Yet More Honegger!

I know, this blog seems to be becoming all Honegger, all the time, but I could not pass up these articles which were emailed to me by a reader named William. I have condensed the articles and bolded the relevant portions:

ROBERT G. KAISER CIRCUS From 'Nightline' To Obscurity the Washington Way
2654 words
24 June 1984
The Washington Post
English
(Copyright 1984)

Looking back almost a year later, a great many participants in the Honegger episode are a little sheepish about it (not Honegger herself, however -- more on her views presently). "It was really rather tragic," said Mary Crisp, former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, who advised Honegger last June, when she first decided to make public her denunciations of the administration's policies on women. "It was like getting into a pretty lake and finding out it was a swamp with a yucky bottom," said Felicity Barringer, a Washington Post reporter who covered the episode. "Well, we certainly all tried to exploit her, I'll tell you that -- poor woman," said Jill Buckley, a Democratic political consultant who briefly tried to help Honegger deal more effectively with the news media.
Remarks like these stemmed from the discovery, made within the first few days of Honegger's big week, that she was, well, odd. She heard voices, which guided her behavior. She had a masters degree in parapsychology. "She turned out, in my estimation, to be a flake," said Sam Donaldson of ABC news.
Donaldson was the substitute host when Honegger appeared on "Nightline" and told the country: "I honestly believe that in the last number of years, certainly since Ronald Reagan gained the presidency, that I am ... the only individual who saw the whole picture."
Earlier in the week she had told Betty Cuniberti of The Los Angeles Times that "a source" using her own voice had told her in January 1980 that Reagan would win the presidency, and that she would work for him on women's issues. "This is hard to believe that it really happened," Honegger said, describing the revelations to her as "channeled information ... as if it were from the future."
Crisp referred Honegger to Rosalie Grattaroti, a publicist who does promotion and marketing work for design firms. Grattaroti thought an op-ed piece in The Post would be ideal, since it would do so much for Honegger's credibility. Sarah McClendon volunteered to make the first contact with Meg Greenfield, editor of The Post's editorial page, and Greenfield expressed interest.
Honegger's first draft was "very operatic," Greenfield recalled, and required a lot of editing. At the same time, Greenfield undertook to confirm that Honegger was indeed who she said she was -- author of the president's executive order setting up a Justice Department review of laws and regulations discriminating against women, then head of the review itself. After a verification process that went on for three weeks, Greenfield satisfied herself that Honegger was as advertised, and that her accusations were well founded.
During those weeks before publication of the article, Greenfield was exposed to Honegger's eccentricities. Some aspects of her behavior reminded Greenfield of other whistle blowers, even of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who provided the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Post. "They are driven, almost messianic, and they greatly overestimate the importance of what they are revealing," Greenfield said of such people. As she came to realize that Honegger was something of an oddball, Greenfield said, she confronted "the most interesting journalistic dilemma I ever faced."
Was a legitimate criticism of a government policy, written by a person undeniably in a position to know the truth, its accuracy independently confirmed, somehow illegitimate because its author was a little strange? After much consideration, Greenfield decided the answer was no -- the article was legitimate and newsworthy. "If she was a kook," Greenfield said, "she was the Reagan administration's kook -- she was their problem."
But the mood quickly changed as Honegger's own personal limitations became clear. "Even some old pros" would have had trouble dealing with the pressure and attention Honegger got, said Martin Anderson, President Reagan's former chief domestic adviser and Honegger's friend and patron. (Anderson had brought her to Washington, and still speaks warmly of her intelligence and ability.) In any event, she did not handle it well, and the image of Honegger as kook quickly bloomed.
A key moment came on Thursday, Aug. 25, when Honegger was invited to join a press conference being staged by the National Organization for Women. It would have been a routine and sparsely attended event, said Dale Russakoff, the Post reporter assigned to cover it, until Honegger's participation was announced. Then a dozen television crews and "a mob" of reporters turned out.
That press conference dismayed and infuriated many of Honegger's friends and helpers, and more than a few of the reporters present. After Honegger gave a meandering, sometimes bewildering performance, "Judy Goldsmith cut her off," Russakoff recalled, and NOW women spirited her to their offices seven floors above.
Mary Berry, a member of the Civil Rights Commission and feminist activist who took part in that Aug. 25 press conference, agrees with Honegger. "If you take a longer view," she said, you see that the administration was "stunned" by the Honegger episode, and changed its ways because of it, appointing more women to top jobs and taking other new initiatives. "We sort of seize upon things that are flamboyant and can be emphasized to advance things politically," she said. "That's standard here in town."
Kathy Wilson of the National Women's Political Caucus -- another participant in that press conference -- sees it differently. She agrees that Honegger's message was powerful, but in the end the episode "fell into the category of Reagan luck," she said. In other words, when the messenger was discredited, Reagan avoided much of the impact of the message.
"Unfortunately," added Mary Crisp, "no one remembers the content, the seriousness" of Honegger's charges.

Hoo-boy, where have we heard that before?

Science Desk; C
PENTAGON IS SAID TO FOCUS ON ESP FOR WARTIME USE
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
1859 words
10 January 1984
The New York Times
Late City Final Edition
English
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

In ''Mind Wars,'' to be published this spring by St. Martin's Press, Ronald M. McRae contends that psychic research was used to evaluate the MX missile ''shell-game'' mode, a $40 billion or so basing scheme in which each MX missile would be secretly shifted among a bevy of concrete bunkers so that Soviet planners would never know which shelter to aim at in a first strike.
Quoting a former White House aide as his source, Mr. McRae says the Pentagon set up experiments in which psychics guessed the position of targets, and that results were positive enough to suggest increased MX vulnerability. The former aide, Barbara Honegger, who holds a degree in parapsychology and left the Reagan Administration this fall, confirmed in a telephone interview that the experiments had been done. But she said she did not know whether the psychic findings had any bearing on the Reagan Administration's decision to scrap the shell-game mode.

