When the Bushites speak of victory, I keep wondering what it would look like. I think that it's possible that Hezbollah, Hamas and particularly Al Sadr are showing us. Perhaps we've been defeated by leaders who use the common sense of apparant humanitarianism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/world/middleeast/19sadr.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

When I saw that the first bombings by the Israelis were all stratigic targets . . . runways, roads and highways, ..I thought that there was more to this whole thing that what it appeared to be superficially. Well, , , somebody else, far more informed that I'll ever be shares a similar view. From the Times Online

This is just the start of a showdown between the West and The Rest Amir Taheri

MANY IN THE WEST see the mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah, now in its fourth week, as another episode in a tedious saga of an Arab-Jewish conflict that began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a political version of the “original sin”. The conventional wisdom in the West is that the whole tale would end if Israel were to return the occupied territories to the Palestinians, allowing them to create a state of their own. But that analysis does not reflect the Middle East’s new realities. All the wars in that region of the past century, including the one between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, revolved around secular issues — border disputes, the control of territory and water resources, security and diplomatic relations. Although fought in the name of nationalism or pan-Arab aspirations, none had a messianic dimension. The first two wars of the new century in the Middle East, however, were ideological ones. The United States toppled the Taleban in Afghanistan and the Saddamites in Iraq not in pursuit of territory but in the name of an idea: democracy. Since 2001 the region has been turned into an ideological battleground between two rival camps with global ambitions. One camp, led by the United States, claims to represent the modern global system of open markets, free elections, religious freedoms and sexual equality. The other camp is represented by radical Islam, which regards the Western model as not only decadent but dangerous for the future of mankind. It hopes to unite the world under the banner of Islam, which it holds to be “ The Only True Faith”. In the Lebanese conflict, Israel and Hezbollah are the junior proxies for the rival camps. Israel is not fighting to hold or win more land; nor is Hezbollah. But both realise that they cannot live in security and prosper as long as the other is in a position to threaten their existence. A Middle East dominated by Islamism could, in time, spell the death of Israel as a nation-state. A westernised, democratic Lebanon, on the other hand, could become the graveyard of Hezbollah and its messianic ideology. And if the US succeeds in fulfilling George W. Bush’s promise of a “new Middle East” there will be no place for regimes such as the Islamic Republic in Iran and Syria’s Baathist dictatorship. The present rupture in Lebanon has much to do with who will lead the fightback against the West. For almost a quarter of a century there has been intense competition within the Islamist camp over who could claim leadership. For much of that period Sunni Salafist movements, backed by oil money, were in the ascendancy. They began to decline after the 9/11 attacks that deprived them of much of the support they received from Arab governments and charities. In the past five years Tehran has tried to seize the opportunity to advance its own leadership claims. The problem, however, is that Iran is a Shia power and thus regarded by Sunni Salafists as “heretical”. To compensate for that weakness, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made the destruction of Israel a priority for his regime. The war triggered by Hezbollah is in part designed to show that President Ahmadinejad is not bluffing when he promises to wipe Israel off the map as the first step towards defeating the “infidel” West. The broader aspects of the Lebanon crisis are better understood in the Middle East than in the West. For the first time, Israel is under attack from Islamist and Arab secular radicals as “an American proxy”. Writing in Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab daily, a Syrian Cabinet minister, makes it clear that the war in Lebanon today is between “the forces of Islam and America, with Israel acting as an American proxy”. Iran’s “supreme guide”, Ali Khamenei, expressed a similar view this week during an audience he granted in Tehran to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President. “What we see in Lebanon today represents the revolt of Muslim nations against America,” he said. “Hezbollah is backed (by Iran and others) because it is fighting America.” President Chávez endorsed that analysis by calling on Muslims and non-Muslim revolutionaries to unite to “save the human race by finishing the US Empire”. Iran’s state-controlled media has said that Lebanon would become “the graveyard of the Bush plan for a new Middle East”. Tehran believes that a victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon will strengthen President Ahmadinejad’s bid for the leadership of radical Islam. A number of recent events have made his attempt to wrest control more likely. This week several leading Sunni theologians at the Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo issued fatwas that allow Sunnis to fight alongside and under the command of Shia Muslims. The fatwas came in response to a Saudi fatwa that had declared any association with and support for Hezbollah to be haram (forbidden). More significant was a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two. The Salafist radical tried to get hold of Hezbollah’s tailcoats in the hope of winning a share of the expected spoils of victory. He endorsed the idea of a global campaign against the “infidel”, thus abandoning his previous strategy of focusing the jihad on countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. More significantly, he dropped the al-Qaeda claim of fighting a defensive war against the infidel by designating a vast area of jihad from Spain to India. All that is good news for President Ahmadinejad, who claims that Sunni radicalism has reached the limits of its capabilities in the fight against the global system led by the US and that it is now the turn of the Shia, led by Iran, to be in the driving seat. “Hezbollah has fought Israel longer than all the major Arab armies combined ever did,” President Ahmadinejad told a crowd in Tehran this week. He also promised that Muslims would soon hear “very good news” about the jihad against the United States. The idea of Shia leadership for the jihad was further boosted this year when Iran took Hamas under its wings. As a branch of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement, a Sunni outfit, Hamas has exerted its influence to win wider support for Iranian leadership at least as a tactical choice. Many in the Middle East are alarmed by these shifts of power and dread the prospect of the region entering a new dark age under radical Islamist regimes. For this reason, there seems to be much less hostility towards Israel in the wider Arab world than we might expect in the West. There may be no sympathy for Israel as such but many Arabs realise that the current war is over something bigger than a Jewish state with a tiny territory of 10,000 square miles, less than 1 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s land mass. This war is one of many battles to be fought between those who wish to join the modern world, warts and all, and those who think they have an alternative. This is a war between the West and what one might describe as “The Rest”, this time represented by radical Islamism. All the talk of a ceasefire, all the diplomatic gesticulations may ultimately mean little in what is an existential conflict.

This is a summary of Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird." The story is an allegory demonstrating that a homeland for Jews was a humanitarian necessity. Israel must continue to exist as a safe haven for those who need one and for those who choose to make Israel their nation. During the Holocost, escaping Jews were turned away from the United States, Palestine (then occupied by the British), and most other countries. They had to return to the places from which they had escaped only to be exterminated. There was no safe haven. This is the reason that the Israelis must weaken or destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no other choice for them.

Recently I've heard people, including Mike Malloy, question the right of Israel to exist where it does exist. Here is the answer. They bought the land!!!

I bought the house I'm living in and paid for it. I've improved it. Now what should I do if the people I bought it from would ask me to just give it back?

Excerpts from: The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 by Kenneth W. Stein (University of North Carolina - 1984)

