Happy Halloween

The creeps at 9-11 Rebunkers came up with this. Love the "16-foot hole at the Pentagon" BS; no less an "authority" than Jim Hoffman has debunked that part.

Noam Chomsky Again

Wow. Aside from Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich (now there's a pairing for you), I can't think of anyone who's come up with a better response to the Truthers, and theirs were much more succinct. Noam gives what appears to be a very much more carefully thought-out response that should have the Truthers saying, "Damn it, he's right! We should be submitting this stuff to the professional engineering societies and similar groups, instead of moaning about the Left Gatekeepers like Chomsky."

No surprise, that is not what is happening according to this thread over at Flogger.

Nine Eleven Know Nothings

I have often accused Truthers of talking about subjects they know nothing about, but usually they at least try and pretend that they do. So I was rather amused to read this post by Jon Gold on 9/11 Flogger (emphasis added), which otherwise has been pretty boring lately:

There's a subscription only article written by Dianne Feinstein right now on the WSJ called "The NSA's Watchfulness Protects America" with a sub headline that says, "If today's call-records program had been in place in before 9/11, the terrorist attacks likely would have been prevented." Unfortunately, I can't read it, however… According to www.historycommons.org, in 1997 the U.S. Military and NSA asked for access to Telecom networks. In documents filed in 2006 by Joe Nacchio concerning his trial on insider trading charges, a Lieutenant General "told Mr. (Dean) Wandry (a member of Qwest) that he ran the largest telecom operation in the world, he had looked at Qwest's network, and he wanted to use it for government purposes." […] "By 1999, Qwest is working extensively with the NSA." 

 Of course if Jon had actually spent $2.00 at the newstand, or 30 seconds on Google looking up the article, he could have read what it actually entailed:

 Consider the case of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, who was being watched by the CIA while he was in Malaysia. U.S. intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots before the attack to recognize that al-Mihdhar had flown with (future) hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi to Los Angeles in January 2000.

Intelligence officials knew about an al Qaeda safe house in Yemen with ties to al-Mihdhar as well as the safe house's telephone number, but they had no way of knowing if anyone inside the U.S. was in contact with that phone number in Yemen. Only after 9/11 did we learn that al-Mihdhar, while living in San Diego, had called the safe house.

In congressional testimony in June, FBI Director Bob Mueller said that if intelligence officials had had the NSA's searchable database of U.S. telephone-call records before 9/11, they would have been able to connect the number to al-Mihdhar and produce actionable intelligence on participants of the developing plot. NSA Director Keith Alexander testified before Congress in October that if the call-records program had existed before 9/11, there is a "very high" likelihood that we would have detected the impending attack that killed 3,000 Americans. 

 And, if Jon had actually read the History Commons story he linked to, he would have seen that it involved a completely different subject:

 By 1999 Qwest is working extensively with the NSA. Minihan is particularly concerned about the potential of “cyberwarfare” by foreign governments, terrorist organizations, drug cartels, and organized crime, a prospect which he felt the NSA is unprepared. He particularly worries about Russia and China; in June 1998, he will testify are training personnel in potential cyber-attacks. “These opportunists, enabled by the explosion of technology and the availability of inexpensive, secure means of communication, pose a significant threat to the interests of the United States and its allies,” Minihan will state. In 2007, a former senior NSA official will say that the agency felt those groups knew US privacy laws all too well and were capable of using those laws against the NSA and other intelligence agencies.

 If ignorance is bliss, then why aren't they smiling?

Rare Honesty from Gage

Just a mediocre architect, who's never worked on a high-rise project?  Check.  Really does very little himself, just depends on his volunteers?  Check.  He notes that all he does is get in front of people with the information.  As a reminder, this clown claims to spend 80 hours a week on that task; so far this year he's spoken in front of 14 groups of people, including this group on back-to-back days and the New York Troofers twice on the 9-11 anniversary.

Is it just me, or does he seem to be cracking up?

Will Publish For Food

The Truthers have made much of getting one of their papers published in an online journal, which they paid for, as if this were proof of their scientific validity. A recent "sting" operation has shown how dubious many of these "journals" are.

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.
I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

And to save you the trouble of looking, yes, the only Bentham Journal queried fell for the scam.

bio0026.doc accepted http://www.benthamscience.com Bentham open http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tobcj/index.htm The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal

Chock Full of Nuts

Yes, that's what I'd call Box Boy Gage's clown crew. But it turns out that you can also wake up and smell the coffee for Troof:

We are delighted to announce a new and memorable way to support Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. If you’re a coffee drinker, and you grind your own, you're in luck. coffee1Get the perfect pair of coffee mugs at a 15% discount (with the “MugSale” coupon code) for your morning mission – and order your choice of the best 2-lb bag of coffee on the market. A new brand of coffee has been created that is specifically designed to support our call for a new 9/11 investigation.

With every 2-lb bag of "Wake Up" coffee you purchase, $4.00 will be donated to AE911Truth! Purchase yours now at wakeupcoffee.org.

How appropriate that one of the flavors offered is called "Jet Fuel"? Because, you know, they're doing this for the family members. Hat tip: Noah Fence at JREF.