Truth Through Annoyance

9-11 Still Not Making Sense, Unless...

The video below competes in two major entertainment categories: Most Cloying Presentation, Most Caustic Use of Irony. The whole thing would be a dismissible mess were it not such an inconvenient set of documented and corroborated truths. There is a combination of weird convergences - Justice Department investigations, special construction activities, big insurance buys - and deliberate inaction  - well-done FBI work ignored by the Bush Administration - coupled with chaos at first responder levels - fire fighters struggling with communications, military fighters going wrong directions - culminating in unprecedented failures of structural engineering. Steel skyscrapers collapse unobstructed through their centers of greatest resistance, Flight 93 vanishes into the earth, Flight 77 scores a perfect hit on the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) record storage rooms at the Pentagon, and Building 7 on the World Trade Center campus collapses, making it the third steel-frame structure in history to perform this feat, all at the same place, on the same day - September 11, 2001. President Bush is out of town, directed by Vice President Dick Cheney not to return to Washington, leaving Cheney in charge and Commander Dunsel (Bush) to fly around in Air Force One like a confused kid playing hooky from school. This video below, annoying as it is, notices all of these weird phenomena, and it is pretty sobering stuff. If you don't want all the point-of-view politics that you may find in this video below, but are more inclined toward engineering analysis, there is a much more satisfying presentation following: Architect Richard Gage, AIA, of Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth.

 

 

AE 9-11 Truth.org

For those of you who have followed the Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth, it is notable how founder Richard Gage, AIA, has refined his presentation. His turning his technical studies into a cause, now well scripted, may represent insight to some. He has, for sure, gotten better as witnessed by the videos of AE 9-11 Truth.org that we have followed on the RCJ. A sales element has crept into the works.

 

By RAR

One doesn't really have to be too far into the lost realms of conspiracy theory to get the feeling that something has never been quite right about the official report on the 9-11 attacks. The recent release of No Easy Day, the first-hand report from the second man up the stairs to Osama Bin Laden's bedroom among the Seal Team 6 group who killed him, revealed yet another opportunity taken by the government - in this case, the Obama government - to weave a false story. The lead shooter killed somebody who peaked his head from a doorway, and then follow-up personnel plugged the fallen man multiple times in the chest as he lay prone on the floor with part of his head blown away. The Seal Team had to ask a little kid and a woman who the guy they just killed was.

Under the circumstances, grim as they were, that story really needn't have been spun. Bin Laden had been a wanted man for years, and he was finally located and killed. So why did the Obama Administration give us what now may have been a phony and unnecessary alternative account; one that allows conspiracy watchers to wonder for what else the government may be providing alternative explanations?

And then there is yesterday's response from Defense Secretary, and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who feels the author/retired Seal Team 6 member who wrote the book (under the pseudonym Mark Owens), should be prosecuted:

"I think we have to take steps to make clear to him and to the American people that we're not going to accept this kind of behavior." - Panetta

That response makes the hair stand on my arms. Is that not a broad threat to anyone in the entire nation who would dare to offer an eye-witness account of a story the administration does not want to be told?

The Bin Laden killing, which was clearly a shoot first and ask questions later operation, regardless of the official claim that it was a capture-first mission, seems not like the end of a story but like an ongoing narrative in a long and depressing novel.

To yours truly, there has been an arc that had its roots way back in the Nixon Administration and has its seeds in the predatory calculations of the international oil companies.

 

Accepting Behavior after 9-11

 By RAR

One doesn't really have to be too far into the lost realms of conspiracy theory to get the feeling that something has never been quite right about the official report on the 9-11 attacks. The recent release of No Easy Day, the first-hand report from the second man up the stairs to Osama Bin Laden's bedroom among the Seal Team 6 group who killed him, revealed yet another opportunity taken by the government - in this case, the Obama government - to weave a false story. The lead shooter killed somebody who peaked his head from a doorway, and then follow-up personnel plugged the fallen man multiple times in the chest as he lay prone on the floor with part of his head blown away. The Seal Team had to ask a little kid and a woman who the guy they just killed was.

