Bill Douglas Takes Shilling for The Shill Game to the Next Shilliest Level

"It is a source of endless sorrow for me that America is not remotely the country that it was 40 years ago in the Apollo days, when we still had MLK and RFK. That was a much cleaner, richer, freer, braver, kinder, and smarter country."

 

Yea, Alek, I can't wait to get back to the "good old days" when "niggers" were still being lynched and denied access to education and voting without poll taxes, when whole new suburbs and housing developments in California - yes California - could exclude "niggers", "spiks", etc., LEGALLY. When Women were forced to choose between being a housewife and...um...not much else, when "men were men and women were women"...the Cold War Hoax was in full swing, the "Red Menace" hysteria, round-ups and purges of "reds", "Communists", the HUAC - House Un-American Activities, CIA MK-Ultra and Nazi Paperclip scientists running amok with their mind-control and "medical" experiments, the Bogus Korea War with false pretexts, chemical weapons, mass slaughter of millions of "reds", let's not even get started with the Vietnam attrocities...yea, the cleaner, richer, freer, braver, kinder, and smarter folks such as these wholesome characters: psychopath Johnson, Prescott Bush, George HW Bush, Rockafelers, Morgans, Nixon, Edgar Hoover's FBI and Cointelpro, Kissinger, Allen Dulles...False Flag Terrorism in Iran and installation of the Shah, death sqads of Guatemala and the genocide of Mayan indigenous population...Rivers so polluted they caught on fire, no environmental protections and safegards for factory emissions or automobiles, carcinogens sprayed on your food and on your kids, electoral fraud, Kennedy's bogus "missile gap", "bomber gap", "whatever-gap"...I'm sure I could go on for a couple of hours but you get my point.

 I'll refrain from addressing any of the other issues cuz I'm going to bed now. And besides, Gratevo will be waking up in a few hours and I have a pretty strong feeling that he's gonna wanna have a word or two with ya and I'm looking forward to his reaction to this...um...rant of yours 

Nice cover for our same-personhood btw. Explaining why we're never in the same place at the same time by claiming that we live in different time zones and therefore one is always asleep while the other is awake has to be one of the most brilliant ploys ever concocted by one of my sock puppets (or split personalities as my shrink tells me to call them). Again I see you've pretty much done the heavy lifting and left the coup de grace for me--thanks as usual.

Alek, what is left to be said? For every hoax ever perpetrated on the masses there seems to be a platoon of folks running around claiming to have been there. To your credit you don't actually claim to have been on the moon with the other cold-warriors. It's entirely possible that everything you say is true and that you were just one of many who witnessing everything you were meant to see sincerely believes that today's technology is incapable of reproducing something that was done five or six times almsot 40 years ago. At the height of the cold war. After the bizarre events in Dealey Plaza. In the middle of a terribly unpopular war of aggression in Southeast Asia. On the heels of a sometimes violent uprising, suppression, and determined uprising again of masses of second class citizens (as Keenan pointed out.) While all but the most blind, conventional, and gullible people were distracted by an explosion of sex drugs and rock and roll and had tuned out from the insanity.

Do you really think that Philip Zelikow could be an expert on public myths if public myths were all on the level of alligators in the sewers? I can understand skepticism when people first realize how much of what they think they know to be true is claimed by others to be false. It's been a fascinating phenomenon to observe just in terms of 9/11. There is enough suspicion out there now that every new myth (Iranian speedboats, etc.) is laughed off the front pages quicker than the mythmakers can come up with both an explanation and a new myth. This will naturally also work backwards as people re-examine everything they have been led to believe by what is obviously a very well entrenched lie machine. There is no going back, Alek. I am one of many who has broken those chains that dictated what I may and may not think. The freedom to know real truth is not something that once realized is easy to give up. Asking politely, ridiculing or guilting us to put the chains back on voluntarily is not going to work. Putting them back on us by force, moreover, amounts to acknowledging our victory. That old world you yearn for is dead, Alek. It cannot be resurrected.

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery--none but yourself can free your mind. Trust me folks, everything makes a lot more sense, and the world is a more beautiful place for it, under the light of reason.

that inevitably develops around crappy books on Amazon. If you wanto know which books are worth buying, just see what the lowest price for a used copy is compared to a new one. Of course as soon as people start remarking on those stats "someone" will spend a dollar plus shipping and handling to buy 100 copies of whatever it is (last happened with Popular Mechanics 9/11 Myths) and try to make it look like a good seller. Of course anyone with half a brain who buys it will immediately realize what a crock it is and back it will go into the cycle of unwanted wastes of good wood pulp until the day that a merciful recycler will turn it into something more useful and noble like a roll of quilted toilet tissue.

anyway great comments cass. my guess is that whether or not we all decide to start pimping the book, the mainstream media will go ahead with the script and ridicule it and anyone who reads it. All the support that Bill Douglas is trying to invent for it now is exactly what is going to be pointed to by Sean Hannity who will use it as an example of how truthers are just too caught up in conspiracy "action novels" to know fact from fiction. If people don't respond properly to that approach then of course they can fall back to plan B which is to embrace what you call OCT v.2, which we all know by its other name, the LIHOP Limited Hangout, eloquently laid out by a New York Times bestselling authorâ„¢...

Just wait until The Shill Gameâ„¢ starring Tom Hanks as the uncoverer of evil LIHOP schemes hits theatres around, oh, first week in November?

“The Pentagon is the Mother of All Dadaist 9/11 Mindfucks.”
— Casseia, WTCD

I don't like Gareth Porter at all but here is more info on the Iran incident:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19085.htm

How The Pentagon Planted a False Hormuz Story

Analysis by Gareth Porter

16/01/08 -- WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (IPS) - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.

Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defence Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination".

Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice.

With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident.

The decision came just as President George W. Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition.

That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7. It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.

The release reported that the Iranian "small boats" had "maneuvered aggressively in close proximity of [sic] the Hopper [the lead ship of the three-ship convoy]." But it did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the boats or that it had nearly resulted in firing on the Iranian boats.

On the contrary, the release made the U.S. warships handling of the incident sound almost routine. "Following standard procedures," the release said, "Hopper issued warnings, attempted to establish communications with the small boats and conducted evasive maneuvering."

The release did not refer to a U.S. ship being close to firing on the Iranian boats, or to a call threatening that U.S. ships would "explode in a few minutes", as later stories would report, or to the dropping of objects into the path of a U.S. ship as a potential danger.

That press release was ignored by the news media, however, because later that Monday morning, the Pentagon provided correspondents with a very different account of the episode.

At 9 a.m., Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers", but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you will explode". She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away".

CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats "dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water". Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident.

The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.

In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning cited Whitman as the source for the statement that U.S. ships were about to fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away -- a part of the story that other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official.

On Jan. 9, the U.S. Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in which a strange voice -- one that was clearly very different from the voice of the Iranian officer who calls the U.S. ship in the Iranian video -- appears to threaten the U.S. warships.

A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHS channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command and Navy leadership in the field."

"Leadership here", of course, refers to the secretary of defence and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defence.

That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt to mislead. As an official at 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers -- often referred to as "Filipino Monkey" -- frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel to make threats or rude comments.

One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the Strait with the Royal Navy is, "Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you."

By Jan. 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell.

The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Capt. David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of the 5th Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on Jan. 7. A week later, Comdr. Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".

The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."