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February 18, 2008 at 01:55:20
Bush Needs Torture and Terrorism by Jim Fetzer Page 1 of 1 page(s) |
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Madison, WI (OpEdNews) February 18, 2008 – The Bush administration has cynically used the 9/11 attacks to constrain civil liberties, increase defense spending, and launch preventative wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Research by Scholars for 9/11 Truth, among others, has proven that the story told to the American people cannot be sustained. Bush himself has admitted that Saddam had “nothing” to do with the attacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that he was not in collusion with al Quada and the FBI has acknowledged that it has “no hard evidence” connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of 9/11. “Bush made his admission during a press conference,” observed James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., the founder of Scholars. “I expected ‘Nothing’ would be the lead in every paper across the world, and that did not happen. But it should be apparent by now that they have been lying about 9/11 from scratch.” Indeed, a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity (“False Statements Preceded War”, Yahoo News, January 23, 2008), revealed that administration officials from Bush to Cheney to Rice on down the line have lied nearly 1,000 times about the reasons for attacking Iraq. “If Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and if Osama had nothing to do with 9/11, then it may be worthwhile to consider who benefited,” Fetzer remarked. Using the traditional standards of motive, means, and opportunity, the likely suspects for having committed these atrocities are not 19 Islamic fundamentalists acting under orders from a man in a cave in Afghanistan but elements at the highest levels of the US government and their closest ally in the Middle East. “We might want to consider those who have lied to us.” Before 9/11, American officials had been in discussions with the Taliban about the construction of an enormous pipeline across northern Afghanistan, assuring them that, if they allowed the pipeline to be constructed, we would bathe them in gold; and if they did not, we would bathe them in bombs. They didn’t, we did. “Today that pipeline is under construction, two permanent bases are in place ideally situated to protect it, the leader of Afghanistan is a former Unocal Oil official and our Ambassador to Afghanistan is another Unocal Oil official,” Fetzer said. “This is not rocket science.” Remember the Taliban had promised to turn over Osama bin Laden if the United States would present evidence thathe had been involved. “Condi promised to do that,” he added, “but of course it was never done.” Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was the principal source for a book, The Price of Loyalty (2004) by Ron Suskind, in which it was revealed that the invasion of Iraq was being discussed at the first meeting of the Bush cabinet in 2001. That was many months before the 9/11 attacks, which Bush used to justify invading Afghanistan and attacking Iraq. According to Fetzer, “The underlying motives appear to have been oil, Israel, and ideology. Anyone familiar with the history of the Middle East and Bush’s thinking would have no problem sorting these things out.” The US coveted Iraq’s oil reserves, Israel wanted to reduce the influence of the most advanced and sophisticated nation in the Middle East, and the neo-cons wanted to introduce American military power into the Middle East in the expectation of projecting American influence outward from that geopolitically strategic location.
“These plans are easily accessible to anyone who can read. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbig Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, outlined precisely such a plan.” It was later embraced and developed by the members of Project for the New American Century, whose documents are still available on the internet. Its enthusiastic supporters included William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and many others who would hold high positions in the administration of George W. Bush. “I find it vaguely amusing that certain candidates for the office of President of the United States should be touting their ‘experience’ as a reason to elect them. We have seldom had an administration with more ‘experience’ than that of George W. Bush, and look what it has brought us. William Kristol, who had been Dan Quayle's Chief of Staff, was gushing about the great benefits of an invasion of Iraq.”
“What the administration appears to have needed was a rationale it could sell to convince the American people that there were good reasons to invade Afghanistan and to attack Iraq.” Himmler had explained at the Nuremberg Trials that it is easy to manipulate the citizens of a nation by convincing them that they are under attack by a foreign power and that they will then gladly surrender their liberties for security. A key member of the Bush brain trust was a colleague of Condi Rice, one Philip Zelikow, who had written about the political consequences of terrorism. In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Catastrophic Terrorism,” November-December 1998), Zelikow and his co-authors Ashton Carter and John Deutch, former Director of the CIA, had spelled out the consequences that would have ensued had the earlier attempt to blow-up the World Trade Center in 1993 been successful:
“the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks.”
