".

Oh really?

Then he claimed that there were no fires.

How do you even hold a discussion with people who have no sense of reality?

Fetzer Gets In Some Decent Points

James pointed the other day to this hilarious argument between Mark Dice and Jim Fetzer. As others have mentioned, the part where Jim discusses Dice's nutty "Resistance for Christ" group and their belief in "Luciferians" is quite amusing. But the part that I found interesting was the bit where Uncle Fetzer claimed that Jim Hoffman and Webster Tarpley had brought up "Directed Energy Weapons". Sure enough, I was able to pull it up from Synthetic Terror (Page 225 of the PDF):



And a paragraph later



This certainly shows how annoying it is to read Tarpley; he tells us not once, but twice on the same page that the power cord would be rather large. And Tarpley gets into real science fiction territory here (Page 245):



So Fetzer has a valid point; why is Webster Tarpley considered credible in the 9-11 Denial Movement and Judy Wood a kook? Of course, Fetzer's arguing they're both credible, while I would maintain they're both nutbars....

Webster Tarpley at the Irvine Conference

Webster Tarpley, the guy who predicted that a US bombing of Iran would take place last Friday, was interviewed on video at the March "Truth and Justice" Conference, sponsored by the anti-Semitic fringe newspaper, the American Free Press.

This guy is even stranger on video than in print. He hilariously claims that Alex Jones' 2006 9/11 conference won the House and Senate for the Democrats, and then goes on to make the typical truther claim that 84% don't believe the "official story". OK, then why didn't a single truther candidate win?

More From Tarpley on the Good Friday "Sneak Attack"

I posted previously on how prominent truther Webster Tarpley wrote about a US "sneak attack" against Iran this Friday. Tarpley, much like David Ray Griffin, is portrayed in the conspiracy community as some sort of towering intellectual, a new age Thomas Jefferson. I have seen claims that he speaks 6 different languages, although apparently not Russian based on the way be completely murders the pronounciation of Novosti, in this radio interview that I found linked at the Loose Change Forum.

As I mentioned previously, he attributed this sneak attack warning to "Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff", although the original Russian article he cites mentions only "military analysts", hardly the same thing.

Well to make it even more amazing, in this radio interview, he now cites sources in "Russian Intelligence" for the same story. Geez, guy, if you are going to make up a story, at least keep it consistent.

I e-mailed Tarpley last week asking for him to explain his sourcing. To no surprise I did not get a response. Six months from now I will probably get an angry e-mail from him complaining that I didn't inform him.

Webster Tarpley On the Depression of the 1990s

The third chapter of Tarpley's book, Synthetic Terror, is clearly drawn from his days as a LaRouchie. As discussed in numerous posts on FactNet.org, LaRouche was constantly selling "doom and gloom":

Ah, housing and Larouche, a real winning combination. A track record like every other prediction of economic collapse.

In the 1970's we would warn people of a Rockefeller take over and tell people to sell their houses and give the money to the US Labor Party before everything collapses.

Now, you know how it is; you can always predict that bad times are around the corner because the corner has not arrived yet. Tarpley tries to do something quite a bit harder; he tries to convince people that the 1990s were the bad old days.

This of course will come as news to anybody who was alive those days. The US economy purred on all cylinders during the 1990s by any measure. The economy added almost 20 million jobs during the decade. The stock market soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketing from 2,750 to 10,800.

But of course, to Tarpley, the US economy spent the entire decade teetering on the brink of collapse, a situation that Tarpley blames on Globalization. He does bring in some legitimate concerns (like the Russian financial crisis of 1998) which did have some impact on the economy, but which turned out to be like a blemish on Jessica Simpson; overall still pretty darn good.

Then he gets into the dollar debate. Is the greenback about to implode in faster than free fall speed? Tarpley sure believes it. We are led to assume that the OPEC nations are all headed to the Euro; that has not happened. He compares the US economy to Weimar, Germany. I know I haven't yet headed out to the market with a wheelbarrow full of money the way the Germans did back then. Even more bizarre, Tarpley claims that the "neocons" are actually pushing this comparison. Brooks' Law states that when somebody who's not a neocon uses the word in a sentence, you can usually bet that the rest of the sentence will be false, and this is no exception. I have yet to hear a prominent neocon (say Bill Kristol) compare the US economy to the Weimar Republic.

Then we get into Tarpley's analysis of the 1998 Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski/Impeachment imbroglio. Tarpley describes it as a "coup" attempt, which may win him some brief fans among the Clinton defenders. However, he goes on to claim that the Navy brass were considering deposing Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot, a notion that is sheer tinfoil hattery.

It just goes on and on, with Tarpley giving his unique take on Kosovo, and the Neocons war of words with China. And absolutely nothing in here seems to have anything to do with the events of 9-11.

Now I see why people tell me to debunk Synthetic Terror. It's because there's almost nothing there that ties to 9-11 so that at the end of reading another chapter, I've done nothing to debunk the Deniers.

Synthetic Terror Part II

The second chapter of the book is obviously the inspiration for a good part of Terrorstorm. Which is to say that it doesn't have a whole lot to do with 9-11, but a lot to do with "False Flag" operations and Operation Gladio and the like. But Tarpley is a little more cautious than Alex Jones. Note how he establishes the supposed link betwee the US and Operation Gladio:



"Information came into the public domain that...." That is a very curious and passive way of avoiding telling us who put that information into the public domain. But that's a research project for another time; for the moment it is sufficient that Operation Gladio does not tell us a lot about 9/11/01. That false flag attacks may have happened in the past does not mean that every attack is false flag, unless Tarpley wants us to believe that the French bombed Pearl Harbor.

Tarpley goes on to tell us about patsies and moles and it seems pretty tangential to 9-11 but he does get back on track with the discussion of the Phoenix memo and the efforts by Minneapolis FBI to get a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. But where most of us see the failure of that warrant to be issued as a sad mistake by an FBI paranoid about violating rights, Tarpley is convinced that the special agent who blocked the warrant must have been one of his "moles".

Sibel Edmonds gets a long mention; she has some interesting claims but she's the usual CT "whistleblower"; she blew the whistle after she was fired, so it's an open question as to what is sour grapes and what is legitimate. I have noted in the past that Edmonds' claims as revealed on 60 Minutes were relatively tame; it's only in recent years that she has embellished them to include supposed 9-11 foreknowledge (even though she herself was hired after 9-11).

Tarpley goes on to Operation Northwoods and at this point my eyes are glazing over. You can't imagine how tedious it is to wade through this all over again, in pursuit of a claim that the US government's willingness to create an incident in which no Americans would actually die indicates their willingness to create an incident in which thousands of Americans would die.

Tarpley does a few side jaunts into British government involvement in Northern Ireland terrorism, something I may be interested in looking at in the future and Israeli involvment in Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip. Again, mildly interesting but not related to 9-11 except in the usual, "If X government would do A, then why wouldn't Y government do B?" sense.

Tarpley also dedicates an entire page to a rundown of the way the US oligarchy controlled all the presidents after FDR. Jimmy Carter, for example, supposedly had a nervous breakdown after "being ousted as Governor of Georgia." But in fact, Carter was prohibited from serving a second term; under his successor, George Busbee, Georgia amended its constitution to allow two consecutive terms.

General comments: As noted in the discussion of the prior chapter, Tarpley does not organize his thoughts well, so we get a mishmash of stuff that is probably recycled from Tarpley's writing for Executive Intelligence Review, Lyndon LaRouche's magazine. His main point in this section appears to be that there are no real outside terror groups or if there are, they are patsies for the governments they nominally oppose.