9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out: Appeal to Authority – The Movie

A new AE911truth video is coming out later this year and its trailer has been released. The trailer begins with the trail of burning paper that 9/11 deniers wrongly assumed was molten metal, and moves right along to footage of WTC 7 collapsing that begins after
the collapse of the rooftop penthouses - the collapses that refute virtually every conspiracy theory requiring WTC 7 to have been "pulled" from the inside.



The music is overwrought, the "experts" are self-righteous blowhards, and no mention is made of the dozens of AE911truth.org "signatories" who have rescinded their signatures or claimed they never signed in the first place. The original studies about "nanothermite" are still bunk. This is simply another attempt to reset the 9/11 denier movement: recut the exact same mediocre documentary with different people, and hope it lends your movement credibility it has never had.

The Norway Terrorist's Conspiracy Theorists

Someone 9/11 deniers are unlikely to agree with has posited a textbook conspiracy about the Norway terrorist attack. It is a piece posted on a young website called Right Side News, and the reason mold-cut deniers are unlikely to agree with the author is because her conspirator of choice is the monolithic, homogeneous group known as “Muslims.”

Right from its opening sentence, you know what’s going to be said:

"Speaking the Truth in Times of Universal Deceit is a Revolutionary Act." George Orwell

And from there is heads straight to the classic conspiracy theorist move: the faux-careful scrutiny of the timeline:

—3:26 p.m.: A car bomb explodes outside the prime minister's office in central Oslo.
[…]
—By 6 p.m.: The team arrives at the lake, but it struggles to find a boat to cross over.

—6:20 p.m.: The SWAT team arrives on the island.

So, basically it took 3 long hours for the Norwegian SWAT team to take control of the situation, after over 90 dead...?

Because given Norway’s long-running problem with domestic terrorism (/sarcasm), it is clearly “suspicious” that its ersatz SWAT teams had a hard time responding to this terrorist attack in particular.

Initial media reports that are of course 100% accurate:

However, despite the fact that supporters of the “Global Jihad” terror group had claimed responsibility for the act, authorities and media seemed reluctant to accept that and have rather come with unique information about the perpetrator:

This is wrong on two counts. One, the New York Times of all places was the first source I found initially attributing the attack to “Movement of the Global Jihad,” retracting the story only later. Two, so far reporting on the actual terrorist almost unanimously references the one source of insight into his psyche, his enormous anti-liberal screed posted online years ago. So there isn’t much original reporting going on, and media were exactly as quick to rush to blame as they’ve been so criticized for doing.

The author then begins to build the rather pathetic case that Norway is actually secretly target number one for religious extremists worldwide:

Other important issues touching a nerve within the Muslim world are the Oslo accords between Israel and Palestinians, signed in 1993.

But Norway also has troops in Afghanistan -and because of that, Ayman al-Zawahiri made threats against Norway then.

Mullah Krekar, founder of the Al Qaeda-linked-terror-group Ansar al-Islam had issued death threats against Norwegians politicians if they chose to deport him.

To add one more ingredient to this melting pot: A Norwegian newspaper re-printed the infamous Propher Mohammad cartoons -those that were first published in Denmark.

I do not believe for a second, that Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists who knew and planned the massacres of 9/11 in America, have stopped wanting to inflict serious damage to Western civilization.

While I have no tangible proof right now, there are symbols and signs that appear throughout the Oslo attacks, such as the use of an American “detail”: the Oklahoma City bombing style -used for the first part of the attack against the government building.

Metrics by which Denmark, the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. score much more highly on the “threat to fundamentalist Islam” list.

In the past, in Israel, some Muslim terrorist bomb attacks have been committed on some few occasions by Muslims disguised as Israeli policemen or as Orthodox Jews.

So, I am wondering what would stop the school of evil 9/11 planners to engineer an attack by a local man from Norway, to perform this massacre and give it enough appearance that it’s a Christian fundamentalist -when in reality it may all well have been as perfectly planned as those airplanes that hit the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center, 10 years ago.

This is exactly as duplicitous, dishonest, and context-free as any conspiracy theorist claim about Israel or Donald Rumsfeld when it comes to 9/11. It operates along the exact same logic: weak induction, speculation, and obviously a pre-destined conclusion.

I’m no fan of Islam. This blog is equal-opportunity critical of extremists, however: it seems as reasonable to me that a fundamentalist, overtly-bigoted unstable person who happens to be from country X could be inspired to commit acts of violence as one from country Y. This author has provided no reason to believe her except by pivoting in a direction that will appeal to her audience.

My challenge to 9/11 deniers is thus. I suspect you are motivated not to believe that there is any such thing as Islamic terrorism, and are indeed motivated to find the NATO strings at the top of the Norwegian puppet. But why do you reject this conspiracy theory? What is it doing wrong? What’s the underlying logical fault with its reasoning that is absent from your own theories? I’m genuinely curious to hear what Eliana Benador is doing wrong, in your minds.

