Author Archives: Bill Veale

Palast, Socialism, and the New York Times

I don’t think it is the subject of controversy that Greg Palast is the reporter who first, and most completely, told the story of the 2000 election in which George W. Bush made off with the victory falsely, since Gore actually won Florida when all the counting was done, if not feloniously; too many mechanisms were employed by the Republican Party to take the time and space to enumerate here.  I am not writing about that election on election day 2020.  I am writing about several interlaced political phenomena that this sad country had better do something about if it is ever to approach the Democracy its citizens think they deserve, and a large number of them, think they already have.

The driving force behind this piece has been the failure of the New York Times to include in its pages the name Palast.  I assume the reason for his absence is the fact that he is an unabashed leftist.  He has written quite a few books, and the central theme of every one of them is that the corporate oligarch class is at work everywhere and in every way seeking to subvert the very notion of Democracy, along with any steps towards its realization.  In spite of whatever pretensions there are, the New York Times is likely the most powerful upholder/bulwark of that very corporate oligarch class.

Then along comes Donald Trump and the election of 2020 and everyone with a reasonable brain is firing in the same direction, their interests, if only temporarily, precisely aligned: Trump must be defeated.  Standing in the way of that are all kinds of problems with the machinery of our democracy, wisely or not, left in the hands of the 50 states.  Palast is a smartass; there is not the slightest doubt about that, and he uses his brand of humor to skewer pretension and its practitioners like the folks at the New York Times, though I frankly don’t remember if he has ever said something uncomplimentary specifically about them, or it.  So, whether that paper has been specifically targeted with his sarcasm or not, what is clear is that he has done the work that it should have been doing, and upon which the essential victor in Georgia this year, Stacey Abrams (though her name was not on the ballot) has relied.  In fact, just today, Nov 16, 2020, a NYT article referred to the problem to which he has directed such enormous energy in the last two decades, Republican false “purges” of legitimate voters, without mentioning his name or his responsibility for calling attention to the issue.

His most recent book, “How Trump Stole the 2020 Election,” leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination when it comes to the flaws in our elections, based on reporting from 2000 until today.  Some things are not nailed down.  For example, the case that operatives are able to change the numbers of votes in a candidate’s column, or the actual choices on the ballot, is maybe just a strong suspicion at this point.  What is not just a strong suspicion is that the purging of voters from the rolls in states, Red States, across the country is a fact, and not a trivial one.  In Georgia in 2018, Stacey Abrams would have won had it not been for unlawful purging of voters by her opponent, then election chief and Secretary of State, now governor Brian Kemp.  I can’t remember if it was 300,000 or more, very likely Democratic voters that were purged, but it was far past the margin of Kemp’s victory in an election that Abrams, bravely, never conceded.

In 2020, the purges are still in operation and Palast has demonstrated, without the slightest question, that some 198,000 Georgians have been purged from the rolls erroneously, and from this criminal trial lawyer’s perspective, feloniously.  The purgers set up an algorithm, or whatever, that knocked off everyone who had moved since the last election, knowing that 80% still had the right to vote at their new address which was around the corner in far too many cases.  There are other tricks that Palast has uncovered, and they do nothing but raise one’s blood pressure for those of us who actually think every citizen should be encouraged to vote, not just allowed.

Here is where it gets peculiar.  That last sentence or its gist could have been found in a NYT editorial.  Those people claim to want everyone to vote, too.  As do all of the Democratic members of the House and Senate.  It isn’t shocking any more the extent to which Republicans admit they don’t want people voting; the demographics are heading in a seriously wrong direction for them these days. Crime and chicanery are about what’s left in their satchel.  But the Democrats and all their power operatives clearly SAY they want everyone voting.  So they should be promoting the brilliant work of Greg Palast, advertising his books and his videos, since the more people are aware of the deeds to which I make reference, the less likely they will be to fall victim to them or vote for their executioners, i.e. Republicans.

How many times has the New York Times mentioned Greg Palast? Zero.  How many times has he testified before Congress about his election findings? Zero.  So what is going on here?  Would these centrist democratic forces prefer to lose than live in an actual democracy that might, according to some, produce a progressive agenda?  Or do they simply think they can get away without answering that question because their power in other regards is so overwhelming?  

I am now writing as Trump has lost but hasn’t, and probably won’t, concede.  The Democrats, or maybe more accurately, the oligarchic, ruling class, has achieved its greatest victory.  One of their most reliable practitioners, Joe Biden, (Iraq War, Crime bill, general corporate hegemony, Anita Hill, etc) has been elected with a diminished House majority, and likely, pending two Georgia run-offs in January, a Republican majority in the Senate.  Bingo, the perfect excuse not to accomplish anything that might discomfit the oligarchs.  Was it a gamble by the ruling class, that they barely pulled off, given the small margins in key states?  Or would they have preferred Trump to a progressive-leaning landslide, or the likes of Bernie Sanders?

How did we get here, to the place where diehard lefties like myself are doing what they can to get Trump out even though the replacement is way below unacceptable?  It all begins with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights:

 

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;  

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;  The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;  

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;  

The right of every family to a decent home;  

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;  

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;  

The right to a good education.

 

Those are the words he spoke at his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. But they are the product of the attitude he expressed so vividly as he announced his Second New Deal on October 31, 1936, when he said that his efforts in the fight for what we call “economic justice” were opposed “by business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” propelled by a hatred of him.  To which he added, “I welcome their hatred.”  

FDR has been, at least in rhetoric, the guiding light of the Democratic Party since he took office in 1933.  He engaged in warfare as a class traitor and set down markers for a just society that resonate now as much as they did then.  So now I ask, which leader of the Democratic Party will stand for these principles now with the words “I welcome their hatred?”  Not Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, or, importantly, South Carolina Repesentative, Jim Clyburn, who gave Biden the win he needed in the South Carolina primary with a crucial assist from Barack Obama who called Buttigieg and Klobishar to get them to drop out and endorse Biden, thereby destroying the chances of Bernie Sanders the Socialist who had won, for all intents and purposes, the first three primaries. 

So the centrist, business-friendly, ruling class Democrats managed to defeat the Socialist.  The embracer of the ideas of FDR was beaten by the forces aligned with FDR’s haters.  And who precisely are these haters today, those for whom defeating a Socialist is worth the gamble of a continuation of Trump?  The fossil fuel industry, convicted of conspiring to destroy mass transit in the first part of the 20th Century, has now been shown to have known that global warming and climate change were the inevitable results of fossil fuel usage forty years ago, and did and said nothing in light of that knowledge.  Does Joe Biden welcome their hatred?  He has actually called the climate crisis an existential threat and has pledged 2 Trillion dollars to fight it.  And who does he suppose is going to be his foremost opponent in that fight, other than the fossil fuel industry and its surrogates in the Republican Party?  You say some of their surrogates are Democrats?  You say some of Biden’s advisors and potential nominees have been lobbying for fossil fuels for the last number of years?  I suppose all of that is true.

The financial industry, scoundrels of 2008, deserve all of our hatred just as FDR expressed it in 1936, but they found impunity under Obama/Biden. Amazon and Google and Facebook are classic monopolies that should have seen the end of their reign and made plans for it, but now will fight regulation while wielding influence among the powerful.  Has there been an expression welcoming their hatred from Joe Biden?  Hardly. They love him. He, after all, carrying a card or not, is a DLC Democrat.  Clinton and it, the DLC, decided that power was with the money in politics, not the far-more-numerous people.  They picked a few wedge issues that all but the extremes could agree on, abortion, guns, gay rights, and declared them to be the heart of the Democratic Party, at the same time assuring big money that it had nothing to fear from them.  They went straight to Goldman Sachs and became the whores of Wall Street, deftly omitting any reference to FDR’s second New Deal or welcoming anyone’s hatred.

And now, 40 years later, Trump has managed to lose but only barely, while claiming seats in the House and maybe still hanging on to the Senate using as his light saber the fear of Socialism.  And Clyburn is decrying Socialism in front of a statue of W.E.B. Dubois, one of America’s premier Socialists, probably in the same month that he extolled the virtues of FDR–just guessing about that last, but Pelosi and Biden sure have within memory.  Clyburn is as strong a DLC’er as there is as a recipient of massive quantities of campaign contributions from Big Business and Big Pharma.  Might there have been another way?  How about confronting the enigma head-on instead of talking out of both sides of Democratic mouths.  FDR’s declarations about economic rights are, after all, as good a definition of Socialism as anybody needs.  What we need is a “paper of record” that will let its readers know when a Democrat extolls the virtues of FDR at the same timing shilling for big business.

Is mendacity playing a role in this debate?  Anybody reading this probably doesn’t need to be told that there are unprincipled liars who are major voices as these issues are discussed.  Jim Clyburn and Representative Spanburger of Virginia can whine about having to run against attacks on Socialism, but he should know those attacks aren’t going away whether the Left is outwardly embracing the label–Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez–or just making glancing references to FDR.  The Republican Party employs the best at doing the worst, and they have no regard for honest discourse.  Every time they step to the plate, they are either lying or dancing on the edge of the term.  And they are great at it.  And, and this part is important, there is a lot in the history of Socialism to be used, however dishonestly.  Hitler and Stalin, for example, both used the word while embodying everyone’s worst nightmare of the Totalitarian state.  But Marx would have been appalled at what was wrought in his name, because, “dictatorship of the proletariat” to the contrary notwithstanding, he was a democrat and fervently believed in the principles of democracy.

But the last thing the Republican public relations apperatus, or the DLC, corporate oligarch, Democratic public relations apperatus have the slightest concern for is that the unknowing might confuse the bad things they inaccurately associate with Socialism with the good things that are the heart of its dictates.  Obviously, and in fact, that is their aim, to play on ignorance for emotional and strategic advantage. So that is a tough fact of life for us Socialists; they lie, and they have material with which to work.

I propose a different strategy from that currently employed by left Democrats.  I think it is possible to win the debate, even among the less politically literate, just by turning around, facing the chaser, and shouting back.  The good news is that we don’t need to lie to have a truly powerful rebuttal that those, who consider themselves more astute at this business than I, have decided not to resort to.  The bottom line fact of life is that everyone loves Socialism, everyone.  It’s just a question of, in which instance?  Socialism does NOT, even if you were to hew closely to the dictates of Das Kapital, which I found unreadable, but which America’s pre-eminent Marxist of the late 20th Century, Michael Harrington, explained to me, simply mean that the state owns the means of production.  Socialism involves the long continuum of government action through the use of money, owning as in the Tennessee Valley Authority, or just affecting in the case of farm subsidies or tax breaks, or…BAILOUTS.

The whole debate about healthcare and socialized medicine is illustrative of the conundrum and the dishonesty employed in the public relations trenches.  Rush Limbaugh and his fellow travelers–why not employ their tools if you can?–shout with abandon about the perils of socialized medicine as did Trump’s campaign in the past 6 months.  What’s wrong with that?  Well, no one, no, actually, no one, is suggesting that the United States should adopt socialized medicine.  What is promoted, with a majority of citizens approving, is socialized medical insurance, the so-called single-payer, Medicare For All program that Sanders, and at one time or another, look it up, Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama supported.  In such a system, the doctors would NOT be employees of the government, but the bill payers would be.  The provision of healthcare would be private in every meaningful sense, unlike for example, the medical attention received by the most famous current besmircher of Medicare For All, calling it Socialized Medicine, Donald Trump, when he contracted Covid and had to be admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital where he was cared for by government-paid doctors of various high ranks.

Hypocrisy, mendacity, deception. These are really all the Right and Republicans and the DLC Corporate Democrats have when it comes to Socialism.  Who, after all, was it that came begging in 2008 when the precipice was staring them and us in the face?  It was big business, Republicans and Democrats, and specifically and principally the banks, who had their hands out, were bailed out, and then bugged out when it would have been time to calmly and rationally discuss the benefits and detractions of Socialism.  I haven’t done the study, but I feel quite certain they were at the heart of the financial embrace that defeated the public option in the healthcare debate in 2009, furiously backing the Blue Dog receptor of mountains of health insurance money, Max Baucus, while whinging about the disaster of Socialism.

For a time, the government actually had a piece of the auto industry and Obama did a wonderful bit about moving some of these Ford Taurus’s at a blockbuster sales event.  That was Socialism in its classic form, actual ownership of a company, so those decriers who were begging for a bailout in 2009 can sit down and shut up; they crave Socialism existentially.  The hypocrisy is not hard to make out; it is the foundation of the public relations effort against Socialism and its proponents.

So, in its simplest form.  The fight today appears to be between corporate America and left socialists. And it is being fought with the machinery of Democracy, elections, with one side professing support for, and the other, unabashedly in opposition to, complete citizen access to the ballot box.  But part of the army, the Decorporocrats, just will not commit to the battle, and therefore, must be considered to be in league with the enemy.  Sure, this analysis leaves out a lot of the country that can’t or won’t look beyond abortion or guns; they are unreachable to the Democratic Party, but not a large enough percentage to win the White House on their own.  What’s left of the electorate are the targets of the Anti-Socialism crusade, and the most powerful force in that effort is the New York Times which has the ability to strike its blow for the Decorporocrats and the Recorplicans just by ignoring some of the most important journalism for the vitality of Democracy that can be found anywhere–the work of Greg Palast.

 

The Trial of Biden v. Reade

So here’s a moment for our nation.  We’ve got Trump. ‘Nough said.  We’ve got a pandemic.  And now we have a presumed Democratic nominee for the presidency facing an accusation that he committed rape by foreign object (digital penetration) in 1993.  The accuser’s name is Tara Reade, then a staffer for then-Senator Biden, since a lawyer.  The press and the women’s movement were embarrassingly late to address the issue, and nobody particularly hides the fact that the reason is obvious–the accused, that’s their, with some exceptions to be sure, pick to eject Trump from the office he has defiled for the entirety of his term.

 

Finally, the story’s importance could be ignored no longer, and Biden, after two weeks or more of silence, was forced to submit to an interview on the subject by Mika Brezinski.  Interestingly, the principal embarrassment on the part of the press came from the quantity of interviews given by Biden during which not one question about the accusation was asked.  At any rate, he denied the accusation and what passed for an examination of him by Ms. Brezinski devolved to her insistence that all of his records, wherever they reside, be searched for the name Tara Reade, an idea that the former Vice President was not happy with.  He leaned on the possibility that privileged conversations with foreign leaders might be divulged, or that some papers might contain material that could be taken out of context and used against him in the campaign, the real horrible (Trump-involved) part of which has yet to begin.

