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Lifted gently with great affection from Lawyers, Guns & Money:
- The next time you hear some washed-up comedian/Gamergater/Republican/wingnut whinging about political correctness, please remember that they’re not actually concerned about being censored. Remember that they resent self-censoring because they know their views are unpopular. It’s not that they want to espouse their views; it’s that they want to feel comfortable espousing them. It’s rare they come right out and say it, however “If you don’t think your personal relationships are a target, then answer this question: How free do you feel to express your non-PC ideas to a coworker, classmate, or neighbor?”
- Some prankster wrote reviews of some Ikea products. They are hilarious and brilliant. You are invited to our upcoming nuptials.
- Paint with Donald Trump. Don’t make a pile of shit; it’s already been done. (By that I mean I’ve already done it.) Thanks to Shakezula for the link.
- One of my co-bloggers (I won’t say whom but his name rhymes with Lobert Larley) sent me a link to the "Onion" ’s take on how animals evolved. It’s possibly slightly more embarrassing and inaccurate than my previous posts on evolution.
- It’s hard for me to express how grossed out I am by the evo-psych narrative that women are natural nurturers. Let me make this clear: I am a woman. I am not your mother, your nursemaid or your teddy bear with a vagina. I’m not here to soothe you or clean up your messes; that is what the droids that will surely one day rise up and destroy us all are for.
Back to business . . .
Unimaginable isn't it? No matter how hard we try to imagine it.
No wonder the 9/11 report reads like illogical, almost illiterate people put it together.
I knew the following documentation existed somewhere, but without Dr. Paul Craig Roberts' prior reporting, which I highlighted in my essay previously, I may never have taken a look at the entire video.
If anyone knows why the following group of riveting interviews is illegitimate, please, enlighten me. Because I viewed a lot of this reporting myself on 9/11/01, and never heard about it again. Ever. And certainly not in the 9/11 report.
Was There Foreknowledge by Officials that the Pentagon Would be Point Pent-4: Attacked?
The Official Account
Critical to the success of the 9/11 attacks was the element of surprise, which was emphasized by key White House and Pentagon officials:
- President George Bush said, “They [al-Qaeda] struck in a way that was unimaginable.” [1]
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “Never would have crossed anyone’s mind.” [2]
- General Richard Myers, Deputy Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “You hate to admit it, but we hadn’t thought about this.” [3]
- White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, “Never did we imagine what would take place on September 11th, where people used those airplanes as missiles and weapons.” [4]
- National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” [5]
- Air Force Lt. Col. Vic Warzinski, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “The Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way, and I doubt prior to Tuesday’s event, anyone would have expected anything like that here. There was no foreshadowing, no particular warning that would have led anyone with any reasonable view of the world to think this was a threat we faced.” [6]
The Best Evidence
The following evidence suggests that an attack on the Pentagon was not at all unexpected: [7]
I. Pre-911 Military Exercises Involving Planes Flown into the Pentagon
- In 1999 NORAD conducted hijacking exercises where planes were flown into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. [8]
- The US military held an exercise rehearsing a response to an airliner crash at the Pentagon on October 24-26, 2000. Emergency responders from the Pentagon and Arlington County assembled in a conference room in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for a mass casualty exercise that involved a commercial airliner crashing into the Pentagon and killing 341 people. [9]
- Department of Defense medical personnel trained for the scenario of a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” being flown into the Pentagon in May, 2001. [10]
II. Government Officials Warned Not to Fly
Several warnings from security sources to Pentagon and other officials about flying on September 11 were reported in the news:
- In a story about warnings, Newsweek reported: “On Sept. 10, "Newsweek" has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” [11]
- San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown received a warning from what he described as his airport security people late Monday evening. [12]
- Salman Rushdie was prevented, by an emergency resolution from the FAA, from flying the week of September 11th, 2001. [13]
III. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld Twice Predicts Imminent Pentagon Attacks
- On the morning of September 11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, seeking approval for enhanced missile defense, held a well-attended 8:00 – 8:50 AM Pentagon breakfast meeting with House supporters. The meeting was winding down just about the time the first Tower was hit at 8:46 AM. During the course of the meeting, Rumsfeld reportedly said that “sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department.” [14]
- Later, in a meeting in Rumsfeld’s office, Christopher Cox, the defense policy committee chairman of the House of Representatives, reported Rumsfeld to have been more specific. Cox said:
Just moments before the Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker, Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why America needs to … focus on the real threat facing us in the 21st century: terrorism, and the unexpected. …
‘If we remain vulnerable to missile attack, a terrorist group or rogue state that demonstrates the capacity to strike the U.S. or its allies from long range could have the power to hold our entire country hostage to nuclear or other blackmail,’ he said ‘And let me tell you … there will be another event … There will be another event.’ ” [15]
According to "The Telegraph," Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, was in his office on the eastern side of the building, in a meeting with Christopher Cox. Mr Rumsfeld, recalls Mr Cox, watched the TV coverage from New York and said: “Believe me, this isn’t over yet. There’s going to be another attack, and it could be us.” [16]
Moments later, the plane hit [the Pentagon]. (When the attack did occur, it did not threaten Rumsfeld, as the attack was on the opposite side of the building.)