Prediction: Truthers Will Ruin October2011

In the run-up to the Iraq war, 9/11 Truthers hurt the peace movement. I know this because I was a student, running around to share my anger at what was going to happen with pretty much anyone I could find. And every time I could get a conversation going, it would inevitably begin with, "So you think Bush was responsible for 9/11?"

Kind of hurts your case when the first words you get have to be, "Well, no... I don't think he's that bad..." This was just the beginning of the impact the tiny, noisy contingent of burgeoning 9/11 deniers had on the American peace movement, both its right and left wings.

Now it looks like they're out to ruin another protest movement.



Every time you see a whiny-pitched, snarky college stoner and a depressed monotonite wearing a "Capitalism Is Organized Crime" pin, pour one out for the American left.

The "October 2011 movement" is a shameful act of bravado parodying the Arab Spring, with a reminiscent Octoberist/Decembrist reference thrown in for good measure. Their decision to protest Afghanistan is particularly odd. Isn't Iraq the lower-hanging fruit? Isn't it the clearer foreign policy bungle?

The 9/11 denial movement has ruined every form of legitmate protest with which it has made contact - by hijacking, infesting, and finally rendering irrelevant its every voice, from Amy Goodman to Ron Paul. And does this movement make good points? Sure. The defense budget is bloated. Massive ground troop presence in Afghanistan can probably be curtailed. The middle class is in a bind. How will they help? They won't.

Is Rand Paul A 9/11 Denier? Probably Not

Rand Paul issued a summons to coincide with FBI Director Robert Mueller's re-confirmation that 911blogger seems to be using to imply that he's a Truther. Part of it is posted almost entirely without comment, though the implication of their choice of which part of the summons to post is clear:

Why did FBI supervisors and lawyers block the search warrant sought by field agents in Minnesota who believed that Zacarias Moussaoui was a terrorist who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon in the weeks before September 11th? Why did the so--called "Phoenix memo," written by FBI agent Kenneth Williams in July of 2001, which warned of an unusual number of young Arab men seeking flight training in the U.S., never reach the highest levels of the FBI? Was anyone ever disciplined, fired, or their career ended for these errors in judgment?"

The rest of the memo is quite telling of Rand Paul's own ideological blinders. He is apparently baffled as to why the FBI has an interest in protecting people who work at abortion centers, and can't understand why one of the criteria used in detecting likely political extremists is outspoken support for 3rd-party, right-wing candidates.

Paul's intent is obvious - the last decade has given many Americans reason to believe the FBI is both run by incompetents and a danger to the freedoms guaranteed by American law, and his goal is to politicize that fact for his supporters. He has chosen an idea that appalls right-wingers and Christians (the idea that the FBI has a vested interest in safeguarding the lives of people who provide and assist in performing abortions) and an idea that appalls those who vote on national security issues (that the FBI was incompetent in detecting foreign radicals who emmigrated to Rand Paul's home state).

These are contradictory in implication. The first implies that the FBI is an overreaching, politicized depriver of legitimate political rights that needs to be scaled back, while the second implies that its ability to track radicalized immigrants desperately needs to be improved and possibly expanded. These are all parts of the contradictions of Paul's personal political philosophy - pro-personal freedom except at the border and the pulpit, anti-government except in its capacity to deprive rights to people unlike him - but overall they make only a weak case that Paul is a Truther. His beliefs happen to quite closely align with the median Truther, but he has bigger fish to fry than that. A group to whom he is sympathetic is clearly just taking one of his statements out of context for political purposes - the bread and butter of the 9/11 denier movement.

Rockefeller Goes After Right-Wing Megacorporation: Truthers Fail to Get Joke

911truth.org is straight-facedly reporting Senator John Jay Rockefeller's impending investigation of Rupert Murdoch's media mega-empire, which for years has been illegally bribing and stealing to get what it wants through one its many corporate entities, News of the World. So far it is rumored to be in for fines of at least $100 million.

This is good news because Rupert Murdoch his American news networks are quite lousy and his organization is probably guilty, and because of the hysterical things 911truth.org's and others' totally unselfconscious reporting of this event say about the movement. Their story is crossposted from freepress.net and economicpopulist.org:

There are some crimes so universally offensive that even mentioning the suspected crime has devastating effects. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) raised just such a question yesterday. In a brief press statement, the Senator said:

"The reported hacking by News Corporation newspapers against a range of individuals - including children - is offensive and a serious breach of journalistic ethics. This raises serious questions about whether the company has broken U.S. law, and I encourage the appropriate agencies to investigate to ensure that Americans have not had their privacy violated. I am concerned that the admitted phone hacking in London by the News Corp. may have extended to 9/11 victims or other Americans. If they did, the consequences will be severe." Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, July 12

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has used voicemail hacking and other forms of privacy intrusion in the United Kingdom as far back as 2002. The goal is to get the most intimate insider information, stay ahead of the news cycle, and beat the competition. Where better to get information than the voicemails and other electronic data belonging to those in the news. The News of the World, Murdoch's flagship paper, hacked the voicemails of a kidnapped 12 year old, the widows of fallen soldiers, and even the powerful. In 2006, the Murdoch papers invaded the private medical records of former Labour Party leader Gordon Brown.