Quotes provided here from published sources is in accordance with the Fair Use Doctrine under § 107 of U.S.C. Title 17 - solely for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting for educational and discussion purposes. There is proper attribution to the original source material. A variety of reasons coalesced in the 1940s to create the state of Israel. These included British withdrawal from the Mandate and from Palestine, the United Nations partition resolution on Palestine in November 1947, American diplomatic and financial support for Israel, profound differences within the Arab world about the future of Palestine, a fragmented Palestinian Arab community, a stubborn Zionist leadership and dedicated cadre of Jewish nationalists, and a moral imperative to take positive actions after the holocaust in Europe. But these reasons could not have enabled a community to declare statehood in 1948 without the acquisition and establishment of Jewish national territory upon which a state could function and in which a population could survive. Accumulating land for the Jewish state was an arduous task. It spanned more than six decades and overcame numerous administrative and political obstacles. Jewish land purchase succeeded for essentially five reasons. First, the inherited Ottoman land regime was vulnerable to manipulation; second, Palestinian Arab society was divided socially and politically, thus allowing the Zionists to move into the land sphere without real opposition; third, Palestine's rural economy remained weak prior to, during, and after World War I and was therefore susceptible to Zionist land-purchase overtures; fourth, the British acted only as an umpire in Palestine and did little to strengthen the condition of the Palestinian fellah; and fifth, the Zionists were able to use their special status under the Mandate to organize themselves in the effort to reach their goal. Ottoman attempts at land reform did not help the economic condition of the fellaheen population in Palestine. Instead, the musha' and taxation systems remained, and the continuing usurious rates of interest and the process of land registration combined to tighten the grip that the notable and the effendi classes had over the Palestinian peasantry. Changes in the Ottoman administration of Palestine generated anxiety among the fellaheen about increased taxation and military conscription. When the British established their mandate, the fellaheen continued to shun government policy, though numerous allowances were made to accommodate customary practice. The fellaheen were terrified of Land Registry offices and the courts, and they were not cognizant of their legal rights and status before the law. Fellaheen skepticism of British intent, compounded by British unwillingness to aid a destitute fellaheen population, contributed to increasing political dislike for the British as they supported the development of the Jewish national home. Meanwhile, the Ottoman administrative legacy bequeathed to the notable, merchant, and effendi classes access to information and privilege that had permitted land accumulation. Ottoman administrative reform did little to influence change in the nature of local politics, which was based upon kinship, close family structure, village identity, and personal connections. These parochial affinities hindered the emergence of national integration and organization of the Palestinian Arab political leadership. By establishing more efficient and enforceable bureaucratic directives, the British administration blocked unrestrained land accumulation by the more powerful classes. At the same time, the residue of previously acquired social prestige and political power remained with those who had large landowning interests. Jewish land purchase benefited from the loss of land-accumulation prerogatives once enjoyed by notables who had been local Ottoman administrators. Jewish land purchase also benefited from the personal nature of Arab politics, which transcended the Ottoman administration. No longer possessing financial means or bureaucratic access to bid on available or vacant land, Arab notables during the Mandate increasingly sold land for capital. They did so to maintain their local political status and accustomed standards of living. At the same time, the Zionists exploited the special status they enjoyed under the Mandate--a trusteeship that protected Jewish interests while rejecting any clear form of Palestinian (Arab) majority self-government. Palestine was administered by a high commissioner who possessed absolute executive, judicial, and legislative authority and who was guided by a policy that included an obligation to both Arab and Jew. The dualobligation policy and the absolute power that the high commissioner wielded determined the nature of Jewish-Arab interaction with the British authorities. Both the Balfour Declaration and the articles of the Mandate defined the concept of political duality. Great Britain reaffirmed its dual obligation in somewhat different policy statements in 1922, 1930, and 1939. Ultimately, the politics of duality failed because the obligation to establish a Jewish national home was not equivalent to protecting the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities. One was a statement of right; the other was a statement of sufferance. Cognizant of this reality, the Palestinian Arab political leadership refused to accept the Mandate's legality. It chose instead to boycott official participation in the Mandate. The leadership itself was elitist, narrowly based, and interested in protecting its dwindling prerogatives and prestige, remnants from Ottoman times. It, like the Palestinian fellaheen population, distrusted British intentions. It possessed a growing fear of being overwhelmed, and it resorted to civil disturbance to demonstrate its frustrations with British policy and Zionist development. The Palestinian Arab political leadership lacked the diplomatic sophistication and willingness to make pragmatic compromises with the British. The Jewish leadership, on the other hand, with its diverse and pluralistic origins, used the articles of the Mandate to enhance its special status. The land sphere was just one area in which the Zionists utilized their consultative prerogative, which they were given in Article 4 of the Mandate. Zionists influenced the appointments of key officials, wrote documents, and drafted the terminology used in the Balfour Declaration, the articles of the Mandate, the 1920 Land Transfer Ordinance, the 1926 Correction of Land Registers Ordinance, successive pieces of legislation for the protection of cultivators, the MacDonald Letter, and the definition of a landless Arab. Each time a major British statement on land or policy was issued in Palestine--including the Shaw Report, the Hope-Simpson Report, the French Reports, and the Peel Report--the Zionists issued their own verbal reply. Zionist input into policy concerning land began with Chaim Weizmann's opposition to loans for the fellaheen in 1918 and continued beyond the Jewish Agency's scrutiny of landless Arab claims in the 1930s. The appointment of Norman Bentwich as attorney general, which was a position of influence in the Land Registry Department in the 1920s, as well as Judge A. H. Webb's appointment to evaluate landless Arabs, aided Zionist fortunes in the land sphere. Although some Zionists did not like Sir Herbert Samuel's public policy of political neutrality from 1920 to 1925, the fact that a Jew and a Zionist was the first high commissioner in Palestine meant that the growth and development of the Jewish national home was not inhibited during the Mandate's formative years. The Zionists' successes and the Palestinian Arab inability to thwart Jewish land purchase were indicative of the differences in background and experience between the two groups. First, the Zionists brought with them immigrant baggage that included survival against nefarious regimes and bureaucracies of eastern and western Europe. Many Zionists were accustomed to using wily, manipulative, innovative, and calculating methods to survive. The Arabs' primary experience was of survival against nature, and they had little experience in confronting the bureaucratic and legislative machinery introduced by the Ottomans and the British. They were used to working through traditional hierarchical channels. Second, most Zionists were accustomed to verbal negotiations and written evidence in defending and expanding their communal status in Palestine, and the Arabs lacked verbal and writing skills. Third, high literacy levels helped the Jews use their knowledge of the Arab community for their own purposes. In 1931, though Jews constituted only 18 percent of the total population, there were more literate Jews in Palestine than literate Muslims and Christians combined. Equally noteworthy was the fact that in 1931 there were 2,216 Jews who read and used Arabic while only 21 Muslims and Christians in all of Palestine knew Hebrew. This linguistic ability assisted all aspects of Zionist land purchase and helped Jews to evaluate the composition, strengths, and weaknesses of the diverse Palestinian Arab community. In a highly competitive and aggressive style, the Zionists continuously strove for increased authority and autonomy in Palestine; they repeatedly diluted policies and laws that threatened the development of the Jewish national home. The Zionists did not have vast resources at their command, but they were skilled, schooled, and able to purchase a nucleus for a state. The Palestinian Arabs, in contrast, suffered from severe deprivation, a lack of capital, and less clear-cut goals. Jewish land purchase continued despite obstacles thrown in its path by Ottoman prohibitions, exorbitant prices, and a steady increase of British restrictions. The British myopically believed that the passage of legislation and regulations would physically and economically assist the poor Palestinian Arab fellah. What was needed was an agrarian policy that provided credit facilities, agricultural tax reform, modernization of agricultural methods, and more efficient land use. The British had neither the trained personnel nor the political and financial commitment to implement such policies. Instead, solutions through administrative directives and ordinances were considered sufficient. When ordinances dealing with land were decreed in Palestine, they inevitably incorporated Zionist opinion. For example, the Land Transfer Ordinance in 1920 and its amendments did not prevent land speculation, and the Zionists had helped draft them. Under the Beisan Agreement in 1921, the fellaheen in the region could not retain the lands guaranteed to them by the British even when they were available at incredibly low prices, and the Zionists helped rewrite the Beisan Agreement in 1928 in order to gain legal access to these lands. In 1929 and 1933, Arab tenants were not protected by the various editions of the Protection of Cultivators Ordinances that Zionist lawyers had helped to write; and from 1931 to 1936, the landless Arab inquiry did not enumerate property or resettle Palestinian fellaheen on alternative land because of Zionist access to the process. Finally, because small-landowner protection never evolved, the British ultimately imposed legislative restrictions on land purchase through the 1940 landtransfer prohibitions. But, like the previous legislative attempts, they proved incapable of stopping the transfer of land because of economic forces. There is little doubt that Arabs sold land to the Jews primarily because they needed money. Both British administrators and Jewish land purchasers knew about the perennial economic distress of the Palestinian fellaheen. Prior to World War I, the economic viability of the Palestinian fellaheen was precarious at best, and the war severely damaged Palestine's rural economy. Successive crop failures followed in the 1930s. The continued retention of small and unproductive parcels of land became untenable. Factors such as insufficient plow animals, plagues, locusts, drought, usurious interest rates--all totally unrelated to Zionist policies--helped create a landless Arab population. Furthermore, economically solvent Palestinian Arabs sold land enthusiastically, voluntarily, and collusively. For many reasons, Jewish purchase and Arab land sales created changes in the life-style of many Palestinian Arabs. Economic factors, Jewish land purchase, and a British policy unresponsive to the needs of a rural population had dramatic effects upon social relationships within the Palestinian Arab community. The dominant and domineering position that the notable-effendi classes enjoyed over many fellaheen in the villages of Palestine began to erode severely in the early 1930s when the inflow of Jewish capital into Palestine reached all-time highs. Land once inviolable became a fair-market item. Entire Palestinian Arab villages disappeared because of land sales. The slow decline in the musha' system eroded further the meager control a fellah had over the land he worked. Urban jobs and per diem labor on public-works projects or in Jewish settlements were the employment alternatives for former agricultural laborers, tenants, and owner-occupiers. Once in the urban environment, the former fellah was susceptible to different economic vicissitudes such as inflation and unemployment. 