Under the circumstances, grim as they were, that story really needn't have been spun. Bin Laden had been a wanted man for years, and he was finally located and killed. So why did the Obama Administration give us what now may have been a phony and unnecessary alternative account; one that allows conspiracy watchers to wonder for what else the government may be providing alternative explanations?

And then there is yesterday's response from Defense Secretary, and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who feels the author/retired Seal Team 6 member who wrote the book (under the pseudonym Mark Owens), should be prosecuted:

"I think we have to take steps to make clear to him and to the American people that we're not going to accept this kind of behavior." - Panetta

That response makes the hair stand on my arms. Is that not a broad threat to anyone in the entire nation who would dare to offer an eye-witness account of a story the administration does not want to be told?

The Bin Laden killing, which was clearly a shoot first and ask questions later operation, regardless of the official claim that it was a capture-first mission, seems not like the end of a story but like an ongoing narrative in a long and depressing novel.

To yours truly, there has been an arc that had its roots way back in the Nixon Administration and has its seeds in the predatory calculations of the international oil companies.

(Continued from Page One)

The sequence goes like this:

1) The 1950s produces an extraordinary population growth internationally, which expands markets, produces significant growth in the middle classes in the Americas and Europe, and exponentially increases energy demands and the import of foreign oil. World War II had placed a focus on oil resources as strategic assets, and firms like Bechtel had established themselves in Saudi Arabia by the mid-1940s, establishing close ties with the Saudi Royal Family, and supporting infrastructure development in the country.

2) The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded in 1960 in response to Middle East nations losing 65 percent of the revenues produced from their soils to oil exploration companies. The initial members were Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. There are now 12 nations, with OPEC adding Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar,  and the United Arab Emirates.

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In 1969, two important figures in modern history join company in the Nixon Administration in the Office of Economic Opportunity. They are Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, pictured above with President Gerald R. Ford.

Ford, who would become the 38th President of the United States (the photo above is from his brief time in the office), had already played a pivotal role in U.S. history as a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission Report was a model for subsequent slap-dash official investigations, a 10-month long effort that confirmed everything that had been presented as the official story a mere 8 hours following the murder, i.e., that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had fired the fatal shots from the Dallas,  Texas School Book Repository building in Dealey Plaza.

Rumsfeld and Cheney will hold top positions again in the Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. Cheney -- the real-life incarnation of The Simpson's Mr. Burns -- continues in 2012 to be a major spokesman for the neo-conservative agenda. He has recently been given a new heart and can now live forever.

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3) In 1971, President Richard Nixon takes the U.S. off the Gold Standard, which had been on shaky ground since the Great Depression, when many nations had no gold reserves to back their money and began dependence on fiat currency - money that derives its value from government regulation or law. Through the Bretton Woods agreement, many nations had tied the value of their currencies to that of the now un-supported U.S. dollar.

 

Note: There is no public record of Gold being stored at Fort Knox since 1980.

 

◄So, down the rabbit hole of history we go.

Or is it through the looking glass? ►

Either way, things are about to start getting really weird.

 

4) In 1973, with an annual inflation rate hitting 8.5 percent, driven by runaway economic expansion, a bubble that threatened to over-value the economy -- leaving all newly acquired assets vulnerable to the inevitable cycles of recession, which are as common to economics as the Fibonacci sequence is to nature -- Richard Nixon announces price controls on oil imports.

5) The Islamic world strikes back. On October 6, 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egyptian forces attack Israel from across the Suez Canal, while Syrian troops attack across the Golan Heights to the north. The OPEC nations have grown bold enough to strike back against the humiliation of the 1967 "Six-Day War", in which the Israelis had taken control of the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. That had been a product of escalating tensions, the seeds of which were planted with the international recognition in 1947 of the Jewish state of Israel, which ceded holy land that had previously existed as shared territory, and about as peacefully as any other such space.

◊

There is the teachable moment that, for various reasons, has never arrived for the moment of elucidation. It isn't really the people - the Palestinians and the Jews - who don't get along. It is the allegiance among elements within those groups to sets of ideas institutionalized primarily for the purpose of organizational commitment (enslavement). The proof is in the denial of their willingness to trust in their own observations of reality: what has worked to create harmony, and what hasn't.