 

The suggested search should certainly be conducted, but it is hardly essential in a search for truth for the people’s purposes at this moment.  Because we can have a trial, or an approximation of one, simply using what we know from the public record.  #METOO has taught us how to evaluate sexual assault and harassment claims that did not arise at the time of the event.  And, as opposed to what some commentators have suggested, the teaching is not to “Believe women.”  More aptly, it is precisely what the accused in this instance has suggested: Women who come forward and subject themselves to the scrutiny of national focus should be presumed to be relating an event the essence of which is real.  The notion is that the reasons for keeping quiet at the time, fear of reprisal by a powerful man and fear for one’s career, not to mention the discomfort attendant all sexual allegations, combine to excuse the uncertainties that naturally accompany other non-sexual accusations made years after an event.  Women do not come forward given all the horrors that come with it, unless they are telling a truth.

 

But that is simply the presumption.  As Biden rightly says in his interview, the matter needs to be looked into and examined.  Here the principal question has to do with corroboration.  Did the accuser actually experience something that resulted in her complaining to SOMEONE at the time, for example.  It is absurd to think that a person would complain falsely at the time in order to have ammunition against a powerful person when it might mean something 20+ years later.

 

In this regard, Ms. Brezinski was missing in action since she mentioned none of what could be considered corroboration in the case of Reade vs. Biden.  But we can still have our trial, as was possible in the “Morning Joe” show two days ago.  It might have gone something like this:

 

Vice President Biden, obviously a proper investigation in this case and some sort of hearing or trial that would allow the American people to come to their own conclusions concerning these allegations against you is not possible.  I would like to do my part in pursuit of truth by exploring what the world knows from the public record.

 

To start, you agree that you employed Tara Reade as a staffer for a period of time around 1993 where at some point she supervised interns working in your office, correct?

 

According to you, you are unaware of any complaints she had concerning your conduct at the time, is that true?

 

You first became aware of some complaint by her a year or so ago when she and seven or so other women publicly complained of your physical treatment of them, your invasion of their space, if you will, uncomfortable, unwanted touching and the like, correct?

 

And as I understand it from your public declarations, you agree that her criticisms and those of the other women were entirely reasonable; which is to say you acknowledge that the conduct of which she complained was inappropriate.

 

Now, concerning the alleged assault in 1993, you acknowledge that she complained about your conduct toward her to some friends and family, more or less contemporaneously, and mentioned it again in 1995; is that right?

 

You are further aware that Tara Reade’s  mother called Larry King on television in 1994 and made reference to her daughter’s  complaint.

 

These matters are some of what determines the credibility of a survivor, corroboration in the form of a contemporaneous complaint, correct?

 

You, as a politician have promoted the understandings that survivors don’t always come forward to authorities at the time for a variety of reasons, including fears for their careers as well as possible reprisal by a powerful abuser.

 

In addition, you are aware of the fact that the difficulty of the subject matter means that the full sum and substance of what happened is not necessarily presented at once, but may take years for the survivor to handle emotionally?

 

And you are famous for your declaration that someone in Tara Reade’s position should be presumed truthful as she puts forth her complaint now.

 

You were once a public defender, and have been involved in criminal justice concerns for decades, right?

 

So you are familiar with the fact that denial on the part of the accused is not, and cannot be, dispositive of anything?  Not every one, but every kind of criminal has denied wrongdoing dishonestly, true? 

 

And it is also an established fact that the manner of the denial, the forcefulness, its articulation, cannot be the end of any inquiry, because all of that can be faked and learned and practiced, correct?

 

As a further piece of corroboration to which Ms. Reade’s supporters refer is the fact that her job of supervising interns changed abruptly at the time of the allegation.  That must be considered corroborative, do you not agree?

 

A record of her complaining, apparently, according to her, about mistreatment due to an uncomfortable work environment, would not add a lot to what we know already, correct?  She does not say she complained of sexual assault, chickening out from such a complaint at the time, as you understand it, correct?  

 

Whatever record exists would be unnecessary given the fact of her contemporaneous complaints of an unofficial nature, you agree?

 

You acknowledge already that her duties changed precipitously, as the interns have recently asserted?

 

Now, if there were some sort of official complaint, of whatever nature, that should have been preserved,  there are reasons for its potential improper removal, correct?  With or without your approval, some person could have taken steps in an effort to protect your political future?  You agree with that?

 

The unfortunate fact is that Tara Reade’s accusation passes all of the tests of a past complaint of sexual misconduct, that make it believable, would you agree?  And were it not you, but someone else, wouldn’t you say that their simply denying the accusation should not be sufficient to answer the question or end the inquiry.

 

Would you agree that the only explanation for Ms. Reade subjecting herself to the kind of scrutiny she is undergoing, if this allegation is false, is mental illness.  And you know of no evidence of pathological delusion on her part.

 

Some have pointed to out-of-the-mainstream views concerning Russia or Putin as evidence that she should not be believed, you are aware of those attacks on her credibility?  You don’t adopt them do you?

You acknowledge that strange or uncommon views on world events or personalities do not, and should not, make unworthy of belief the sort of complaint made against you.   People with unusual opinions are entirely capable of being victims of sexual assault, right?

Further, she is a lawyer in good standing presumptively worthy of belief, whose complaint, you agree, pre-exists any statements or writings on twitter or elsewhere to which reference has been made by your defenders, isn’t that right?

 

You agree that a person’s general tendency towards telling the truth should be part of an assessment of their allegation of sexual assault, or their denial of sexual assault, correct?

 

With regard to your denial we are forced to consider a number of matters in your history.  For example, you were forced out of a presidential race in 1988 because of false statements about your academic record and at least two instances of plagiarism, true?

 

You have acknowledged that your vote for the Iraq War was a mistake, but you have claimed to have been opposed to that war from the moment it started.  There are multiple instances of you promoting the military action after its commencement, aren’t there, calling into question the veracity of your more recent public pronouncements made in  pursuit of the presidency?

 

Your statements about your support for cutting social security have also been untrue and the subject of criticism have they not?  Your claims of having marched in the civil rights movement, and being arrested in South Africa have also been scrutinized for a lack of veracity?  And you have admitted and apologized for not telling the truth concerning these matters, true?

 

And I am sorry to have to bring it up, but you apologized after his death and to his family for having said that the driver of the truck involved in the accident that led to the deaths of your family members had drunk his lunch when that was not only false but he was entirely blameless in the event.  That is true is it not?

 

And you are ultimately responsible for attempting to mislead the investigation into this very complaint by submitting to people such as Stacy Abrams talking points for their media appearances that falsely cited the New York Times as having deeply investigated the allegations and found them to be untrue, a patently dishonest assertion.

 

Were you personally the impetus behind the inclusion of that false idea in those talking points?  Or was that the effort of some staffer trying to protect your political viability now as another may well have 27 years ago, or since,  if no record of Ms. Reade’s complaint is found in your archived documents?

 

I think it unlikely that Joe Biden would ever agree to such an examination, because these questions contain the most damning amalgamation of evidence, every piece of which is part of the public record.  What is demonstrated here is that while Tara Reade should be presumed to be telling the truth in the first instance, there is no reason that can be produced by Joe Biden not to conclude that he raped her as she has claimed.

 

As a strategic matter, it may be impossible not to vote for Biden if his name is on the ballot in November.  There is another matter with which Democrats are confronted right now, however.  Each of us must demand that Joe Biden step down from the presidential campaign for the good of the nation.  It may well be impossible to predict what the ticket will look like should he do this, but there is not the slightest question that the country will be better off with his replacement…unless it is Hillary Clinton.

 

Goldberg, Marcotte, and Walsh Go After Tara Reade, Biden’s Accuser

Having now consumed sufficient quantities of political venom concerning the accusations leveled at presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, by a former intern, Tara Reade, that amount to the crime of rape by a foreign object, I am compelled to weigh in since I haven’t yet succumbed to the effects of the poison.  Joan Walsh and Amanda Marcotte and Michelle Goldberg have been serially destroyed by the estimable Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, but that isn’t going to stop me from dancing on their graves. And all of those years cross-examining rape victims and overcoming some pretty serious pangs of empathy to do it, may have given me a little bit of a different angle to see it all from.

 

Goldberg et al are expressing skepticism about Reade’s allegations, but they can obviously feel the cold wall of feminist outrage against their back, so they do their best to make it all palatable.  But political hit jobs will always be political hit jobs no matter how silky smooth it feels going down. As Robinson points out, as long as you get the words, “changed her story” planted in the minds of the reader, it really doesn’t matter whether you allow for the possibility of her telling the truth or not.

 

The problem that #MeToo encountered, and, with the lengthy sentence of Harvey Weinstein, and multiple other resignations and dismissals, it was thought, had overcome, was the inbred fact of these cases, that it is searingly uncomfortable, and incredibly damaging for the victims to open their mouths.  The reluctance has always been an arrow in the defense lawyer’s quiver because it leads to long periods of time between event and complaint and often a halting process of disclosure once it is begun. The story isn’t changed, it is simply not able to be told in its fullness at one time, or at a certain time, in the life of the abused woman.  #MeToo managed to provide this understanding in such a way that people such as Joe Biden were able to declare that women who make these claims do so at enormous cost, and that cost is sufficient to overcome whatever doubts might be urged against them for not saying anything immediately, or for not being able to stomach total disclosure in one fell swoop.  It should be “presumed,” in Biden’s words, that the accusations are true, until the opposite has been shown.

 

There is not a relevant syllable that Tara Reade has uttered about what Biden did to her that cannot be more than adequately explained by the structure of all #MeToo complaints as we have come to know them.  The power imbalance at the moment of the crime, coupled with the accurately perceived long term detrimental consequences to the victim’s career demand that the decision to complain be considered with the utmost care and deliberation.  Would Elizabeth Warren have progressed beyond “baby law professor” if she had opened her mouth just after being chased around a desk by her senior? We will never know, but it took the #MeToo movement to pry the facts out of her. 

 

When Goldberg and Marcotte and Walsh went after Tara Reade, they were playing public defender, soulfully bemoaning the prior inconsistent statements that some referred to as a “changed story.”  But that is not their forum, nor a role for which they are qualified. It would have been entirely appropriate for Joe Biden’s defense lawyer, had the statute of limitations not extinguished the idea, to repeat to Tara Read’s face each and every one of the differences that may well exist between what she has said or didn’t say throughout the decades.  And, were it to have transpired in a criminal court, it would have been the jury’s prerogative to find that there was that degree of uncertainty, not beyond a reasonable doubt, such that the only proper verdict would have been “Not Guilty,” but in that case, Joe Biden would have walked out of the courtroom, an acquitted accused rapist. Under no circumstance would he have been declared, at that moment, an innocent man.  In California, an acquitted defendant can make a motion to be declared “factually innocent.” Should such a motion be granted, at that event, may the word innocent be relevantly and legally applied. These are all matters way beyond the remit of Goldberg et al. Their job, as journalists, was to give Tara Reade the presumption to which the understandings of #MeToo make her entitled. It was their job to treat her the same way they treated Christine Blassey Ford, or any other woman who has managed to summon the almost unimaginable courage to speak the horror of her personal experience against a powerful man.

 

Goldberg et al are journalists who have taught the world the functional realities of #MeToo, but here, in this most momentous time, they decided to forget all that they had taught, or even the words of this particular accused, “[F]or a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”  Amen. But there is one further matter that must be addressed since it tends to shed light on the minds of the perpetrators, Goldberg, Marcotte, and Walsh.

 

Tara Reade’s accusation may not sit well because it is, in a sense, a garden variety #MeToo complaint, not made at the time, halting in its revelation.  But each of the “Three” are forced by truth to acknowledge that there is the important matter of corroboration in the case of Ms. Reade in that she complained to friend and family at the time.  What is enlightening is the fact that there is an additional piece of evidence that even a criminal jury may have had some difficulty with. Reade claims to have brought the crime to the attention of her supervisor in the Senator’s office, a fact which no supervisor supports.  But what is clear from the investigations that have been conducted by the likes of Marcotte and Walsh at least, is that Reade was reassigned out of the position she held immediately following the complaint, mirroring precisely what she recites as the chronology of events. We, the unwashed and unresponded to, would dearly love to be able to cross-examine the “Three” concerning their omission of this particular piece of chronology in their discussions of Tara Reade.

Bernie Biden Debate Possibility Squandered

A glorious opportunity was squandered on Sunday night when politics as usual proved too much for democracy as required.  Who knows if the nation is better off with a dozen or so candidates for president vying in what ways they can to be on a stage with their confreres trying desparately to keep being there as polls and primaries come and go.  But when at last we are left with two, at that moment the country has a chance to find out who in fact these contestants are and what they are made of. But instead on Sunday we were presented with a most watered-down, sanitized, and moderated version of what might have been.

If the candidates agreed on the format that was produced, that is their failing, but even in the face of such an agreement, one of the candidates needs to have the guts or the presumption to short-circuit what was planned and demand what was called for, two hours of mutual cross-examination.  I suggest that Bernie Sanders should have said this:

Moderator: “ Sen. Sanders, let’s begin with you,” etc

Bernie:  “Let me say, with a certain apology, that I did not come here tonight to answer your questions, Jake, though that is a good one that Joe and I may choose to address.  I came here to ask questions of Joe Biden and for him to ask questions of me. I would like us to be involved in a probing conversation that is mutual, honest, and fair in all respects.  I would ask you moderators to keep time but otherwise stay out of it, except perhaps to express an opinion as to whether one or the other of us is not answering some question that was asked and maybe in the second hour, to suggest a topic which you believe is more important than those we have chosen up until then.  I will further suggest as a guide post, that answers should begin with a “yes” or a “no” unless the format of the question dictates otherwise and then an explanation if it is required. I think 10 minute segments directed by one of us and then the other makes sense, but if Joe has a different idea, I am amenable to it.  We should proceed in that manner until we run out of time. I appreciate that I am not adhering to the rules we agreed upon; but in my opinion a vibrant democracy is more important. I will begin right now if it is okay with Joe, but maybe we should first address my duplicity in agreeing to one format and then reneging on that understanding.  Do you not agree, Joe, that the candidates should choose what they want to press their opponent about and address those issues that they as leaders think are the most important?”

What is good about cross-examination is that it puts the respondent in the position of having to answer the question and paying the rhetorical price when they do not.  The mutual nature of this proposed system gives each debater the ability to frame premises in exactly the words they choose, being assured that a yes or no, with explanation as necessary, was on its way.

It might have gone like this:

Joe, we represent two wings or tendencies within the democratic party, the progressive and the more moderate.  Do you agree with that characterization?

Can you tell us which parts of the goals of my platform you disagree with?

For example do you believe health care should be a matter of right in this country as you said on television last week?  

How is that view consistent with leaving 10 million Americans uninsured as your program makes explicit on your website?

Would it be fair to say that you would like to have tuition free college for all Americans who want it?  And universal free child care?