5 For moneylenders, merchants, lawyers, landowners, and others with investment in agricultural land, the process of rural-urban migration upset traditional relationships between the suppliers of seeds, agricultural equipment, and financial loans, on the one hand, and the fellaheen on the other. With fewer workers on poorly cultivated land, yields were lower, rents were less, and the retention of these parcels became increasingly less economical for the landowners. In the early 1930s, Arab social bonds frayed at a time when the political leadership of the Palestine Arab Executive was again fragmented by kinship, family, and local rivalries. Between 1931 and 1935 many small owner-occupiers became aware of the potential monetary benefit of selling their small parcels of land directly or indirectly to Jewish purchasers. At the time of the disturbances in 1936, the landlord who lost some of his field hands to urban migration realized that he could prevent severe economic losses and gain access to capital by selling land to Jewish purchasers. The agricultural laborer, not in possession of any land and gradually estranged from his customary seasonal sources of occupation (such as plowing or harvesting), was already dependent upon a subsidiary income in a new urban environment that he found unfamiliar and inhospitable. By 1936, Palestinian Arab society was undergoing fundamental social changes. The Westernization of norms and modernization of values challenged the traditional patterns and lines of authority. The meager Ottoman reforms, the paternalistic British administration, and the committed Jewish presence collectively impressed changes upon Palestinian Arab society. Mores, customs, habits, beliefs, and manners were slowly transformed. Change meant that the prestige of the past and the disciplined structure of Arab society were altered. The magnitude of change was too much for the Palestinian Arab community to absorb. Norms of informality were replaced by a formal bureaucratic structure and a more efficient administration. The issuance of title deeds to the fellaheen in Beisan in the 1920s was revolutionary. It gave them physical proof of ownership and made it possible for each fellah to sell land, and not necessarily through an intermediary. Tensions rose as traditional social ties were strained and broken. Lack of steady employment of a class disenfranchised over time heightened its despair. Urbanization in the late 1930s stimulated an awareness of goods that only money could purchase. Property was exchanged for capital. The peasant was caught in the transition from a barter to a market economy without possessing the means to attain economic solvency or the education or experience to manage and protect his own destiny. Many fellaheen and landowners were disillusioned and frustrated. Many expressed their anger by participating in social unrest, land disputes, and the disturbances that lasted from 1936 to 1939. In the 1930s, Palestinian Arabs from all segments of society were aware of the dangers that increased Jewish immigration and land purchase posed for them. Palestinian Arabs clearly and unambiguously knew that the Zionists wanted a state in Palestine. Yet there was little that a generally poor, unorganized, uneducated, unsophisticated, and splintered Arab community could do to defend itself. The Arab community in Palestine just could not compete. Precisely at the time in the 1930s when land sales from Palestinians proliferated, Arab Muslim leaders sought to invoke Islamic symbolism against the Jewish interloper. But the resort to primordial instincts failed, although anti-British and anti-Zionist feeling was high. The use of religious injunctions in 1934 and 1935, which labeled land brokers and sellers of land as infidels who were not to be accorded the rights of burial in Muslim cemeteries, proved ineffective. The effort to create an Arab National Fund in 1931 and the Tulkarm-based Society for the Preservation of Arab Lands in 1932 failed to attract public commitment to protect and defend Palestinian land. Later efforts in the 1940s by Palestinian Arabs to stop land sales to Jews, already prohibited in most cases by the Land Transfer Regulations, were ineffective also. The separation of Palestinian Arabs from lands they had habitually owned and worked began with the Ottoman land-registration system of the late nineteenth century. This process favored large-landowning interests ultimately at the expense of many Palestinian fellaheen. Economic factors, Jewish land purchases, and Arab land sales further displaced the fellaheen. The climax was reached by the population shifts prior to, during, and after the 1947-49 war. The creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948-49 was a culmination of social, economic, and political processes that had begun a century earlier. The turning point for the creation of the Jewish state and the acquisition of land for it came in 1930, before which time a "land issue" had not existed. In 1930, the Zionists successfully repudiated the British challenge. The British had forced a coherent and comprehensive Zionist response, which stimulated thinking, organization, communication, and political planning that saw the evolution of coordination and geostrategic implementation. Why had there not been a land issue in the 1920s? There were at least six major reasons. First, a severe shortage of Jewish capital necessitated the acquisition of only large parcels of land from relatively few landowners, whose tenants and agricultural laborers could be easily compensated. Jewish purchasers made contact with a minimum of Arab sellers, certainly less than several hundred. Second, the absence of a coordinated, enunciated, and well-planned Jewish land-purchase policy gave the Palestine Arab political leadership little to berate. On the other hand, Jewish immigration was easily detected. Certificates for Jewish immigrants had to be issued, but land sales took place in an impersonal Land Registry office unseen by the majority of the Palestinian Arab population. Third, during the 1920s, more than 60 percent of the land purchased by Jews was bought from Arab absentee landlords residing outside of Palestine. However, political rancor about absentee sales in the 1920s was not as great as the attention paid to domestic sales in the 1930s. Fourth, Palestinian Arab landowners had no reason to be angry with the Palestine administration, once it removed area limitations on land sales in the 1921 Land Transfer Amendment Ordinance. That law stayed in force until the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations placed restrictions on the areas in which a person could sell land. Fifth, most of the Palestinian Arab political complaints and petitions to the high commissioner focused on the illegality of the Balfour Declaration, the Mandate system, and Jewish immigration, but not on land purchase. And sixth, he magnitude of land sales was neither understood nor discussed by some in the Palestinian Arab leadership. The absence of a Palestine-wide network to monitor Jewish land sales and the reluctance of some leaders to raise an issue that would betray their own involvement kept the land issue quiet in the 1920s. The land issue emerged as a political question in 1930 first and foremost because the British raised it; it emerged because of steadily increasing Arab population pressures upon a decreasing amount of cultivable land. Many fellaheen were living below a subsistence existence and were landless; they became increasingly despondent over their economic plight and lacked corrective recourse. Their plight and British inaction were much more frequently discussed by the Palestine Arab press in articles and editorials in the early 1930s than at any time in the 1920s. And, finally, the land issue emerged because the Zionists were forced to react publicly to the imposition of land-transfer prohibitions threatened by the British. The findings of the Shaw Report and Hope-Simpson Report and the issuance of the Passfield White Paper in 1930 convinced the Zionists that High Commissioner Chancellor's anti-Zionist philosophy had to be neutralized. The defeat of the White Paper by the MacDonald Letter, the postponement of land-transfer controls for a decade, and their successful intervention in the landless Arab inquiry gave the Zionists a needed breathing space to expand on previous purchases and to create contiguous land areas. Though successful at winning several important bureaucratic and political victories in the early 1930s, the Zionists found that their successes were not without subsequent problems. Chancellor's leadership motivated the British to adopt a clearly paternalistic policy toward the Palestinian Arabs. It was a policy that developed slowly in the 1930s and was given meaning in the 1939 White Paper. After the application of the Land Transfer Regulations in 1940, Sir John Shuckburgh of the Colonial Office remarked that "the Arab landowner [needed] to be protected against himself." The British had already exhibited a taste for legal palliatives instead of for financial expenditures to ameliorate a worsening economic situation. British intervention in the land sphere evolved into a paternalistic protection of the Arab community. The adoption of such an attitude increasingly put the onus of responsibility for the unsettled situation in Palestine upon the Zionists instead of upon British frugality and Arab collusion in land sales to Jews. The Zionists were the beneficiaries of a hierarchical Arab social structure in Palestine. Zionists did not have to compete with an Arab middle class; instead, they negotiated with relatively few notables and with a poor uneducated peasantry. When the traditional community leaders proved incapable of providing protection and defending Palestine from an intrusion of demographic and social change, many Palestine fellaheen hoped that the British would return the land to them. Expectations were high, but they repeatedly went unfulfilled. Despite the Protection of Cultivators Ordinances and the Land Disputes Possession Ordinance, smalllandowner protection and the eventual partition of musha' land did not materialize. The Zionist success in defeating what was essentially Chancellor's intent to "protect" the Arabs had a profound impact upon Zionist motivation and policymaking. The Jewish Agency had confronted and beaten back a steady series of very grave political and physical threats. The defeat of Chancellor's intentions catalyzed the Zionist drive to keep building a national home. A sense of self-confidence, resilience, and autonomous existence evolved from the Zionist struggle with the British about land between 1929 and 1933. While the Zionists were creating an opportunity to develop and streamline a collective land policy with a sighted goal, the Palestinian Arab community was floundering and divided. The Zionists manipulated the British bureaucracy in Palestine. They were enormously successful at nullifying attempts to curtail the development of the national home. When necessary, they made compromises, but they did so only very reluctantly. Specific committees on colonization, Arab tenants' resettlement, and land availability were established. The Zionists were constantly nurtured by the knowledge that there were more Arab offers to sell land than Jewish ability to purchase them. Zionists were aware of the inconsistencies in the Palestinian Arab leadership between its anti-Zionist public statements and its private involvement in land sales. These inconsistencies were to be found all over Palestine--not just in one family, one class, or one region. This factor unquestionably fueled Zionist efforts to establish a national home. In the early 1930s, three unrelated factors combined to bring about the physical division of Palestine into distinct Jewish and Arab zones. First, the Zionists decided that Arab tenants should not be resettled between existing Jewish settlements, and they expressed a clear intention after the 1929 disturbances to create contiguous Jewish areas. Second, the British perceived that the coastal and valley regions were becoming more and more Jewish, and thus the 1931 directive for the resettlement of landless Arabs indicated that, save for exceptional instances, Arabs were to be resettled in the hill regions. The Peel Commission Report and Land Transfer Regulations made similar suggestions for the geographic division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors. And third, natural migratory patterns brought many Arabs to the hill regions around Nablus, Tulkarm, Jenin, Bethlehem, Hebron, and the Galilee, and away from Jewish settlements. Individual Arab laborers still worked in urban areas and on Jewish settlements, but their families were settled far from Jewish concentrations. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Peel commissioners suggested the first partition of Palestine in 1937. In February 1936, six years after Arthur Ruppin had expressed the fear that there was insufficient cultivable land in Palestine, Menachem Ussishkin of the Jewish National Fund sounded a similar warning. 9 Yet in those six years, Jewish land purchase had abounded. The rate of purchase and the amount of land acquired had confirmed that the Zionists had succeeded in creating a nucleus for a state. That areas in Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon were eagerly sought by Zionist land-purchase agents also indicated a recognition that land in Palestine could not long sustain its population under the existing methods of agriculture. When Jewish land-purchase efforts were rebuffed in these areas, the focus of land acquisition was redirected at areas, such as the Galilee, within Palestine. The suggestion in 1937 that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states expanded Zionist land-purchase objectives. Discussions at Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund meetings thereafter centered on how land could be procured to derive the utmost political benefit. Unlike the 1929-31 period, the interval between 1936 and 1940 was marked by an unmistakable Zionist conviction that a Jewish state would ultimately be established. In the earlier period, the Zionists were openly committed to the goal of a Jewish national home, but after 1936 they felt a greater overt self-confidence in the feasibility of the objective. It is therefore not surprising that the imposition of the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations did little to impede Zionist efforts to buy more land. The events of the 1940s, which greatly affected the Jewish condition, the weakening British presence in the Middle East, and the varied Arab and Great Power responses certainly contributed to the establishment of Israel in 1948. But an analysis of Jewish land acquisition and Arab land sales makes it seem quite evident that a formidable Jewish national territory was necessary and was already present in Palestine in 1939.

