NIGHTLINE covers 911 Truth in wake of Pentagon Shooting

[elfismiles]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqQHHYaBsGg

[Simulist]

Didn't people pay attention in Sunday School? Anyone who has a different interpretation of the official story gets ridiculed — no matter how silly the official story may be. That's a pretty instructive lesson really.

And that's really all this Nightline piece amounts to: ridicule. The message? "You don't want to be thought of like that 'crazy gunman,' so don't be any different from the rest of us."

(Humans and lemmings must have a common ancestor...)

[JackRiddler]

One must give props.

This is the best network TV coverage ever, and it's thanks to the skilled way in which everyone buttonholed by the sandbag journalist turned the tables on him. That even includes the Loose Change guys, unusually restrained but constructively combative against leading questions. I very much liked Avery's parry to "Why would they do this?": "Why wouldn't they do this?" Well rehearsed, it shows an awareness that five words is all he gets on that one, that they're not going to allow talk of PNAC or Bush geostrategy or the fact that the crimes following from 9/11 showed an equal willingness to murder and in fact have killed many times more people. (Perhaps Avery was also aware that he's not necessarily the guy to try that.)

Betsy Metz, Coleen Rowley and Sander Hicks all did beautifully in projecting sanity and credibility and in underlining the undeniability of a cover-up (Hicks slipped a bit, it seemed to me out of his usual narcissism). Again, they knew this was at best all they would get, and at least the piece showed the unusual smidgen of integrity of not trying to smear them as Bedells, or smelly kooks; also in acknowledging the presence of Sept 11 relatives. All the closeups of fellows looking like the cliche "CT" (and there are a lot of them) thankfully were broken up by shots of women and generally well-spoken statements.

Nevertheless, we learn 9/11 "truthers" (goddamn that word) are all motivated by an unshakable faith. My heart sank at the statement that "the gospel of this movement" is Loose Change, though I guessed it was coming. It's so important to airbrush out the four years of stubborn work and the confrontation with the 9/11 coverup that preceded the arrival of LC and the dominance of the demolitions church! Of course the piece failed as usual to give a coherent reading of any of "the evidence," beyond implying that it's almost all about demolitions and that this has been discredited. (You could tell from the superficiality that the sandbagger hasn't looked into the NIST report or Steven Jones and the rest, probably not even "Popular Mechanics.")

Another usual routine is to assert "they don't come forward with the evidence" while, of course not letting anyone speak for more than a soundbite and not summarizing anyone's book (or even, thank god, Loose Change) before going to Hamilton (as usual!) and his lie that if only there were evidence, his crew would have looked at it.

The self-imposed demolitions focus of the majority remaining in the active 9/11 truth movement (true among actors sincere and fraudulent alike) remains a millstone. Its popularity comes from the epic miscalculation that claiming "proof" of demolitions is a shortcut that settles the case for anyone who doesn't already think so. It makes it easy for such reports to let themselves off the hook. The most important question posed in the piece - "Why wouldn't they do this?" - need not be pursued. Ironically that's very much due to the faulty oeuvre of the man who asked that question.

The only way forward politically has always been to pound away at the coverup and demand all books opened and all "persons of interest" interrogated, repeatedly, under oath, in public. Those who remember the period from Watergate to Iran-Contra know this was once possible, if not successful, in Congress itself.

The point is not whether it's realistic to expect disclosure of a gangster government but that, given all politics is rooted in theater, and given that the debate over 9/11 is a form of war, focusing on the coverup had the chance of defining the debate and motivating the uncertain to join in the same demand. (Instead of accusing them of being "gatekeepers" and agents.) Demolitions and other positivist theories of "what really happened" also facilitate omission of the context, which in turn is what makes clear that the "simplest explanation" for all of the relevant facts - which include the pre-planned, immediate full-spectrum exploitation of (and unlimited profiteering from) an event that was known to be coming by more than just its planners - is indeed that there was orchestration on the part of deep state elements to assure "successful" 9/11 attacks.

[Username]

~
May I add this thread to yours?

tyvm
~

[elfismiles]

One must give props.