Do you agree that your support for the Green New Deal translates into to a far less aggressive economic program than what I have proposed?  In essence the difference between $1.9 trillion and $16 trillion?

Can you explain why your program is so mild in comparison?  What do we disagree about? 

And that last question is the heart and soul of the benefit of a mutual cross-examination debate; it should be, and, better than any other format known to man, is designed to delineate agreement and disagreement, as one classic form of question employed in cross-examination is: “you agree that…”

Andrew Cockburn swings and misses on 9/11

There is so much of failure in humanity’s quest for justice, which, in spite of an enormous trove of evidence to the contrary, I still believe exists.  If you are not inspired to true rage by the Iraq War and the mechanisms of its creation by the Bush Administration, you and I have very little in common.  Not everyone is familiar with Justice Jackson’s assertion that the crime of aggression, waging war without need or legal justification, is the worst of which man is capable, but the notion would find general acceptance everywhere.

 

To our great misfortune, however, few expect what should be the inevitable consequence of the transgression: prosecution and imprisonment.  Beyond the inaudible fringe, no one of power or voice is capable of such a suggestion.  We. the inaudible, yet strive to be heard.  Is there the slightest question that the same crime will be committed again by latter-day Bushes and Cheneys, if those two and their enablers are not called to a courtroom?

Köpa Original Levitra 10mg eller 20mg till bra pris på apoteket online https://potensmedel-receptfritt.com/kopa-levitra i Sverige. Den finns tillgänglig 5mg, 10mg och 20mg tabletter som innehåller Vardenafil

 

The War in Iraq sits atop the pile of injustice, but another still-throbbing excrescence of only slightly less egregious proportion is 9/11.  Andew Cockburn writes very recently in Harper’s that some kind of justice may await those whom he considers the true authors of the crime, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  He enlightens us with a sufficient rendering of the history of the sanctioned investigations, two by Congress, one by the 9/11 Commission.  He has interviewed former Senator Bob Graham who chaired the original Congressional investigation, and they both apparently share the bewilderment provoked by the objections raised then by today’s most holy of investigators, Robert Mueller, to the Joint Inquiry’s own investigator, Michael Jacobson, traveling to San Diego to do what would be considered the bare minimum in pursuit of truth.

 

Cockburn details what Jacobson found there, much, we assume, to the displeasure of Mueller and the Bush Administration.  Theirs, however, we also assume, was the last laugh since all that was uncovered would stay hidden for 10+ years and the suspicions fueled by the contents of the famous 28 pages remain today beyond the pale of public “respectable” inquiry.  And here we arrive at the point of this present endeavor.  How much are we allowed to suspect?  What is the extent of our permitted curiosity?

 

Those 28 pages, of which the intrepid Jacobson was the principle author, include the following information:  Two of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals handled by Saudi agents in San Diego in the weeks leading up to 9/11.  Their handlers were funneled $150,000 from the “wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington.”  Hmmm, looks bad for the Kingdom.  And that is as far as our minds are permitted to wander thanks to the stewardship of the renowned and accomplished A. Cockburn.

 

With just a piece or two more of information, things could be different.  That Saudi ambassador in Washington?  He is Prince Bandar, one-time Chief of Saudi intelligence.  But the real point of importance is his relationship to the Bush clan.  In the family he is known as… Bandar Bush.  I believe that was even a joint account upon which the checks were drawn, but it is of no consequence if I am wrong.  The idea that the wife of the Saudi Ambassador would pay money, a great deal of money, in an intelligence operation without her husband’s approval, if not direction, seems ludicrous.  That’s Saudi Arabia, only just considering female drivers licenses.

 

So, without much hesitancy, we may assert that a virtual family member of the Bush clan paid the hijackers to wreak their havoc on Bush and Cheney’s watch.  Might one be so bold as to suspect that those manipulations took place as a result of an inside job conspiracy, the unsayable essence of 9/11 Truth?  I don’t know how to avoid the conclusion, but Mr. Cockburn takes care of all that with the judicious deletion of critical detail.  For more see “Conclusion of Gallop v. Cheney” at vealetruth.com.

Nuland and Kagan and Clinton

There are so many reasons to vote for Bernie Sanders.  For those of us whose interest is primarily in national security and foreign policy, the two other names that you might not recognize in the title of this piece are the best ones I can think of.  Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com said it better than I can in https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/25/neocon-kagan-endorses-hillary-clinton/, but the main point, which Parry alludes to, is that Bernie seems to be making nothing of this issue.

 

Maybe he is completely on top of it, understands the issue, and sees it precisely as Parry and I do. And maybe he knows from his decades in the business that you don’t win elections on foreign policy, though that is a premise that a lot of presidents might well argue with, Kennedy and Cuba, Carter and Iran, Reagan and the Soviet Union.  But why not play a pretty good card, pivotal or not?

 

Hillary Clinton has allied herself with neocons for decades; the idea that her vote on Iraq was some sort of one-off “mistake” is absurd.  Her alliance with, and support for, and employment of Nuland and Kagan, the husband/wife neocon intervention operatives, is absolutely everything one needs to know about the direction of Clinton’s foreign policy, assuming she sticks with her history and eschews some sort of redemption scenario which is the fantasy-based rationale for my vote for her in any general election.

Kagan was a co-founder with William Kristol of the Project for a New American Century, made famous in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” for its pre-9/11 reference to the necessity for a New Pearl Harbor in order for the US to be able to project power around the world in the way that its signators wished.  Who were members of that gang?  Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearle, Abrams, Wolfowitz…need one say more?

“I Told Them To Cut It Out”

Hillary Clinton’s self-congratulatory pronouncement at the first Democratic debate that when she represented Wall Street–giving the most benign interpretation to that phrase–she went down there, being aware of the behavior in which they were engaging, and told them to cut it out, provokes a question or two.  They are:

 

  1. What precisely was the behavior that led to her admonition?

  2. Upon what information was she relying to conclude that the admonition was appropriate or necessary?

  3. Where did she say what she said and who was present?

  4. Is there a record of what was said?

  5. What was the reaction to her statement?

  6. Was the conduct of which she was complaining criminal or just risky and stupid?

  7. When she returned to the Senate, what steps did she take to confront the problem which impelled her to go to the headquarters of the mis- or malfeasance and admonish its practitioners?

  8. Did she conduct hearings, make a referral to the Justice Department, or inform her colleagues, or the other citizens that she represented, of the dangers that she foresaw?

  9. How precisely would she describe those dangers, did she memorialize her fears at the time in any manner whatsoever?
  10. Maybe most importantly of all, what did she want us voters to think about her?  Are we supposed to be impressed that she had the gumption to speak harshly to the financial world, her most powerful backers?  Are we supposed to be impressed that she knew bad things were happening?  Or are we supposed to be too stupid to realize how useless an act she was committing.  Did she know what a useless act it was, if act it was?

.

Jon Stewart and Judith Miller

 

There are moments in history that draw commentary out of the most reticent and taciturn.  I am neither, just unusually provoked by Jon Stewart’s efforts with former New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, for whom people like me have immeasurable disdain.  The partially encouraging news is that Stewart apparently feels a similar regard.  I write because this missed moment was so unusual and so important that it required substantial preparation which, if it took place, was ill-directed or unproductive.

 

Jon Stewart is capable of greatness.  He is also capable of failure and self-criticism; his chagrin at his own performance with one of the modern era’s most famous mass murderers, Donald Rumsfeld, seemed heartfelt but was absolutely well-founded.  With what was he presented in the person of Judith Miller?  There before him trying to sell a book containing her defense of her own iniquity, was a reporter for the most influential newspaper in the world who apparently admits that she was used by the forces of war and aggression and who admits that she got the story wrong based on faulty intelligence.  Can anyone remember another similar occasion?

 

Mr. Stewart, why could you not have said something like this?:

 

Ms. Miller, I am going to admit that it is quite easy to be critical in hindsight, but as I understand it, you do not at this time suggest that you did not perform a vital function in enabling the Bush Administration to commit the war crime of aggression and involve itself in one of the worst foreign policy blunders of any living person’s memory.

 

You acknowledge that it was essential for the Bush Administration to get the people of the United States behind any military action in Iraq.  And you do not distance yourself from the role you played in that strategy.

 

There are a range of possibilities for why you did such a thing.  The first, historically very far from an outrageous accusation, is that you are a compensated or uncompensated agent of the CIA which had a job for you to do that you agreed to perform.  Under such an arrangement, one hopes you would know whatever intelligence you were being fed was unreliable, whether or not you cared in the slightest if it was true.

 

The second possibility is that you are an entirely honest journalist who was seduced by her proximity to power and whose analytical powers were compromised by the loss of objectivity which comes from such a position.  In that case, you may have cared whether what you were saying was true, but been unable to make the determination.

 

Another explanation for your performance hinges on your ideological worldview; your ideas are so in line with those of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocon stalwarts, that you, deep down, would feel just fine considering yourself a warrior in alliance with their objectives.  You have in fact known Saddam Hussein to be evil for a very long time, and any steps taken in the direction of his erasure from the world stage are worthy and right, the considerations of law, or morality, or the long-term consequences of any action aimed at his end being someone else’s business; you are just a reporter.

 

The question which the world needs an answer to, since your path was trod by almost all of what passes for journalism in this country, is, since you ended up doing the very worst thing you were capable of, paving the way for a heinous war crime whose devastation it will take generations to reckon, was there ever a moment when you, your co-writer, and/or your editors gathered together to consider whether or not you might be on your way to doing precisely that, the very worst thing a journalist can do?

 .

Chuck Todd v. Dick Cheney

Immunity for Dick Cheney?  Now there is an odd idea.  He is one of the most despised men on the planet, and therefore beloved by probably close to one half of Americans, but why precisely is he entitled to immunity?  You haven’t heard about his being granted immunity?  Okay, so he hasn’t been granted immunity in the traditional sense, as a testifying or cooperating witness.  He has been granted immunity from being questioned about the subject that he apparently thinks absolves him of any responsibility to act as decency and humanity ordinarily dictate—–9/11.

 

I do not begrudge him in the slightest for being the guy that says the oft-thought but unsayable, that he isn’t concerned about the rights or comforts of suspected terrorists, or even the ones who turn out to be innocent.  His support of the use of torture is not a particularly enlightened position now that its uselessness has been established.  And even if no one is entitled to their own facts, there will always be partisans impervious to reason.  Chuck Todd is as good as anyone, I suppose, at demonstrating those people are wrong.  But Cheney’s answer to the question, “what is torture?” was a recounting of the horrors of 9/11.  Twice.  And of all of the human beings in the world, the most painfully prominent who should not be allowed that refuge is Dick Cheney.  Why?  Because whether it knows it or not, the world has the goods on him.  He was complicit in the attacks in a more demonstrable way, based on far more powerful evidence, than any other soul alive,… or dead; Osama bin Laden comes to mind.  The U.S. never even tried to prove Bin Laden’s guilt to the Taliban, which was all they were asking for as a prerequisite to turning him over, thereby alleviating the necessity of a 10-year war in Afghanistan.

 

How bad is it exactly? Does Chuck Todd know the truth but hasn’t the stones to inquire?  Is he uncertain, possibly, or has he found Cheney innocent after exhaustive investigation?  Does he know that Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta testified to the 9/11 Commission that he was in the PEOC with Cheney before the Pentagon was hit on the morning of 9/11?  Does he know that Mineta gave a detailed account of Cheney confirming orders which either allowed the attack to succeed–we call that treason–or were not followed, leaving the building undefended?  If it were the latter, military history and military law and military standard operating procedure dictate that there would have been a Board of Inquiry, courts-martial, demotions, reprimands, or prosecutions for failure to obey orders.  Instead, there were, in the wake of this nation’s worst single event, promotions across the board.  Whatever Todd’s state of mind, aren’t Meet The Press’s viewers entitled to their own conclusions?

Is this Mr. Todd’s ignorance at work, his failure to raise the obvious questions?  Or is this just the grandest display of intimidation by a truly evil man in the history of journalism, surpassing Rather’s quailing at the scour of Bush in the dark episode known as Iran-Contra?.

Conclusion of Gallop v. Cheney + Affidavit

This is probably a little here-and-there theft from the book which has made its way to the publisher.  If it ever escapes from there, this can act as advertising.  The book details my charge into the valley of death in pursuit of 9/11 Truth.  I survived, but Mother Truth has not done so well.  A kind of natural period having been placed at the end of the sentence with the Supreme Court’s denial of our Petition for Certiorari, it seems an apt moment to sum up, for anyone who cares.

When last I felt the urge to set it down, we had been sanctioned $15,000 for appealing the dismissal of our lawsuit, Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers, which accused those three of complicity in the attacks of 9/11.  For those reading such words for the first time, for God’s sake, don’t turn away now, unless you simply know yourself well enough to be certain that physical malady will shortly arrive if you continue.  There is so much evidence at this point that literally no one will deign to debate the question.  No one.  And if anyone thinks I am wrong, please do all you can to prove me so, because if there is one thing that I will likely die grieving for the lack of, it is any sentient human to be required to answer the questions which I have posed to two courts, fifty +/- journalists, and the world in general too many times to feel comfortable acknowledging.

We were sanctioned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the second highest court in the country, in a virtually unprecedented way, on the court’s own motion, which means the United States Attorney, our opponent, had no part in the initiation of those sanctions.  The Panel issuing them included Judge John Walker who is the first cousin once removed of former President George W. Bush, which certainly feels wrong and looks wrong, everything else to the side.  President Bush would be an unindicted co-conspirator at the very best for him, had I any sway or say at the Department of Justice.

We were sanctioned for filing a frivolous appeal to a frivolous lawsuit.  If you are a lawyer, few more devastating things can be said about you than that you have wasted the court’s time with frivolous claims.  So, where is my embarrassment?  Why in the world publicize the fact?  How about a little dignity, or the self respect that comes from the recognition and acknowledgment of error?  Where, why, and how, indeed.

I guess because the very last thing I am, is wrong, and my hope is for people to see that and want to act.  I have known with certainty the matters that I alleged, long before I made the allegations.  That was the least that I had to require of myself.  Hobbes(?) asserted that outrageous or unusual claims require more than the normal amounts of proof.  I have had that fact pointed out to me by really brilliant people since I first ran into this trouble, and have taken the admonition as seriously as I possibly can.  So I didn’t need to be told by anyone that I was right.  I had put in the hours, read the books and scholarly articles, hired the experts, questioned what witnesses I could with 3 decades of experience in cross-examination at my disposal.  Only then did I take the most serious action available to me.  I accused of mass murder and treason, publicly and in court documents, three of the most powerful people on the planet.