National Desk; A
FRIENDS SAY FEMINIST HEROINE IS SINCERE IF ECCENTRIC
By JUDITH CUMMINGS
1152 words
30 August 1983
The New York Times
Late City Final Edition
English
Copyright 1983 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 29 -- When Barbara Honegger denounced President Reagan's commitment to equal rights for women as a ''sham'' and resigned from the Justice Department last week, she became an instant heroine to some women's rights groups.
But some of her new allies have winced as Miss Honegger has linked her beliefs about women's rights to her beliefs about the occult and the supernatural.
As passionately as she has been a student of politics, Miss Honegger is also a dedicated student of the occult, her friends say. She was widely quoted last week as having said that supernatural influences had guided her course, marking her as destined to have an impact on the Reagan Administration and on women's rights. One of these influences, according to an article in The Los Angeles Times, was ''a source'' using her voice that told her that she would become a defender of women's rights in the Reagan Administration. Another article said she had written of ''omens of power'' in Mr. Reagan's ascension.
Miss Honegger denied these accounts and said she never referred to ''a source'' or to ''omens.'' But while making these denials, she also said that she was indeed influenced by an unusual spiritual dynamic.
''I feel like a catalyst,'' she said in a recent interview. ''I am honored to have been used by the Force, if you will, with a capital F, like in 'Star Wars.' That's how I feel. You know, the Zeitgeist of history.''
Miss Honegger also was outspoken about her interest in parapsychology and coincidences. She earned a reputation in the White House as being ''somewhat odd,'' according to Mr. Bandow. As an example, he said, she wrote a manuscript discussing the significance of a particular grouping of three stars on events in the campaign. Mr. Bandow said this ''eccentricity'' did not appear to diminish people's regard for her work.

Reading between the lines here, it's not hard to see that people were happy to use Honegger for their own political agenda, but ended up being embarrassed when they realized that she was nuttier than a Blue Diamond warehouse.

Honegger at Respectable Truth Sites

One of our commenters griped about my mention of Barbara Honegger in the previous post, and suggested:

Simple test: register at a large truther site or forum that has a track record of not putting up with the fringies and ask what they think of Honegger.

Well, I hardly think that TruthAction would accept my registration. But let's look at some of the larger Truth sites and see what they have to say about the Munchkin.

How about starting with 911truth.org?

In December 2007 (well after I did my series on Honegger, she was noted as a featured speaker at the Boston Tea Party:

Ray McGovern, (see above) will be among the featured speakers at the evening presentation, along with Nancy Murray, Director of Education for the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU. Military analyst and former aide to President Reagan, Barbara Honegger, and Donna Marsh O'Connor, professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University (retired) and mother of 911 victim Vanessa Lang Langer, who died in Tower 2 on 93rd floor will also be making presentations. Other speakers may be added to the program.

In March of 2009, she was cited as among the charter members of Political Leaders for 9-11 Truth:

Barbara Honegger, former White House Policy Analyst and Special Assistant to the Assistant to President Ronald Reagan (1981 - 1983). (Charter Member of PL911Truth)

Honegger was also mentioned in 2008 as appearing in the movie Zero:

Question: ‘How do you propose to reopen the investigation?’

Chiesa: ‘The film is the primary instrument to get the debate going. It is a collection of discoveries, by many respected researches from around the globe (the film features, among others, Gore Vidal, Sibel Edmonds, Dario Fo, David Ray Griffin, Dr Steven Jones, Dr Kevin Ryan, Webster Tarpley, Barbara Honegger, FAA-controllers, USAF pilots, military commanders, physicists – ed. note). But they are still questions. The movie doesn’t provide the answers. It only lays bare the questions that remain, that were left unanswered by the official investigation and need to be answered by the US government.’

How about 911Blogger?

In September of 2007, she appeared on Air America, and the Truthers were aglow:

Yesterday, Sunday September 2nd, 2007, the disciplined effort of an LA Truther paid off in getting Webster Tarpley and Barbara Honegger an hour of air time on KTLK-AM1150, the local affiliate of Air America. Through engaging host Johnny Wendell in a serious 9-11 Truth dialogue over a course of many hours on the internet, she was able to get Wendell to invite Tarpley and Honegger, on very short notice, onto a show from 3-4pm he was guest-hosting for Joe McDonnell.

Note that there are no comments there decrying Honegger's appearance.

Truth Action does have some mention of Honegger, but not much.

Here's she's being touted as a speaker in LA:

SATURDAY TALK BY BARBARA HONNEGER (See www.911truthla.net for details)
Again, please note this reminder regarding Saturday's talk at the Unurban Cafe (details at www.911truthla.net). Barbara Honegger is a senior military affairs journalist, author of the historic Irangate expose' October Surprise, the first public resignation of conscience from the Reagan-Bush Administration, and author of the breakthrough 9/11 truth white paper "The Pentagon Attack Papers". Ms. Honegger is the 9/11 whistle blower who first connected the multiple military & intelligence war games and mass casualty exercises, which the Bush Administration was holding the morning of 9/11, to the scenario of planes crashing into buildings.

Victronix (aka Victoria Ashley, wife of Jim Hoffman) noted that there were problems with her:

Barrett and Honegger were there last year and the crowd didn't seem very large (I complained on blogger last year and no one knew who Honegger was, so couldn't understand anyone's issues with her), so the end result of mixing them with our best researchers is to provide false credibility for them on the internet, when the videos go up putting them altogether and the news stories come out with quotes, etc.

John Bursill mentioned the speakers featured in an Aussie film on 9-11 Troof:

Prof NAFEEZ AHMED -Director, Institute for Policy Research & Development, London
BARBARA HONEGGER - Senior Military Affairs Journalist, Naval Postgraduate School
GHALI HASSAN - Iraqi writer, Political Analyst, Perth
THIERRY MEYSSAN - Director, Voltaire Network, Paris
RALPH SCHOENMAN - Radio Host, Taking Aim

Here's another one with Victronix (apparently the only "respectable" troofer) pointing out a problem with Honegger that I admit I had not heard before:

I could list them, starting with the hoax LA911truth Grand Jury that featured Honegger saying that the shoebomber is actually Osama (a presentation based on facial similarities) and anti-semite Christoper Bollyn claiming that a plane couldn't have hit the Pentagon.