Yeah! Yeah! I know. Another conspiracy?? Well, I haven't been at CCN for a few days and I don't know whether anyone else has mentioned it, but three people who were at my house today all doubt that Ken Lay is really dead. I do too. Why would the case (charges) be dropped for a dead man? Think about it. . .with friends like the Bush crime family, how could Lay miss? Bush couldn't pardon him yet and Ken Lay couldn't do time with "real criminals."

I just can't buy the coincidence theory. Does anyone else find it a bid odd . . . death . . . now? Oh puleeeze! Hasn't anyone else here

Shame on me for continuing to search for answers.  As one comment put it the last time I addressed a similar topic, "This should't be on the General's blog."  Well, I'm following through with further information about "911 Truth" activities and I'm doing it on my blog.  Some of you might want to read some of the latest articles on this site.

I particularly got a kick out of the article proving that the Pentagon was hit by a grilled cheese sandwich.

 9/11, American Empire, and Christian Faith (Part I)

 by David Ray Griffin
April 28, 2006

This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church of Santa Barbara, Saturday, March 25, 2006.

In this essay, I offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course, presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main alternative theory is that 9/11 was a "false flag" operation, orchestrated by forces within the US government who made it appear to be the work of Arab Muslims. ...

I will argue that the attacks of 9/11 were false flag attacks, orchestrated to marshal support for a so-called war on terror against Muslim and Arab states as the next stage in creating a global Pax Americana, an all-inclusive empire. I will conclude this essay with its main question: How should Christians in America respond to the realization that we are living in an empire similar to the Roman empire at the time of Jesus, which put him to death for resistance against it.

1. False Flag Operations

The evidence that 9/11 was a false flag operation is very strong. Many Americans, however, reject this idea on a priori grounds, thereby refusing even to look at the evidence. The main a priori assumption is that America's political and military leaders simply would not commit such a heinous act. This assumption is undermined, however, once we know something about the history of false flag operations.

False Flag Operations by Other Countries

Far from being rare in the history of warfare, false flag operations are very common. They have been especially popular with imperial powers wanting to expand their empires.

In 1931, Japan, which had been exploiting Manchuria for resources, decided to take over the whole province. To have a pretext, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of its own railway near the Chinese military base in Mukden, then blamed the sabotage on Chinese solders. This "Mukden incident" occurred almost exactly 70 years prior to 9/11, on September 18, 1931. It is, in fact, referred to by the Chinese as "9/18."1

A year and a half later, the Nazis, less than a month after taking power, started a fire in the German Reichstag, then blamed it on Communists. Their proof that Communists were responsible was the "discovery" on the site of a feeble-minded left-wing radical, who had been brought there by the Nazis themselves.2 They then used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to arrest thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, shut down unfriendly newspapers, and annul civil rights.3

That was 1933. Six years later, Hitler wanted a pretext to attack Poland. The solution, known as "Operation Himmler," was to have Germans dressed as Poles stage 21 raids on the Polish-German border. In some cases, as in the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station, a dead German convict dressed as a Pole was left at the scene. The next day, Hitler, referring to these 21 "border incidents," presented the attack on Poland as a defensive necessity.4

More germane to the question of 9/11, of course, is whether American leaders would do such things.