The photograph above shows Jews and Palestinians interacting like people normally do at the Zoo in Jerusalem.

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6) With the military support of the United States, Israel wins the Yom Kippur war by November, 1973, re-gaining control of the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, the disputed areas.

7)  It is far from over. In fact, it is only beginning, for on October 17 the OPEC nation's announce the "Arab Oil Embargo", targeting the U.S. (think Harken Oil, Chevron, Coastal, Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Gulf Oil Corporation, Standard Oil of Indiana [Amoco]), and the Netherlands (think Royal Dutch/Shell Oil). The embargo increases prices paid by America's Western European allies by 70 percent. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil sold to those nations rises from $3 to $5.11, and by January 1974, the price reaches $11.65. per barrel.

On September 4, 2012, the WTI Crude Oil Price was at $96.73 per barrel, and the Brent Crude Oil Price was at $114.97. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $20.81 and $24.74, respectively, in 1974 dollars. So where is all that profit going?

8) By 1974, the American lifestyle has morphed to a suburban model, with 85 percent of U.S. workers dependent upon a car or some form of mass transit to get to and from their places of employment. We are hostage to our cars, the oil companies, and to the OPEC cartel. Then suddenly the nation finds that it cannot afford this satellite existence that we have fashioned for ourselves. The die is cast, for in large part we have abandoned the inner cities and the troubles that go with them and opted for the big carbon footprint that will thereafter characterize American excess.

President Nixon calls for voluntary rationing of gas sales, closing gas stations by mandate on Sundays, and limiting customers to 10 gallons per station visit. Homeowners are asked to turn their thermostats down, and businesses to trim their hours of operation. Think how odd these government interventions seem, in retrospect, coming from a Republican President. Nixon wasn't, of course, one that was going to be around for his full second term because he had that Watergate problem - that weird, utterly unnecessary botched burglary of Democratic National Headquarters. Nixon lost the support of his party and was forced to leave office, handing the keys over to Congressman Gerald R. Ford (R-MI), who had become the Vice President with the departure of the scandalized previous VP. Spiro T. Agnew, ousted under investigation of tax fraud, bribery, extortion, and conspiracy while serving as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United States.

There was one significant Republican-type program that Nixon does push through in November, 1973, before being booted from office: Congressional approval of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (TAPS), which starting in 1977 opens the Arctic to 2 million barrels of oil production per day. With that, the U.S. economy has an additional supply of energy to fuel our gluttonous ways and lock the American auto industry into another three decades of refinements on a 100-year old carbon-producing technology that continues to grow at the expense of world stability, the global economy, and the environment. And yet we stay the course. Oil stocks soar while the DOW loses 45 percent of its value before the OPEC nations finally lift the embargo.

9)  The campaign chairman of the Ford campaign for the 1976 re-election bid is Dick Cheney, who goes off to serve in Congress after his man loses to the initially sunny, soon to be dour Jimmy Carter. Carter, who is the Obama of the 20th Century, inherits a lousy economy and terrible international dynamics, topped off by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that topples the U.S. ally Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavī, the Shah of Iran, who had ruled the country for 30 years as a close friend to the west. He had been placed in power initially through Operation Ajax, a joint Central Intelligence Agency (U.S.) and Secret Intelligence Service (British) plot that overthrew the previous Iranian ruler, Mosaddegh.

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In many respects, the 1979 Iran Revolution, which establishes Shiite control of the largest Shiite-majority country in the world, sets the stage for everything that will transpire in the Middle East over the next four decades.

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10)  The misery of the oil economy and an ill-fated rescue of American Embassy personnel from Islamic radicals who were responsible for the overthrow of the Iranian Shah - including a then college-aged future President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - leads to a one-term Carter presidency and the rise of Ronald Reagan.

11) Reagan's policy on the Middle East is uncertain, at least until October 23, 1983, when 241 American soldiers, serving as part of a multinational force during a Lebanese Civil War, are killed in their Beirut barracks by a suicide truck bomber. VP George H.W. Bush visits the blast site, does some tough talking about targeting Hezbollah leadership, and in February 1984 the Marines abort the mission and come home. Osama bin Laden later cites Reagan's withdrawal of forces as a sign of American weakness.

