The truth is stranger than fiction

In my update to yesterday's post, I addressed the conspiracy theory (actually well-grounded in fact) that the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9-11 was not only the attack by commercial jetliners, but a controlled demolition as well. This has led to a Facebook conversation with a skeptic (whose name I am withholding), which I thought deserved a larger audience.

Skeptic: Who set the charges?

HT: As I indicated in my post, we do not know. If it was a false-flag attack (conspiracy theory alert), it would probably have been done by undercover CIA operatives, possibly agents of al-Qaeda on the CIA payroll, as suggested by my link to Michael Chussodovsky [director of the Canadian think tank Global Research, often quoted in this space]. I do not know -- we may never know.

Skeptic:  really!? Our own CIA was in on destroying two of the most expensive buildings in the world and killing thousands of people and doing incalcuable harm to the American economy. okay, gotcha.

HT: I know it's hard to believe. I get that. The problem is that our federal government has been manipulated for years (I'm not sure how many) by people intent on using it for their own benefit at the expense of the rest of us. These people have no problem with murdering thousands (even hundreds of thousands, if you include Iraqis and Afghans) and cleaning millions of Americans out of their savings (through bank and currency manipulations) to maintain their wealth acquired through an imperialist American foreign policy. I'm not speculating about Jews, Illuminati, and Freemasons -- I'm talking about New York bankers (and by extension, the Federal Reserve Bank, which prints our money), arms merchants, and people like George Soros, a billionaire who profited heavily from our moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (by buying into a Brazilian oil company that is drilling in the Atlantic and ... the Gulf of Mexico), and is trying to replicate on the dollar his feat of profitably crashing the British pound about a decade ago -- effectively stealing billions in savings from the British people. [To which I should have added a host of very corrupt Congressmen, like inside traders John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and those who donate heavily to their campaigns.] The endgame is to reduce all but a small elite of the American people to poverty, so they will willingly enslave themselves to the rich that remain in order to survive. It serves their interest to have Americans more interested in football, Lindsay Lohan, and Dancing with the Stars, and in what would be (but for Ron Paul) a meaningless Republican primary, than to understand what is really going on.




A future historian might well entitle their work on the last fifty years, While American Slept: The decline and fall of the United States of America.

Wednesday night, I attended a meeting of an organization of which I have been a member for sixteen years. Before it started (it is a small group), I briefly went over the Defense Appropriation Bill's detainment provisions and their implications (essentially what I wrote Nov. 29), and asked them if this was the kind of government they really wanted to pledge their allegiance to (They know I have not recited the Pledge of Allegiance since I joined them). And again, even with this warning, I remained the only one not to stand up for the pledge. Our people are very confused, and I am beginning to wonder what, if anything, will shake them out of the myth that we still live, and always will live, in a "sweet land of liberty."

My allegiance to the United States government is conditional on its fidelity to the Constitution, which represents the basic principles of our Founding Fathers. My desire for Ohio independence is to replace that government with a smaller one that is faithful to the same principles, as the Ohio Constitution is (in some ways better than the U.S. Constitution). If we see a miracle next year in the election of a President and Congress who are faithful to the Constitution, I will reconsider my position, but I am not confident that such a miracle will happen.

9-11

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

There is only so much one can say on 9-11, so this will probably be my last post on the subject, unless something new emerges that calls for comment.

The most appropriate way to observe 9-11 is to make it a day:

• To remember the 3,100 people who died in the attacks.
• To thank the first responders in New York and Washington for risking their lives to save so many others, and to bring closure to the families of those who perished.
• To remind ourselves of the threat of terrorism, at least as long as we maintain a military presence in the far reaches of the globe. Many people scoff at the idea of "Fortress America" -- keeping our troops entirely (or almost entirely) within our own borders; but no military presence abroad can really respect the sovereignty of other nations. Those who doubt this should consider how we would react if foreign troops were stationed on our soil. Justifying our presence abroad in the face of the Golden Rule (for example, by justifying it as "American exceptionalism") is nothing more than pure arrogance on our part. Our presence abroad provides terrorists with the motivation to attack us. We have no moral obligation to protect any country except our own. Europe is (or should be) perfectly capable of defending Europe. Israel and South Korea can likewise defend themselves against any likely attackers. The simplest and most effective antidote to terrorism is to remove their motivation to attack us.
• To mourn for the lost liberty that we allowed to occur, in the false belief that it was necessary to preserve our national security. Americans need to remember that the Fourth Amendment (against unreasonable searches and seizures), the rest of the Bill of Rights, and the Constitutional protections of habeas corpus*, and against bills of attainder and ex post facto laws** are absolutes. The best security for Americans is to jealously guard our liberties from our own governments, which by their nature will attack personal liberties for their convenience, or to protect favored interests.