U.S. Wars Based on False Charges of Enemy Aggression

In 1846, President James Polk, anxious to expand the American empire, had the U.S. army build a fort on the Rio Grande, some 150 miles south of the commonly accepted border between Texas and Mexico. After 16 US soldiers died in a skirmish, Polk told Congress that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil." This claim was called "the sheerest deception" by a congressman named Abraham Lincoln.5 Nevertheless, the Mexican-American war was on and in 1848, Mexico, being out-gunned, signed a peace treaty ceding away half of its country, including California, for a paltry sum.6

In 1898, the United States falsely accused Spain of blowing up a battleship, the USS Maine, which President McKinley had sent, uninvited, to Havana Harbor. This accusation, which led to the chant "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," was used as a pretext to start the Spanish-American war, through which America took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In the latter case, the United States, after helping the Filipinos defeat the Spanish, went to war against the Filipinos, claiming that they had fired on American soldiers. A quarter of a million Filipinos died in the resulting slaughter, which provoked the usually ironic William James to say: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."7 Many years later, General Arthur MacArthur admitted that American troops had fired first to start a pre-arranged battle.8

In 1964, a false account of an incident in the Tonkin Gulf was used to start the full-scale war in Vietnam, which brought about the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and some two million Vietnamese.9

Of course, we might be tempted to reply, although Americans have done such things to enemy nations ("All's fair in love and war"), they would never deliberately kill citizens of friendly countries for political reasons. That assumption, however, is undermined in a recent book, NATO's Secret Armies, by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. This book demonstrates that during the Cold War, the United States sponsored false flag operations in many countries of Western Europe in order to discredit Communists and other leftists to prevent them from coming to power through elections.10

Italy suffered a wave of deadly terrorist attacks in the 1970s, including a massive explosion at the Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.11 Between 1983 and '85, Belgium suffered a series of attacks, known as the "Brabant massacres," in which hooded men opened fire on people in shopping centers, "reduc[ing] Belgium to a state of panic." At the time, all these attacks in Italy, Belgium, and other countries were blamed on Communists and other leftists, often by virtue of planted evidence.12

In the 1990s, however, it was discovered that the attacks were really carried out by right-wing organizations that were coordinated by a secret unit within NATO, which was guided by the CIA and the Pentagon.13 A former member of the organization that carried out the massacres in Belgium, which was funded by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, explained that the plan was to "make the population believe that these terrorist attacks were done by the Left."14 The former head of Italian counter-intelligence, in explaining the motivation behind the attacks in Italy, said: "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left." To achieve this goal, he added, it seemed that "the Americans would do anything."15

Operation Northwoods

If Americans would do anything to achieve their political goals in Europe, would they do similar things within America itself? Early in 1962, which was shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented President Kennedy with a plan, called Operation Northwoods. This plan described "pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba," partly "by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." Possible actions to create this image included a "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area . . . and . . . Washington" and a "Remember the Maine" incident, in which: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba." Although President Kennedy did not approve this plan, it had been endorsed by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.16

2. The Probable Motive for 9/11

US political and military leaders, as these examples show, have been fully capable of orchestrating false flag operations that would kill innocent people, including American citizens, to achieve political goals. The political goal during the Cold War was to prevent and overthrow left-leaning governments. But what motive could US leaders have had for orchestrating the attacks of 9/11, a decade after the Cold War had ended? Actually, it was precisely the end of the Cold War that provided the likely motive: the desire to create a global Pax Americana.

Whereas the world during the Cold War was bipolar, the demise of the Soviet Union created in some minds---the minds of that group known as neoconservatives, or neocons---the prospect of a unipolar world. In 1989, Charles Krauthammer published a piece entitled "Universal Dominion," in which he argued that America should work for "a qualitatively new outcome---a unipolar world."17 A year later, he said the United States, as the "unchallenged superpower," should act unilaterally, "unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them."18

The most important neocon has been Dick Cheney. In 1992, the last year of his tenure as secretary of defense, he had two of his assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, write a draft of the Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidance," which said America's "first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival."19 Andrew Bacevich, who is a conservative but not a neoconservative, has called this draft "a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony."20 An article in Harper's calls it an early version of Cheney's "Plan . . . to rule the world."21

During the rest of the 1990s, while the Republicans were out of White House, the unipolar dream kept growing. In 1996, Robert Kagan said the United States should use its military strength "to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony."22

In the following year, William Kristol, the son of neocon godfather Irving Kristol, founded a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century, often called PNAC. Its members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and many other neocons who would become central members of the Bush administration in 2001. In September of 2000, PNAC published a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses. Reaffirming "the basic tenets" of the Cheney-Wolfowitz draft of 1992, this document said that "America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend [its present] advantageous position" and thereby "to preserve and enhance [the] 'American peace.'"23

What would it take, according to these neocons, to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? Basically five things. First, control of the world's oil. As Robert Dreyfuss, a critic of the neocons, says, "who[ever] controls oil controls the world."24 For the neocons, this meant bringing about regime change in several oil-rich countries, especially Iraq. Some neocons, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, had wanted the first President Bush to take out Saddam in 1990.25 They continued to advocate this policy throughout the 1990s, with PNAC even writing a letter to President Clinton in 1998, urging him to use military force to "remov[e] Saddam's regime from power."26 After the Bush-Cheney administration took office, attacking Iraq was the main item on its agenda. The only real question, reports former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, was "finding a way to do it."27

A second necessary condition for the envisaged Pax Americana was a transformation of the military in the light of the "revolution in military affairs"---RMA for short---made possible by information technology. At the center of this RMA transformation is the military use of space.28 Although the term "missile defense" implies that this use of space is to be purely defensive, one neocon, Lawrence Kaplan, has candidly stated otherwise, saying: "Missile defense isn't really meant to protect America. It's a tool for global domination."29

In any case, implementing this transformation will be very expensive, which brings us to a third requirement: an increase in military spending. The end of the Cold War made this requirement challenging, because most Americans assumed that, since we no longer had to defend the world against global Communism, we could drastically reduce military spending, thereby having a "peace dividend" to spend on health, education, and the environment.

A fourth neocon requirement for a Pax Americana was a modification of the doctrine of preemptive attack. Traditionally, a country has had the right to launch a preemptive attack against another country if an attack from that country was imminent---too imminent to take the matter to the UN Security Council. But neocons wanted the United States to act to preclude threats that might arise in the more or less distant future.30

These four developments would require a fifth thing: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. This point had been made in The Grand Chessboard, a 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor. Brzezinski is not a neocon but he shares their concern with American primacy (as indicated by the subtitle of his book: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives). Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America must get control of this region. However, Brzezinski counseled, Americans, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the military spending and human sacrifices necessary for "imperial mobilization," and this reluctance "limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation."31 But this impediment could be overcome, he added, if there were "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."32 The American people were, for example, willing to enter World War II after "the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."33

This same idea was suggested in PNAC's document of 2000, Rebuilding America's Defenses. Referring to the goal of transforming the military, it said that this "process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor."34

3. Opportunities Created by the New Pearl Harbor

When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on that night: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today."35 Many commentators, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.36 Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world." President Bush and Condoleezza Rice also spoke of 9/11 as creating opportunities.37

And it did, in fact, create opportunities to fulfill what the neocons had considered the other necessary conditions for bringing about a Pax Americana. With regard to oil, the Bush administration had, during the summer of 2001, developed a plan to attack Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with a puppet regime, thereby allowing UNOCAL to build its proposed pipeline from the Caspian Sea and the US military to build bases in the region.

The official story of 9/11, according to which it was carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, provided the needed pretext for this operation. In 2004, Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission that prior to 9/11, the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to "invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban." 38

9/11 also provided a necessary condition for the attack on Iraq. It did not provide a sufficient condition. The administration still had to wage a propaganda offensive to convince the public that Saddam was involved in 9/11, was connected to al-Qaeda, and illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction. But 9/11 was a necessary condition. As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: "At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn't doable. . . . That changed with September 11."39 Historian Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why 9/11 made the attack on Iraq possible, says:

    The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren't exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration's propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States.40

Sniegoski's view is supported by Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker. Lemann says that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration that, in Lemann's paraphrase,

    the reason September 11th appears to have been "a transformative moment" is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.41

The new Pearl Harbor also opened the way for the revolution in military affairs. Prior to 9/11, Bacevich reports, "military transformation appeared to be dead in the water." But the "war on terror" after 9/11 "created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case."42

9/11 also allowed for great increases in military spending, including spending for space weapons. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing at the Pentagon. Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked:

    Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don't have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?43

Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later.

The new Pearl Harbor also paved the way for the new doctrine of preemptive warfare. "The events of 9/11," observes Bacevich, "provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power."44 Bush alluded to this new doctrine at West Point the following June.45 It was then fully articulated in the administration's 2002 version of the National Security Strategy. The president's covering letter said that America will "act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed."46 The document itself said:

    Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first. . . . [T]he United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.47

    4. 9/11 as a False Flag Operation

If 9/11 provided the "tailor-made opportunity" for enunciating this new doctrine, as Bacevich has observed, it equally provided the opportunity to realize all the other things that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons had been dreaming about during the previous decade. Should not this fact lead us to suspect that 9/11 was not simply a godsend? In any criminal investigation, the first question is always cui bono—who benefits? Why should we not apply this principle to 9/11? Let us now look at some evidence, to see if it supports the view that 9/11 was a false flag operation, orchestrated to produce precisely the effects that it did in fact produce.