Even though that necessary certainty had been achieved long before, in a sick sort of way, I was gratified to have the federal courts of this country, or two of them, concede the facts, in the only way they were ever going to, by ignoring them.  They have yet to mention the smallest part of the legion of assertions that we have made in our Complaint and in our various filings in response to the Government’s, or the Courts’ actions.  Every one of these documents and the Courts’ decisions are available at centerfor911justice.org.

I am tired of citing the most egregious example, but it is required if the proper flavor is to be appreciated.  We and the world have a witness to what Vice President Cheney was doing and saying at the crucial times that morning in the person of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.  The long and short of it is that Cheney was heard giving orders about the plane that was heading for the Pentagon, that played such a pivotal, if controversial, role in the attacks.  The most obvious interpretation of the orders, given the absence of Boards of Inquiry and demotions afterwards, is that Cheney ordered the plane to proceed unmolested by Pentagon defenses just before the devastation occurred.  In other words, Cheney did what he could to ensure that the plane continued on its path so that the plan of the attack could succeed.

Whether Mineta was accurate in all he said–it should be noted that he has been given more than one opportunity to correct the record, which includes his testimony to the 9/11 Commission, and hasn’t–is beside the point when it comes to the actions of the courts involved.  The accusations we made must by law be addressed by any court considering dismissing the lawsuit based upon those claims.  But that didn’t happen, leaving a pronounced, unmistakable hole where reason should have been.  As we have written elsewhere, it is as if, upon review of a liquor store hold-up indictment, the reviewing party were to fail to take note of the entry into the store of the defendant, gun drawn.  It was as bold and bald as that.  If this were all just some sort of strange delusion- the concept advanced by the court in the same documents which allege bad faith on my part- the delusional facts should be cited, with supporting argument.  Not in this world; not as this game is played; not by these who play it, possessed of the power to destroy with their very words.  The absolute last thing that government agents are going to do is mention the supporting evidence that we cite.  For those schooled in the law, in fact for pretty much anybody, the omission says it all.
But, some have said and thought, wasn’t Osama Bin Laden responsible for 9/11?  In my opinion, he most certainly was one of the perpetrators.  However, we must leave history and every day common sense behind if we are to think he could not have been aided in his endeavor, or co-opted in it, by forces rather more powerful than he.  We needn’t go back very far, nor graze far afield, to find precedent for that idea.  In 1993, a former Egyptian Army officer living in the US,  named Emad Salem, went to work as an informant for the FBI and infiltrated the mosque in New Jersey where the Blind Sheik Abdel Rahman was engaged in conspiring with Ramzi Youssef to bomb the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan.  For reasons never divulged, the FBI terminated their relationship with Salem before the attack, he saying, “don’t come to me when the bombs go off.”  The bomb went off, and Salem’s testimony convicted the bombers.  There is no evidence that the conspirators knew they had been infiltrated before their arrests.  We, pursuing truth about 9/11, needn’t prove that events recurred precisely as they did in New York and New Jersey eight years before. The existence of those events simply demonstrates that the evidence which establishes, without question, that the highest levels of American government descended into evil on the morning of 9/11 sits firmly upon a foundation of human experience and recent human history.

It has never been necessary to prove motive in a criminal case, helpful as understanding it may be in a court proceeding.  More than any other question, I am asked, skeptically, why would they do that, and in that way.  There is a very good reason why proof of motive is not required.  One’s thoughts are one’s own, and may well be unknowable to others, therefore impossible to prove without a confession, which we do not require a defendant to make in this country.
Nevertheless, there are some reasonable speculations about why agents of our own government would engage in such conduct, and why this or that tactic was employed.  However weak or strong those guesses may be, they are as nothing when trying to understand what happened.  Skepticism or perplexity must fail when compared to the laws of physics and the accumulated physical evidence which demand the conclusion that the buildings in New York were destroyed by controlled demolition, leading to the discovery of nanothermite, an explosive compound, in the dust and debris at Ground Zero.

We are also compelled to conclude that the Pentagon was successfully attacked because elements within our military did not employ its defenses.  Based upon the totality of the evidence it is quite doubtful that any airliner hit the building, but it is unnecessary to conclude whether it did or didn’t. The “inside” nature of the attack is demonstrated by the stand down of defenses and all of the other circumstantial evidence to which we have made reference in our papers.
As to why they would do it, generally, I cite two wars with their attendant enhanced defense spending, the Patriot Act, innumerable and unquantifiable opportunities for financial benefit by allied corporate forces and personal associates, the ability to employ fear as a motivating force on a daily basis and during election cycles, and lastly, to divert attention from the plethora of other crimes that had been committed and would be committed by members and associates of the then-governing administration.  Those crimes include fraud in the procurement of defense contracts, the theft of elections, and the murders required to enforce and maintain silence by less-committed members of the conspiracy.

There is very little of solace to be found in the history of this lawsuit.  There has not been a single voice among all of the chorus of commentators that predicted the extent to which the jurists involved in this case would take leave of their oaths.  But of course there has never been a lawsuit in the history of this country which contained allegations as monumental as are at the heart of Gallop v. Cheney.  And 9/11 was the worst single crime in American history.  In order to defeat truth, the judges had nowhere to go but to abject, craven falsehood.

When the planes disappeared into the buildings and the Pentagon erupted, 2977 victims’ lives were claimed, but the true toll of this basest of human cowardice and evil is far larger than that.  Thousands more have died from disease caused by the toxicity at Ground Zero.  And what of the innocents around the world?  There are American soldiers who fought in Iraq who thought they were retaliating for 9/11 when almost nothing could be further from the truth, yet hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead.  It is doubtful that Osama Bin Laden’s contribution to the attack would have achieved anywhere near the devastation brought about by demolition of the Towers which are the responsibility of the American conspirators.  Therefore, it may have been possible to avoid both of the wars had it not been for the participation of Cheney and Rumsfeld.  The Affidavit submitted to the 2nd Circuit opposing the SANCTIONS contains the bulk of the evidence against Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers.  It can be found with the other documents submitted in the case, and at the end of this piece.

There is, maybe, an honorable explanation for the actions of the various judges who have ruled in this case, and the myriad journalists and law professors and deans of law schools, and unmoved-to-action, informed citizens who have rested immobile when another choice was presented to them.  It has been said by some that the investigation into the assassination of JFK was as flawed as it was because the people investigating understood what would be found and decided that the result of truth would be chaos and instability and therefore chose untruth.  It could be that the same or a similar phenomenon is at work with 9/11, a decision made that the very fiber of this country, the ties that bind us, the foundation that supports us, are too fragile to endure such a wretched stroke.   So because they could, they chose the well-traveled path of deceit, in spite of the dishonor, in spite of the numberless additional victims sure to find their ways to a death too soon, holding fast to dread stability out of fear.

Sad and wrong, and if so, only barely honorable in light of the selfish tilt of the calculations.  Stability serves the well-seated and powerful.  Who knows but the rest of the world might well benefit from what others see as chaos.

Thus the last ostensible victim in this horrifying tale is justice.  It has been tested in this nation, and there is little left.  In fact, it has been unmasked. Maybe that should be the title of the book.

Affidavit

I, William W. Veale, hereby declare under the penalty of perjury that the following are the facts upon which I have relied to conclude that Defendants Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers conspired to commit mass murder and treason, and the reasons why those facts warrant that conclusion:

THE PENTAGON
Plaintiff April Gallop went to work at the Pentagon on her first day back from maternity leave on September 11, 2001. She had her two-month-old baby with her and was directed by her superior to go to her desk first before taking her child to daycare.  She arrived at her workspace with no knowledge that the nation was in the midst of a terrorist attack, two airplanes having flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

As she turned on her computer, the building exploded.  She was knocked unconscious; came to; engaged in efforts to save others and then remembered her child.  She was able to extricate her son from the rubble and make her way out of the hole blown in the outer wall of the building.  As she climbed out toward the light with thirteen others, through the smoke and dust and debris, it never occurred to her, based upon what she saw and smelled and heard and felt, that an airplane had been involved in causing the destruction.  Her memory did not comport with what shortly became the government’s version of events, that American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, had been hijacked and flown into the building.  As the months and years passed, nothing could diminish certain stark, abiding, undeniable facts.  Her desk was some forty feet from the edge of the hole that she managed to climb out of.  Her desk was in the way of the bulk of the left wing of a Boeing 757 as it plowed into the wall very near to which she sat, if in fact there was such a plane.  But she could not imagine how she could have made her way out through a hole created by an airliner flying into the building without seeing evidence of it having done so.  She saw nothing; she felt nothing; she smelled nothing.  No pieces of plane or luggage or jet fuel. And no fire.  She walked out having lost a shoe, but suffered no burns on her naked skin.  Nothing about her experience said, “airplane.”  Her initial instinct persists to this day, that it was a bomb. Years later, in 2008, she filed the lawsuit which has occasioned the appeal that gave rise to the Order to Show Cause Re: Sanctions.  It alleges that former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, were part of a conspiracy that enabled the attacks now known simply as “9/11.”

Even the most casual, if non-perfunctory exposure to the attacks that day finds a quantity of material that is difficult if not impossible to summarize in any manageable court document.  Much of that material establishes that the Twin Towers and Building 7 in New York were destroyed by controlled demolition.  The work of scholars of a number of applicable disciplines, most importantly, architects and engineers, have established these facts to a moral certainty.  The finding, by the 9/11 Commission and the reports by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, that those buildings were destroyed due to the combination of being hit by airliners, in the case of the Towers, or by falling debris in the case of Building 7, and the resulting fires, is simply false.  Scientific inquiry and exposition have made it demonstrably so.  For example, the buildings collapsed at free-fall speed.  The only way that would be physically possible is if the supporting structures and floors were eliminated by explosive detonation.  The conclusive evidence that this is precisely what occurred lies in the finding of a substance called nanothermite in the dust and debris of the ruins.  Nanothermite combines with other chemical elements to form a compound capable of cutting through steel instantaneously, creating extremely high temperatures in the process.  The entire matter of the events in Manhattan will be addressed in the World Trade Center section of this Affidavit.

Two other pieces of this extraordinary puzzle, so compelling, so strikingly probative, are mentioned here to give them prominence. First, 37,500 gallons of jet fuel were missing from the alleged crash site of United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, according to the Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Agency, thus demolishing completely the government’s official version of what took place that day.  Second, some three hundred human bone fragments, none with any dimension larger that one centimeter, were found on the roof of the 41-story-tall Deutsche Bank building across the street from the South Tower, with nothing other than explosive force to explain their condition, or their presence in that particular place. It is explosive force that the government denies in every instance, despite hundreds of statements of witnesses to the contrary, videotape of its occurrence, expert witnesses’ corroboration, and the refusal to test for its residue.
At the trial of the allegations in the Complaint, Plaintiffs will be able to establish that the three defendants were at their various posts and conducting themselves as their various roles would have dictated at the time of the attacks.  Vice President Cheney was whisked off to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center attached to the White House joined by his wife and a number of other staff members as well as White House photographer David Bohrer and Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.  Rumsfeld and Myers participated in a video-teleconference from the Pentagon that involved Counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, at the White House.  A number of matters concerning the three defendants and their actions that morning are important to an understanding of the broad claims made in the Complaint.

1.  Former Vice President Dick Cheney lied when he told the 9/11 Commission that he did not arrive in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center until almost 10AM.  If believed, he would thereby make himself immune to the accusation that he was in a position to materially and crucially take steps to defend the Pentagon from attack, since the building would have already been struck. On the other hand, his presence there at an earlier time would give him the opportunity to assure that whatever defenses existed would have no effect.  When the accused has provided false evidence concerning his actions, it is a matter of great importance at his trial, and before then, it fuels the fires of investigation for those who would know the truth. No seasoned investigator fails to take note when a suspect lies, because those lies are often the product of  guilt.  Sometimes deliberate, sometimes desperate and impulsive, lies are efforts to contain and sculpt information.  This particular lie by the central figure in the case is referred to first because it concerns the two most important pieces of evidence of conspiracy surrounding the whole subject of the 9/11 attacks: the fact that the headquarters of the mightiest military ever assembled on earth was successfully attacked and the testimony of Norman Mineta.

2. Cheney was, in fact, in the PEOC, “shortly after the South Tower was struck” according to his very own words, and by 9:15 or 9:20 AM, according to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and consistent with the statements of Condoleeza Rice, Richard Clarke, and White House photographer David Bohrer.  These witnesses, called to testify at any trial of this case, will not be the Defendants’ enemies, but rather their friends and colleagues or long-time associates.  These former wielders of unimaginable power will be forced by their oaths to commit perjury, or condemn their fellow with their own words.

3. While there in the PEOC, Cheney learned of the approach of an aircraft toward the Pentagon from 50 miles out, to 30 miles out, to 10 miles out.  When told by his aide that the plane was 10 miles out, Cheney was asked if the orders still stood. Cheney whipped his neck around and said, “of course they still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?”  Within a minute, part of the Pentagon was a mass of dust and smoke and rubble.  Thus, here again, Plaintiffs make the factual assertion that former Vice President Cheney gave or confirmed orders concerning a principal instrumentality of the crimes of 9/11, which orders allowed the plane to proceed unhindered to the Pentagon, for whatever purpose it served there.  Had the orders been of a different nature, a Board of Inquiry would have affixed responsibility for the disastrous performance of the soldiers in charge of the defense of the Pentagon.  The scene itself, as described by Mineta, in testimony to the 9/11 Commission, is full of importance.  Cheney is not a befuddled and beleaguered and hapless bureaucrat in uncertain waters.  He is in charge, and so comfortable in the role, that he has the mental and emotional capacity to dress down his aide in no uncertain terms, even as the worst single moment of crisis of any American presidency, and worst single crime in American history, is taking place.

4.  The testimony of Norman Mineta concerning the actions of Defendant Cheney at the time of the crime, arguably at the place of the crime, and indisputably concerning a principal instrumentality of the crime is not referred to in the 9/11 Commission Report, nor in the book, The 9/11 Investigations, Staff Reports, Excerpts from the House-Senate Joint Inquiry on 9/11, Testimony from 14 Key Witnesses, including Richard Clarke, George Tenet, and Condoleeza Rice.  These omissions are every bit as inexplicable as the failure to mention the destruction of WTC 7, taken up below, except as the purest form of cover-up.  For the untethered, unbiased mind, simple knowledge of the Mineta testimony changes all the debate concerning 9/11.  It immediately places the government advocates on the defensive, there being no honest retort to the obvious conclusions that Cheney was in charge in the bunker; that he was confirming orders about whatever plane was heading for the Pentagon; that there was time to raise an alarm and save lives at the Pentagon; and that the only plausible explanation for the absence of a Board of Inquiry after the defenses at the building failed is that it was a stand-down order to which Cheney referred, thus leaving him as the single most important and culpable official who enabled the attack on the Pentagon.

