Why Does the Truth Movement Appear More Divided Than it Is? An Answer to JamesB on the Amazon Product Forums

gretavo's picture

LINK TO ORIGINAL

 

James B says:

You got your argument backwards. Of course there are disagreements in science, but in science, unlike conspiracy theories, the disagreements get smaller with research and experimentation. 100 years ago scientists would argue over whether evolution even existed, then it moved on to how genetics worked, now it is into the precise technical elements of genetics. With each generation of research and experimentation there is more and more consensus. Yes, there is a still disagreement, but it is about more and more detailed items.

Now conspiracy theories are exactly the opposite, each generation brings ever more disagreement on even the most basic things. Take the JFK assassination theories. At first there was just an argument as to whether Oswald acted alone or not. 50 Years later though, there is far from a consensus, half the Northern Hemisphere has been drawn into the conspiracy. There are literally thousands of different theories.

The truthers started out with basically 2 camps. LIHOP vs MIHOP. Now there are easily a dozen variations of each, and that is even before getting into the bizarre no planers space beam people. I bet in 5 more years it will be even more fractious.

RT says:

Sorry JamesB, I must take issue with your characterizations on a couple of different points. The first is your claim that the 9/11 truth movement has, in essence, made no progress on coming to any consensus. This is false.

Early in the movement's history, it was common for the idea that the 3 WTC towers were destroyed with explosives to be dismissed as "conspiracy mongering". I remember buying Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon and wondering why he made no mention of the evidence for explosives. I was also disappointed to find that many of the websites on Carol Brouillet's otherwise nifty "deception dollars" also poo-pooed what was becoming known as the "controlled demolition theory".

When I argued on popular 9/11 forums that the physical evidence for the presence of explosives was our trump card, a distinct cadre of "fellow truthers" chided me for advancing unproven theories as fact, suggesting in the strongest terms that the approach i advocated was irresponsible and that we should focus instead on the evidence (flimsy in my view) that the Bush administration ignored numerous clear warnings about an al Qaeda attack and therefore must have been complicit in allowing the attacks to succeed.

Over time, with the earlier work of Steven Jones (before he began advancing dubious theories) and with the formation and rapid growth of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, it became clear that the demolition theory had indeed "won" and people (like the reviewer of this book, J.Gold) became increasingly shrill in denouncing the derisive use among truthers of terms like LIHOP (referring to a position which had become untenable but which some in the movement clinged to with almost religious fervor.)

As the evidence for explosive demolition became more clear, and the position more popular among truth activists, there arose competing claims like the "video fakery", "mini-nuke" and "directed energy weapon" theories, none of which drew more than a token (and likely manufactured) following. That these efforts were deliberate and intended to sow division and confusion as well as to facilitate the misrepresentation of the movement was clear to many of us who began to freely talk about "real truthers" and "fake truthers". Our position on that score was vindicated with the publication in 2008 of a paper by legal scholar and future Obama appointee Cass Sunstein, which discussed the need to use "cognitive infiltration" to undermine dissident groups such as the 9/11 truth movement. Though David Griffin has written an excellent book on the subject, I will quote here Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

"Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."

If the 9/11 truth movement has appeared to become fractious over time, it is most likely as a result of such activities--not necessarily on the part of government agents (alone), but of any number of people who for various reasons prefer that Americans not take the issues raised by 9/11 skeptics seriously. I and an admittedly small number of others hold that as it became evident that the evidence for explosives was so compelling as to neuter the ridiculous alternative theories, it was decided somewhere to introduce the bogus evidence of nanothermite. I say bogus not because nanothermite doesn't exist--it most certainly does, but because it is not needed to explain any aspect of the WTC demolitions, which were more likely achieved with some quantity of ordinary thermite (to quietly thin the thickest structural components) in order to minimize the amount of high explosives needed. Not only is it not needed, claiming its presence in all of the WTC dust based on Jones' samples could be disastrous for the truth movement if large quantities of WTC dust being stored somewhere are found not to contain any of Jones' tell tale red/gray chips. It is a tactic reminiscent of the dirty trick that sank Dan Rather's career, when a forgery of a document that actually existed was provided to him so that he would appear to have fallen for a hoax and the issue in question, Bush's absence from his required military service, though true, would be easier to dismiss as a fabrication.

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Annoymouse's picture

Amazon deleted my review...

...yours might be next RT.

-AS

gretavo's picture

Orly?