Wow. Richard Reid is Osama? LOL!

At any rate, you would really have to search 9-11 Troof sites very hard to find any negative comments about her.

More Barbara Honegger

James was able to get hold of a little more information on the Clock Lady, who will apparently appear in Loose Change, the Final (Nearly) Cut. Here's a 1985 article from Newsweek, entitled The Munchkin's Musical I've bolded the more entertaining passages.

Whatever its lasting contributions may turn out to be, the Reagan administration will long be remembered for its colorful and abundant ephemera. The resignation last month of Education Department aide Eileen Gardner (briefly famous for her view that a handicapped person's "external circumstances . . . fit his level of inner spiritual development") was only the latest in a long series of mini-controversies. The strangest of all, perhaps, was one that began on an otherwise dull Sunday in August 1983. Barbara Honegger, a special assistant in the Justice Department's civil-rights division, published a guest editorial in The Washington Post, attacking the president on women's issues. On Monday she quit her job.

On Tuesday a Justice Department official memorably dismissed Honegger as "a low-level Munchkin"; on Wednesday White House spokesman Larry Speakes sneered that the last time he'd seen her "she was the Easter Bunny at the White House Easter Egg Roll." (Speakes was mistaken, but Honegger had been photographed in a rabbit suit in 1980.) The next day Honegger produced a photo of herself with Reagan and crowed that it was "the Munchkin with the Wizard of Oz." White House aides began whispering that Honegger was a believer in ESP who claimed she'd ridden on Halley's comet; others began to wonder about her when she bombed on ABC's "Nightline," claiming that since Reagan had been in office she was "the only individual who saw the whole picture." The media backed off as quickly as they'd latched on. Honegger's entire passage from obscurity to obscurity took about two weeks.

When the fuss died down, Honegger joined the Jesse Jackson campaign as a coordinator for women. Then, last May, she moved back to California, where her parents own valuable real estate -- including the small, tidy house overlooking Monterey Bay in Pacific Grove where she now lives. Outside her picture window, sunbathers loll on their blankets; inside, Honegger, 37, sits with her back to the blue Pacific, her black dress buttoned to her chin, and talks animatedly about her latest response to the events of August 1983.

'Zingers': After thinking "very, very deeply and seriously and lightheartedly" about it, she decided against the lawsuits she'd been planning against government officials. Instead she's writing a musical satire whose working title is "The Wizard Because"; a "New York producer," she says, is "very, very interested." In the show, Honegger is a Munchkin, Reagan is the Wizard, the heartless, ax-wielding Tin Woodman is David Stockman and Dorothy -- for whom there is no Washingtonian counterpart -- has trouble getting back to Kansas because of Reagan's farm policies. Honegger's collaborator, a woman named Raye Dyer, is a former Gary Hart campaign worker. "There'll be some zingers in there," says Dyer. "Oh, yes, there will be." Parody, Honegger adds, is the best answer to the ridicule she endured, "a response in kind -- with a positive message. Oh, we're so excited."

But the ridicule still stings. "The image of me was a caricature," she says. To "let you know who I am," she produces medals awarded her by the Hoover Institution (a conservative think tank at Stanford University) and a volume of scholarly essays she helped edit there. After graduating from Stanford (she majored in creative writing), she spent five more years there as a "graduate student at large" doing research in "the neurophysiology of communications." She never claimed she rode on Halley's comet, and although she has a master's degree in parapsychology (from John F. Kennedy University, an evening and weekend school in Orinda, Calif.), she cooled toward the study of "anomalous communication" when she found that the data was not sufficiently credible.

Defection: Despite the damage done to her own credibility by the White House -- and despite her vote last year for Walter Mondale -- there's still a photo of her with "the Wizard" on her desk and she's still proud that she worked for him. "This president has sold the American people on themselves," she says. And she sounds almost compassionate when discussing the administration's reaction to her defection. "I feel that the White House, for reasons that are not clear to me, was actually threatened," she says. "This White House has very rarely been out of control. All I can think is that the people who make policy at the highest level must truly feel guilty about their positions, because they overreacted."

Honegger plans to apply to law school soon; the degree, she thinks, would help her should she finally run for public office. "My goal in life," she says, "is to serve the truth." Meanwhile, she's busy finishing "The Wizard Because" -- and starting her own business, a public-relations firm called Zeitgeist. (Its motto: "The Right Idea/The Right Time.") For this enterprise she has a new partner (who she says is "an elected official in the Monterey area") and a new idea. They pick a company they'd like to represent, "find out what its needs are and, unsolicited, present a complete concept." Zeitgeist descends on potential clients, she says, "like a bolt out of the blue." So far there have been no takers. But Barbara Honegger is not easily discouraged.

You can see the pictures of Honegger at her desk and in the rabbit suit here.

Here's some musing on David Duke and Barbara Honegger from somebody called Rayelan (probably the Raye Dyer mentioned in the Newsweek article).

I did not know that David Duke was living in Russia. I find this interesting because years ago I was told by one of Gunther's bosses, a four star Admiral, that the Soviet Union and the United States were going to change scripts.

At the time the Admiral said this, my ears perked up, because a year or two before he said this, I had been working with Barbara Honegger, the author of the first book with the name, October Surprise. She was writing a musical satire....

You Have Got to Love What They Consider "Research"

I caught another episode of Kevin Barrett's "Truth Jihad" radio show, although I still haven't figured out why he calls it that, since Barrett seems to think that in the history of Islam, not one Muslim has ever carried out a "holy war" against anyone. In this week's show he has on Barbara Honegger, whom he calls a leading researcher in the 9/11 truth movement. Barbara's claim to fame is apparently that she is a "Senior Military Affairs Correspondent" at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, which probably says more about DoD hiring standards than anything.

Both her and Barrett repeatedly cite a "white paper" she has written titled rather awkwardly, "The Pentagon Attack Papers Seven Hours in September: The Clocks that Broke the Lie". Although this paper repeats a series of truther myths, such as automated missile batteries at the Pentagon, the crux of the paper seems to be, as indicated in the title, that the plot is revealed by the time shown on a couple of damaged clocks at the Pentagon. Honegger alleges that a cordite bomb (whatever that is) went off several minutes before an aircraft hit the Pentagon, and caused those clocks to stop. The fact that there is not a single witness to this event, in contrast to the numerous witnesses who saw a plane hit, is not discussed.