The Alleged Hijackers

The official account of 9/11, by blaming the attacks on Arab Muslims, provided a basis for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq wars---not a legal basis, but an emotional basis sufficient to marshal support from a the American people and Congress. But there are many problems with this official story.

For one thing, the alleged hijackers are portrayed as devout Muslims, ready to meet their maker. Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader, is said by the 9/11 Commission to have become very religious, even "fanatically so."48 But some journalists found that he loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances. Several of the other alleged hijackers reportedly had similar tastes.49

Also, the flight manifests that have been released for the four flights have no Arab names on them.50

It appears, moreover, that evidence was planted. Authorities allegedly found two of Atta's bags at the Boston airport. These bags contained Atta's passport and his will along with various types of incriminating evidence. But why would Atta have planned to take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade Center?51

The Legend of Osama bin Laden

There are also many problems in the official story about Osama bin Laden. In June of 2001, when he was already America's "most wanted" criminal, bin Laden reportedly spent two weeks in the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the local CIA agent.52

Also, after 9/11, when America was supposedly trying to get bin Laden "dead or alive," the U.S. military evidently allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being the "battle of Tora Bora," which the London Telegraph labeled "a grand charade."53

Moreover, although the Bush administration promised that Secretary of State Colin Powell would provide a white paper with proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, this paper was never produced. And although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, the Bush administration refused.54

Finally, although this administration claims that bin Laden admitted responsibility for the attacks in a video allegedly found in Afghanistan, the man in this video has darker skin, fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the other videos. We again seem to have planted evidence. Indeed, within the 9/11 truth movement, this video is known as "the fake bin Laden video."55

Reasons to believe that 9/11 was a false flag operation are also provided by various features of the attacks that could not have been accomplished by the alleged hijackers. One of these is the destruction of the World Trade Center.

5. The Destruction of the World Trade Center

According to the official explanation, the Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed primarily from their fires---plus, in the case of the Twin Towers, the impact of the airplanes. But this explanation faces several formidable problems.

First, many people have been led to believe that the steel in these steel-frame buildings was melted by the fires. But steel does not begin to melt until 2800 degrees F, whereas open fires burning hydrocarbons such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel is---can in the most ideal circumstances rise only as high as 1700 degrees.

Second, the fires in these three buildings were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A fire in Philadelphia in 1991 burned 18 hours; a fire in Caracas in 2004 burned 17 hours. But neither of these fires resulted in even a partial collapse.56 By contrast, the north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed. Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, had fires on only a few floors, according to all the photographic evidence57 and several witnesses.58

The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized as especially difficult to explain. The FEMA report said that the most likely scenario had "only a low probability of occurrence."59 The collapse of building 7 was not even mention in the 571 pages of The 9/11 Commission Report, even though this collapse was, according to the official account, a historic event: the first time a steel-frame high-rise had ever collapsed from fire alone. The latest official report, put out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has claimed that the Twin Towers collapsed because the airplanes knocked the fire-proofing off the steel,60 but it has yet to explain why Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, also collapsed.

A third problem with the official account is that total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never, either before or after 9/11, been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with externally produced structural damage. All such collapses have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as "controlled demolition."

A fourth problem is that the collapses of these three buildings all manifested many standard features of controlled demolition. I will mention six:

1. The collapses began suddenly. Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But if you look at videos available on the Web, you will see that the buildings are perfectly motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse.61

2. These huge buildings collapsed straight down, instead of toppling over, which would have caused enormous death and destruction. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type of controlled demolition known as implosion, which only a few companies in the world are qualified to perform.62

3. All three buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors.

4. The collapses were total collapses, resulting in piles of rubble no more than a few stories high. This means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had to be broken into rather short segments---which is what explosives do.

5. Fifth, great quantities of molten steel were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover, that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble, molten metal would be dripping from the end.63

6. Dozens of people, including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters, reported that explosions went off prior to and during the collapses of the north and south towers. For example, Fire Captain Dennis Tardio said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom."64 Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: "It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions."65

One more feature of the collapses of the Twin Towers was that virtually everything except the steel---all the desks, computers, and concrete---was pulverized into tiny dust particles.66

The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all, of these seven features---at least, as physicist Steven Jones has pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.67 But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all of them.

This evidence for controlled demolition contradicts the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. They could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours needed to plant the explosives. Agents of the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III---the president's brother and cousin, respectively---were principals of the company in charge of security for the WTC.68 Al-Qaeda terrorists would also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise.

Another relevant fact is that evidence was destroyed. An examination of the buildings' steel columns could have shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all of the steel was quickly sold to scrap dealers, trucked away, and sent to Asia to be melted down. It is usually a federal offense to remove anything from a crime scene. But this removal of thousands of tons of steel, the biggest destruction of evidence in history, was allowed by federal officials.

Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived not only the fire but also whatever caused everything in the north tower except its steel to be pulverized into dust.69

[NOTE: This is part 1 of 2. The conclusion of this article is at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060430225908335

NOTES

1. On the Mukden incident, see Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Religions throughout History (New York: Norton, 1997), 164-66; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 40; and "Mukden Incident," Encyclopedia Britannica, 2006 (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9054193).

2. The question of responsibility for the Reichstag fire had long remained controversial. But the dominant view, that the fire was set by the Nazis themselves, was confirmed in 2001 with the publication of Der Reichstagbrand: Wie Geschichte Gemacht Wird, by Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel (Berlin: Edition Q, 2001). This book presents ample evidence of Nazi responsibility, including the testimony of a member of the SA, who said that he was in the subterranean passageway that night and saw other SA members bringing explosive liquids to the Reichstag. Bahar and Kugel have, accordingly, substantiated the position contained in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 191-93.

3. Wilhelm Klein, "The Reichstag Fire, 68 Years On" (review of Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, Der Reichstagbrand), World Socialist Website, July 5, 2001 (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/reic-j05.shtml).

4. See "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. II: Criminality of Groups and Organizations" (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-15-criminality-06-05.html); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), 221; and "Gleiwitz Incident," Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident#References).

5. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 150. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York, Norton, 1974), 143.

6. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, 146.

7. Quoted in Zinn, A People's History, 307.

8. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 57-62.

9. George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How American Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987),220; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 119.

10. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 53-54.

11. Ibid., 5.

12. Ibid., 138-39.

13. Ibid., 9-11, 27-29, 241-43.

14. Ibid., 142-43, 146.

15. Ibid., 82, 120. On the evidence linking NATO and the United States to the Bologna massacre, see ibid., 25, 81.

16. This memorandum can be found at the National Security Archive, April 30, 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430). It was revealed to US readers by James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (2001: New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 82-91.

17. Charles Krauthammer, "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.

18. Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs, 1990.

19. Department of Defense, "Defense Planning Guidance," February 18, 1992. It might be thought, incidentally, that Dick Cheney cannot be called a neoconservative because he (a) was never a liberal and (b) is not Jewish. But although the term "neoconservative" originally referred to people who had moved to the right after having been on the left, the second- and third-generation neocons, as Gary Dorrien points out, "had never been progressives of any kind" (Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16. Also, as Dorrien points out, from the beginning of the movement "a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews" (ibid., 15). As former neocon Michael Lind says: "[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, . . . and [Donald] Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists" (Michael Lind, "A Tragedy of Errors," The Nation, Feb. 23, 2004, online; quoted in Justin Raimondo, "A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq," in D. L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq [Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005], 112-24, at 123.

20. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.

21. David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's Song of America," Harper's, October, 2002.

22. Robert Kagan, "American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed," Commentary 101 (April 1996).

23. PNAC (Project for the New American Century), Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), iv.

24. Robert Dreyfuss, "Oil-Control Formula," July 18, 2005 (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050718/oilcontrol_formula.php).