No dice, "AS". I'm pretty sure you deleted it yourself because I had cornered JamesB (i.e. the evil genius behind Screw Loose Change) and he was starting to embarrass himself. Here is the first part of his last post before you deleted your review. It's in response to my insistence that he tell me in his words why he thinks NIST didn't bother heating the concrete in their analysis, if not to ensure that the shear studs would fail due to differential thermal expansion:

"Jul 13, 2011 1:03:03 PM PDT
James B says:

I am no expert on this, and I seriously doubt you are either, but I would imagine it is because concrete doesn't expand as much while heated, and it was a steel structured building anyway, the material used for the flooring was irrelevant. If the building were concrete, it would have stood long enough for them to tear it down like the rest of the World Trade Center buildings that were damaged in the collapse of the twin towers..

Building safety issues are a red herring anyway. You people are not honestly concerned about truss construction, you just use what the evolution/ID people call the "God of the Gaps". You think that if you point out something which is unexplained you can just insert your own explanation in there, while ignoring the fact that you have absolutely no supporting..."

In fact I'd been making him look like a fool all through the comments, explaining to him very calmly that I didn't actually believe anyone but David Chandler and David Griffin were real truthers and that I agreed with him that Steven Jones, Jesse Ventura, etc. are charlatans.

I'm going to see about reconstructing the entire thread through my locally cached versions because I was clearly doing something right.

Annoymouse's picture

I didn't delete it

and I find it weird that you'd think I'd have a problem with you exposing the SLC shill for what he is. Oh, that's right, because I staunchly defend CIT from the disinfo campaign against them I am somehow a "fake truther."

gretavo's picture

uh huh

Strange how mine hasn't been deleted, and how JamesB has tucked tail and disappeared. Oh, but Jon Gold calls you a little turd, so naturally you should be my best friend. Uh huh. Tell me more...

willyloman's picture

Can I not save one from the pitiless wave?

"I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"

The more they play the more obvious it becomes. There are few actual Truth advocates still out there writing and blogging and speaking but there are millions upon millions lying in wait, like grains of sand lying on the shore. They have abandoned the stage play of the movement out of boredom with the incessant games of mediocre minds but they still wait and they know who to trust... and who they don't.

A.S. and others are as obvious as Obama is these days. Keep plugging along, Gret. We are still here. And we remember.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. JFK

gretavo's picture

The more they play the more obvious it becomes

Yep. Keep on truckin, WL.

gretavo's picture

here you go, pal

Customer Review

7 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Agree with RT; This book does not get to the real full truth, July 2, 2011
By 
Kameelyun
This review is from: Disconnecting the Dots: How 9/11 Was Allowed to Happen (Paperback)

I, too, waive my need to read this book based on my 6 years studying and investigating 9/11 from many angles, including the angle that this book takes. As such, and as fellow researcher Aidan Monaghan points out at 9/11 Blogger, reading the summary of the book itself tells us what we need to know: this book argues in favor of the "evidence" that the Bush Administration deliberately allowed actual Islamic terrorists to attack us by hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

This very premise cannot be rationally squared away with the physical evidence at all three crime scenes: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville. In all three scenes, the evidence points very strongly to inside jobs, that is, staged events; what are known as "false flag operations."

Before I proceed, however, I would like to make a distinction between "inside job" and "the government did it." Most would instantly equate the two, but that is a fallacy. Elements of the government include our local mailman; surely we can see that it is absurd to think he was part of the plot. We are talking about a small, criminal cabal within key positions of power to make decisions and manipulate others, like supremely maneuvered pieces on the chessboard. I read a comment on a blog recently that also made the point that if a bank robbery turns out to be an "inside job," it means that one bad apple employee robbed the bank, not that the whole bank staff was in on it. Okay, moving on.

The most compelling physical evidence that Arab Muslims did not destroy the World Trade Center is the evidence that the buildings, all three of them, including WTC7 which was never hit by a plane and sustained only minor damage, were brought down with explosive demolition. Regardless of what TYPE of explosive brought down the World Trade Center, the freefall acceleration, as high school physics teacher David Chandler forced the National Institute of Standards and Technology to admit, is proof that the structure was removed ahead of time, before the building fell. Over 1,500 (so far) architectural and engineering professionals have signed a petition at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, rejecting the official explanation of the "collapses" and demanding of Congress a new, impartial investigation. For the best video presentation evidence of explosive demolition, watch Richard Gage's presentation Blueprint for Truth, along with the videos of David Chandler, on youtube.