This interview, is full of just as many errors and outright falsehoods, but if I had to pick a section, it would be the following:

Honegger: The people who are following the $2.3 trillion that Rumsfeld himself admitted in a press conference before 9/11, September 10th that they couldn't find $2.3 trillion, that is half the GNP of the United States, the Gross National Product of the United States. You don't just lose half the Gross National Product out of the Pentagon budget.

Barrett: Yeah. It was well timed.

Honegger: They said the day before 9/11 they were going to track the money and on 9/11, the Army auditors, the financial management area of the Army offices were the very ones taken out by the explosions, which in my paper, the Pentagon attack paper, go read it, proves was the result of bombs inside the building to take out the Pentagon auditors who were following that 2.3 trillion.

Caller: Oh my Goodness.

Barrett: 2.3 trillion will buy quite a few bombs I would imagine. That would buy a lot of cordite.

We have alreay addressed this $2.3 trillion thing several times. First of all, it was not a press conference where Rumsfeld "admitted" this, it was mentioned in passing during a speech to a conference of DoD logisticians titled rather boringly"DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield ". Furthermore, the reason they couldn't "find" the money, was not because it was stolen, but because of the antiquated accounting and IT systems, which is what Rumsfeld was complaining about in the speech! Anyway, read our previous posts if you want more on this subject.

The rest is just bad economics, $2.3 trillion is not "half the GNP of the United States" or GDP, she incorrectly interchanges the two. The GNP of the US in 2001 was around $10.2 trillion.

Finally, the idea that Rumsfeld would criticize the Pentagon's accounting systems, call for a change, and then launch a bomb attack to kill a couple of dozen accountants in order to stop these reforms is just idiotic. The truthers point to the number of accountants and finance people who were killed in the attack, as if it were anomalous, but just imagine how many of them work at the Pentagon? The Defense Finance and Accounting Service alone has around 16,000 employees. If a bunch of finance people were not killed, they would have used that as a sign of a conspiracy.

They continue:

Honegger: The real question is what the hell were they doing and had they been doing with half the GDP of the United States? That's the real question.

Barrett: Yeah. Where are they putting all that money?

Honegger: Well I think it is huge numbers of underground bases and in particular we know that Osama bin Laden father's company drilled the tunnels into the hills of Afghanistan when the CIA was paying them to do it to fight the Soviets there.

Barrett: You think they are using this money on underground bases?

Honegger: Yes, in part.

Barrett: Umm what’s your, well you see I don’t know too much about that, can you give me sources of information?

Honegger: Well that is a different program. The general question I want to get out here is what the hell have they been doing with one half the GDP 2.3 trillion, half the Gross National Product of the United States?

And these are the leading Truther researchers?

Who Is Barbara Honegger?

The answer, of course, is the clock lady, the woman who believes that the clocks all stopped at 9:32 in the Pentagon on 9-11, thereby disproving the government's claim that the Pentagon was hit at 9:37 (her section starts at 7:00).



But it turns out that Honegger has been around for a long time and is quite a wackadoodle. Curt at Flopping Aces has some background on Honegger. She's a munchkin who has talked to computers 100 years in the future.

Update: The original source on that talking to computers story may not be the best. But here's a 9-11 Denier who has more information on Honegger that confirms she's pretty nutty.

Another Bit of Debunking

By some Truthers, of a nutty conspiracy they don't agree with.  This time it's Barbara Honegger's idiotic fascination with the Pentagon clocks.

No kidding, the writer actually dropped a bunch of clocks on the ground at about 9:38 AM to see if they would move backwards due to the fall.  And yes, it happened:

Could the fall have caused the minute hand to move closer to a 9:31:30 am time for two of the clocks, as suggested by Russell Pickering? See the section “Wall Clock Experiments” for an experimental test of this suggestion for a clock virtually identical to the Heliport clock. The result of the experiment is that the minute hand can move back readily, even for a drop of 4 feet, as much as 8 minutes or more (to around the 9:30 am position), depending upon the clock’s orientation when it strikes the floor. This experimental evidence proves Honegger’s claim that the wall clocks’ provide the “ultimate evidence,” to be without foundation.

You know how it is; there's a part of me that feels they did a good job, and a part of me that realizes if we ever debunked stuff like this we'd get slammed by Truthers because "nobody gives credence to Honegger".

More Honegger Inanity

We have discussed Barbara Honegger before, the woman with a masters degree in parapsychology who amazingly still works as a journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School. Now she is back on Kevin Barrett's show in a veritable festival of nuttiness (Kevin Ryan is the guest for the first hour).

Honegger's main assertion, which she repeats in-depth here, is that a bomb went off at the Pentagon at 9:30 (she cites April Gallop as a witness) and then a separate object (probably a cruise missile) hit it at 9:37. OK, well there are a few problems with this theory. She claims to have witnesses to the explosion (which she compares to William Rodriguez and his claims of explosions in the basement of the WTC), but for some reason she cannot come up with a single person who then claims to have seen something hit the Pentagon, 7 minutes afterwards. You would think a massive explosion blowing a hole in the wall of the Pentagon would draw some attention, and someone might notice a cruise missile flying into that hole (yes, that is what she speculates happened) seven minutes later. In fact Barrett, that great truthseeker he is, never even bothers to ask that question.

Incredible.

I was also amused by her claim of an anonymous (of course, aren't they always) whistleblower, supposedly someone on a Navy ship in Chesapeake Bay witnessed a cruise missile being fired "towards shore" on the morning of 9/11. Uhh, take a look at Chesapeake Bay, just about any direction you go is "towards shore".