As in past years, I refuse to be drawn into the "truther" arguments. I am not saying that the truthers are wrong -- I am saying that evidence to prove the truth either does not exist, or will remain hidden until this country experiences a revoluton, or years after most of us are dead.

Two of our Founding Fathers have given us the admonitions we most need to heed whenever we remember 9-11:

"Eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty"

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The man who would exchange essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin

Americans lost their liberty because the people were not vigilant; and the experience of the last ten years should show us why we are today neither free nor safe.

* Habeas corpus is the legal principle that one should not be detained by the state, except according to law -- specifically, pursuant to a court order.

** Definitions and examples of bills of attainder and ex post facto laws (scroll down just past the sentence in bold).

9-11

Last year and the year before, I wrote about the questions that surround the events of 9-11 -- whether they were really the work of Al-Qaeda, or were an "inside job." There is little point to rehashing these issues; because they may never be resolved.

This year, however, we seem to be experiencing an attempt to whip up hatred of Muslims, beginning with the media-induced campaign against opening the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, and continuing with the threatened burning of the Koran in Florida. My concern is not with either issue (which I have addressed in earlier posts); but with the way they are being hyped.

Let me be blunt. All efforts to incite hatred are evil. Political and social leaders who preach hatred of others are pursuing agendas that should be questioned closely and shouted down.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had the right idea when he preached non-violence. But the only way to guarantee non-violence is to practice it in thought as well as action.

Those of us who want revolutionary change do so because we love liberty, and want to free our fellow Americans to achieve everything they are capable of. Hatred only strengthens the oppressor.

What IS the truth about 9/11?

I didn't know the truth when I wrote this in September, and I still don't; however this evidence from a registered architect in San Francisco sounds pretty convincing, as reported by Stephanie Kraft, with the Valley Advocate, a weekly alternative newspaper in western Massachusetts.

In the lofty auditorium of Northampton's First Churches on October 10, an audience of perhaps 200 listened as San Francisco architect Richard Gage presented evidence that the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 were brought down on Sept. 11, 2001 by controlled demolition by planted explosive charges, not by the impact and resulting fires when the buildings were hit by hijacked airplanes.

Gage, a member of the AIA (American Institute of Architects) with 20 years' experience designing large gymnasiums and mixed-use structures, presented visuals showing that the longest documented skyscraper fires have never thrown a steel-framed building into total collapse, even fires that burned up to 18 hours (the towers fell less than two hours after the planes hit). He also showed that the cave-in from the centers and the straight descent of the towers at free-fall speed was visually similar to textbook cases of controlled demolition.

He showed that tangled fragments of steel girders were ejected as far as 400 and 600 feet from the lower parts of the towers, a phenomenon hard to explain unless they were propelled by active charges. He showed Building 7 collapsing straight downward in clouds of pyroclastic dust though it was never struck by the planes.

And he cited physical analysis purporting to prove that dust containing signature elements from the high-tech military explosive thermite covered New York after the explosion.

Please note that there is no attempt to theorize on the evidence, only to present it empirically; therefore, we are not dealing with a conspiracy theory here. What Mr. Gage wants, and Americans are entitled to, is an explanation of the events on 9/11 that takes these facts into account.

Virtual buckeye to Rob Williams at Vermont Commons.

9-11

Today is the eighth anniversary of the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and as I observed last year, many questions continue to gnaw at us. There is enough evidence, raised by Michael Ruppert in his book Crossing the Rubicon, and by the 9/11 truth movement, to allow reasonable people to reasonably doubt the official version of events.