The reason that the demolitions evidence negates the "Al Qaeda few planes into buildings" scenario, and hence this book's premise, is that once you accept that controlled demolition brought the buildings down, the next logical step is to realize that whoever set up the demolitions had to be 99.99999% certain that they were going to successfully get the planes to impact the buildings, in order to serve as cover for the demolitions. As such, it goes without saying that the perpetrators of these demolitions would not risk having a human in control of the cockpit lest the pilot either screw up or double cross his masters. Remote control technology for planes has been around since at least the 1960's, when the Joint Chiefs hatched a plan called Operation Northwoods, which proposed blowing up remote controlled planes over Cuba and blaming it on Castro. (JFK rejected this plan and fired the person who thought it up.)

We have equally incriminating evidence of a staged, faked, simulated plane crash at the Pentagon. The very first ground level and aerial photographs taken immediately after the event, before part of the facade of the outer ring collapsed, show nothing whatsoever resembling a large Boeing 757 having crashed there. A Boeing 757 is 110 tons, or 220,000 lbs, when empty. Early 9/11 researchers noticed this lack of debris on the lawn, remarking that the "PentaLawn" looked as clean as a golf course. As federal authorities came into the scene, during which time small scraps of "evidence" could have easily have been planted, photographs were taken. People, including within the "skeptics" category of reviewer J. Gold, like to cite a few CLOSEUP photographs of SMALL AMOUNTS of flimsy, lightweight wreckage, taken mostly near the base of the building (plus one famous image of a small piece of red, white and blue metal some distance away on the grass) as proof that the plane did hit after all. No sale. Whether we're talking about large, intact pieces of tail, or whether the plane smashed itself into small confetti when it hit, we should be seeing 220,000 lbs of wreckage outside the building, in addition to luggage, bodies, etc. April Gallop was inside the Pentagon in the zone where the explosion occurred, and she even crept to, and walked out of, the hole created by the alleged plane. She said the there was no wreckage of a plane anywhere INSIDE the Pentagon either! (Remember, this was as it happened, not later after evidence could be planted.) CNN reporter Jamie McKintyre reported live that from his "close up inspection," on the outside of the building, there was "no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon." He said no plane outside, she said no plane inside. Case closed.

But the real cherry on top, the icing on the cake, with the Pentagon, is the eyewitness testimony collecteded by two ordinary folks from California who call themselves Citizen Investigation Team (CIT). They tracked down and contacted as many witnesses to the Pentagon strike as they could. They traveled across the country to Arlington and spoke with over a dozen eyewitnesses whose vantage points were such that they could see the details of the plane's trajectory in the final few seconds of the flight path. According to the official story, the plane knocked down five highway light poles. Photographic evidence of the poles on the ground is abundant, and they are five specific poles in a specific path: a straight line that approaches from the south side of the Citgo gas station. The problem is, three employees at the gas station all say that the plane approached the Pentagon from the NORTH side, meaning that it couldn't hit those poles. For the gas station employees, this is a simple left vs. right deal, and for all three to be wrong in the same way is highly unlikely. CIT presented these witnesses in their first 2007 video, but by 2009, CIT had interviewed over a dozen more witnesses from the Navy Annexe and Arlington National Cemetery who also corroborate this flight path. Their main presentation presents 13 witnesses, but since 2009, several additional witnesses have also been found to confirm this path. For anyone who took a "probability and statistics" math course in high school, the odds of 15 or so eyewitnesses coincidentally all being wrong in the exact same way is so astronomically low as to be ruled out for all practical purposes. The plane flew north of the Citgo, did not hit the light poles and did not cause the directional damage to the Pentagon from the E ring to the punchout hole in the C ring.

The North of Citgo flight path is akin to the 2.25 seconds of freefall of WTC7. It is a simple make or break deal that proves a 100% staged inside job. The only logical conclusion is that the plane overflew the Pentagon, as a huge explosion and fireball from within, creating the illusion of a plane crash to any observers, even though a few people did say they saw the plane flying away. (But cognitive dissonance and a desire to believe the official story deep in the psyche, they convinced themselves it was "another" plane.) Please go to YouTube and watch "National Security Alert - Sensitive Information" for the true lowdown on the Pentagon attack.

Obviously, Muslim hijackers did not hijack "flight 77" and fly it over the Pentagon and onto wherever it went. This was another remote controlled, decoy jet used for deception purposes.