Obama on Mars

No, not figuratively.  Literally:

In a statement made Sept 20, 2011, Mr. Basiago confirmed Mr. Obama’s co-participation in the 1980 Mars training class, stating:  “Barry Soetoro, a student at Occidental College, was in my Mars training class under Major Ed Dames at The College of the Siskiyous in Weed, California in 1980. That fact has been corroborated by one of my other classmates, Brett Stillings. Two years later, when he was taller, thinner, more mature, a better listener, using the name ‘Barack Obama,’ and attending a different college, Columbia University, we crossed paths again in Los Angeles and I didn't recognize him as the person that I had been trained with in the Mars program and encountered on the surface of Mars. In fact, doing so would have been virtually impossible in any case, because measures had been taken to block our later memories of Mars shortly after we completed our training in 1980.”

Mr. Basiago states that during one of his trips to Mars via “jump room” that took place from 1981 to 1983, he was sitting on a wall beneath an arching roof that covered one of the “jump room” facilities as he watched Mr. Obama walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain. When Mr. Obama walked past him and Mr. Basiago acknowledged him, Mr. Obama stated, with some sense of fatalism:  “Now we’re here!”

Mr. Stillings states that during one of his visits to Mars, he walked out of the “jump room” facility and encountered Mr. Obama standing beside the facility by himself staring vacantly into a ravine located adjacent to the facility.

 Not a good idea; apparently you want to stay quite alert on your visits to Mars:

When they then first teleported to Mars in Summer 1981, the young Mars visitors confronted the situation that Major Dames had covered at length during the class the previous summer – that one of their principal concerns on Mars would be to avoid being devoured by one of the predator species on the Martian surface, some of which they would be able to evade, and some of which were impossible to evade if encountered.

The Mars program was launched, Basiago and Stillings were told, to establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space and, by sending civilians, to establish a legal basis for the U.S. to assert a claim of territorial sovereignty over Mars.  In furtherance of these goals and the expectation that human beings from Earth would begin visiting Mars in greater numbers, their mission was to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence or, as Major Dames stated during their training near Mt. Shasta in 1980: “Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten.”

What does this have to do with the Truthers?  Well, one of the people pushing this incredible story is Alfred Webre.  Webre was a featured speaker at the NYC Truther 9-11 Anniversary Celebrations in 2007:

Alfred Webre, who was given 45 minutes to talk on the topics "9/11 as a war crime" and the "development of [an] international tribunal" for the Bush administration. After touching on those subjects (to great applause), he veered off course, arguing that an "artificial intelligence matrix" controlled by the Rothschild family might have caused 9/11, that the cancer rate in Iraq now stands at 30 percent, that AIDS is a biological weapon created to control the population, that global warming is being caused by a black hole 23 light years from Earth, and that the NYPD was employing a supersonic crowd disruption device that was depressing turnout.

As I never tire of pointing out, the 2007 Truther Confab was billed as "Ready for the Mainstream."

Webre also collaborated with David Ray Griffin:

This Legislative Memorandum was co-authored by expert researcher David Ray Griffin, independent scientist Leuren Moret and attorney Alfred Webre.

He was also chosen for the Vancouver hearings that Uncle Fetzer, Barbara Honegger and some other fruitcakes had a year or so ago.

I strongly advised Jim and Joshua to dump Webre. Being fair-minded to a fault, Jim contacted Webre and was assured that no, Webre would certainly never contaminate the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings by linking them in any way with his "exotic" teleportation, time travel, and UFO material. On that condition, Jim (ill-advisedly, in my view) allowed Webre to serve as a judge in Vancouver.

After the final day of the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings, Webre had dinner with author-journalist Barbara Honegger and retired psychologist Ernst Rodin. At this dinner, in the presence of both witnesses, Webre announced that he intended to find a way around (i.e., break) the promise he had made to Jim Fetzer, and include Andrew Basiago's ludicrous claims in the "indictments" issued by the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings!

How crazy do you have to be when fruitcakes like Fetzer, Honegger, Blakeney, and Kevin Barrett realize you're not playing with a full deck?

The Munchkin Speaks

Barbara Honegger talks about the Troof Movement's next fiasco:

The most tangible and encouraging development of the conference was Zwicker’s revelation that Canadian and international legal experts are moving forward with what they call the “11/11 Project” for an international inquest on the mass crimes of September 11. “11/11” refers to November 11, 2011 -- one month after the projected date of the announcement of the inquest’s judgment on Sept. 11, 2011 -- “when,” Zwicker said with his signature grin and twinkle, “all of our goals will have been achieved.”

No, that doesn't add up; one month after 9-11-11 is 10-11-11, but then expecting sense out of Honegger is like expecting the truth out of Joe Isuzu And I do have to chuckle a little bit at the proposed date: 11-11-11!

Scholars Announce "Girls of 9/11 Truth" Calender

In an effort to increase awareness of 9/11 truth issues, and raise money for the movement, the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth, according to founder, spokesman, and all around blowhard Jim Fetzer is going to produce a "Girls of 9/11 Truth" Calender.

"I think it is important to get this issue on the wall of every garage, office, and dorm room in America.", Fetzer added. "Every time someone looks up an appointment or holiday I want them thinking, 'you know maybe Star Wars death rays really did bring down the World Trade Center towers..'"

Fetzer commented that he didn't know if the calender would feature swimsuits, lingerie, or just be "tastefully nude", but that he did know that two members of the movement had commited to appear, former physics professor Judy Wood, and journalist Barbara Honegger. "I am hoping to get Rosie O'Donnell too" He added, "But her agent hasn't returned my phone calls yet".
















Judy Wood

















Barbara Honegger

Fetzer also stated that he may consider coming out with future offerings for their female fans. "I have been working out," he said, puffing out his chest, "I walked 3 miles last week. Also, if needed we could do an entire calender with nothing more than Kevin Barrett making finger quotes".

Scholars Slam Troofer Appearance

Nice to see someone cares about academic standards:

Some professors at the school argue conspiracy theories have no place at UQÀM.

Julien Tourreille, who holds the Raoul-Dandurand chair in strategic and diplomatic issues, told Montreal media outlets that Truthers are intellectually dishonest.

"I think it's a shame to see UQÀM's name associated to such a movement," Tourreille told Montreal newspaper La Presse last week. "It doesn't help the credibility of a research institution that tries to demonstrate that it employs serious people."