Fun fact: The second most popular Google search term for Rupert Murdoch is "Rupert Murdoch Jewish." (He's Christian, by the way) I wonder which movement is responsible for that!

Anyway, consider the things 911truth.org has previously written bout Rockefeller. They're not crazy about him or his family, who are apparently indistinguishable from the Bushes or even the bin Ladens:

Come on, a lot of you are hip. A lot of you KNOW whatlies [sic] we are all sold, every day. Are you going to let the Scaifes, Mellons,Rockefellers, Olins etc. keep setting their reactionary little agendasfor the world? Not to mention the Binladins, the Bushes, the Royal Families,the Moons, the Fords, all the other Multi-Jillionaire Nuts?

and apparently is a co-founder and lead funder of one of the "right-wing organizations" that has taken over "the Left:"

Leslie Cagan's Pacifica Foundation is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which was recently taken over by what has been described as a "Right Wing coup"), the Rockefeller-funded Working Assets group, and the ubiquitous George Soros. Like PBS, the Pacifica Network recently went through a takeover drama where a cabal of Board members attempted to sell the station off to center-mainstream corporate interests. Cagan is also reportedly connected to the right-wing Ford Foundation, which funnels money to her through a Lesbian advocacy group known as Astraea.

And now, here he is, leading the fightr against right-wing megacorporations - along with the FBI and MI5, two organizations key to complicity in virtually every 9/11 conspiracy theory, along with Fox News.

Time to draw up a new flowchart, guys.

No 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Can Survive Thirty Seconds of Google Searching: Episode 346

Blogger Paul Schreyer made a positively exhausting attempt to demonstrate that the United States Air Force “stood down” on 9/11. Sound familiar?



Given the vast quantity of 9/11 denier absurdity out there I usually give their videos until the first big bogus claim, and then I tune out (of course, this tends to mean tuning out after the first claim, period – but so far it doesn’t look like I’ve missed any shockers). I had some extra time today, so I gave it its first two.

You know precisely where it’s going from the start. It builds a cast of characters – in this case, a sort of caricature of the U.S. military’s chain of command, with Bush at the top and some of the staff at NEADS at the bottom – and begins with the claim that “the top of this chain of command was empty on 9/11” – this is false. President Bush spent the morning doing what all presidents are always doing – photo ops. What does it even mean to “stay out of the loop of military orders,” as the speaker intones? Let’s think of a counterfactual: how much weirder would it have been if the President was actually giving military orders on 9/11? That’s something that essentially never happens, and when it does, it makes headlines.

The barely grammatically coherent second claim falsely reads:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld abandoned his post and was not available for his air defense subordinates during the attack.

This is false as well – Rumsfeld was at the Pentagon during the attacks.

Marr tried to “obstruct” the process. Right. Let’s see what he means.

Two fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base, 300 km northeast of New York, were alarmed [?] and sat in their jets ready to start their engines at around 8:42, even before any hijacked plane had hit the World Trade Center towers.

But than [sic] they had to wait.

Colonel Marr, who could have ordered them to take off immediately, chose not to do that. He made an unnecessary phone call with his boss, General Arnold, instead. In effect the order to take off was delayed for a crucial 3 to 4 minutes.

Without that delay the pilots could have intercepted the second hijacked plane, which crashed at 9:03.

Could Marr have ordered those planes to intercept a civilian aircraft? No. it would have been literally illegal for him to have done so – additionally, at 8:42 it was still unclear that any planes had been hijacked. Indeed, it wasn’t 8:42 that Flight 93 even took off, and Flight 175 wasn’t even actually hijacked until about 8:46.

And what was that “unnecessary call?”He was telling him about the possibility of a hijacking and the need to scramble planes.

Doesn’t this bullshit sound familiar? Haven’t 9/11 deniers made very similar claims before? Oh yes – just like the ones refuted years ago in Popular Mechanics’ great little books.

Claim: "It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers," says the Web site oilempire.us. "When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes."

9/11 deniers must be absolutely fucking exhausted by now. They’ve been making the same demonstrably false claims since 2003, and still have to pretend to each other that this shit isn’t already out there.