25. Stephen J. Sniegoski, "Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The Origins of the U.S. War on Iraq." In D. L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005), 81-109, at 86-87, citing Arnold Beichman, "How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began," Washington Times, Nov. 27, 2002.

26. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).

27. O'Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O'Neill repeated this point in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" in January of 2004. Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews with other officials, said that in its first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml).

28. PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.

29. Lawrence Kaplan, New Republic 224 (March 12, 2001), cover text; quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 223.

30. PNAC's letter to Clinton in 1998, for example, urged him to "undertake military action" to eliminate "the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction."

31. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.

32. Ibid., 212.

33. Ibid., 212, 24-25.

34. Ibid., 51.

35. This according to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.

36. Robert Kagan, "We Must Fight This War," Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, "Destroy the Network," Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com); Lance Morrow, "The Case for Rage and Retribution," Time, Sept. 11, 2001.

37. "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times," New York Times, October 12, 2001. On Rice, see Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power," New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1), and Rice, "Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy," April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov); on Bush, see "Bush Vows to 'Whip Terrorism,'" Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001, and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.

38. See "Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing," Washington Post, March 23, 2004 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17798-2004Mar23.html).

39. Quoted in Elizabeth Drew, "The Neocons in Power," New York Review of Books, 50/10 (June 12, 2003). Bob Woodward made the same observation, saying: "The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein" (Bush at War [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002], 83).

40. Sniegoski, "Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11," 108-09.

41. Nicholas Lemann "The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power," New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1).

42. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173.

43. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM, Sept. 11, 2001 (available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm).

44. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 91.

45. "President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point," June 1, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html). America's security, Bush said, "will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action."

46. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), cover letter.

47. Ibid., 15.

48. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 116.

49. "Terrorist Stag Parties," Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298).

50. The flight manifest for AA 11 that was published by CNN can be seen at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html. The manifests for the other flights can be located by simply changing that part of the URL. The manifest for UA 93, for example, is at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/ua93.victims.html.

51. For this and other problems in the story about Atta's bags, see Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 180-83.

52. Richard Labeviere, "CIA Agent Allegedly Met Bin Laden in July," Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001. This story was also reported in Anthony Sampson, "CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July," Guardian, Nov. 1.

53. Telegraph, Feb. 23, 2002; discussed in David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005), 60.

54. "White House Warns Taliban: 'We Will Defeat You'" (CNN.com, Sept. 21, 2001). Four weeks after the attacks began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?" (Kathy Gannon, AP, "Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect" [http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html]).

55. See "The Fake bin Laden Video" (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html).

56. "High-Rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," FEMA (http://usfa.fema.gov/fire-service/techreports/tr049.shtm); "Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela's Tallest Building" (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html).

57. A photograph taken by Terry Schmidt can be seen on page 63 of Eric Hufschmid's Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002) or on Schmidt's website (http://www.nycwireless.net/Images/wtc2/). According to Schmidt, this photo was taken between 3:09 and 3:16 PM, hence only a little over two hours before Building 7 collapsed. It shows that on the north side of the building, fires were visible only on floors 7 and 12. Therefore, if there were more fires on the south side, which faced the Twin Towers, they were not big enough to be seen from the north side.

58. Chief Thomas McCarthy of the FDNY said that while the firefighters "were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down," there was "fire on three separate floors" (Oral History of Thomas McCarthy, 10-11). Emergency medical technician Decosta Wright said: "I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out?" (Oral History of Decosta Wright, 11). These quotations are from the 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department at the end of 2001 but released to the public (after a court battle) only in August 2005, at which time they were made available on a New York Times website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html).

59. FEMA Report #403, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002 (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm), Ch. 5, Sect. 6.2, "Probable Collapse Sequence."

60. "[T]he towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation (fireproofing) and the subsequent multifloor fires," Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (Draft), June, 2005: xliii and 171.

61. See Jim Hoffman's website (http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html) and Jeff King's website (http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.king2/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html), especially "The World Trade Center Collapse: How Strong is the Evidence for a Controlled Demolition?"

62. Implosion World (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html).

63. Professor Allison Geyh of Johns Hopkins, who was part of a team of public health investigators who visited the site shortly after 9/11, wrote: "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel," Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, Late Fall, 2001. Dr. Keith Eaton, who somewhat later toured the site with an engineer, said that he was shown slides of "molten metal, which was still red hot weeks after the event" (The Structural Engineer, Sept. 3, 2002: 6). On the dripping steel, see Trudy Walsh, "Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks," Government Computer News, 21/27a, Sept 11, 2002 (http://www.gcn.com/21_27a/news/19930-1.html) and Jennifer Lin, "Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero," Knight Ridder, May 29, 2002 (http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/attacks/4522011.htm).

64. Dennis Smith, Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center [New York: Penguin, 2002], 18.

65. For the testimony of Banaciski and dozens of other members of the Fire Department of New York, see David Ray Griffin, "Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories," 911Truth.org, January 18, 2006 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192).

66. Jim Hoffman, "The North Tower's Dust Cloud: Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center," Version 3, 9-11 Research.wtc7.net, Oct. 16, 2003 (http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volume.html). The available evidence, Hoffman says, suggests that the dust particles were very small indeed---on the order of 10 microns. Also Colonel John O'Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said: "At the World Trade Center sites, it seemed like everything was pulverized" ("The World Trade Center: Rise and Fall of an American Icon," The History Channel, September 8, 2002).

67. Stephen E. Jones, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" In David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006); also available at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html. See also David Ray Griffin, "The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True," in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, March, 2006), and in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006); also available at 911Review.com (http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html). For videos of the WTC collapses, see "9/11/01 WTC Videos" (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/index.html).

68. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 31-32.

69. See Morgan and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 68.

[NOTE: This is part 1 of 2. The conclusion of this article is at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060430225908335]

Bush Defector To Demolish
911 Lies On May 6
4-18-6

 The former top economist in Bush's Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds, will speak out on the 9/11 inside job at the State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday, May  6th. The film Loose Change will be shown, and refreshments served, starting at 1 p.m, and Reynolds will speak at 3:00 p.m.
 
Dr. Reynolds, who holds three U.W.-Madison degrees, and who is currently Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, will present evidence that top Bush Administration officials orchestrated the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and the murder of almost 2,500 Americans, as a pretext for initiating their pre-planned "long war" in the Middle East.
 
"While more Americans doubt the 9/11 story every week, evidence abounds that many have a mental block against rational examination of the evidence about 9/11" writes Dr. Reynolds in a recent article. This mental block, he thinks, amounts to willful ignorance-not just about 9/11, but about history.
 
"Governments throughout history have provoked or staged attacks on their own people to serve the powers behind the throne ('the money power'), glorify themselves, engage in vast government spending, reward friends, exert domestic control, stimulate the juices of war, annex neighbors and pursue vast geostrategic rearrangements (the 'global domination project)" Reynolds asserts. He notes that every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on the "Operation Northwoods" plan to murder Americans in fake "Cuban terrorist" attacks in 1962. The planned Operation Northwoods murders of ordinary Americans in fake terrorist bombings and a fake "airliner shoot-down" would have involved hundreds of military and intelligence personnel. Yet the existence of Operation Northwoods was successfully kept secret from the American people for forty years until James Bamford revealed it in his book Body of Secrets, published in January 2002.
 
Though government officials have historically been able to successfully conceal their fake or arranged war-trigger attacks long enough to avoid being hanged for treason, Reynolds thinks the 9/11 cover-up has already unraveled. "Skepticism about conspiracy, small or large, is somewhat beside the point in the case of 9/11 because the official Osama-and-Nineteen-Young-Arabs (ONYA) conspiracy tale is so farcical and impossible. Nearly everyone in America has easy access to the internet and hundreds of websites expose the 9/11 fraud." (Morgan Reynolds, "Conspiracy and Closed Minds on 9/11": http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )
 
Reynolds argues that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building  7 were destroyed in a manner that can only be explained by controlled demolition with pre-planted explosives-which should not be surprising, since no steel framed high-rises have ever collapsed in the way the three World Trade Center buildings did for any other reason. In his article "Why Did the World Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" Reynolds writes that among the many features of the WTC demolitions that suggest explosives, rather than jet-fuel fires, are:
 
1. Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.  
 