U.S. experts at other Quebec institutions, including Steven Saideman at McGill University and Louis Balthazar at Laval University, also spoke out in public against the conference.

Good to hear that somebody's standing up and denouncing this kookery. As usual, though, the real hilarity is in the comments section. For example:

This link is for open minded readers.

Those unwilling to look at evidence, ignore the link and pass on.

http://physics911.net/pdf/honegger.pdf

The writer is a US Defence Department historian.

Read more about her at Patriotsquestion9/11.

Barbara Honegger? The Munchkin?

Less Than Zero

The Troofers have a new film coming out called Zero. I believe (but am not sure) that it has already been released in Italian (the original language of the filmmakers), but that the English version is not available yet. There is a video of the first fifteen minutes.

The filmmakers choose an especially grisly opening; the 911 phone call of a woman on the 83rd floor of one of the towers, who is obviously about to die. We've talked about 9-11 videos being porno for paranoids; this one starts out like a snuff film.

The first bit of "evidence" is that old favorite of Troofers, "Osama ain't wanted for 9-11." This is the Sacred List BS that we have talked about ad infinitum. Elements at the very top level of the US government were involved in 9-11, and yet they can't change the freaking Wanted Poster? What do they think is going on? Is there a rogue band of "Truthers" in the FBI who just happen to control what goes on the Wanted Posters, and they're sending this signal to their allies in the 9-11 Goofball community?

In fact, of course, the FBI's Most Wanted Posters list people and the crimes for which they have been indicted or convicted. The FBI already has plenty of indictments to arrest Osama, and thus there is no current need to indict or convict in absentia Osama bin Laden for his crimes on 9-11. In the unlikely event he is captured while living, there will be plenty of new charges added to his rap sheet.

And of course the Troofer idiots always miss that KSM and four other 9-11 plotters are in fact about to go on trial for their part in the crime. How come the FBI isn't raising a stink about that? The FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9-11, but they do have hard evidence on KSM, Bin-al-shibh and the others?

They present the story of two of the few men to make it down out of the South Tower above the impact zone; Stanley Prainmath and Brian Clark. As best I can figure, the reason for including this is so that they can mention the ominous fact that there was an announcement in the South Tower that there was no need to evacuate that building (after the first plane had hit but before the second).

Then we get Nobel Prize Winner Dario Fo explaining that the WTC was constructed to take the impact of a plane. And of course I'm thinking, wow, a Nobel Prize winner! But it turns out he's a playwright and his Nobel Prize was in Literature. He sounds PC to the max:

Following the performance of Dario Fo's anti-Iraq war play 'Peace Mom' featuring Frances de la Tour as mother Cindy Sheehan, United Kingdom theatre has seen a revival of political satire in the form of farce (particularly in the Edinburgh Festival). This farce generally aims to alert all social classes to political oppression and exploitation rather than specifically targeting the working classes.

So, okay, they got a lefty playwright to explain structural engineering to us. But he sure looks impressive standing in front of a couple of blueprints.

They show some quotes, like this one from Frank De Martini:



That's not even a quote mine; that's a quote creation, taken rather loosely from here:



So our first outright lie comes about 6:40 into the film. That's actually pretty good by Troofer standards, usually there's been several by that point.

Steven Jones compares the buildings to "a (sic) tree". He claims that the fibers in a tree can handle that motion. I'm thinking maybe we're about to get the Keebler Elves comparison, but no such luck. We get the collapse of the South Tower, then some more snuff bits of the jumpers. Then the North Tower collapses. But it's amateur hour. After correctly showing the initiation of the North Tower collapse, they cut to a street-level scene of the South Tower collapse.



See that big building at the left? It's the North Tower. DOH! At this point I'm thinking maybe I should hire myself out as a fact-checker for these crappy films.

Next we get a quote from Morgan "One-Planer" Reynolds. Heheh! I'm starting to enjoy this and according to a review posted earlier on 9-11 Blogger by Reprehensor, there's more entertainment to come, with Munchkin Barbara Honegger and the man who walks through walls (unsuccessfully), Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine.

Next we get the lefty playwright in front of the blueprints again. What, they couldn't afford Richard Gage? Then they show once again, the phony quote from De Martini.

Then Urantia and 9-11 Nut Les Jamieson gets his moment in the spotlight, to tell us never before... steel frame... yadda yadda. The lefty playwright talks about the Windsor Towers. As usual, they show the collapsed steel portion of the skyscraper and marvel that it did not collapse completely. He points out that it was still under construction (not noticing that means it had a much lighter load than an occupied building would have, with all the furniture, filing cabinets, computers, people, etc). He sure looks jovial while telling us this, with a big grin on his face.

Jones tells us that the fires in the WTC were oxygen-starved. I am so sick of that claim:



Does that fire look like it's having difficulty breathing to you? And at this point they zoom in on the lefty playwright and we can actually see those "blueprints" he's been standing in front of:



And it's somebody's crayon drawing of the Towers? Wow, it's easy to see where they spent the $1.5 million budget that is reported for this crockumentary! Throughout this part, Fo is smiling and jovial, like some old man telling a silly joke to his three-year-old grandson. Weird.

Then he claims there's some mystery about how anybody got down from the South Tower above the impact zone (Prainmath and Clark are two of the very few). Of course it is well known that one stairwell in the South Tower was clear because of the off-center hit by Flight 175. The purpose of that segment of the film seems to be so that Clark can mention that the fire wasn't very strong at the 78th floor (he helpfully suggests "oxygen-starved") and that the building was quite normal from the 74th floor down. All I can figure is they're trying to claim that because it was cool on the 74th floor, the fire could not have been very hot.

As further evidence they show poor Edna Cintron standing in the entrance hole of the North Tower, once again ignoring the fact that where she was standing was the spot farthest away from the fires. So far we've heard the voice of one doomed women, seen three jumpers and now doomed Edna. Beyond the errors and phony quotes, this is the most disturbing aspect of the film. I have a hunch we're going to see the body parts photos from the Pentagon before it's over. That's where the opening segment leaves off.