5.  According to the 9/11 Commission Report, former Vice President Cheney was not in the PEOC when Norman Mineta testified that he was, though as mentioned above, the conflict is not referred to in the report.  Also missing is any reference to Cheney’s actual words on the subject, first to NBC’s Tim Russert five days after the event when he said, aides having gathered in his office after the South Tower was hit, “over the next several minutes, watching developments on the television and as we started to get organized to figure out what to do, my Secret Service agents came in and, under these circumstances, they just move. They don’t say “sir” or ask politely. They came in and said, “Sir, we have to leave immediately,” and grabbed me,” thence to be escorted to the PEOC. This account, Cheney in the PEOC when he heard news of the attack on the Pentagon, is in perfect accord with the Mineta testimony and assumed standard operating procedures on the part of the Secret Service which would certainly act with dispatch when it is clear a terrorist attack of undetermined design is under way.  These statements are flatly contradictory of the 9/11 Commission Report and the official Cheney account as reported by the likes of Barton Gellman in his book Angler where an unexplained thirty-three minutes elapses between the impact with the South Tower and Secret Service Agent Jimmy Scott’s hand coming down hard on Cheney’s desk, his shouted “Now!,” and Cheney being lifted out of his chair.  It is impossible, virtually, to comprehend how the official version, as opposed to the version the world has seen emanate from his very mouth, survives the most minimal scrutiny.  A criminal investigator’s first impulse upon hearing that two principal actors in the event, here Bush and Cheney, were allowed to provide statements to the investigating body, the 9/11 Commission, while together in the room, with no ability to record the event, would be to spit out whatever liquid might have been on the verge of being swallowed, and then a simple knowing smile signifying the realization that the fix is in.  In a reasonable and  comprehensible world, Defendants or their lawyers or defenders would be required to explain how the Secret Service knew they needn’t hurry Cheney into the bunker.  How did they know there wasn’t a truck bomb on its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, or an RPG in Lafayette Park, or a small plane bearing down like the one that landed on the White House lawn during the Clinton Presidency?  If it took 33 minutes to act under these conditions, that was surely a failure, dead bodies a consequence or not.  Were there demotions or reprimands for those involved?  Not according to the public record.  Maybe discovery will uncover a different story.  Far more likely, there was a swift departure by Cheney from his office at the physical insistence of Jimmy Scott as soon as the second tower is hit at 9:03 AM, just as Cheney has stated publicly ever since, and Clarke and Rice and Bohrer and Mineta have each in so many words confirmed.

6.  The 9/11 Commission Report adopts Defendant Myers’s claim that he was on Capitol Hill that morning discussing his upcoming hearing to be confirmed as the new Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that he had no idea what was going on until shortly before the Pentagon was struck.  Petitioner makes the factual assertion that those claims are false, established as such by the statements of Counter-terrorism Chief Richard Clarke who has reported that Myers, like Rumsfeld, was a participant in Clarke’s video-teleconference, convened by Clarke at the White House soon after the South Tower was hit.  According to Clarke, he had ongoing conversations with Myers about events as they transpired.  As will be suggested further below, it is important to note that this claim could be disproven with certainty with the release by the government of the videotape of that teleconference, without sound if necessary, if the claim is not true.  By rights, the holder of the evidence should bear the burden of its failure to disclose.  It is, given that failure, unreasonable and imprudent not to conclude that that tape, far from disproving the claims made by plaintiffs, would do everything to confirm them.

It is essential to grasp the importance of this evidence and the conflicts it exposes.  Any eventual trial will hear, at a minimum, two witnesses of, it would be thought, unquestioned integrity, enormous accomplishment, and incomparable stature and power, give conflicting testimony about whether one of them was a participant in a video-teleconference in the middle of a national security crisis, where the absence of either one, given their respective positions and responsibilities, would be notable if not shocking.  In the midst of a terrorist attack, who would Counter-terrorism Chief Clarke expect to be cooperating with in defense of the nation other than the two people at the pinnacle of the chain of command, Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld?  Presence at the scene of a crime, by itself, with nothing more, is rarely sufficient to establish responsibility for a crime, but when one’s presence carries with it certain powers and responsibilities, and it is falsely denied, culpability is established in almost the only way it could be.  It is not likely that some inferior in the chain of command will give damning testimony concerning a superior about a matter of such overwhelming importance; though discovery in all its forms will test the assumption.

7.  Defendant Rumsfeld made false statements as well, when he claimed not to have been situationally aware until 10 AM that morning.  He was a participant in the video-teleconference along with General Myers.  Richard Clarke says so in unambiguous terms.  In addition, Robert Andrews, an aide to Rumsfeld at the time, was in the Secretary’s presence at critical moments the morning of the attack and has made statements establishing the falsity of Rumsfeld’s claims concerning his actions.

8.  Defendant Rumsfeld also lied when he said the nose of American Airlines Flight 77 was responsible for the hole in the C-Ring wall of the Pentagon and that it could be found there in the wreckage.  He was supposedly reporting what he had been told, but since his statement is patently untrue, Rumsfeld is purveying a known lie, or at a minimum establishing the existence of a false cover story.  There is no innocent explanation for such a story that does not involve levels of incompetence on the part of highly trained military operatives and investigators that it is simply impossible to swallow.

9.  Defendant Rumsfeld told the truth when he referred to the “missile that hit the Pentagon” in the days following the attack and when he referred to the shooting down of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, neither of which statements are in accord with the government’s position concerning the nature of the attacks.  It is plain that Rumsfeld did not mean to say what he said.  He did not mean to acknowledge or make reference to a missile hitting the Pentagon.  Nor did he intend to give the impression that the people who were responsible for the attacks had “shot down the plane in Pennsylvania.”  Neither of these assertions, the missile or the shoot-down, was consistent with the government version of events which supposed an airliner, Flight 77, hitting the Pentagon and Flight 93 being flown into the ground by its heroic passengers.  Both statements, however, are entirely consistent with allegations contained in the Complaint.  Only a jury is authorized to determine whether Defendant Rumsfeld’s slips of the tongue were unwittingly honest releases of accurate information or not.

The story of the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 involves much more than the actions of the three defendants.  It involves human beings in the midst of violent attack, their reactions, their heroism, their perceptions, and the physical characteristics of the destruction of the building they had to escape, as and after the dust settled.  Plaintiffs assert that the evidence that an airliner hit the building is far from convincing.  In fact, other possible scenarios appear more likely based upon the facts as learned so far.  One of those possibilities is that there was a plane substituted for Flight 77, possibly while flying over West Virginia, that was fitted and painted to look like Flight 77, which plane actually flew over the building while some other plane or missile exploded into the building on a slightly different flight path.  There is the further possibility that no flying object hit the building at all, that the damage there was done by pre-placed explosives.   Parts of an aircraft found in the rubble could have been planted in the building before the attacks so they could be found afterward.  It will take an honest investigation and subpoena power to learn the truth.

10. There is general agreement that the scene at the Pentagon immediately after the onset of violence did not look like it involved an airliner.  Jaime McIntyre of CNN and John McWethy of ABC both claimed, after close inspection, not to have seen evidence of a plane hitting the building.  Arlington Fire Chief Ed Plaugher initially agreed that there were no obvious signs of an aircraft having hit the building, no large pieces of wing or fuselage.  One posited explanation for the few possible remains of the proposed Boeing 757 in the ruins of the Pentagon refers to a raging fire and tremendous heat said to have consumed the evidence.  In that event, April Gallop must have survived that heat and walked out where the plane flew in.  Not one word by government or judge seeks to explain how she could possibly have managed such a miracle.  Indeed, her entire narrative demands attention.

If the Defendants are correct in their official version, that adopted by the 9/11 Commission, a Boeing 757 left all of itself either in the space from which Ms. Gallop escaped, or outside the building, on the lawn, but there was nothing of it that caught her attention as she struggled out onto the grass, finished with her efforts to save her child and others.  It may be possible for the first floor of the Pentagon and that Boeing 757 to have merged in a way that allowed for Ms. Gallop’s failure to notice an airliner in her midst, but it would appear to be the less likely of the choices, putting the burden of proof squarely on the Defendants’ shoulders which they have the theoretical, in terms of facts, but unquestioned, in terms of technology and authority, ability to bear by showing the world what appears on all of the tapes of the eighty-some video-surveillance cameras that watch the building on a constant basis.  They also have the ability to show the world the parts of the plane recovered in the debris, hundreds of which in the normal airliner are stamped with identification numbers.  For obvious reasons having to do with NTSB crash investigations, the government, therefore, has, again, the theoretical ability to establish Flight 77’s presence in the wreckage.  Yet those interested wait, to blank silence, for any government effort to produce such proof.

11.  The presence of an E-4B, the Flying Pentagon or Doomsday Plane, above the White House as the attack on the Pentagon was taking place established the ability of high government officials, particularly within the military, to coordinate and direct the attack.  In addition, of course, it provided the Defendants with the ability to know of and appreciate the danger faced by Petitioner and her son, in the Pentagon, and take the necessary steps to protect them.  The non-existence of the radar tracks for that plane in the information provided by the 84th RADES Battalion demonstrates the ability and the intention by high government and military officials to erase radar tracks which might conflict with their proposed scenario concerning the events of that morning.  When CNN investigated this question, it received the telling denial by operatives at the Pentagon that there was such a flight, of such a plane, at such a time and place, one more lie of extraordinary importance to the hypothetical criminal investigator.

12.  The 84th RADES Battalion radar tracks also establish the ability and intention of the conspirators to manipulate radar track data with regard to American Flight 77.  The tracks of the incoming plane, never actually identified at the time as corresponding to Flight 77, appear to end at the west side of the Pentagon, confirming the proposition that the plane crashed into the building.  Calling into question, if not destroying, such a hypothesis is the fact that radar detail has been erased from the information provided.  The “ground clutter,” tall buildings such as the Washington Monument or the office buildings of Rosslyn, VA, does not appear in the seconds after the event at the Pentagon where it had been at the moments before the plane supposedly hit the building. The conclusion that radar tracks were erased is therefore unavoidable. This is precisely what would have been required to obscure the fact that the plane in question flew over the Pentagon, instead of into it.

13.  Two agencies of government, the NTSB and the 9/11 Commission, have produced computer animations of the flight path of American Flight 77.  They do not agree. They describe two different approaches to the Pentagon. One, that of the 9/11 Commission, is consistent with the government-proposed flight path that created the pattern of destruction reported inside the Pentagon, flying South of the Navy Annex and the Citgo gas station, knocking down light poles within a half mile of the building.  The other, that of the NTSB, whose source is purported to be the Flight Data Recorder recovered inside the building, describes a flight path that proceeds north of the Navy Annex and the Citgo gas station.  It is important to note as well that there are credible eyewitness accounts of both flight paths.  There is, at this stage of the investigation and lawsuit, no reason to adopt a “single flying object” theory.  There are more witnesses to the Flight 77-hit-the-building theory, but many, if not all of them, are vulnerable to attack as to credibility or perception or both.  Eyewitnesses, without cross-examination, cannot be permitted to end any inquiry at this juncture; any more than a member of the audience at a magic show should be considered a reliable reporter of truth.  It must be considered probable that Defendants had at their disposal a number of operatives trained at misdirection.  One compelling explanation for the existence of two government animations that do not agree is that some person or persons within the conspiratorial apparatus wants the world to know what precisely took place on 9/11, but fear prevents more than the surreptitious provision of clues.

14.  Multiple military, and combat-trained witnesses reported shock waves and the smell of cordite consistent with the use of explosives at the Pentagon.  Only ignorance and inexperience disregards these kinds of firsthand evidence of conditions during the attack. On paper such pieces of information appear insignificant as “one man’s opinion.”  In a courtroom, however, such firsthand relating of all of the five senses and the experiential bases for the conclusions presented can be the most important and compelling evidence that can be presented to a jury.  Cordite and shock waves are the artifacts of explosion and battle.  They do not occur with the crash of an airplane, even into a building; the chemical components simply do not exist.  These witnesses do not deserve to have their views accepted as historical truth now, but they have every right to be questioned in a courtroom before a finder of fact.

15.  There were secondary explosions at the Pentagon which no governmental source has acknowledged or sought to explain.   It is not open to disagreement that these explosions took place; the footage of them is quite available to anyone interested, seen behind David Martin of CBS while he is on camera, and heard while first responders can be seen on videotape caring for the injured outside of the building.  It is therefore incumbent upon an honest and thorough investigator to seek an explanation for the explosions.  If the building contained substances which might have exploded with the power shown in the footage, witnesses making such an assertion should be subjected to cross-examination.  One matter is certain; there are employees at the Pentagon who were there at the time of the blasts who reported explosions for which no innocent explanation occurred to them.

16. Laura Brown, the Deputy in Public Affairs for the FAA, sent the 9/11 Commission a memo explaining that the FAA had not waited until 9:24 AM to tell the military about Flight 77’s troubles, as NORAD’s official document implied, but that the FAA and the military had been in conversation about this flight long before. This memo was read into the 9/11 Commission’s record by Richard Ben-Veniste on May 23, 2003. The Commission’s report rejected even the 9:24 time in favor of its own claim that the FAA did not notify the military about Flight 77 until after it had crashed into the Pentagon, simply ignoring Brown’s memo.  Part and parcel of the cover-up is the failure of the 9/11 Commission in its Report to mention that which conflicts with what was its preordained conclusion.  The cover-up in this instance serves the essential strategies of the Defendants who, according to Brown, had ample time to warn occupants of the Pentagon and evacuate them.

17.  No judge and no government source has sought to explain why, or how, Hani Hanjour, FBI-identified suicidal terrorist hijacker of American Flight 77, would, a.) be able to fly the plane in the first place given his documented, pronounced lack of ability to fly even the most rudimentary aircraft; b) change course in the last 2 1/2 minutes of the flight to the Pentagon from one heading toward the office of Donald Rumsfeld and the roof of the building that would have achieved maximum devastation and a death toll in the several thousands, c) to one, after a 330 degree spiraling dive from 7-8000 feet, a maneuver even the most competent pilots would be unsure of accomplishing, heading into the building parallel to the ground, without hitting a blade of grass, d) where the building was sparsely occupied due to the recent renovations to better withstand attack, e) thereby causing the deaths of only 125 people including a solitary flag officer.  An unbiased observer must assess the likelihood of each of the foregoing components of the government version, and then assess the probability of their concurrent occurrence on a day when the 19 religion-besotted terrorists could apparently do no wrong, and the vaunted most powerful military in human history had already made more mistakes than the most imaginative fiction writer would dare include in a comic novel.