This is the best network TV coverage ever, and it's thanks to the skilled way in which everyone buttonholed by the sandbag journalist turned the tables on him. That even includes the Loose Change guys, unusually restrained but constructively combative against leading questions. I very much liked Avery's parry to "Why would they do this?": "Why wouldn't they do this?" Well rehearsed, it shows an awareness that five words is all he gets on that one, that they're not going to allow talk of PNAC or Bush geostrategy or the fact that the crimes following from 9/11 showed an equal willingness to murder and in fact have killed many times more people. (Perhaps Avery was also aware that he's not necessarily the guy to try that.)

Betsy Metz, Coleen Rowley and Sander Hicks all did beautifully in projecting sanity and credibility and in underlining the undeniability of a cover-up (Hicks slipped a bit, it seemed to me out of his usual narcissism). Again, they knew this was at best all they would get, and at least the piece showed the unusual smidgen of integrity of not trying to smear them as Bedells, or smelly kooks; also in acknowledging the presence of Sept 11 relatives. All the closeups of fellows looking like the cliche "CT" (and there are a lot of them) thankfully were broken up by shots of women and generally well-spoken statements.

<snip>

Thanks for commenting Jack. I was hoping to get your opinion on this coverage.

I too felt it might qualify for "best network TV coverage ever" but sometimes it's hard for me to be unbiased in my sensing of the msm.

[Canadian_watcher]

CBC has done some good work, too:

The Unofficial Story

[thatsmystory]

The media is exempt from criticism. It's their game so they set the rules. Some people like to say "Who needs the media?" What they miss is that the media gets access to government officials. If you don't have access you are left to speculate and eventually will be labeled a conspiracy nut by the media! The tragedy (for the public) is that the media wastes their access. They ask softballs or limit the line of questioning to "politically acceptable" avenues. The media and the two party system have the same advantage. A weird mix of authoritarianism and propaganda creates a climate in which corruption is passed off as incompetence and anyone who says "What is this bullshit?" is labeled an unpatriotic conspiracy nut.

In such a rigged system Hamilton gets to play the "where is the evidence" card and not be called on it. One need not consider a single theory to demonstrate why Hamilton is completely full of shit. Many key 9/11 records are still classified! Hamilton damn well knows this. We are talking about a basic failure in transparency. It doesn't matter if the classified records back up every word of the 9/11 Commission report. The issue is the secrecy. Has ABC interviewed Richard Blee? Have they asked anyone at Alec Station to explain why two ID'ed al Qaeda operatives with links to the embassy bombings and the Cole attack were allowed to roam around the US for 20 months before Alec Station finally notified the FBI?

This memo demonstrates the attitude of the Washington insiders. They don't seem to believe the public has a right to know what happened on 9/11.

[82_28]

I've literally always wondered that all this "dust up" on 9/11 going on 9 years wasn't simply due to the unforeseeable tides of the Internet. The plan had to have been hatched at least some 5 to 10 years earlier. Which would put it into the era of commercials like these:



Yet strangely, when you think about it, those AT&T commercials came out CLOSER in time to 9/11/01 than 9/11/01 is to 9/11/10! Which helps to put things into perspective. Linux wasn't even conceived of until 1991 I believe. The earliest "social networking site" that I remember was this thing called "6 degrees". That was probably 1996-97 ish?

In a phrase, I often wonder if these plans were hatched, the money spent, the operatives in place when speculations upon high, dark conspiracies couldn't go VIRAL. The viral and ultimately open source nature of the internet was unforeseen, as can be witnessed in those AT&T commercials. The companies pushing the move into the "digital age" thought they had shit locked up in their UNIXES and SOLARISES and what not -- everything proprietary and expensive. They imagined a somewhat more advanced and modern way in which customers would remain "private" about their use of their new technologies. So the criminals, masterminds of the deed were planning all along, a 1960's era conspiracy, only in a 2000 and beyond world with information sharing capabilities unfathomable back, I presume, when the black contracts were signed.

Thus our steady march into fascism, with the tried and true fascists taking their witheringly powerful corporate and military elements today, calling the anti-fascists the actual fascists themselves.