The film is already on some of the BitTorrent sites so I may watch the rest of it for Honegger and Stubblebine, easily two of the zaniest characters in Kookdom. It also features Gore Vidal, which means I can't resist posting Bill Buckley's smackdown of him at the 1968 DNC:



It's another craptacular production from the 9-11 Troof Movement, who've made more lousy movies than Uwe Boll. Negative One Stars.

Is DC the Place to Be?

For the twelfth anniversary of 9-11?

Kevin Barrett plans to be part of the Million Muslim March.

AMPAC will be forcefully announcing its presence with a “Million Muslim March” on the White House on September 11, 2013. The goal, announced at AMPAC’s press conference in New York:

“We at AMPAC (American Muslim Political Action Committee) are planning a historic event for 9/11/13. One million Muslims will march to Washington D.C. and demand that our civil rights be protected by our government. We are demanding that laws be enacted protecting our First Amendment rights. We are asking President Obama to fulfill his promise from his first campaign for the Presidency of a transparent government. Lastly we are asking for the establishment of a real 9/11 Commission to reveal the truth to the American people.”

AMPAC founder M.D. Rabbi Alam, a well-known Missouri Democratic Party organizer, points out that American Muslims, like other Americans, were targeted on 9/11. More than 60 Muslims were murdered in the explosive demolitions of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11, and a mosque in the South Tower was annihilated. Alam points out that “Muslim and non-Muslim alike were traumatized by 9/11, but we as Muslims continue twelve years later to be victimized by being made the villains.”

Note the explosive demolitions crap.

As an adjunct to this no doubt enormous march, there will be a confab in Pentagon City, Virginia, the following weekend with Box Boy Gage as the featured speaker.  I do like this detail from the agenda:

Morning Theme – Understanding the Pentagon Attack

9:30

Moderator

Kevin Barrett,

Long-time Public 911truth Advocate

What Happened? Three Perspectives

Dwain Deets, Retired Aerospace Research Engineer -- Plane Hit the Pentagon

Matt Sullivan, Former Editor, Rock Creek Free Press--Citizens Investigation Team (CIT) position, Plane Did Not Hit the Pentagon

Barbara Honegger, Retired Military Affairs Journalist -- Preplaced Explosives and Heliport Plane

They are going to spend three stupifying hours on this topic. Note that Deets, who gets to endorse the official story of the Pentagon, was a CIT flyover kook in Jesse Ventura's  moronic episode on the Pentagon.




Deets' segment starts about 11:45 into that video. Right about 14:00 Deets specifically proposes the flyover theory.

Late To the Party

Jenny seems to think--strike that. Jenny seems to feel that we have insufficiently covered the Truth Action Forum's attempts to clean house. We covered extensively their efforts in the Kennebunkport Warning fiasco, coming down squarely on their side and opposing Webster Tarpley.

Now they have moved on to Kevin Barrett. It is certainly enjoyable to see the Truth Jihadi getting hauled on the carpet, but jeez, if they'd been reading our site they'd have known about his negative qualities long ago. I apologize if this is ancient history to a lot of you.

They discuss:

Kevin's Holocaust Denial. Jeez, we caught onto that in February.

Captain Eric May is a numerologist and anti-Semite.

Barbara Honegger is a Munchkin.

Of course, this being the Troofers, they bring up some of the "good" things Kevin Barrett has done, like expose the Franklin Coverup.

ACLU Out of 9-11 Accountability; Williams Still Behind the Scenes?

The Feathered Bastard reports that local ACLU honcho Alessandra Soler Meetze has dropped out of the 9-11 Accountability conference; turns out she thought she would be speaking on civil liberties in the post-911 era, but instead they wanted her on a Citizen's Grand Jury panel with Barbara "voices in my head told me to work for Ronald Reagan" Honegger.

Even more interesting, is a post-script from FB:

PS: Meetze also let me in on the fact that recent e-mails from Knudson to her were cc’d to none other than Holocaust denier Eric Williams, who is supposedly no longer a part of the Chandler 9/11 conference.

I also neglected to mention that Charles Goyette has finally managed to get his name disassociated with the event; Steve has the details. His post on the ACLU gal also has the details on AZ 9-11 "Truth" leader Kent Knudson's sentence for his recent felony conviction.

David Ray Griffin's Earlier Writing

I suspect that most people looking at Griffin's 9-11 books have been disinclined to take a look at his earlier works, since he is generally described as a theologian. However, I found that the Phoenix Public Library offers online access to some of his earlier books and at least one of them is rather interesting.

In 1997, Griffin published a book entitled, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration. I've read a little bit of it online and it absolutely fits in perfectly with Griffin's 9-11 nuttiness, and marks him as a kook of the Barbara Honegger school.

In the book, Griffin makes some pretty wild claims for parapsychology, saying that a new type of experiment known as a Ganzfeld in conjunction with meta-level analysis has shown that Psi powers do exist. (Discussion here). Griffin leaps off from there to anecdotal evidence in favor of just about every kooky parapsychology claim, from life after death (Griffin in a memorable bit of quackery on page 151 estimates the odds of it happening at 50/50) to mediums, to possession to reincarnation (Shirley MacLaine was right!) to apparitions to out of body experiences.

More important than the crackpottery, which we've come to expect from the Guru of the 9-11 Denial Movement, is the similarity of the arguments. In his recent Vancouver lecture, Griffin harped on the fact that a lot of "respectable" people are part of the 9-11 Truthers, citing in particular Bishop Bob Bowman, Andreas Von Bulow, and (believe it or not) the inmates at Pilots for 9-11 Truth. So it is with his parapsychology book. Why look, a bunch of people like the former professor of moral philosophy at Trinity College in the 1800s believed in parapsychology!

As Griffin rails about a priori rejections of the 9-11 tinfoil hat crowd now, in 1997 he was bemoaning the a priori debunkings of psychic loonies. Indeed, substitute his bitter complaints about CSICOP (a parapsychology debunking group) for Popular Mechanics and you'd just about have the equivalent of Debunking 9-11 Debunking. James Randi even comes in for a bit of bashing!

You can see selected excerpts of the text online at Google Books.

We're going to be doing quite a few posts on DRG in the next couple days; stay tuned!