Reagan's focus is on the Cold War nemesis the Soviet Union, which is as backward a perspective as one can imagine, in retrospect, but it creates the Reagan Doctrine, part of which is committed to providing overt and covert aid to anti-communist resistance movements. Reagan deploys the CIA's Special Activities Division to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they train and equip the Mujaheddin forces (shown at left) who later become the Taliban and whose al-Qaeda-associated Arab fighters include Osama Bin Laden. The plan chases the Soviets from Afghanistan after a decade of fighting, but it creates an army of Islamic fundamentalists who remain central to our shared international story to this day.

"THE DATABASE": "Al-Qaeda" (sometimes spelled "al-Qaida" or "al-Qa-ida") is an Arabic translation of the English word for the base. Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has been the source for a background explanation, that the word al-Qaeda originally referred to the computer file of thousands of Mujahedeen militants who, in the 1980s, were recruited and trained with CIA help to defeat the Russians. In this sense, al-Qaeda is a CIA invention, a database of names.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Stop for a moment to consider the intelligence gold mine this represents. In the al-Qaeda database you have "our terrorist enemy's" enrollment information: who each person is, where they were born, their ages, educational backgrounds, and affiliations. Imagine how many ways this information could be used, particularly if one were inclined to present information on an identified security threat, a particular terrorist.

12) In February 1993, with President Bill Clinton in office only 33 days, Islamic fundamentalists bring the fight to the U.S., detonating a truck bomb below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. The 1,336 pound (606 kilogram) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device kills six people and injures more than a thousand. The name Osama Bin Laden, the son of a large Saudi Arabia-based family whose members are well-known to U.S. power brokers through their involvements in the construction, oil and finance industries, is first associated with international terrorism.

13) In August 1998, Bin Laden strikes with simultaneous bombings on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Clinton retaliates by launching cruise missiles at al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, as well as a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, where al-Qaeda is suspected of manufacturing biological weapons.

14) In the 2000 Election, neo-conservative and oil company interests led by Dick Cheney, who by this time is CEO of oil industry services firm Halliburton, create a campaign to defeat Vice President and environmental activist Albert Gore and elect former oil executive George W. Bush. Cheney, chosen by the Bush campaign to help vet potential vice president candidates, chooses himself and Bush-Cheney go on to defeat Gore and future Democrat turncoat Joseph Lieberman in a disputed election in which Gore gets the most votes. Gore fights using legal challenges, while Lieberman accepts that Bush-Cheney have won. A Supreme Court decision stops a recount of votes in Florida that gives the electoral college majority to Bush and ends the election, as well as a two-term Democratic presidency that has left the nation with a budget surplus. Bush installs Donald Rumsfeld as his Secretary of Defense at the urging of Vice President-elect Dick Cheney.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Joseph Lieberman, the Senator from Connecticut who became widely known to the general public as a moralist during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, is a key marker in this story. His presence on the 2000 Democratic ticket with Al Gore was a calculated sell-out to the right-wing direction the U.S. was already taking, driven by resentment toward the OPEC nations and anger over the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and exploited by radical right-wing elements in Congress. The Israeli lobby, always powerful in the U.S., was ratcheting up pressure on the U.S. to support the Jewish nation as Islamic nations all around the Middle East, many openly hostile toward Israel, grew in power, fueled by their own oil resources. Lieberman's addition to the Democratic ticket was intended to win the Jewish vote in Florida, which was expected to be the difference in the 2000 election, as indeed it was. Lieberman's easy acceptance of a Supreme Court decision that sent him back to the Senate and put the aggressively pro-Israel Bush Administration in place, seems almost pro forma in retrospect. No committed warrior to the Democratic cause, Lieberman jumped ship in 2006 to become an Independent, after he became unable to win a Democratic primary to keep his Senate seat. He had come to office in 1988, during the George H.W. Bush administration, defeating moderate Republican Lowell Weicker. He was, from the beginning of his time in national office, more far right than many Republicans. In 2007, he spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the confirmation of Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium. Fox, a prominent Republican businessman and political donor, was a contributor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign in 2004 that was instrumental in undermining Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) run for the White House. Someday a thousand years from now, if there are still people around to read about the slow crumbling of the United States of America at the beginning of the 21st Century, they will read about Joseph Leiberman the way we read about Cassius and Brutus of Caesar's Rome.