I'll make my Shanksville paragraph as brief as possible. We know the least about what really happened there, but for some startling eyewitness accounts that challenge the official account, watch (on youtube) "Shanksville Flyover Indian Lake" by field investigator Domenick DiMaggio.

Now, reviewers like "J. Gold" who gave the first review of this book, get angry at the insinuation of controlled demolition and of planted evidence at the Pentagon because they think it sounds crazy and turns the public off, and that we should shut up about it even if true, and that it "sounds more credible" to promote to our incredulous public the idea that Cheney et al simply "let" it happen, since even "letting" it happen would still be high treason and grounds for the scaffold for Cheney and Rumsfeld. This is indeed true. However, truth can coexist with justice. People like RT and myself like to follow the facts wherever they lead, even if they lead to conclusions that might SOUND at first like a "crazy conspiracy theory." And the history books should, ultimately, be about historical truth. At first I thought it seemed crazy that the perps would stage the light poles outside the Pentagon. I thought, "Isn't it simply more likely that the poles were downed because the incoming plane hit them?" But after looking at the evidence with an open mind, I was indeed convinced that the light poles being staged was the only possible conclusion given the evidence.

In this day and age, with high quality photographs and video, coupled with ordinary citizens' ability to share and analyze information, both physical evidence and the testimony of eyewitnesses (to explosions in the towers and the flight path at the Pentagon), truth has a much greater chance of coming out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

This book serves to perpetuate the clouds over our heads by reaffirming the myth that at core, this was "in fact" an Islamic terror attack.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 13, 2011 6:57:47 AM PDT
RT says:

Since I know you're pressed for time, James B, here's a simple yes or no question. Did the NIST heat the concrete in their computer model analysis that led them to conclude that the differential expansion of the structural steel compared with the concrete caused shear stud failure? Now, I know you know the answer is NO, they did not, since it's in black and white in their report, so I'll give you another very simple question--do you think they should have heated BOTH the steel and the concrete in their analysis, given that the actual fires in the building they were modelling definitely *did* heat both? If perchance you find just a couple of minutes in your busy schedule to answer that last one, would you be so generous as to tell us why in your view it does or does not matter that their model purporting to explain an event unique in human history (the fire-based collapse of a steel-framed skyscraper) is deficient in such a glaring way, given that their conclusions depend entirely on the claim that the steel expanded but the concrete did not? I will understand if you don't respond at all to this post. Really--I think most people will understand quite well. :)


In reply to your post on Jul 11, 2011 9:21:57 PM PDT
James B says:

Sorry, I am not going to play Truther 20 questions. That is what you guys do, you fail to do any research other than surfing sites which already agree with you, then demand that people answer your questions, as if your inability to understand what is going on is their fault. Then regardless of the response you declare victory and move on to the next questions, none the wiser.


You just replied with a later post


Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 11, 2011 1:12:18 PM PDT
Last edited by you on Jul 11, 2011 1:12:59 PM PDT
RT says:

You seem to have plenty of time to post here and lord knows where else and you seem perfectly happy to rehash the same tired critiques. I should think it would be easy for you to simply say what your explanation for the issues I raise are. Frankly it sounds like you're evading a discussion--funny for someone who apparently spends so much time in discussion forums! I'll rest my case until you show you can answer simple questions without referring me to your 574 blog posts.


In reply to your post on Jul 11, 2011 12:13:19 PM PDT
James B says:

As I said, I have already discussed all these issues. I don't have the time to rehash everything. A search of my blog for "world trade center 7" returns 574 hits. When you finish reading those, left me know what we have left out.

http://www.google.com/search?q=world+trade+center+7+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2F...


You replied with a later post


Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 11, 2011 11:49:45 AM PDT
RT says:

Pick any of the problems I mentioned with the NIST's report on WTC7 and let's discuss!


In reply to your post on Jul 11, 2011 11:06:39 AM PDT
James B says:

No, you misunderstand the meaning of an ad hominem argument. That would be if I said something like, "The no hijacker theory is not valid because David Ray Griffin is old an ugly." I was not making an argument based on an irrelevant trait of the person involved. Pointing out that Truthers tend to have a different epistomological viewpoint than normal people, and as a result tend to have a variety of fringe views, is a perfectly legitimate observation to make. No, it is does automatically make their views invalid, but serves to explain them.