18.  The FBI report of cellphone calls during the attacks, admitted into evidence at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, establish that the conversations alleged to have occurred between then-Solicitor General Ted Olson and his wife and passenger on American Flight 77, Barbara Olson, did not take place.  It is difficult to overstate the importance of this evidence.  It is through the statements of Ted Olson that the essential story of the attacks of 9/11 became available to the public through the news media.  He told of the purported eyewitness account of his wife in the midst of a hijacking, describing the Middle Eastern men and their efforts to commandeer Flight 77.  He told of two phone conversations, by cellphone, he said, that lasted a minute and two or three minutes.  Years later, scholars and investigators determined that cellphone calls were not possible from aircraft at 30,000 feet or more, the supposed altitude, according to the government, of Flight 77 at the time the calls were made.  Whatever doubts about the question there may have been were erased when FBI records were admitted into evidence in the Moussaoui trial.  The phone records obtained by the FBI proved that there was one attempt at a phone call on Ms. Olson’s phone, but it lasted 0 seconds, never being connected.

The implications of this evidence are impressive.  A number of scenarios propose themselves.  One prominent possibility is that Solicitor General Olson was a witting member of the plot, providing a much-needed personal tale of drama and victimization and tragedy which would then be used by the perpetrators to sell their version to the world.  In this instance, Ms. Olson may well have survived the ordeal that awaited the rest of the passengers on board Flight 77.  Records, and autopsy reports would have been doctored to comport with the legend.  It is impossible to know the actual facts without discovery.

A second possibility calls upon what is referred to as voice-morphing technology which allows the putting of one person’s words, through computerized digital manipulation, into the mouth of another.  In this scenario, Olson was the unwitting recipient of a faked call from his wife, all carried out by trained operatives in the employ of the architects of the conspiracy.

It is certainly impossible to conclude at this stage in the lawsuit which of these possibilities is true, or if some other as-yet-unimagined truth pertains, but pursuing a lawsuit based upon the simple contradiction between the statements of Olson at the time and the phone records of the FBI cannot be thought of as frivolous by any meaning of that term.

19.  A study of the scene at the Pentagon raises a number of questions all of which are the subject of great controversy amongst people who believe that elements within the government were complicit in the attacks.  Only an honest investigation and again, subpoena power, will produce the truth concerning these matters.

Among them are the following:
a. The hole in the far C-Ring wall, a picture of which is found at Para.25 of the Affidavit of William Veale attached to the Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss, is almost perfectly round and virtually identical to what would be the result of a standard wall-breaching by explosives.  If the perpetrators saw it as necessary to have a hole in the C-Ring to point to, in an effort to prove the flight of the plane into the building, even though there in fact was none, they may well have created a hole in this fashion.  This part of the scene of the crime is therefore consistent with the allegations in the Complaint which hypothesize the absence of an airliner and steps taken at misdirection and cover-up.

b.  The damage pattern inside of the building appears in significant respects to be  consistent with multiple explosions exerting forces in more than one direction.

c.  Columns near the outside wall appear to be bent out, or toward the direction from which the supposed Boeing 757 was coming.

d.  Columns in front of and behind Plaintiff Gallop’s desk were both destroyed almost completely.  Had there been one single event, or explosion, causing the destruction, it is inconceivable that she could have survived it.  Two events allow her the chance of escape between them.

e.  The hypothesis that there were two or more explosions is supported by clocks in different places inside the ruins found stopped at different times, approximately 9:32 AM and approximately 9:36 AM.

f.  Parts of an aircraft engine found at the scene of the attack on the Pentagon have been identified by some researchers as belonging not to a Boeing 757, but rather an A-3 Skywarrior.  It certainly may be argued that none of these matters is conclusive of anything, a notion that deserves dispute, but it is hard to imagine why the expert opinion, which is what it is, that a part of an engine of a plane other than a Boeing 757, is seen in a photograph of the clean-up efforts at the Pentagon should be dismissed without further inquiry.   No fewer than two reporters from the New York Times have done precisely that when made aware of that very identification.  The number of New York Times reporters who have published any of the evidence supporting the most important claims made in this lawsuit or by the 9/11 Truth Movement is zero.  That, in and of itself, should stop any marginally informed observer in their tracks.

20.  Not one of the eight pilots on the four hijacked airplanes managed to squawk the hijack code, “7500,” to signal their predicament to air traffic controllers, a process that is drilled into all such pilots and takes a matter of seconds to perform.  When considering the events that the government urges on the world, it is enlightening to think of Captain Chip Burlingame, the pilot of Flight 77, the plane supposedly hijacked by the incompetent, according to his flight instructors, and, relatively speaking, diminutive Hani Hanjour, and then flown, again according to the government, into the Pentagon.  Burlingame was a combat veteran fighter pilot and imposing physical specimen.  Those who knew him, in their tragic remembrance, sneer at the idea of him giving up his plane without a fight, some suggesting his first instinct would have been to turn the plane over, breaking any hijacker’s neck precipitously, but hyperbole to the side, it takes a monumental effort to conceive of Burlingame unable to squawk the hijack code, far more to adopt such a vision without trial or the first deposition, or to find for sanctions against lawyers who deign to suggest the government version is unlikely.  The problem for the government is further compounded because the failure to squawk “7500” must be multiplied by eight since each plane had a pilot and a copilot all similarly trained.

WORLD TRADE CENTER

The first indication of a terrorist attack on the United States on 9/11 came seconds before Flight 11 plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan at 8:46 AM.  Then-Lieutenant of the NYFD William Walsh, on a gas leak call a half a mile or so north of the World Trade Center, heard an explosion that he thought was Con-Edison blowing up.  He looked up in response to the sound and saw what turned out to be United Airlines Flight 11 fly into the North Tower.  He went to the North Tower and found destruction in the lobby when the plane had hit ninety floors above.

That there was an explosion or explosions in the North Tower before Flight 11 hit is confirmed by the existence of an audio-tape of a meeting across the street at the time, and the statements of occupants of the subbasement of the Tower who heard, saw, felt, and were injured by, the explosions well below ground level and no gwhere near the impact of the plane.

Prior to these first public moments, there was awareness, according to operatives within the FAA, which was communicated to the military, of airliners turning off their transponders and deviating from their authorized flight paths, amounting to what are known within the aviation community as in-flight emergencies.  Such emergencies trigger responses by air traffic controllers and US fighter jet squadrons in normal circumstances.  As alluded to below, standard operating procedures were not complied with on the morning of 9/11 in myriad ways and instances that beggar belief, and which resulted, most incredibly, and most notably, in the successful attack on the nation’s military headquarters, an accomplishment for which not one human being has been… sanctioned.

The result of the failures of air defense in New York were the collisions of airliners into the Twin Towers.  Those failures did not cause the total destruction of those buildings, or the other that sank to the ground at 5:20 PM that day, never having been hit by an airplane, World Trade Center 7.  Known as the Solomon Building, WTC 7 was 47 stories tall and owned by the new leaseholder of the Towers, Larry Silverstein.  Though it would be the contention of all government spokespersons and the 9/11 Commission, and the totality of mainstream journalism in this country, that the buildings were destroyed by the combination of damage resulting from the plane impacts, or the impact, in the case of WTC 7, of the debris from the South Tower’s collapse, and fire, the years since have devastated those conclusions.  Scientists, architects, academics, engineers, and controlled demolitions experts, in addition to ordinary people with the interest to pursue evidence no matter the direction in which it leads, have established that the Towers and Building 7 were blown up by explosives.  Since it takes weeks at least, to prepare a building for destruction, and because WTC 7 housed such federal agencies as the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service and the SEC, it may be comfortably asserted that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out with the complicity of elements within the United States government.  When placed along side the shocking failure of the defenses at the Pentagon, most reasonably and probably, the consequence of a stand-down order within the chain of command, these facts allow no other conclusion but that 9/11 was an inside job. Some of the particular facts upon which Plaintiffs rely are set out below.

21.  Nanothermite, a constituent element of a substance capable of cutting through steel instantaneously and producing extremely high temperatures, has been identified, in a peer-reviewed paper by academics of chemistry and physics, in four separate, independently-collected samples of dust and debris from Ground Zero, confirming the views of over 1500 architects and engineers that the Twin Towers and Building 7 were destroyed by controlled demolition.  There is simply no other explanation for the presence of this substance in the places where it was found.    For all intents and purposes, nanothermite is an advanced weapons substance developed by scientists at the behest of the US military. There is also no conceivable explanation for the broad array of professionals from the fields of criminal investigation to intelligence, to military security to aviation to physics to chemistry to chemical physics other than the one compelling overwhelming truth that congeals them into a single voice–that high government officials were complicit in the enterprise which created the attacks of 9/11.  If it is possible for some non-governmental entity to have laced the three buildings with explosives and nanothermite for the instantaneous cutting of steel, it is well beyond the time for the Defendants to proffer that defense.   But its unlikelihood is pronounced to say the least since, as mentioned above, important government security agencies had offices in WTC 7.  One doesn’t enter such a building without governmental approval, presumptively.

22. Multiple witnesses have attested to the presence of molten metal, steel and iron, in the ruins of the three destroyed buildings in Manhattan which establishes the existence of temperatures well in excess of those created from a jet fuel or office building fire, further confirmation of the controlled demolition hypothesis. To be repetitive of other documents in the case, jet fuel, or office furniture fires cause temperatures approximately one thousand degrees Fahrenheit lower than what is necessary to melt steel.   Since there was molten steel at the scene of this crime, there must be some other explanation for its existence than the jet fuel and office materials put forth by NIST and defenders of the government version of events.  As an analogy, a homicide investigator must explain the presence of a bullet in a dead body.  If there is no non-criminal explanation, it must be presumed to have had a role in the death of the victim.  Molten metal in the rubble may be viewed as the bullet of 9/11.

23. The destruction of World Trade Center 7, though an event appearing in every respect to be a textbook example of controlled demolition, was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report at all, a completely astonishing omission unless the idea of cover-up is allowed space to breathe.  The household names, Jennings, Rather, and Brokaw all intoned in almost identical phrases at 5:20 PM when the building came down, how it looked like what we have all seen on television so often, where a building is destroyed by pre-placed explosives.  But these words and that fact could have no meaning at the time.  There appears no innocent explanation for the event’s evaporation from history by the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report.  Commissioner Bob Kerrey was asked point-blank why it was so.  He replied that there was no easy answer to that question.  It is only in a court of law or Congress that public officials have no option but to provide the explanations required, easy or no.  The building, WTC 7, but for the Towers, would have been the tallest building ever destroyed.  It was insured for close to a billion dollars.  It was one of the costliest monetary losses of that day.  Its demise had no readily acceptable explanation since it had not been hit by a plane.  And its destruction demanded the conclusion that it was an integral part of the conspiratorial plan because no one contests that it takes at least weeks to prepare a building for controlled demolition.  These may have been unknown facts that day, but they were the subject of frenzied analysis by experts and professionals long before the 9/11 Commission Report was written, yet to its reader, WTC 7 stands there even now.

24.  Steven Jones, then a professor of physics at Brigham Young University, began a study of the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2004, when he was shown a video of the collapse of WTC 7 and saw it so obviously to be a case of controlled demolition.  As outlined in his paper, Why Indeed Did The World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse?, published in the online Journalof911studies.com, in September of 2006:

a. He was initially struck by the presence of molten steel in the rubble which would be impossible if the heat created was the result, solely, of a hydrocarbon fire.

b. He analyzed the events, the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7, and concluded that the collapses could not have occurred as the result of a jet fuel fire.

c. He was unable to find a single example of a steel frame skyscraper collapsing because of fire. In contrast he was able to find many examples of fires of much greater severity and length in buildings of similar construction that remained standing after many hours of being engulfed in flame. A fire in a high rise in Madrid in 2005 burned for twenty hours; was an inferno; and did not cause the building’s collapse. The North Tower of the World Trade Center itself suffered a three hour blaze over several floors in 1975, a fire twice as long as those of 9/11, but the building survived.

d. Jones wrote a paper which he published on the internet that set out his beliefs and called for a new investigation, suggesting that there were many areas of study that should be pursued that could provide answers to the many questions that remained.

e. He was subsequently contacted by four individuals with no knowledge of, or connection to, each other. Each had collected small quantities of dust or metal from Ground Zero. They gave him portions of what they had collected, and he tested each to determine their constituent elements.
f. He found that each sample possessed the signature ratios of certain elements, zinc, magnesium, barrium, aluminum, copper, iron, and sulfur that define a compound known as thermate, a substance used for the cutting of steel in controlled demolitions. Thermate is capable of producing temperatures in excess of 4000 degrees.

g. He noted the existence of phenomena on the videotape footage of the collapse of the towers which are emblematic of alumino-thermitic reactions (the use of thermite or thermate, as it is known when it includes sulfur). Those phenomena included certain colored fires, flowing, molten metal, and a light gray plume of smoke rising above the area of the reaction.

h. Because it was suggested that the molten metal seen on the videotape could have been the aluminum from the airplane, which melts at a lower temperature than steel, he performed tests in the laboratory designed to determine if that possibility could be excluded. All of his testing led him to conclude that the characteristics seen on the video footage were consistent with the use of thermate and inconsistent with any other tendered or imagined explanation.

i. Building 7 of the World Trade Center was central to Dr. Jones’ analysis because it appeared to be a textbook example of what a controlled demolition looks like, as Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw all said at the time.  In addition, molten metal found in the rubble of WTC 7 could not have been aluminum because WTC 7 was never hit by an airplane.

25.  Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Peter Jennings of ABC News that day: “we set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street …and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse.  And it [the South Tower] did collapse before we could actually get out of the building.”    The importance of this piece of reporting is that there was no objective basis for expecting the towers to collapse.  This was a prediction of an unprecedented event with no innocent explanation for it.  Even the 9/11 Commission admitted that none of the fire chiefs expected the Towers to come down. The FDNY oral histories show that the information that they were going to collapse came from the Office of Emergency Management—Giuliani’s own office.  Giuliani officials could not have known that the Towers were going to come down, unless they knew that the buildings had been laced with explosives.

26. As mentioned above, WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane. Though it was damaged by falling debris and on fire, there should have been no reason, given the history of buildings of similar construction, to believe it would collapse. Even so, its collapse was predicted by city officials, just as the collapse of the South Tower was predicted just before that building came down, and too late to save those still trapped inside, or rescue workers trying to save them.

27. NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which produced the official reports on the destruction of the Twin Towers and WTC 7, has been, according to a former employee, “fully hijacked from the scientific to the political realm,” so that its scientists are little more than “hired guns.”  Similarly, the 9/11 Commission, far from being an independent investigative body, was headed by Philip Zelikow, essentially a member of the Bush White House who failed to disclose his deep ties to the Administration, membership in the transition team, and authorship of the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive war, to the Co-Chairmen who hired him.  These are certainly matters of opinion, but the crucial question is, what are the bases for them.  It will only be discovery and a subpoena that will provide the answer.