“What this means,” Fetzer added, “is that the inside insiders of the Bush administration had a plan that would enable them to achieve their political objectives. It was one that satisfied Himmler’s conception and could be used to manipulate the American people. Of course, it would need to be covered-up, where the tried and true tactic of a Presidential Commission could do the job. And who better to run the show and make sure nothing got out of hand than Zelikow himself.” Indeed, a new book, Philip Shenon's The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (2008), has just appeared and reveals that Zelikow was in communication with Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, during the commission’s inquiry, which is a convincing indication that it was being conducted with attention to the political objectives that motivated the attacks and their implications for the administration, were they to be uncovered, Fetzer said.
The plot of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)—that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial airliners, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and perpetrated these crimes—can be disproven in every significant respect. “Plane crashes and kerosene-based fires could not have destroyed the Twin Towers; something other than a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon; the events in Shanksville are shrouded in mystery,” he observed. “Hani Hajour’s flight instructor was dumbfounded when told that he had allegedly piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon because ‘He couldn’t fly at all!’ Alas, too many Americans have been taken in by the elaborate hoax presented in The 9/11 Commission Report, which was carefully contrived to be convincing by an expert on ‘public myths’ named Philip Zelikow, who was in bed with the administration.”
It is common knowledge that torture is ineffectual at producing useful information (or “actionable intelligence”), because the subject will say anything to escape the torment. This fact cannot have escaped the administration, which, Fetzer believes, found it irresistible to resort to torture to extract false confessions that could support its phony rationale for the “war on terrorism.” Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, for example, who is alleged to be the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly confessed to no less than 31 attacks (“Al Qaeda Chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Confesses to Planning Sept. 11, Gitmo Transcript Shows,” March 15, 2007). “The fact that some of these occurred when he was a child and others after his capture does not seem to have impressed The New York Times. But the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui was an even more grotesque case of the abuse of judicial procedure and violations of due process. He wasn’t convicted of the crime for which he was punished.”
Scholars published a press release about the Moussaoui trial (“Scholars Call Moussaoui Trial ‘A Charade’,” April 22, 2006), explaining that he had confessed a year before to participating in a plot to free the blind shiek who had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center but had nothing to do with 9/11. “He was equipped with a 50,000 volt ‘stun belt’ at the trial to determine his punishment,” Fetzer said, “which I am sure made him very cooperative. But the situation is absurd. One day we have an article, ‘Bush Wants Limits on Access to Evidence’ (February 15, 2008), the next day a front page story, ‘U.S. Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law’ (February 16, 2008). We are suspended somewhere between ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘1984’. The nation is living a lie. Bush needs torture and kangaroo courts to justify his fake ‘war on terror.’”
www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/
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911 Investigation
911 Truthers seek to encourage the general population to support an international/non-neocon dominated investigation of the 911 atrocity; an open process that is well funded and has subpoena power. This mass murder has never been properly and publicly investigated. Existing forensic evidence relative to dust and metallic sphere chemical analysis casts real doubt on the official NIST and FEMA building collapse theories. (wtc.nist.gov/media/JonesWTC911SciMethod.pdf page 22) In our system of government (as if that means anything anymore), it is a jury that is the finder of fact. In this mass murder case, there has been no discovery, no presentation of evidence, no direct testimony and no cross-examination. We have had to settle for a flawed, incomplete and self-contradictory 911 Commission public report that made damn sure that no one would be held accountable. Planned trials of accused terrorists allegedly responsible for the 911 attacks will be in secret. Published testimony will be censored due to "national security" concerns. Confessions obtained under torture will likely be introduced into evidence. The death penalty will follow and, like Saddam, dead men tell no tales. There will be no further public disclosure of the money trail, or of the unusual insider trading (short selling UA, AA, etc.) hours before the attack that made several "unknown" entities tens of millions. With all the lies this administration has spewed over the past seven years, why anyone would give them the benefit of the doubt on anything is beyond me. And in the case of the 911 atrocity, there is ample room for doubt. by brisa (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 9 comments) on Monday, Feb 18, 2008 at 12:43:23 PM  (0+)