I am perfectly willing to discuss the facts of 9/11. I have written hundreds of thousands of words on the subject over the last 5 years. Name a subject and I am pretty sure I have discussed it at some point. I am only willing to do so under a rational viewpoint though. Non-falsifiable conspiracy beliefs are not scientific. They are not up for debate.


You replied with a later post


Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 11, 2011 7:33:33 AM PDT
Last edited by you on Jul 11, 2011 7:35:34 AM PDT
RT says:

David Ray Griffin is also a Christian and as such believes in God. I do not. Since Prof. Griffin's faith has nothing to do with his analysis of the public record on 9/11, including both media and government reports, I'm not troubled by the fact that as a philosopher he has also studied "paranormal phenomena". Do you agree 100% with all of the beliefs of everyone whose work on any given subject you have studied and found to have merit? Your post is a classic ad hominem attack on steroids. Instead of discussing the facts, you prefer to attack the messengers (some of whom do indeed merit criticism, no question.) Why, I wonder? Could it be that you want to *avoid* discussing the facts? What better way to deal with inconvenient facts than to enlist the services of charlatans (or actors posing as charlatans) in proclaiming them, so that public scrutiny can be deflected from the facts to entertaining personalities who like professional wrestlers (kof kof Ventura kof) put on a good show having little to do with the truth? Why don't you want to talk about things like the NIST's report on WTC7 which in addition to failing to account for the 2.25 seconds of freefall it admitted, advanced a theory of thermal expansion based on a finite element analysis in which the steel was heated but not the concrete? That's right, in order for their theory to even come close to working as an explanation, the steel had to expand while the concrete didn't. Since in a real world fire the concrete would expand along with the steel, they just ran their model assuming no heating of the concrete. All of this chicanery can mean only one thing--their "investigation" was designed not to determine the true cause of WTC7's implosion, but to avoid reaching the only conclusion consistent with all the known facts--the building had been prepared for demolition before 9/11/01. That simple fact, that one lie, is enough to call into question the entire established narrative and begin anew but this time with the public being made aware of all the facts and how they were arrived at--and that must not be through secret interrogations of shadowy accused terrorists or pseudoscience masquerading as forensics.


In reply to an earlier post on Jul 9, 2011 2:40:12 PM PDT
Mark Werling says:

You still fail to provide an explanation to why no airliner wreckage was in any of the newsreel of the Pentagon on 9-11. You fail to conclude that something is amiss when three buildings of the World Trade center fell at freefall speed, less than ten seconds, an impossiblity just because of fires. This is beyond a matter of incompetance.


Posted on Jul 9, 2011 2:33:20 PM PDT
Mark Werling says:

Quite well written, Kameelyun! Bringing the 9-11 question to top priority in American politics is more important than they want to realize. It would expose and consequently change a whole lot of things, our foreign policy would be completely overhauled. Americans would be awakened and could still sing "His Truth is Marching on", without being embarrassed.


In reply to your post on Jul 9, 2011 7:48:44 AM PDT
James B says:

No, there is no effort by the government or anybody else to introduce fake theories into your movement. Conspiracy theorists can be stupid and paranoid by themselves. That is what they do. It is who they are. That would be like the government having to start a program trying to get people to surf the net for porn. It is not needed.

Conspiracy theorists are conspiracy theorists because of their way of thinking. That is why Jonathan Kay's book is so good. That is why Steven Jones is also researching chemtrails, David Ray Griffin wrote a book on paranormal powers, Kevin Barret is a Holocaust denier, Jesse Ventura will buy any conspiracy theory in the book, Kevin Ryan writes paranoid papers reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind. These are not outliers. This is your movement! Just because you think you happen to be the one person who isn't like that, doesn't make it so. Guess what, they all think the same thing as you do! They all think you are the disinfo.


You replied with a later post

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Disconnecting the Dots: How 9/11 Was Allowed to Happen

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gretavo's picture

I'll get the rest up soon :)

If JamesB is reading this, I'd love to continue the debate--if you have the time of course! :-P

gretavo's picture

some more salvaged comments

Showing 1-10 of 56 posts in this discussion
Initial post: Jul 2, 2011 11:16:14 PM PDT
Kameelyun says:
And as an afterthought, I'd like to say: Jon Gold's idea that we should lead with the less crazy-sounding "let it happen" scenario rather than the more crazy-sounding "made it happen" scenario is negated by this interview Jesse Ventura did on CNN with Piers Morgan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peztNH3Ksww

In this interview, Jesse Ventura postulates to Piers that Dick Cheney knew Al Qaeda was going to attack, and deliberately set everything up so that our defenses would be crippled so as the attack could succeed. Piers Morgan expresses absolute incredulity to that.