28. A number of prominent structural engineers, including Hugo Bachmann, emeritus professor of structural analysis and construction at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, have said that  the destruction of WTC 7 was a controlled demolition. Others, including Jorg Schneider of the same institution and Jack Keller, emeritus professor of engineering at Utah State University, have concluded as well that the demise of WTC 7 was the result of controlled demolition.

29. As stated in Prof. David Griffin’s New Pearl Harbor Revisited, “[T]he most dramatic demonstration of this obviousness [that the destruction of WTC 7 was a controlled demolition] was provided when Danny Jowenko, a controlled demolition expert in the Netherlands, was asked to comment on a video of the collapse of WTC 7, without knowing what it was—he had not realized that a third building had collapsed on 9/11. After viewing it, he said: ‘They simply blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards…. This is controlled demolition.’ When he was asked if he was certain, he replied: ‘Absolutely, it’s been imploded. This was a hired job. A team of experts did this.’ When he was told that this happened on September 11, he was at first incredulous, repeatedly asking, ‘Are you sure?’ When he was finally convinced, Jowenko said: ‘Then they’ve worked very hard.’ When asked in 2007 whether he stood by his original statement, he replied: ‘Absolutely….I looked at the drawings, the construction and it couldn’t be done by fire…absolutely not.’ ”  (p. 44-45).  It is well understood by lawyers and judges throughout the world that the power of a witness depends on many factors.  The opponent of Jowenko’s conclusions is going to have a difficult time rummaging in the toolbox of impeachment.  Not only was there no incentive, monetary or otherwise, for him to opine as he did; he didn’t even know the import of what he was saying when he said it.  It was a blind tasting, and his bias as demonstrated by his words was of incredulity when he learned what building’s destruction he was reviewing.  His credentials are impressive as an expert in the very field under examination.  What precisely will his forensic opponent propose?  It does not matter, now.  The assertion that it was a controlled demolition is entitled to be accepted, now.  And that is equally true when a court seeks to exact sanctions in the light of such an opinion.

30.  Some of the bases for the opinion that WTC 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition follow:
a.  The collapse was preceded by the signature “crimp” in the roof of the building indicative of controlled demolitions. The “crimp” is the result of the destruction of the middle or interior of the building first so that the remains of the building fall in, as opposed to out, where damage might be caused to surrounding structures.
b. The penthouse of WTC 7 collapsed first, when there was no fire anywhere near that part of the building.
c.  The building descended, for at least part of its travel, at free fall speed, an impossibility without the use of explosives to remove the resistance of the lower floors in the way of the upper floors’ descent.
d. The collapse was of rapid onset, hardly what would be expected from a building gradually giving in to higher and higher temperatures.
e.  There are no historical precedents for steel framed buildings to collapse because of fire.
f.  There are, as mentioned above, abundant instances of much more devastating fires being survived by buildings of similar construction.

31. In August of 2008, NIST concluded its report concerning WTC 7 finding that it collapsed as a result of the damage done to the building from falling debris and the fires that occurred as a result, conclusions which demand skepticism and scrutiny especially in light of the following:
a. NIST did not explain the molten steel and iron in the rubble of WTC 7;
b. NIST did not explain the presence of sulfidation in metal in the ruins of WTC 7 as noted by scholars at Worcester Polytechnic Institute;
c. There were no tests for thermate conducted by NIST;
d. The eyewitness experience of Barry Jennings, Deputy Director of the Emergency Services Department of New York City Housing Authority, who survived explosions in WTC 7 in the morning of 9/11, many hours before its collapse, was not accounted for in The NIST report, nor was the account of corporation counsel Hess whose life Jennings saved in the explosions that morning.
e.  For support, NIST referred to a fire burning at 5:20 PM on the 12th floor, when its own photograph demonstrated that fire was out by 4:45 PM.
All of the insights that apply to each of the preceding paragraphs regarding the Towers are even more applicable with regard to the demise of WTC 7, which has been described as the smoking gun of 9/11.  One must assume that the plan of the attacks went horribly awry with the destruction of Building 7, because it is, in every respect precisely what one would use to demonstrate what controlled demolition is. One must simply be stunned by the arrogance of the planners or be awed by the power to silence anyone daring to proclaim the nakedness of the Emperor.  And the power was tested on more than one occasion.  Most notably, Michael Berger, a spokesperson for the 9/11 Truth Movement, and Steven Jones whose work as been discussed in this document, both requested to have the destruction of WTC 7 shown to the viewers of their interviews by Fox or another network, and both were refused.  One wonders how assertions of fact such as these can be considered sanctionable for other than power political reasons, to silence the messenger.

32. There are many, if not thousands, of individual stories that are noteworthy concerning the actual events at the Twin Towers.  Many were told in Jim Dwyer of the New York Times’ 102 Minutes.  Not found in that account are any of the countless instances of people experiencing explosions while they were in or near the Towers before or as they were destroyed.  These descriptions of “secondary explosions,” as they were called, and actual footage of the sounds themselves that morning are available in multiple places as DVD’s or on the Internet. 118 firefighters reported such explosions to their superiors in the effort to preserve the history of the FDNY’s response.  At the same time, the story of Brian Clarke is instructive not for his experience of explosions, but rather his inexplicable survival in the inferno proposed as the reason for the South Tower’s collapse after only about an hour of fire.  He was in that Tower when it was hit at 9:03AM. He was located on the 84th floor, above the impact of the airplane. He managed to rescue a person on the floor below him, and climb down the stairs to safety through the floors that were on fire, said to be so destructive and devastating, in the government version of events, as to cause the collapse of the building.  Surely one needn’t apologize for questioning an explanation that includes such discordant assertions of fact.

33. Kevin McPadden was in a position to give assistance to the injured on 9/11 and at 5:20 PM was close enough to a Red Cross representative’s radio to hear the last three counts of a countdown that preceded the demolition of WTC 7. Just before that, he was told that “they” were thinking about bringing a building down.

34. A firefighter was caught on videotape saying that the building(WTC 7) was coming (going to come) down.

35. There were bone fragments found on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building hundreds of feet from the Towers, none of which was larger than one centimeter in length.   This piece of information is one of the most compelling facts to which anyone could refer in the entire case.  There were some three hundred bone fragments found.  They were human bones.  They were on the roof of that building, across the street from the South Tower.  The building was 41 stories tall and the bone fragments were found in 2005 and 2006.  Is there an unbiased mind that can create a mental construct that explains how those pieces of bone, none bigger than a centimeter, got up onto that roof in that condition, that involves only fire and gravity?  Fire does not turn the human body into minute pieces of bone.  It turns them into charred remains whole. The fragments were 41 stories up and exploded to virtual dust.  Is a consideration of these matters an exercise in frivolity?

36. At least one rescue worker remarked on the absence of items such as telephones, computers, desks, or chairs in the rubble at Ground Zero.  He was struck by the dust of the remains without substantial solid pieces.  Again, when a telephone is crushed by great weight, it is hard to imagine it turning into powder, yet the court, to impose sanctions, must not only imagine it but conclude that the proposed presence of solid pieces of desks and chairs would be a grotesque flight of sick surmise without factual underpinning, a bit of dishonor to suggest.
37. Ben Fountain and Scott Forbes, two people who worked in the World Trade Center Towers, have stated that there was an unusual power-down the weekend before 9/11 and that there was unusual construction going on in the building in the weeks before the attack.  This is important for those stuck upon the “how” of the entire enterprise of conspiracy.

38. The company Securacom/Stratasec, whose director from 1996 to 2000 was Marvin Bush, the younger brother of President George W. Bush, was responsible for updating the security system at the World Trade Center in those years. Wirt D. Walker III, apparently a distant cousin of the President, was the CEO of Securacom/Stratasec from 1999 to 2002.  Though hardly essential, it would seem helpful to have someone trusted in charge of security for the buildings whose internal structures must be compromised in order to effect a controlled demolition.  Were this the only piece of evidence upon which plaintiffs rely, sanctions might well be in order.  It is not.

39. The government denies that the “black boxes” from American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 have been recovered.  But three of the four from the two flights were found by New York City firefighter Nicholas DeMasi who escorted federal agents to the site of their recovery on an all-terrain vehicle. Witnessing the recovery of the boxes was Mike Bellone, chronicled hero of the Ground Zero rescue efforts.  As with many of these pieces of evidence one is provoked to ask “why would they do that, not acknowledge the black boxes or not have that base covered in the event of the find?”  It is impossible to know without discovery and maybe impossible even then, but the law does not require a proponent to say why something happened as long as they can establish that it did.

40. Richard Siegal set up a camera on a tripod in Hoboken, New Jersey after the World Trade Center Towers were hit. An analysis of the videotape taken from his camera, the pictures and the sound, shows that there were multiple explosions just before and as the towers came down.

41. Further, the videotape shows smoke at the bottom of the Towers just before their collapse which is what one would expect with the detonation of an explosive device or devices at the bottom of the building removing the lower supports, and allowing gravity to achieve total collapse.
Siegal’s video has been available to the public for years now.  Can anyone point to the government’s, or anyone else’s, refutation of the claims made based upon that video?  What does such silence mean?  Is it responsible and conscientious for a government to allow the most explosive claims concerning the worst possible crimes to be promulgated into the discourse of the nation without official rebuttal?  Is it not apt for the citizens to reason, if these assertions were false, our leaders would tell us that?  That the government remains silent is strong indication that it does not possess the ability to combat the inference.

42. The leaseholder of the World Trade Center towers and owner of WTC 7, Larry
Silverstein, made statements in the years following 9/11 that suggested that WTC 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition.
a. On the television program Frontline he told of having conversations with fire officials during the day on 9/11 during which the tremendous loss of life was discussed, and Silverstein suggested, “maybe the smartest thing is to pull it.” He said that the decision was then made to “pull it.”
b. The building subsequently came down at 5:20 PM. Some people watching the show took note of the use of the words,”pull it” and claimed that those were terms of art used in the demolition industry to refer to the controlled demolition of a building. The claim was made that Silverstein had admitted to participating in the decision to demolish WTC 7.
c. Because it takes a matter of weeks to prepare a building for controlled demolition, it then seemed clear that the attacks and the destruction of the buildings had to have been arranged in advance and planned by forces in control of the World Trade Center.
d. It was noted that among the tenants of WTC 7 was the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, and the SEC, making it unlikely that some non-governmental entity could have planted the necessary explosives without the government’s knowledge and acquiescence.
e. Destroyed in WTC 7 were records of the investigation of corporate fraud kept by the SEC, including that involving Enron.
f. When the accusations concerning Silverstein and his statements surfaced, a refutation was offered by Silverstein that he had been referring to the FDNY battalion that had been in WTC 7, supposedly at the time the decision to “pull it” was made.  He claimed that the decision referred to, was to pull the battalion out of the building. Further, it was claimed that “pull it” is not a term of art in the industry.
g. Critics of the Silverstein response made two key points in rebuttal:
(1). The battalion that had been fighting the fire was actually pulled out of the building around 11:30 that morning. There was no firefighting going on in WTC 7 when Silverstein claims the decision was made.
(2). Proponents of the governmental complicity theory were then able to obtain an audiotape of a phone conversation during which a demolition worker was heard saying that they were about to “pull building six”, referring to the cleanup efforts at Ground Zero that involved demolishing the building known as WTC 6.
h. Within the last two or three years, a Brooklyn College student demanded in a public forum that Silverstein explain his comments about WTC 7.  Silverstein avoided the question, gave the accepted, official explanation for WTC 7’s collapse that had nothing to do with explosives, and then, when pressed, told the moderator to take another question, refusing subsequently to address the issues raised by the student.
i.  Jeffery Scott Schapiro, a journalist with pronounced disdain for the 9/11 Truth Movement has reported that Larry Silverstein spoke on the telephone to his insurance company on the morning of 9/11 and discussed the possibility of demolishing World Trade Center 7 by controlled demolition.
j.  Silverstein leased the World Trade Center from the Port Authority in the last six months before 9/11. The insurance policy that he took out on the Towers specifically included acts of terrorism. He reportedly collected between 4 and 8 billion dollars on the policies.
k.  The World Trade Center was not financially viable at the time of its destruction. There was asbestos clean-up that was needed which was to cost at least $1 billion. In addition, occupancy was falling in the towers leading to declining revenues.
These are facts found by independent investigators or gleaned from media reports.  No prudent, impartial person should be prepared to decide the truth of the matter based on such a recitation, but in the face of what is recounted here, lawyers asserting these facts should not be dismissed as frivolous and sanctioned.

UNITED FLIGHT 93, SHANKSVILLE, PA

All of the matters set out above demand the conclusion of complicity on the part of the three defendants.  Plaintiffs rely on considerably more in response to the Order to Show Cause.  The circumstances surrounding the loss of United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania provide an abundance of further clues, evidence, that there was a plot at the highest levels of government, that 9/11 was a false flag attack against its own citizens, to advance the world-hegemonic policies of the Administration then in power.
43.  Defendant Cheney lied when he said that no shoot-down order was given until 10:25 AM on the morning of the attacks.  Richard Clarke establishes his knowledge of that order at 9:50 AM in time for United 93 to be shot down a little after 10 AM, accounting for the dispersal of its debris over eight miles of terrain.  The amount of evidence that Flight 93 was the victim of such a shoot-down order is quite staggering, and includes the following:

a.  The site of the supposed crash of United Flight 93 does not agree with general ideas of what an airliner crash site looks like, as there are no substantial pieces of plane visible.  The idea that the plane dove straight into the ground thus producing a crash site that is significantly different from those general ideas, has been terminally discredited by aviation experts who have studied the evidence available from the NTSB.

b. The pattern of damage to the surrounding vegetation contradicts the official version’s flight path.

c. There is debris from Flight 93, including the engine, spread over a large area.  The engine was found about a mile away, but other debris was located 8 miles away.  Each of these facts is consistent with a plane shot down in the air and completely inconsistent with an intact airliner, or virtually intact airliner if one adopts one of the government-defender scenarios, crashing to the earth in a suicide dive.

d. Susan McIlwain witnessed a low-flying plane, or missile, as she was driving her car near the crash site outside of Shanksville, PA. The object, solid white and without rivets, came from her right, in front and just above her, ascended over a stand of trees, banked right out of sight, at which point there was an explosion at what is known as the Flight 93 crash site.  Ms. McIlwain has straightforwardly maintained her account of the event she witnessed ever since she first told it within months of the event.  By herself, Ms. McIlwain, if found credible, destroys the official account of 9/11, establishes the good faith behind the accusations in the Complaint, and makes ludicrous the notion that the suit before the Court is in some way delusional or an expression of frivolousness.  One is left to wonder where anyone finds the authority to discredit Ms. McIlwain’s account without her ever being questioned by a lawyer or investigator, much less taking an oath in court.

e. Air Force officers have stated that it was an Air Force mission to shoot down Flight 93 which mission was accomplished, and there is a hearsay account from the pilot who shot the plane down.  It is not surprising to find such statements if one assumes the possibility that the government version of events may be flawed in some fashion.  It will take the power of subpoena to learn of the factual basis of the claims.

f.  The Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Agency studied the impact of the events near Shanksville on the environment.  The agency sought to determine the extent of the damage done by jet fuel, burned or unburned, at the scene of the crash.  The Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Agency determined that no jet fuel whatsoever was present, in any form, at the crash site. Since United 93 was a cross country flight near its beginning, calculations were made, and it was concluded that 37,500 gallons of jet fuel were missing from the crash site in Shanksville.  Similar to the account of Ms. McIlwain, this scientific finding eviscerates the government’s case completely in the sense that it establishes conclusively the false nature of the government account.