IV. NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski Warned of Pentagon Attack by Intelligence Officer
Sometime between 9:03 and 9:37 AM, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said on camera:
“The first time I heard the word ‘terrorism’ out of any US official came shortly after the second plane hit, and I bumped into a US military intelligence official, and I said, ‘Look … what have you got?’ And he said ‘Obviously this is clearly an act of terrorism. And then he got very close to me, and … almost silent for a few seconds, and he leaned in and he said, ‘This attack was so well coordinated that if I were you, I would stay off the E Ring’ – where our NBC office was – ‘the outer ring of the Pentagon for the rest of the day, because we’re next.’ ” [17]
The intelligence official’s apparent foreknowledge was unaccountably specific:
V. FBI Confiscates Security Camera Videotapes within Minutes of Pentagon Attack
- How did he know the Pentagon would be hit next?
- Even if he had just guessed that the Pentagon would be hit next, how could he have guessed that the outermost E Ring would be the specific target?
- Of course, if an airplane attack had been aimed at one of the walls, the E Ring would have been struck. But why would he have guessed that the attack would have targeted one of the walls, which are only 80 feet high, when it would have been have been easier for a plane to dive into the Pentagon’s roof, where it might have killed the secretary of defense and some top brass?
On the morning of 9/11, the Pentagon was surrounded by rush-hour traffic jams. [18]
A Department of Justice after-action report describes the difficulty the FBI had in getting to the scene following the official attack time of 9:37 AM:
“The FBI Evidence Recovery Team began arriving before 10:00 a.m. and set up in a grassy area a short distance from the heliport. Because of the extremely congested traffic conditions, it took several hours for the entire FBI contingent to negotiate the route from the District of Columbia to the Pentagon.” [19]
The first priority of the Evidence Recovery Team was “to find and collect all the airplane parts and other bits of evidence from the lawn on the west side of the building, before firefighters and other rescue workers completely trampled it.”[20]
In spite of these conditions and priorities, FBI agents identified at least two private businesses whose security cameras may have captured the attack. The FBI agents then confiscated their videotapes within minutes after the Pentagon was hit:
The FBI agents who arrived so promptly to seize the business videotapes appeared to be operating separately from the traffic-delayed FBI Evidence Recovery Team.
- José Velásquez, the Citgo gas station supervisor was interviewed by the "Richmond Times-Dispatch:" “Velasquez says the gas station’s security cameras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recorded the moment of impact. ‘I’ve never seen what the pictures looked like,’ he said. ‘The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.’ ” [21]
- “A security camera atop a hotel close to the Pentagon may have captured dramatic footage of the hijacked Boeing 757 airliner as it slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon. Hotel employees sat watching the film in shock and horror several times before the FBI confiscated the video.” [22]
Conclusion
The idea of 9/11 foreknowledge is also covered in a Consensus Point about World Trade Center 7, another about insider trading, a third about VP Cheney’s role regarding the Pentagon, a fourth about NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and a fifth Point about the Able Danger data-mining discoveries.
This compelling array of evidence suggests that there was foreknowledge of the Pentagon attack by various officials. The strike on the Pentagon (whatever its nature) requires a full, impartial investigation with subpoena power.
References for Point Pent-4
Other force disturbances:
America's Oligarch Problem: How the Super-Rich Threaten US Democracy
The sky's the limit when it comes to the United States' campaign finance system. Increasingly, the country's richest sector is gaining influence and control over America's politicals. The development threatens the country's once proud democracy.
What Dick Cheney Has Learned From History
The former vice president has proposed an alternative to Obama’s Iran deal. It sounds an awful lot like war.
Silicon Valley's Labor Uprising
Gabriel Cárdenas, 27, works in the warehouses of Google Express — Google’s same-day and overnight online shopping and delivery service — loading and unloading trucks. The sometimes suffocatingly hot warehouse in Palo Alto, Calif., is a far cry from the beautifully appointed Google campus in nearby Mountain View, with its radiant cooling system.
USAID and the Criminalization of Social Movements in Paraguay
The massacre took place on June 15, 2012, when more than 300 special operations police officers within the Grupo Especial de Operaciones (GEO) attempted to forcibly displace 60 campesinos (farm workers or peasants) who were occupying a highly contested piece of land. Long-distance shots were fired and a battle ensued leaving 11 campesinos and six officers dead.
This moment, which shocked the country with violence unheard of since Paraguay's military dictatorship ended in 1989, was used by the Congress of Paraguay as a primary excuse to impeach center-left president Fernando Lugo. Three years later, 13 of the campesinos are on trial facing criminal charges.
However, the "#somosobservadores" campaign has highlighted the fact that as of this date no police officers or officials have been investigated for the killings of the 11 campesinos.
Whistleblower on Medical Research Fraud: 'Positive Results Are Better for Your Career'
In an interview, whistleblower Peter Wilmshurst discusses how pressure from Big Pharma corrupts research into new medicines and leads companies to cover up fraudulent data. He says he has no regrets about taking on an entire industry.
Voting, Elections, Climate, 9/11 and to Hell with False Balance: - Brad Friedman on 9/11
The War Against Women: College Campuses and American Culture
A Refugee Crisis Made in America
Ever seen that last video before?
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