But that was the "ceiling" Ventura created. If he had created the ceiling along the lines of: "This was a staged and orchestrated false flag operation by our own institutions from start to finish," then perhaps Morgan might have said: "Well, that sounds pretty crazy and I don't know that I could go that far, but I'll give it to you that maybe they let it happen on purpose."
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 4, 2011 8:12:44 AM PDT
Robert A. Millegan says:
Again, review a book before it is even read. What are you folks afraid of?

By giving this a one star review, you do not want this book to be successful or for people to read. Boy that'll teach the Constitution.

There is much reported in this book that helps understand the perfidy of 9/11. True understanding of how the 9/11 operation was pulled off is the focus of the book. The nuts and bolts of lies within the bureaucracy used to obfuscate and cover-up the crime.

We are after the truth of the matter, not into creating acceptable scenarios.

This book does not deny the unnatural collapse of the towers or other anomalies surrounding 9/11. What this book does, is to destroy parts of the official story.

A question may be asked. Why are you telling people not to read? Do not you believe in a free press? What is your agenda?

Peace,
Kris Millegan
Publisher
TrineDay
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Posted on Jul 4, 2011 10:00:14 AM PDT
James B says:
Truther fight! The completely crazy attack the partially crazy for not being crazy enough. Let me grab the popcorn. (munch) (munch)
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 4, 2011 10:30:12 AM PDT
Mike says:
I have never seen a credible explanation from SLC for the strange conduct (examined in the book) of US intelligence in the lead up to 9/11.

Feel free to explain why the author is off base in his analysis. You admonished one of the reviewers for failing to read the book yet it now appears you are labeling the author "partially crazy" without having read the book yourself.
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 4, 2011 10:40:45 AM PDT
Last edited by the author on Jul 4, 2011 11:06:38 AM PDT
James B says:
I was actually referring more to Kameelyun (completely crazy) and Jon Gold (partially crazy), although I assume that Fenton is somewhere in the Gold camp. He is not very well known, even among the rare demographic that actually follows the increasingly inaccurately named 9/11 truth movement.

As far as what you characterize the "strange behavior". As someone who spent 21 years as a reserve officer with two overseas deployments (in what capacity I will leave up to your feverish imagination) there is a simple explanation. The government is incompetent. Despite the lurid imaginings of the 9/11 truth movement where the government is an incredibly efficient machine which carries out amazingly vast and complex plots with breathtaking exactitude and James Bond like technologies, for the most part the government is made up of card punching bureaucrats who spend most of the time covering their own butts and counting down the days until they can collect their pension and buy a condo in Florida.

Sorry, reality is pretty boring sometimes.
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 4, 2011 3:47:07 PM PDT
Anthony J. Thorne says:
The government often outsources covert work to various intelligence agencies, CIA, ISI, Mossad etc. Are those agencies incompetent too? Numerous whistle-blowers with long career tenures than your own have said otherwise, in print and in public. The phrase 'for the most part' in your post seems to indicate that you still feel some sections or portions of the government mightn't be comprised of incompetents. I agree with you there, unless you feel the need to rephrase your generalization to include every member of every branch of the US military and intelligence communities.
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 4, 2011 4:22:18 PM PDT
James B says:
Hey genius, the CIA is part of the US government, therefore they can't "outsource" anything to them, they are the source. I am not saying that every person in the government is incompetent, far from it, I don't consider myself incompetent, but as a whole there is plenty of incompetence, ass covering and protecting fiefdoms to explain the pre-9/11 (and post 9/11 for that matter) intelligence failings.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

-Hanlon's Razor-

Aside from that, there is also hindsight bias. It is easy after the fact to pick out the one or two pieces of intelligence that should have been followed, but you are ignoring the 1,000 other pieces of intelligence that were completely useless. A contemporary analyst does not have that advantage.
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Your post: Jul 5, 2011 9:06:33 AM PDT
RT says:
This is exactly the problem with this book and the approach to 9/11 research that it takes. By not including the undeniable fact that the WTC was rigged with explosives prior to 9/11 in its analysis, its effect (and I believe goal) is to frame the debate as "Were the failures that enabled al Qaeda to attack America on 9/11 a result of incompetence or conspiracy on the part of the Bushadministration?" Well, you can debate that til the cows come home and it will change nothing nor will it get us any closer to understanding what actually happened that day. That's why we must start with the forensics and go from there. The forensic evidence is clear--the vast majority of deaths on 9/11 were the result of explosives planted in the WTC. That this fact has been denied by those offering instead a dubious narrative of conspiracies by either Arab muslims or neo-conservative profiteers is a clear indication to me of where we should be focusing our attention and of what specifically we should be working to raise awareness.
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In reply to your post on Jul 5, 2011 3:24:54 PM PDT
James B says:
"the undeniable fact that the WTC was rigged with explosives prior to 9/11"