Another example of this is how viral atheism has gotten. I called myself an atheist way back when it was uncool (circa AT&T ad above and a little beyond), now every forum in the world has denizens of bitter, cruel atheists. They have fully taken over. In newsgroups in the mid 90's it was a long hard slog to take on dozens of fundies. Now they are taken out forthwith.

Open source, distributed, anonymous information probably, IMO, has more to do with the "truther" movement than the actual crime itself that happened on that day. It could very well be the cause of the housing bubble and all the other bubbles that are obviously out there. The empire must provide chaff to cover for their mistakes as they diligently get their shit together. Like a ratchet, they move on to the next notch in order stave off responsibility -- humanity, Earth be damned.

[JackRiddler]

82_28, thanks for some insights new to me!

[surfaceskimmer]

Sure am glad I missed that show... but then I stopped watching TV and MSM news a long time ago. What would one expect from a network started by the chairman of the SEC who went on to service as the DCI, the same one that ran a simulation -- which by definition is the same as reality these days -- to show how LHO fired the magic bullet that did its dirty deed?!

I'll stick with Dr. David Ray Griffin, thanks, and Peter Dale Scott, and a small army of their types who do their homework.

I was in the production meeting with Av Westin and Harry Reasoner one day as an intern at ABC-TV Evening News when Washington called and set the tone and tenor of that Vietnam-era broadcast with fresh footage coming in from the Hong Kong bureau then run by Ted Koppel.

The Mighty Wurlitzer is still playing A-19.

[Allegro]

Good ideas, 82_28. As one response to

They imagined a somewhat more advanced and modern way in which customers would remain "private" about their use of their new technologies.

is a video presented on the FreePress.net web site during a 2008 conference.

If one first plays the video AT&T You Will Ads from 1993 followed by this video Big Media Hall of Shame: Worst Corporation, one might feel again a quiet outrage for what appears as part of a strategic plan decades in advance of imagining our losses of privacy essential in that plan. And as many have said before me, easily presumed is corporatocracy’s trumpeting of 9/11, necessarily by monumental planning for immense psychological and profitable advantages, excessively forced fear laden privacy challenges into the U.S. citizenry’s psyché.
_____________________
AT&T You Will Ads from 1993


_____________________
Big Media Hall of Shame: Worst Corporation | 2008

[elfismiles]

Inside a 9/11 'Truther' Convention
http://blogs.abcnews.com/nightlinedaily ... tion-.html

Betsy's Uncut ABC Interview, Chris Bury, Correspondent (Recorded by Mark, We Are Change, Boston) from Elizabeth O. Metz on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/10021081

ABC interviews Coleen Rowley at the Treason In America Conference - 03/06/10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcbGRgT-L7s

9/11 truthers attend Treason in America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-7GCs-2NUg

TV Media Info Wars Strikes At Valley Forge ‘9/11 Truth’ Conference
http://www.onlyinphiladelphia.com/2010/ ... onference/

[SanDiegoBuffGuy]

This may backfire, I think...

[HamdenRice]

The only way forward politically has always been to pound away at the coverup and demand all books opened and all "persons of interest" interrogated, repeatedly, under oath, in public. Those who remember the period from Watergate to Iran-Contra know this was once possible, if not successful, in Congress itself.

If history is a guide my guess is that the way forward is going to come from a disclosure by a disgruntled foreign intelligence service/government or some part of it. Iran Contra was broken by the leak, by a well placed Iranian functionary, to a Lebanese newspaper as part of an intra-Iranian struggle over power and policy (and specifically, whether Iran should accept weapons from the US), as an explanation of Eugene Hasfus's appearance in Nicaragua as a surviving prisoner of a shot down gun running CIA air shipment. Even though the Iranian leaker, Mehdi Hashemi, was disappeared within Iran before the story he leaked even ran in Lebanon (and was subsequently tortured and executed before the scandal fully unfolded in the US), the western media seemed in those days to feel the need to address this explosive story in a (to Americans) obscure Lebanese magazine.

Today, with the internet and near universal access of everyone to published information almost anywhere, the media feel no such need -- an irony of the internet age, I suppose.