15) In May 2001, newly-elected President George W. Bush begins receiving top secret reports from the CIA that “a group presently in the United States” is planning a terrorist operation. In June he gets another report predicting that an Al-Qaeda strike could be “imminent”. And on August 6, 2001, President Bush and his security team receive a “presidential daily brief” with the heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The response of the Bush Administration is to launch a campaign against the validity of the threat. Neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, recently installed at the Pentagon (and now President of the World Bank), begin circulating reports characterizing the threats as "bluster".

A few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda accomplishes its goal, expressed by those arrested in the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, of bringing the towers to the ground. Along with a third building, of the seven associated with the WTC complex: Building Number 7, where the Federal government's investigators house their library of files associated with the ENRON energy commodities trading scandal. An attack the same morning on the Pentagon wipes out records rooms where information on trillions of dollars in missing funds, under investigation at the time, are kept. The records are lost, but from the ashes of ENRON comes the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, and heavier regulation of corporate accounting practices.

The other thing that rises from the rubble of the World Trade Centers are wars in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda, and the Taliban government that is supporting them, and a virtually inexplicable invasion of Iraq. The purpose of the latter is the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, which had once been a U.S. ally against the Shiite radicals in Iran led by spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

16) The End of Value: The Iraq War, it is later learned, is predicated on a phony report that Hussein was ready to use "WMD" - Weapons of Mass Destruction. President George W. Bush, for reasons that will be studied forever by historians, topples Hussein where his father before him had chosen a more prudent path, leaving Hussein in power after the 1993 Iraq War that drove Hussein from U.S.-friendly Kuwait. It is also soon realized that while the U.S. invades Iraq from the North and South - Turkey and Kuwait respectively - agents of the Iranian government invade from the East, where they fuel an insurgent underground that saps the resources of the U.S. military, and saps the will of the American people.

Sustaining two wars simultaneously on the other side of the globe, without a congressionally-approved allocation of funds, evaporates the U.S. budget surplus and soon puts us into a deficit, helped along by across-the-board tax cuts that weigh heavily in favor of the wealthy.

With the U.S. (and world) economy slowing from a jobs-producing Clinton Era machine to a jobless slog, the Bush Administration urges Americans to spend, and particularly to invest in real estate, and a real estate bubble that has been slowly growing in high growth areas for years suddenly expands dramatically. And then, two-thirds of the way through G.W. Bush's two terms in office, it breaks, taking the world economy down with it.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The collapse of the real estate market reveals something that goes all the way back to 1971 and President Richard Nixon's decision to put the U.S. economy on the same fiat-type currency evaluation the rest of the world had been on for some time. Fiat-based currencies are designed to be regulated by government controls, but the U.S. has never been enamored with that type of socialist thinking, so in the U.S. the value of things is determined by the market. In real estate, the bullish markets of the 1990s and early 2000s, especially in the high-growth parts of the U.S., like Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California, feed a perception - endorsed by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and many other key economic influencers - that real estate values will continue to grow into the foreseeable future, largely independent of the inherent value of each property. So in California you get a lot of 1,800-square foot homes valued at $600,000 and greater, with more than half of that value being hot air, an inflation pumped up on the strength of what the market will allow. And with people clearly convinced that the only remaining avenue toward any significant level of personal wealth and security is through real estate investments, hopeful buyers go all in. More than that, hopeful financial players go all in, too; even Main Street operations like Bank of America, who offer loans to anyone who can breathe and sign a mortgage contract. The smart guys in the finance offices know that these loans are bound to go bad, particularly as the economy starts to slow down in the Bush years, and more and more buyers are confronted with ballooning interest payments. So they package the loans in bundles and sell them off to investors, as they always have, but then they dump the paperwork and wash their hands of the whole thing. The buyers of these bundled securities are concerned enough about their actual value that they take out government-backed insurance that will guarantee them a return on the likelihood that the loans fail. So long as people in the government will go along with this, everyone in the food chain gets over except the U.S. taxpayers, millions of whom will lose their homes to foreclosure, and millions of whom will see their properly mortgaged properties lose their value due to all the foreclosed properties springing up in their areas.