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 5, 2011 4:01:12 PM PDT
RT says:
Sure they do. The observed accelerations were impossible without explosives removing structural elements that would have slowed the "collapses". Moreover the official account disregards over one hundred different eyewitness accounts of explosions as reported by first responders to the FDNY. Copious amounts of molten iron also attested to by firefighters on the scene as well as on video are yet another fact the official version requires we ignore. You can deny this until you're blue in the face, and you can claim (falsely) that "the experts" all agree that the case is closed. However the official claim that fires and jet impacts alone can account for the observed disintegration of the three skyscrapers of the WTC is demonstrably false and the "proof" offered by the NIST in each case is not just an embarrassment, it constitutes deliberate fraud. Even a small child can look at WTC7 and tell you it is a building being demolished and that the twin towers are exploding, not collapsing. You can fool a lot of people for a long time when enough people agree to lie to cover up an inconvenient truth, but not everyone, and not forever. We know what they did that summer, and we will never let them get away with it as you would like.
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In reply to your post on Jul 5, 2011 7:35:45 PM PDT
James B says:
Uhh yeah, just like a small child can look out the window and tell you the Earth is flat. That does not make it so. This is not fact, this is not even a theory as that would require some sort of coherent and tested collections of observations and experiments. It is a hypothesis, and a weak incoherent one at that.

It was thermite, no wait, thermate, no wait, superthermite, no wait, nanothermite, no wait, conventional explosives with nanothermite detonators, there were explosions heard, no wait, they were quiet incendiaries, they found pools of molten steel, no wait, no evidence was found of fires over 400 degrees, no wait...

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 12:19:23 AM PDT
RT says:
No need to complicate things. The molten iron is indicative of regular thermite or thermate (super, or nanothermite need not have been used--I for one do not trust Steven Jones who is mostly responsible for the "finding" of thermitic material in the dust.) The fires were not particularly hot, that is correct, nor were they the cause of the disintegration of the buildings. Thermite was used in order to minimize the needed explosives, which were nonetheless noticed by plenty of people. It's really pretty simple.

But hey, you want to play that game? Let's see what the official story is. For the twin towers, it was a pancake collapse. No wait, no pancaking because that can't explain the building's cores failing. The shear studs didn't fail and cause pancaking, they were actually the strongest part of the building and didn't fail thus making the perimeter columns bow inward, yeah that's it! And then they just, um, pancaked, or something--we don't know. WTC7? Oh that's easy--diesel fuel tanks caught fire. No wait, that fuel was recovered. Must have been debris from the north tower. Um, no, that only affected the facade. The north tower antenna gouged the poor thing... Um... AH! Thermal expansion caused a wicked catastrophic chain reaction that would make Rube Goldberg blush. THAT'S it. Look, we made a nice computer animation that looks nothing like the actual collapse, see? Then we could take on the official list of hijackers--no wait those two are still alive, mistaken identity! A few more revisions and we'll settle on the names, even though we have access to the flight manifests, yeah. We found a passport in the rubble! No wait, we found it blocks away! Mohammed Atta drank vodka at Shuckum's bar the day before, no it was cranberry juice because as a muslim he wouldn't drink! Koran and flight manuals found in a car at Logan--no, they drove that car to Maine and flew back! Bin Laden planned it! No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned it! The calls from the planes were cell phone calls. What? Those are impossible at high altitudes? Then they were airphone calls. The family member who said she knew it was a cell phone because of the caller ID just misspoke! Oh my god, really? You want to go there?
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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 4:51:00 AM PDT
Last edited by the author 9 hours ago
Anthony J. Thorne says:
(Responding to James B's note from the earlier page, not to his comments from this one..) There are numerous incidents documented where the CIA has evidently undertaken tasks 'off the books', and also where it has performed tasks financed by funds obtained from outside the government. A number of ex-CIA personnel (I can name them if you disagree with the statement) have noted as much. If it's off the books, outside of congressional control, and not subject to restrictions of funding, the 'outsourcing' can easily take place - performance of deeds that the normal restrictions of government (and likely morality) wouldn't allow. I don't need a 'feverish imagination' to suggest that if you're that experienced as a reserve officer with overseas deployments, you should be aware of this already, unless you feel that your regular Office Joe work experience suggests that the covert history of the various US intelligence agencies was equally mundane.