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Reply: metal spheres
A more recent and in-depth study of the metal spheres found in the WTC dust is here. This paper provides proof that the temperatures in the collapsing towers were far higher than possible with office furniture and jet fuel fires. Only chemical reaction with material such as thermite could produce these temperatures and products. The NIST report is proved to be a pack of lies. by gravity32 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 201 comments [38 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Feb 18, 2008 at 6:18:03 PM (0+)
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Reply: A perr review of the Jones paper
I wish I could take credit for this excellent peer review of Jones’ paper, but I cannot. That doesn’t make the criticisms any less valid. -------------- -------------------- ---------------------- Just to be clear, I would like to list my criticisms of Jones's paper: 1. In section 2 (Methods), the authors fail to specify whether the detector on the SEM is a silicon lithium Si(Li) detector or a silicon drift detector (SDD). This is actually quite important since the SDD has a high instance of coincidence peaking which can cause misidentification of certain elements. Looking at the spectra, it appears to be a Si(Li) detector, but that's an educated guess at best. 2. On page 2, in the section "Results", the author states, "The spherules found in the WTC dust were predominately iron-rich" without supporting his contention with a statistical analysis of the iron content of the particles available for analysis. He might mean that the particles he analyzed were iron rich, but that indicates heavy operator bias in selecting particles. 3. The author makes no mention of the particle correction routine used to determine the composition of the particles. He further makes no indication of standards collected, or of calibrations run to determine what the relative deviation of a standardless particle quant would be. This is an extremely important point. Jones is reporting "approximate" particle compositions to one decimal place, indicating that his analysis has a deviation of +/- 0.1%. It, of course, would be helpful if Jones were to actually report the actual two standard normal deviation, but I think we've already established that such considerations are for real research papers, not Jones's dreck. Anyway, J.T. Armstrong in Electron Probe Quantitation (pp 296) reported 2 standard deviations for particle analysis using conventional ZAF corrections as +/- 55% relative. In the case of the iron composition given as a caption in Figure 3, it should read Fe = 10.7% +/- 5.9%. 4. The caption under figure 4 states "The Fe-S-Al-O signature is striking, nothing like the signature of structural steel." This is a particularly appalling statement intending to somehow imply that all of the iron rich spherules from his "dust sample" had to be from structural steel or gypsum. Similar to what Dr. Greening has already pointed out, we can't simply assume that the only source of iron in the WTC dust was from steel. Nor can we assume that the temperatures necessary to vaporize the individual constituent elements of those spheres is what caused them to form in the first place. I mentioned rice husk ash in an earlier post which has an abundance of iron rich particles despite rather low burning temperatures. Crazy Chainsaw has also provided information regarding the vaporization of molybdenum at temperatures far below those required to vaporize the pure constituent metal. 5. The caption under figure 5 states "The O/Fe ratio of 1.5 suggests that Fe2O3 is present, iron (III) oxide." Regarding my analysis in point 3, Jones can not state with any certainty that the O/Fe ratio is actually 1.5. Furthermore, Jones seems completely unaware that hydrogen atoms are not fluoresced during XEDS. This means that Jones cannot, with any certainty, determine if the particles are Fe2O3 or Fe(OH)2,3,4 or any variant thereof. 6. On page 4, Jones reports the following, "No explanation for the presence of these iron-rich and silicate spheres (which imply very high temperatures along with droplet formation) is given in the published USGS reports." This is further evidence that he simply rejects the possibility that fires caused this ash sample. The USGS report's purpose was not to comment on the source of the iron rich spheres. In fact, I can't imagine why any researcher, when presented with a sample of ash from a building fire would think twice about finding iron. 7. On page 4, Jones reports, "A WTC dust sample acquired at 130 Liberty Street shows a “mean of composition” of “Fe spheres” of 5.87% which is very high compared with “Fe spheres” found in ordinary building dust of only 0.04% [1]." Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you that Jones has decided to compare apples to oranges. He has chosen to compare the composition of ordinary building dust to ash from a building fire. And he thinks it's strange. Lunacy. 8. The next several pages operate on the following argument: Because the temperature required to vaporize a pure metal is really high, these spheres cannot form in normal office fires. Of course, this argument is completely useless unless you compare the results to a similar office fire or across a series of office fires. Jones is expecting the scientific community at large to believe that such elements are not found in office fires because he says so. 9. Finally, the appendix notes where Jones got his samples from. I'm sorry, but I honestly can't understand how any legitimate scientist could possibly believe the validity of Jones's source. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Jones's "WTC Dust" samples are from the actual World Trade Center. Suffice it to say that such forensic handling would certainly not be admissible in any court. Anyway, that's the nuts and bolts of it. Jones has done an excellent job of writing a report that gives the appearance of scientific validity with absolutely no science to back it up. He has utterly neglected standardized analysis methods, ignored forensic evidence gathering techniques, and has based his argument on nothing more than his personal opinion. There is absolutely no reason to accept any of Jones's conclusions or results. ---------------- ------------------------------------- ----------------- http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3385202&postcount=77 by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 3:03:36 PM (0+)
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liar
‘He couldn’t fly at all!’ he never said that you liar. by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 9:53:51 AM (0+)
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Unsupported claim presented as a fact
the leader of Afghanistan is a former Unocal Oil official and our Ambassador to Afghanistan is another Unocal Oil official,” Fetzer said. Not necessarily true. You need to provide something to back this up, Jim. I found the following contradictory information. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/afghanistan/karzai.htm by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 1:15:26 PM (0+)
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Your opinion
“Plane crashes and kerosene-based fires could not have destroyed the Twin Towers." Well it is true that there was more than kerosene in the buildings, there was acres of modern commercial offices filled with plastic and paper. (Which, BTW, pound for pound has pretty much the same caloric value as kerosene.) At any rate, the above quote is your opinion and while you are entitled to your opinion, you have no special qualifications that distinguishes your opinion from anyone elses. Given that you have no formal training in forensic strucutral engineering, I will take the word of real experts who say that the impact damage and fires did, in fact, cause the collapses. by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 1:23:32 PM (0+)
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Oh, and BTW
What's up with refering to yourself in the third person in an article which you wrote? Isn't that a bit pretentious? by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 1:25:59 PM (0+)
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Thank-you, Jim
You are a Hero, Patriot, and Scholar, and above all a true Scientist. I think the latter is the greatest compliment, for you are teaching people the method whereby they can determine the truth of phenomena and data, test it and find what are the repeatable theories and what are anomalies. "Science is one of the few areas of human life where the the majority does not rule." Samuel C.C. Ting Co-winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics by Millie Merian (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 2:35:23 PM (0+)
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Reply: Go get a room.
Jim, look out, you have a groupie. :) by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 5:03:36 PM (0+)
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Are you kidding me?
"something other than a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon" Sheesh, even the "loose Change" boys have stopped shiiling that B.S. by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 4:06:07 PM (0+)
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Please explain something:
The plot of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)—that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial airliners, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, How was the U.S. air defense system supposed to deal with a hijacked airliner? Be specific, please. What makes you think that they could have done anything to prevent the hijackings or the deliberate crashing of the planes? by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 5:02:51 PM (0+)
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Reply: Hijacking was irrelevant, and so are you.
"How was the U.S. air defense system supposed to deal with a hijacked airliner?" If they were not stood down, normal procedure would have been to scramble NORAD fighters to intercept any plane loosing radio contact and transponder signal or deviating from filed flight plan without radio communication. Interception means to establish visual contact, not shoot down. This happens usually over a hundred times a year, but not once on 9/11. by Millie Merian (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 10 comments) on Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 at 11:26:39 PM (0+)
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Reply: BZZZZT
Wrong. not even close to reality. by Roark Howard (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 350 comments) on Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008 at 4:52:38 AM (0+)
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