2008: RESTORING INTEGRITY TO THE SYSTEM

17) Politics of Surrender: The 2008 election, between U.S. Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, becomes a mirror image of the 1976 Ford-Carter election, though somehow the U.S. news industry, itself in a state of morbidity, determines to see a John F. Kennedy in the young one-term Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. (The media's pitch of this unlikely parallel is a little unsettling, unless the narrative is indicative of some other story in progress.) When the utterly unprepared Obama comes to office, lifted by an unprecedented turnout of young and Black voters, and the temporary endorsement of independent voters, he discovers that he has inherited the worst economy since that of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To confront the economic debacle, which threatens to sink the banking industry and the world economy with it, Obama does two significant things: he bails out the finance industry with short-term loans using money borrowed from big European banks and the Chinese government, and he bails out General Motors, a company on the brink of bankruptcy, thus saving the American symbol, along with the chain of suppliers who make up a significant part of the U.S. workforce.

The result is that the U.S. is drowning in debt so deep that sustaining government services is not possible without new revenues or drastic revisions in assistance to the poor and the most vulnerable members of society.

There are sell-outs, too. Obama ensures American dependence on fossil fuels, opening areas for off-shore drilling and letting British Petroleum off the hook when their Deep Water Horizon well bursts and pollutes the waters off Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Redneck Riviera of Georgia and Florida.

Obama buckles to the pharmaceutical industry, signing legislation that protects U.S. manufacturers against price competition from Canada. And most importantly, he champions a health care solution that cements the role of private insurers in health care delivery, which is anathema to Democratic principles.

The Near Future

So now we are in September, 2012, just two months away from the November election, and the wars rage on in most ways. After more than 10 years, the Afghanistan War appears to be waxing back in favor of the Taliban. And yet we stay, because Afghanistan and Pakistan are crucial for reasons that have never been made entirely clear. And while we have pulled out of Iraq, we fight to stay there, close by in Kuwait and Qatar, to control what is not ours to control.

Iran threatens to close down oil transports through the Persian Gulf - called Arabian Gulf by Saudis - and to develop nuclear weapons that would threaten the safety of Israel.

And so, one might well ask, what has all this been worth?

We have gained no security, and in fact are poorer than ever. There is real suspicion that the U.S. may have moved into a new normal, which is to say a sustained period of diminished potentials.

And the Obama re-election? What difference would it make, given that he has governed so far the right of what would be required to distinguish his from Republican policy?

Obama's health care plan, after all, is the one devised by Mitt Romney for Massachusetts and championed by 1996 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS).

 

Without some major correction ▬ some massive re-direction of focus in the American public ▬ the calculations that went into pulling off the 9-11 plot will have been successful. The Vulcans (read the article in the column at right) have driven U.S. foreign and domestic policy to the right, destroyed all investigations into the financial and political crimes at the heart of the story, and most importantly have put time between the crime and now. With each passing year, it makes it less likely that the public will distinguish the history of the events of 9-11, which were written in stone virtually in the moments in which they happened  ▬  through news accounts and immediate official reports  ▬  from the truth of all that transpired.

The latter, after all, is always the work of kooks and conspiracy theorists.

NOTE: Where exactly is this Muslim army poised to destroy the United States of America? The largest of the armies in the Islamic world is that of Iran, and that is under the control of the Iranian government, not the Ayatollah, and the government in that country is struggling to remain in control against an educated class of progressives who are not at all in line with the radical elements of Islam. This is why you have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a struggle to control the purely religious elements that influence his country's direction, while also attempting to placate more progressive voices. None of this amounts to a threat against the U.S.