The 'stupidity' theory is an all-purpose excuse that I feel has, of late, been occasionally used by duplicitous members of government to explain away numerous events which are best attributed to malice. The same goes for the incompetence theory. For whatever it's worth, I attribute neither stupidity, incompetence or malice regarding 9/11 to President Bush (whose name invariably comes up in these sort of pro and anti truther discussions, so I thought I'd make the point), but am persuaded that the members of the Bush administration that agitated for action in the Middle East prior to 9/11 aren't as easily judged innocent of malicious intent regarding this incident.

I get the point of your final paragraph (though correct me if I'm wrong, I'm assuming you mean that contemporary analysts -do- have the advantage of hindsight, and analysts circa 2001 and before did not), but I don't believe the whole Shaffer / Able Danger saga is explainable by retrospective ass-covering. Shaffer certainly doesn't think so, and has noted that his communications with intelligence heads pre-9/11 were systematically squelched at the time, not afterward.

Given your disdain for truthers and the 9/11 truth movement, I'm mildly curious as to what brought you to this thread in the first place. I'm assuming it wasn't an interest in reading the book, (though if you've already bought it and are planning a review, negative or otherwise, I'm obviously wrong). A review bringing the observations of your first paragraph to a reading of the actual book would be worthwhile even if it was a negative review. (I own most of the 9/11 truth literature and am critical of some of it). Just curious - if you've simply popped in to poke fun at those crazy truthers, fair enough.
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Posted on Jul 6, 2011 6:54:08 AM PDT
Robert A. Millegan says:
You state: "This book serves to perpetuate the clouds over our heads by reaffirming the myth that at core, this was "in fact" an Islamic terror attack. "

Have you read the book?

This book is about corruption by CIA/FBI officers and the cover-up of 9/11.

Why are you so worried about someone reading a book?

Peace,
Kris Millegan
Publisher
TrineDay

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In reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 7:54:53 AM PDT
James B says:
" if you've simply popped in to poke fun at those crazy truthers, fair enough."

Yup, that is pretty much it.

I might read it if someone gave an indication that it was something more than the usual Truther Internet cut-and-paste job, but thus far nobody has. I have wasted enough of my life already reading David Ray Griffin books.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 9:39:28 AM PDT
RT says:
I very much doubt you've read any of Prof. Griffin's books. Does Publisher's Weekly often make "internet cut and paste jobs" their Pick of the Week?
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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 9:42:28 AM PDT
RT says:
Our concern is that people understand that this book's very premise is flawed and that they should balance their reading of it with other books on the subject. No one has said "don't read this book", just be aware of what exactly you will be reading. You are the one that seems to have a problem with the book being put in its proper context!
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In reply to your post on Jul 6, 2011 9:54:40 AM PDT
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James B says:
Sadly, I have. I have even exchanged e-mails with the fraud, where he admitted that he doesn't bother to check the source or context of quotes. Once I went to one of his speeches and asked him questions. He wasn't very responsive. Apparently any question in the world can be answered with "the government lied".

Read the Pulitzer Prize winning history The Looming Tower someday. There are something like 7 pages of lists of people the author interviewed on 4 continents over a period of years. Now read all 8 of the books (probably more by the time you read this at this rate) that Griffin has written. You can list the names of people he has actually interviewed on a 3 by 5 card, and still have room for a grocery list.

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Your post, in reply to an earlier post on Jul 6, 2011 12:04:37 PM PDT
RT says:
So Publisher's Weekly is part of the Truther Conspiracy, eh? Gotcha.
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2 new posts since your last visit
In reply to your post on Jul 6, 2011 12:54:59 PM PDT
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James B says:
No, I have no idea what their editorial standards are or what that even signifies. Both Ghost Wars and the Looming Tower won Pulitzer prizes for history, that is far more prestigious than a Publisher's Weekly mention. But oddly, you don't see any Truthers promoting the conclusions of those books.
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