Draft of pamphlet, part 1, revised version

In response to some feedback I got in the Truth Action forum, here’s my revised version of Part 1 of the pamphlet:

About the warnings

The draft of my pamphlet mentions the Bush administration’s lack of response to the warnings. The standard “debunker” response to this point is to say that the warnings weren’t specific enough to be actionable.

Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment of President George W. Bush

In recent comments, Gregory called attention to Dennis Kucinich’s recent articles of impeachment of President George W Bush. Here is a link to those articles of impeachment.

9/11 – The Saudi connection?

The two aspects of 9/11 I now think are most worth looking into further are:

1. Statements by whistleblowers such as Sibel Edmonds. (See various links in my April 21 post U.S. government foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.)
2. The relationship between the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia.

U.S. government sponsorship of Islamist terror

A topic I’ve been reading up on lately is the history of U.S. government sponsorship of Islamist terror.

I highly recommend the Cooperative Research site’s pages on The use of Islamist militants by American and Israeli militarists. (See especially the more recent stuff on page 2.) One caveat: Some items here are well-sourced, others aren’t. However, even if one confines one’s attention to the better-sourced items, the picture that emerges is still quite disturbing.

Richard Gage’s avowed enemy, part 1

In reply to my post Review of Hardfire debates between Mark Roberts and Loose Change crew, some comments were posted by “boloboffin,” who turns out to be Joseph Nobles, author of a website called AE911Truth.INFO, devoted to a crusade against Richard Gages’s organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth.org).

Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments

Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.

There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.

To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.

In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.

“9/11: Press for Truth” – my response to an official-story defender’s comments

ref1 has asked me to comment on this review of “9/11: Press for Truth”:

George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers: Their whereabouts on 9/11

During the attacks of 9/11/2001, pretty much the entire top of the U.S. military chain of command found more pressing things to do than to give their full attention to the attacks. This was a serious dereliction of duty, especially on the part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, given the regulation (CJCSI 3610.01A, discussed in the comments on my post Why we need a new investigation of 9/11 – first draft of a leaflet) requiring the Secretary of Defense to approve any intervention involving use of lethal force.

More about Francesco Cossiga, plus more about Alex Jones, Ron Paul, paleoconservativism, and Jew-haters

One of my most popular posts, here on this blog, is Former Italian president Francesco Cossiga thinks 9/11 was an inside job?. Lots of people have found that post via search engines. So, in response to the apparent popular demand, I’ll blog a little more about Cossiga.

Here on WordPress, on the tag page for Francesco Cossiga, I found only two other recent English-language posts on Cossiga’s statement about 9/11.

Bush at Booker School on the morning of 9/11

Two days ago, in a post about My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11, I wrote the following about Bush’s behavior on the morning of 9/11/2001:

My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11

Below is a summary of the things I personally find strangest about 9/11, and which lead me to suspect complicity by high officials in the U.S. government.

• Bush’s under-reaction
• The lack of air defense
• WTC 7
• The war in Afghanistan
• Credible allegations of U.S. government complicity in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
• Other issues
• The most important issue: A truly independent investigation is needed

“Stand down” evidence on the “Emperor’s Clothes” site, including FAA web pages

The website Emperor’s Clothes contains a fairly good, though outdated and incomplete, presentation of evidence for a NORAD stand down on 9/11 (or at least a de facto stand down, even if there wasn’t an explicit stand down order). It’s outdated because it does not take into account the 9/11 Commission Report, which put all the blame on the FAA for not contacting NORAD soon enough about all four planes. It’s also lacking some other pieces of information I still haven’t seen anywhere, but which would be needed in order to prove that either the FAA or NORAD was indeed responding slower than normal on 9/11.

But the “Emperor’s Clothes” website does contain quite a few relevant links to the FAA site, useful in analyzing whether the newest version of the official story is credible, and also very useful (though not sufficient) on the more general issue of whether Flight 77 could have been intercepted (and then either forced down or shot down) before it hit the Pentagon. These links are all broken, but I was able to find all the referenced pages on the Internet Archive site. Links to the archived FAA pages, and some other relevant archived pages, will be provided further down on this page. These pages are a vital piece of evidence, filling one of the gaps I complained about in War games, etc.: A preliminary overview of some of Mark Robinowitz’s evidence about 9/11.

Alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

In a comment after a post titled Some People Will Believe Anything, about the Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Columbia University, blog author muzeuterpe claims:

I could give you the names and addresses of at 5 soldiers who were part of George W’s initial invasion who are suffering from neurological damage caused by the ‘non-existent’ chemical weapons.

A very startling claim, to say the least.

muzeuterpe, are you sure that your friends were injured by chemical weapons and not by bombs or depleted uranium? Bomb blasts can cause quite a bit of hidden neurological damage to people with no visible injuries.

Googling “neurological damage Iraq war” has led me to this news story, and a bunch of similar stories, about neurological damage from bomb blasts, not from chemical weapons. I also found some articles about the use of depleted uranium by the U.S. forces. The only article I found about neurological damage due to chemical weapons is this New York Times article, about veterans of the first Gulf War, not the most recent Iraq war. I then tried Googling “Iraq war neurological damage chemical weapons” and again found such reports pertaining only to the first Gulf war.