I do not know what the truth is about 9/11. I have not investigated the claims of the 9/11 truth movement; and while I have looked at Crossing the Rubicon, the book is a very dense presentation of evidence that I frankly do not have the time or the interest to read through.

I do know this. The "truthers" include the strangest bedfellows in the history of American politics: liberals intent on destroying what legacy President George W. Bush has left; and the John Birch Society, which is trying to establish malfeasance by the federal government. I have read of engineering studies that cast doubt on whether the Twin Towers could have fallen the way they did as the result of the aircrafts' impacts alone. It is evident to me, in the way the federal government has handled such investigations, that it has something to hide; just as the federal government has never addressed the evidence presented by the Zapruder film of a second assassain of John F. Kennedy.

Why should we care? It is, after all, history. It is past, and some would argue, it is time to move on. Here is why we should care: The Kennedy assassination and 9/11 have left suspicions, which appear well-grounded by known evidence, that the federal government has not been truthful with the American people.

We have the right to know the truth, whatever that truth is. If the official version is correct, it will withstand all of the evidence and questions presented against it. Otherwise, it is reasonable for us to assume that the federal government has something to hide; which will only add to the reasons Americans have for separating themselves from it.

9-11

Seven years, as one writer suggested recently, is long enough for the immediate shock and pain to wear off, but not long enough to recede into history.

It is a tragedy whose aftermath continues to gnaw at us. Some people believe that 9-11 was a conspiracy internal to the United States, used to create a hysteria that would provide the pretext for abridging our Constitutional liberties and paving the way for a police state. They base that belief on anomalies in the official explanation for the event (for example, the slow military response to the hijacked airliners).

Whether or not the conspiracy theories are true, it is evident that 9-11 has been used by the United States government to create a "war on terror" that is being used to support an unjustifiable war in Iraq (while only belatedly acknowledging our neglect of a totally justified war in Afghanistan), increase Federal surveillance over the American people, and using our collective fear as an excuse for ignoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

One question that I frequently receive as a secessionist is, how can I justify secession when terrorism is still a threat to America? After all, doesn't the terrorist rhetoric call for conversion of the entire world to Islam by force? Isn't al-Qaeda still well-funded and well-organized?

Yes, I have heard the terrorist rhetoric about forcing Islam on the world, and yes, evidence suggests that al-Qaeda is still well-funded and well-organized; and has successfully resisted attempts to smoke them out in the ungovernable tribal regions of Pakistan.

However, I have no doubt that terrorism is not a threat to a Republic of Ohio that peacefully pursues its own interests in the world. How can that be, you ask? Look at it, not fearfully, but rationally. Al-Qaeda's goal is to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate that existed until 1924. No country, no organization has unlimited resources. Those that are successful in achieving their goals must focus their time, their money, and their people toward achieving them. The United States found themselves in the crosshairs of al-Qaeda, because the American military presence in Saudi Arabia following Desert Storm was religiously offensive to them. With the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the United States government dedicated itself to frustrating the ambitions of al-Qaeda. Assuming that the conspiracy theories are false (and I am not taking a position either way), this is the reason 9-11 occurred. Removing Ohio's troops from the Middle East following independence would remove any motivation for al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts against Ohio. The same could be said of any other state or country that did the same.

To some, this might sound cowardly; but I suggest that it takes great courage to admit that we poked around where we had no real business -- except that of protecting our sources of oil, which are peaking in production capacity, and from which we should be weaning ourselves. In other words, to admit that we were wrong to take this course of action, which can be justified only in terms of imperialism and aggression. I have no doubt that George Washington and most of the Founding Fathers would have sternly disapproved of this action; and am confident that a President as recent as Dwight Eisenhower would have felt the same way.

True national security comes from having a strong national defense that focuses only on defense, from effective border controls; and from a citizenry that, while ever vigilant to threats on their liberty, remains satisfied that their government consistently acts in their interest as opposed to the selfish interests of an élite, or those of a foreign power. Firm in this belief, I remain confident that the Republic of Ohio would have little to fear from Islamic terrorism; but might have to cast more a wary eye on a District of Coercion that uses pretexts like 9-11 to advance its own agenda.