What If You Threw a Conference, and Nobody Cared?

From August 3rd to the 5th in Madison Wisconsin there was supposed to be a truther conference titled "The Science and the Politics of 9/11: What's Controversial, What's Not?", starring such luminaries as Jim Fetzer, Kevin Barrett, Morgan Reynolds, Judy Wood and Barbara Honegger. However, after looking at all the usual sites, and doing a web search, I can't find a single thing on what happened. Even Fetzer's site has nothing more than the planned schedule. If anyone can find anything, let me know. So much for taking the world by storm. 84% indeed.

What's Box Boy Richard Gage Up to These Days?

If you check his events page, it looks like "not much" is the answer. The most recent event shown is the 15th anniversary, where Gage shared the stage with Munchkin Barbara Honegger.

But it turns out that the founder of AE911Truth participated in the recent Nation of Islam conference. It's not like Gage to avoid publicizing such events; when he appeared there in 2012 he was certainly crowing about the opportunity to expose Louis Farrakhan's followers to 9-11 Troof.

Back then we bashed him a bit based on inside information we had stating that Boy Wonder Kevin Barrett would be appearing with him. As it turned out, our insider was wrong. Waterboy Kevin Ryan appeared instead.

And indeed, this may give us something of a clue as to why Richard Gage is not anxious to publicize his appearance at the Nation of Islam rally. This time around, not only was he appearing with Kevin "the Holocaust is a hideously destructive myth" Barrett, but also Christopher Bollyn.

Bollyn gave us quite a bit of amusement back in the early days of this blog. Once a reporter for the Holocaust-denying, white separatist rag the American Free Press, Bollyn was an early investigoogler of 9-11 nuttery, with the result that when a more respectable and scholarly-seeming man like David Ray Griffin came along, Bollyn's work was often cited. Indeed, I used to joke that Griffin seemed unable to complete a book without referring to him once or twice.

One afternoon, Bollyn was apparently drinking when he noticed a suspicious looking vehicle parked in his neighborhood. When he confronted the occupants of the vehicle, they apparently freely admitted they were local cops on a stakeout of a nearby residence that they suspected of drug-dealing.

Well, paranoid people are going to be paranoid, and Bollyn assumed that the cops were in fact spying on him. Big altercation, Bollyn assaults a cop, and he's up on charges. He was convicted and probably facing about 90 days in the big house, but he lammed instead.

So this time around, Gage shared the stage with two Holocaust deniers, one of whom may still be a fugitive from justice.

I'm sure he'd much rather we talk about his exciting new NIST whistleblower.

But it's a classic false appeal to authority. As Peter Michael Ketcham himself notes in the video, he did not work on the WTC investigation. He states that he was in the mathematical computations area, which leads me to wonder if we are in for some real deep calculations that prove inside job.

Not to worry. Ketcham's cited evidence has nothing to do with number crunching. It's the usual "symmetrical collapse into its own footprint at near free-fall acceleration." Ketcham is Charlie Sheen with less hair.

Here's Ketcham's Linked-In page. His current occupation?

Mobile application developer currently building a data visualization application for Apple iOS devices with an emphasis on accessibility for disabled users. Other interests include data science, virtual reality environments, haptic technologies, hierarchical data formats, matrix computations, and Swift numeric data types for rational numbers, complex numbers, and quaternions.

Again, if he were questioning the numbers used by NIST he might have some credibility. But he's not, he's just parroting the Truther talking points.

Truthers Blow Lid Off Of New World Order

A pair of prominent Truthers have finally accomplished their dream, uncovering some of those secret operatives behind the American Empire.  After years of spinning their wheels and making vague accusations against people like Dick Cheney (like that one was hard to call) they have now exposed the secret life of... Ben Affleck.

Argo, Ben Affleck's blockbuster film and this year's Academy Award-winner for Best Picture, is nothing more than a propaganda piece developed to incite hatred of Iran.
At least that's what some conspiracy theorists have posited. And as BuzzFeed first reported, they believe that Affleck, in addition to his day job in Hollywood, may also be a secret government operative.
Writing for Iranian state news agency PressTV on Wednesday, Kevin Barrett presented a dubious case to support that claim. Citing a "leading [expert] on ultra-secretive covert operations," but offering no hard evidence, Barrett ripped the film and wondered if Affleck should be "brought to justice" for his role in producing it.
"If the makers of Argo are deposed under oath, they may be forced to reveal that their film — like the fictitious film-within-the-film — is a covert operation disguised as a movie," he wrote. Barrett's expert is Barbara Honegger, a former Bush and Reagan staffer with a reputation for promoting conspiracies based on scant evidence.
In her book October Surprise, she claims that officials close to Reagan colluded with Iran to prolong the infamous hostage crisis until after the 1980 election, in a deliberate attempt to weaken incumbent Jimmy Carter. 

 I just want to know how Gigli fits into all of this. Explain Gigli!

A Reminder of What Rand Paul Will Have to Overcome

His dotty dad's website, for starters.  The Ron Paul Institute put up a post by 9-11 Truther Paul Craig Roberts suggesting that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was a false-flag operation:

The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.

Usually Muslim terrorists are prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo were determined to escape and succeeded, an amazing feat. Their identity was allegedly established by the claim that they conveniently left for the authorities their ID in the getaway car. Such a mistake is inconsistent with the professionalism of the attack and reminds me of the undamaged passport found miraculously among the ruins of the two WTC towers that served to establish the identity of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

Of course, the miracle passport did nothing of the kind; it was merely one small bit of evidence in a much larger chain.

Lew Rockwell's website is amazed that the "neocons" are willing to throw Paul Craig Roberts under the bus:

As for the column run by RPI, it was written by Paul Craig Roberts, PCR is a  a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. WSJ is, of course, considered by those in the know, the War Street Journal, i.e. an outlet controlled by the neocons. And PCR was an assistant Treasury Secretary during the period neocon favorite Ronald Reagan was president.

So what?  Roberts is a nut.  As a reminder, Barbara Honegger was in the Reagan Administration too; she's also flipped her lid (actually in her case she showed signs of being wacko beforehand).