It seems to me that it's after some effective disclosure elsewhere that the political classes in the US feel compelled to put their own operatives "under oath."

One of the things I've always found most interesting about 9/11 is how much, even in the official story, other governments are said to have known about 9/11 before it happened. During the Bush years, foreign governments hinted at spilling the beans several times, or selectively leaked, but ultimately did not put all the pieces on the media table. France, Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia have all made thinly disguised threats about this over the years.

I was thinking about this because here in NYC, the cable tv companies have recently added free stations that are little more than official propaganda outlets for "frienemy" governments like China and Russia. These stations are staffed by engaging young westerners, mostly Americans, so that you barely know you are listening to a foreign sponsored media outlet. (Perhaps opening the airways has something to do with debt, or maybe with comity considering the ubiquity of CNN over there.) China has BON Network, which is fairly apolitical, and focused on recruiting Americans to come work and play in Beijing, while teaching Americans how to speak Chinese (badly taught by the way by a west-friendly African guy), but it seems to have gone off the air. Russia has RT which is more straightforward in presenting a trenchant critique of US foreign policy and economy from a neo-KGB perspective, plus a lot of local Russian and European news. And the other night one of the stories RT covered was what they called the "growing" 9/11 Truth movement, presented as a logical, rational citizens' reaction of the events of the date and its aftermath.

I guess the question is whether any of these foreign governments or factions are going to make the cost benefit analysis that telling everything they know is more useful than holding back at some point. For example, screwing around with Afghan warlord Rashid Dostum, such as asking him, even politely, to stop killing people, to refrain from dealing in opium and destabilizing the Afghan government, or probing too deeply into his past massacres of civilians, is probably not a good idea from the perspective of the US goal of keeping the official narrative simple and clean.

Btw, I'm not making any claim about what the content is of what these agencies and actors may know -- although considering what's already in the 9/11 Report, the mainstream media, the foreign press, and the infamous August PDB, there's a good chance it's about how much warning the Bush administration had and at what level in the administration it rose to.

[JackRiddler]

The only way forward politically has always been to pound away at the coverup and demand all books opened and all "persons of interest" interrogated, repeatedly, under oath, in public. Those who remember the period from Watergate to Iran-Contra know this was once possible, if not successful, in Congress itself.

If history is a guide my guess is that the way forward is going to come from a disclosure by a disgruntled foreign intelligence service/government or some part of it. Iran Contra was broken by the leak, by a well placed Iranian functionary, to a Lebanese newspaper...

I am in full agreement, and have said so here before. The likeliest models for cracking the cover-up involve insiders: Pentagon Papers or a foreign leak as with Iran-Contra. In the above, I was talking about what one could do as a "movement" from the outside to create an atmosphere that encourages leaks, "limited hangouts" that inadvertantly chip away at the original official story, fuck-ups and genuine "whistle-blowing."

Such a movement must appear sane, appeal to justice for the victims, mobilize the broadest possible coalition (not "big tent" but with the majority who don't want to call "inside job"), and demand truth rather than espouse its own version of it (the latter should be researched and published, but not trumpeted as a political demand).

If on the other hand the potential leaker sees that when they speak up
- the government or their employers will find ways to punish them in court or by other means of harrassment or attack;
- the "debunkers" will call them crazy or greedy or attention whores
- right-wingers will threaten them as traitors,
- and, to top it off, members of the so-called "truth movement" will accuse them of witting participation in the cover-up or the crime itself (because they didn't talk about demolitions or Israel or whatever the standard is), or else seek to combine their revelations with conspiracy exotica...
then they are much less likely to speak.

I'm certain the mainstream attitude among the foreign agencies is to avoid pulling the curtain aside to reveal wizardry, as they all use deception and brutality as their means. An open assault on the 9/11 story means hardball in return. It would release a whirlwind of unpredictable forces. And it's not like several of them were not themselves involved in the same "spook international." Also, practically all of them are hiding different kinds of criminal operations against their own people. The Russian apartment bombings of 9/99, it's close to an open-and-shut case.

So the likeliest model is of an internal conflict prompting leaks, like the example you point out that got the Iran-Contra ball rolling. Always a dangerous game for those who make such moves.