2. The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were small.  
 
3. WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.  
 
4. WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams (pp. 68-9).  
 
5. In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC lease-holder, recalled talking to the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 and said, ".maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.  
 
6. FEMA, given the uninviting task of explaining the collapse of Building 7 with mention of demolition verboten admitted that the best it could come up with had "only a low probability of occurrence."  
 
7. It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.
 
Professional demolition, by contrast, can explain all of these facts and more. Demolition means placing explosives throughout a building, and detonating them in sequence to weaken "the structure so it collapses or folds in upon itself". In conventional demolitions gravity does most of the work, although it probably did a minority on  
 
9/11, so heavily were the towers honeycombed with explosives.
 
1. Each WTC building collapse occurred at virtually free-fall speed  (approximately 10 seconds or less).
 
2. Each building collapsed, for the most part, into its own footprint.  
 
3. Virtually all the concrete (an estimated 100,000 tons in each tower) on every floor was pulverized into a very fine dust, a phenomenon that requires enormous energy and could not be caused by gravity alone (".workers can't even find concrete. 'It's all dust,' [the official] said").  
 
4. Dust exploded horizontally for a couple hundred feet, as did debris, at the beginning of each tower's collapse.  
 
5. Collapses were total, leaving none of the massive core columns sticking up hundreds of feet into the air.  
 
6. Salvage experts were amazed at how small the debris stacks were.  
 
7. The steel beams and columns came down in sections under 30 feet long and had no signs of "softening"; there was little left but shorn sections of steel and a few bits of concrete.  
 
8. Photos and videos of the collapses all show "demolition waves," meaning "confluent rows of small explosions" along floors (blast sequences).  
 
9. According to many witnesses, explosions occurred within the buildings.  
 
10. Each collapse had detectable seismic vibrations suggestive of underground explosions, similar to the 2.3 earthquake magnitude from a demolition like the Seattle Kingdome (p. 108).  
 
11. Each collapse produced molten steel identical to that generated by explosives, resulting in "hot spots" that persisted for months  (the two hottest spots at WTC-2 and WTC-7 were approximately 1,350o F five days after being continuously flooded with water, a temperature high enough to melt aluminum (p. 70). ("Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?" by Morgan Reynolds: http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911 )
 
The apparent demolition of the three skyscrapers, and a perhaps inadvertent statement by heavily-insured WTC landlord Larry Silverstein that WTC-7 was "pulled" (slang for "demolished") can be viewed on many 9/11 truth DVDs and web-videos, including Loose Change, 9/11 Eyewitness, 9/11 and the American Empire, (Dr. David Griffin), and 9/11 Revisited (Dr. Steven Jones). Dr. Reynolds' articles on 9/11 and other matters can be found at http://nomoregames.net .
The videos, and further information about Dr. Reynolds' May 6th speech, are available from the event's sponsor, the Madison-based Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth: http://mujca.com

Since the "newly released" frames of the Pentagon on 911, Jamie McIntyre has been saying that he was there and there was wreckage of the "plane."  This is what he said from the Pentagon that day:

• 9/11 - CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre reporting live from the Pentagon says that there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the building.

► Jamie Mcintryre, CNN correspondent

From the Canandaigua Daily Messenger 

Congressional candidate stumps here

Messenger Post

CLIFTON SPRINGS - Corning Democrat Eric Massa campaigned here Tuesday, the day after his opponent in the Nov. 7 election, U.S. Rep. Randy Kuhl, R-Hammondsport, announced he is seeking a second term.

Massa, a retired naval commander, made stops in the village, including to a government class at Midlakes High School, Townline Machine Company, the Ashton Place senior living center and Clifton Springs Hospital & Clinic.

Massa on Tuesday attacked Congress for agreeing to extend tax cuts for high-income Americans while hiking taxes for low- and middle-income citizens. Specifically, Massa cited the penalty that goes into effect May 15 for seniors who haven't signed up for the Medicare Part D drug prescription program.

The candidates are vying to represent the 29th Congressional District, which includes all of Yates County, parts of Monroe, and all of Ontario County except Geneva.

Sun, May 7, 2006
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Spitzer pledges integrity, values

The attorney general and gubernatorial candidate met with about 100 supporters at a Democratic forum in Canandaigua Saturday.

By JESSICA PIERCE / Messenger Post staff

CANANDAIGUA - At a "meet the candidates" forum at Bella Lago Restaurant and Party House Saturday morning, Cecily "Cc" Bodnar seized an opportunity to speak to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer about her top priority: education.

Bodnar, of Canandaigua, is retired from a long career in adult education at the Wayne-Finger Lakes Board of Cooperative Educational Services and the state Education Department. She said programs like English as a Second Language and high school equivalency have "been dismantled under this administration."

After a short speech, the attorney general spent several minutes greeting supporters. Bodnar was among the first in the crowd to rub elbows with him, and she was impressed.

"I had the feeling that he 'got' what I was trying to say," she said. "I was also impressed by his realism. He didn't say he could fix the state of New York, (his) point was that he could change the governor's office."

Bodnar was one of more than 100 Democrats who turned out for the forum, hosted by the Ontario County Democratic Committee. In addition to Spitzer, other Democratic candidates in attendance included: Eric Massa, who is running against incumbent Republican Randy Kuhl for the 29th congressional district; Judge Steven Lindley, who is running for Supreme Court; Dan West, vying for the 130th district assembly seat; Oneida County District Attorney Michael A. Arcuri, vying for the 24th congressional district seat; and Ontario County Sheriff Philip Povero.

Spitzer arrived at the Lakeshore Drive party house just before 10 a.m., after making a campaign trail stop in Newark. Elected attorney general in 1998, he is the favored Democratic candidate for governor, though several other names have entered the increasingly crowded arena. Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi has stepped up to challenge him for the Democratic nod.

Among the hopefuls on the Republican side are former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, former New York Secretary of State Randy Daniels and former Assemblyman John Faso.

Elected officials in attendance Saturday praised Spitzer for stumping upstate. The attorney general has been to Ontario County five times in the past two years, said Charlie Evangelista, chairman of the county's Democratic Committee. "He's really sincere about what is going on in the region," he said.

In his short address, Spitzer pledged to bring integrity back to state government. "We will do to this governor's office what we did to the AG's office," he said. "We will bring (to it) the values we all share: hard work, integrity."

Spitzer said one of his role models was Theodore Roosevelt, who sought to curb the power of trusts and regulate industry.

"We believe in capitalism - we believe in making money," said Spitzer. "But we believe in doing it by playing by the rules."

Before heading to Rochester for another campaign stop, Spitzer urged the audience to support running mates on the Democratic ticket. "We need to win and change the direction," he said. "The most important thing is to reclaim Washington. We have been going off in the wrong direction down there for too many years."

Attendees Saturday included Geneva city Supervisor Robert C. LaRocca; Manchester Supervisor William Eddinger Jr.; Geneva town Supervisor Mary Luckern; Canandaigua city supervisors Robert Buck and David Baker; and Canandaigua Mayor Ellen Polimeni.

Sue Kaszynski, a member of the Canandaigua City Planning Commission, was also in attendance. She said she appreciated Spitzer's "common sense approach" to politics. Kaszynski said she was also impressed by Massa. "He has some of the best ideas, but he is a realist," she said.

In his address, a fired-up Massa touched on topics ranging from the war in Iraq to the economy and education. "We need real leadership," he said. "Staying the course is not a strategy."

The audience of supporters rose to their feet and applauded after Massa told them: "We are going to take back Albany. There is going to be a blue tsunami that starts in Washington DC and goes all the way to San Francisco this year."

You folks might want to read this whole article.  I found it while I was looking for the years that GHW Bush was head of the CIA.  Can genes be evil?  Could this be a lead into Kennedy, Kennedy, King?  I don't know, but it's worth keeping an open mind and looking into the whole picture.

There was a dinner party . . . *snip *Held at the home of Neil Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, who himself was the very ambitious former CIA director and current Vice President, the guest of honor at the dinner party (which was quickly cancelled after news of the failed attempt on the life of the President), was Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley, the man who just that afternoon shot President Ronald Reagan, coming one half-inch from killing him.*snip