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY

The foregoing establishes the fundamental claims of this lawsuit, that there was a conspiracy, and that the 9/11 Commission Report is false and the product of cover-up.  In an effort to be complete without becoming minute, the following facts will be a part of proof at trial.  It was essential for the air defenses of this country to be stood down at the crucial time and for there to be a plausible story to tell a shocked nation and evidence to support its claims.  Thanks to the vigilance and tenacity and scholarship of its citizens, the country has access to at least parts of the truth.

44.  Standard operating procedures between the FAA and the military, according to which planes showing signs of an in-flight emergency are normally intercepted within about 10 minutes, were not followed during the morning of 9/11.  The number and varieties of the supposed failures, from the fighters at Otis AFB taking some 12 minutes even to get off the ground, to sending them to some holding pattern off Long Island, to the failure to alert any of the jets at the bases referred to by Colin Scoggins, below, to vectoring jets from Langley AFB in Virginia, aloft in time to get to the Pentagon before whatever plane was headed in that direction, into the Atlantic Ocean away from all critical intercepts, have been documented in countless places.  After a trial a jury may feel compelled to conclude that our military forces were simply grandiosely inept and impoverished of luck at this crucial time, all of the circumstances of incompetence unfortunately dovetailing perfectly to produce the disastrous consequences no one but Al Qaeda intended, but lawyers suggesting otherwise are hardly deserving of sanction for their different opinion.  In fact, the most reasonable explanation for this set of events is the existence of a stand-down order, such as Cheney confirmed in the PEOC, according to the testimony of Norman Mineta and a rudimentary understanding of American and World military history, i.e. that failure in the military leads to investigation, demotion or incarceration, and disgrace.  It does not lead to promotion, the fate of every high-ranking military official in the wake of the attack.

45.  A witness at Los Angeles International Airport reported the existence of such a stand-down order as coming from the highest levels in the White House.  The whole story is recounted in Griffin’s New Pearl Harbor Revisited.  It is entirely consistent with the set of events asserted in the Complaint, an insider with insider’s knowledge telling of what he heard and saw while in the company of other insiders as the critical events unfolded.  Discovery will or will not confirm his story, but it is completely within the duties of lawyers to allege these facts when there appears no reason to disbelieve them other than the pabulum of childhood that our leaders are incapable of such atrocity.

46.  Colin Scoggins, the military specialist at the FAA’s Boston Center, reported what happened in relation to American Flight 11, the plane that flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and showed that the military had to have known about this flight’s troubles much earlier than it claimed.  Scoggins also refuted the various claims that there were only four military fighter jets available that morning. Also available, Scoggins reported, were fighters at Andrews (in Washington DC), Toledo, Selfridge, Burlington, and Syracuse.

47. Evidence of the fabrication of evidence can be found in every corner of this case.  The scrubbing of radar tracks has already been alluded to.  A passport belonging to one of the alleged hijackers must have survived an enormous fireball that destroyed virtually everything else, but was found on the streets of Manhattan unscathed.  A bandanna and a visa belonging to a proposed hijacker, it is claimed, survived the crash of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania whereas almost nothing else did.  It may be that these facts by themselves should overcome any tendency toward skepticism concerning the allegations in the Complaint, but when seen in conjunction with all of the other perceived misdirections that are found throughout the case, their reinforcing and confirming power of all that is asserted by Plaintiffs is undeniable.

48.  The cellphone calls from Flight 93 present several problems.  Under normal circumstances, as set out above, such calls appear to have been a technological impossibility at the time, from the altitudes ascribed to them by the government version of events.  They could have been made possible by the presence in the aircraft of a specially-engineered and -placed “cellphone repeater” of sufficient power to establish connections to ground stations for the necessary time frames, or they must have been the product of voice-morphing technology.  Voice-morphing, again, referred to above, has been in existence for a number of decades, most recently featured on the television program “30 Rock,” and demonstrated to military top brass when treasonous words were put in the mouth of a general present at the meeting, much to his surprise, and totally without his participation.  In any event, it is impossible to ignore the suspicion that the Hollywood film, “United 93,” was the conceit of a mind in the employ of the conspirators before any of the aircraft actually left the ground that morning.

49.  Although the official story holds that the four airliners were hijacked by devout Muslims ready to die as martyrs to earn a heavenly reward, Mohammed Atta and the other alleged hijackers regularly drank heavily, went to strip clubs, and paid for sex.  Atta’s former girlfriend, as well as other residents of Venice, Florida have given detailed accounts concerning the lifestyles of these supposed suicidal martyrs that simply cannot be reconciled with the portraits the government has painted of them.

50.  Decisive evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks was reportedly found in Mohammed Atta’s luggage–which allegedly failed to get loaded onto Flight 11 from a commuter flight that Atta took to Boston from Portland, Maine, that morning.  This story, however, was made up after the FBI’s previous story had collapsed. According to that story, the evidence had been found in a Mitsubishi that Atta had left in the Logan Airport parking lot, and the trip to Portland was taken by Adnan and Ameer Bukhari.  After the FBI learned that neither of the Bukharis had died on September 11, it simply declared that the trip to Portland was made by Atta and another al Qaeda operative.  Only the most inexperienced or biased investigator would pay no attention to contradictions such as these on the part of the principal agencies charged with providing facts to the relevant governmental bodies and to the American people.

51.  Osama bin Laden, recently executed by Navy SEALS, as far as the world knows, because he was the force behind the 9/11 attacks, was already America’s ‘most wanted’ criminal, in July 2001 when he was treated by a Canadian doctor in the American hospital in Dubai and visited by the local CIA agent.  A closer look at the matter reveals that Bin Laden was never considered directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11 by the FBI or, importantly, by Defendant Cheney who said precisely that.

52.  The actions of the Secret Service bear further scrutiny.  After learning that a second World Trade Center building had been attacked—which would have meant that terrorists were going after high-value targets—and that still other planes had apparently been hijacked, the Secret Service allowed President Bush to remain at the school in Sarasota, Florida, for another 30 minutes. It thereby revealed its foreknowledge that Bush would not be a target: If these had really been surprise attacks, the agents, fearing that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on the school, would have hustled Bush away.  Again, the telling of the suspect’s tale by the suspect or his agents, provides important further suspicious circumstance. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the White House started telling a story no one had heard before.  According to this account, Bush, rather than remaining in the classroom several minutes after Andrew Card whispered in his ear that a second WTC building had been hit, immediately got up and left the room. This lie, made manifest through the video of the occasion and shown to the world in the Michael Moore documentary, Fahrenheit 911, was told in major newspapers and on MSNBC and ABC television. This popularized knowledge, one would have thought, should have kick-started a moribund curiosity in the attacks on the part of the mainstream media, especially since unspeakable analyses of the event were already finding traction on the Internet.  Instead, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers about 9/11 have refused to look back, having already turned away, or shake their heads distractedly while saying it will be a source of mortification if they got the most important story of their lives, if not American history, wrong.

53. General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistan’s ISI, had $100,000 sent to Mohammed Atta just before 9/11.  The history of the intersections between American and British intelligence and what has become militant Islam has been written about by many scholars of renown.  Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s two books, The War On Truth, and The War On Freedom provide page after page of peculiar or suspicious circumstance all completely consistent with the allegations in the Complaint.  At some point the failures, or oversights, or strange alliances that existed coincident with the antecedent events that led to the 9/11 attacks cannot be overlooked.  In each case it may be entirely plausible to say, this was a mistake, or that was a coincidence, but for each of us, there is a tipping point beyond which the sheer number of mistakes or circumstances cannot be reconciled with innocence.  We do not rely upon any of these circumstances found in the histories to which we refer, but they bolster the instinct to look further and confound the suggestion that the factual allegations in the Complaint are the product of fantasy.

Some of the important history in this case involves the relationship between the CIA and the Pakistani ISI particularly in the years of the CIA efforts to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.  It is a fact that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset during those years; that many of the men he and the CIA trained became Al Qaeda; that Pakistan’s ISI was instrumental in these efforts.
Therefore, when it is alleged, and in fact uncontested, that the head of that agency provided financial assistance to the man the government calls the ringleader of the 19 hijackers, it becomes laughable to suggest that “inside job” conspiracy theories must be the product of delusion.

54. General Mahmoud Ahmad met with the National Security Council during the week of 9/11, a fact which then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice has denied, provocatively.

The foregoing list includes some matters discovered since the filing of the Complaint or the Appendix attached to the Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss, but it does not include all of the new scholarship or investigative discovery.  Underscoring the pronounced injustice that will follow this Court’s decision, of which the Order to Show Cause is a part, should it remain undisturbed and the doors of inquiry locked to Petitioners, are the following new matters:

a.  Won-Young Kim, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in Palisades, New York and Gerald R. Baum of the Environmental Geology and Mineral Resources Program, at the Maryland Geological Survey in Baltimore, Maryland conducted a study at the behest of the United States Army which sought to pinpoint the exact time of the crash at the Pentagon through a study of the seismographic record.  They found that there was, for all intents and purposes, no seismographic record, that is to say there was no spike or other remarkable indication of movement of the earth’s crust around the time the events at the Pentagon were known to be taking place.  This fact has led one experienced aircraft crash investigator to state categorically that no airliner crashed into the building.

b.  Further work by representatives of Pilots for 9/11 Truth establishes that the Flight Data Recorder information produced by the NTSB pursuant to a FOIA request, cannot have come from American Airlines Flight 77.  The implications of this are quite staggering.  According to experienced aviation experts, the government has disseminated false information concerning one of the most significant pieces of evidence in any plane crash.  It is possible that the information was provided for the purpose of promoting the search for the truth, and ultimately should be applauded.  Under no circumstances, however, can Plaintiffs’ use of the information, or hypotheses based upon it, be considered an expression of bad faith.  One theory to which these facts add weight holds that the plane that was heading for the Pentagon, which the Cheney stand-down order allowed to proceed unmolested, was not American Airlines Flight 77, but a substitute used to play some role in the attack whose precise nature cannot at this moment be known, reminiscent of one of the “Operation Northwoods” plans of 1962, proposed to President John Kennedy by all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and rejected by him, which were in toto a false flag proposal to justify a war against Cuba.  Had we made up any of what appears here, had the assertions been spun from whole cloth, the product of a truly diseased imagination, sanctions would be entirely appropriate.  None of it is; as the court well knew.  What led the court to consider sanctions in order, in the face of what appeared in the Complaint and the Appendix, is a far more perplexing question than any other rhetorically propounded within this document.

Even as these papers are prepared, more players and more information enter the lists.  It now appears confirmed that five Israeli agents were arrested on the morning of 9/11 in New Jersey having been seen celebrating at the success of the attacks.  They had set up cameras before the first plane hit, and were filming the Twin Towers when they were struck by the airliners. Police arrested the men who remained in custody for several weeks and then were sent back to Israel where they appeared on television and proclaimed that they were in New Jersey to document the event.  In addition, according to Alan Sabrosky, PhD., ten-year veteran of the Marine Corps and graduate of the Army War College, two other Israelis were arrested in a truck or van containing explosives near the George Washington Bridge on the morning of 9/11.  They were in FBI custody according to Dan Rather, but nothing further concerning them has been reported.
Because the Courts which have heard this case have felt the allegations to be the product of fantasy and delusion, it seems appropriate to cite a scholar with unimpeachable credentials who has offered his expert opinion concerning the nature of the 9/11 attacks, having studied the matter in depth.  Dr. Sabrosky has stated that the attacks were a Mossad operation carried out with the aid of elements within the United States Government.  While he does not dismiss as unimportant other pieces of evidence to which, for example, this document makes reference, he gives precedence for proof of the essential claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement, to the unquestioned destruction of WTC 7 by controlled demolition, the myriad reports of so-called secondary explosions in the buildings in New York before and as they were being destroyed, and the evidence of Israeli participation as set out in the previous paragraph.  Dr. Sabrosky is by no means the only military-trained scholar to endorse the contentions of the 9/11 Truth Movement.  Adherents include members of parliaments, former intelligence officials, state department officials, many former and current soldiers, and at least one retired general of the United States Air Force.  Most are probably not accustomed to having their beliefs demeaned as delusion or fantasy.

Even though effort has been made to be complete, it should be pointed out that what is set out above is a mere synopsis of the scholarship which has impelled this lawsuit. Dozens of scholarly and scientific articles and close to forty books have been distilled here so that this document could be manageable.  In addition, the complex and imposing tapestry of historical and political circumstances which will provide compelling context for the ultimate trier of fact in the case have, in large part, been omitted.

As can be seen in the matters set out within, as well as in the Complaint, the Opposition to the Motion To Dismiss, the 65 pages of Affidavits contained in the Appendix to the Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss, and Appellants’ Opening and Reply Briefs in the Court of Appeals, and the Petition for Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc, Plaintiff/Appellant does not conjure speculative innuendo in accusing Defendants Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers of mass murder and treason.  Rather she and her son rely on sometimes simple, sometimes complex, but in every instance, demonstrably verifiable statements of fact.

Plaintiff’s claims, set out in this lawsuit, are the furthest possible distance from frivolous, from being founded in cynical delusion, or the product of fantasy.  It is quite difficult, indeed, to imagine a seasoned lawyer deciding to make the allegations we have made, to file a lawsuit accusing three of our most exalted leaders with unspeakable, unimaginable atrocity without sufficient facts to sustain the belief.  Plaintiffs’ lawyers have certainly not done so, but rather, they have taken this unprecedented step because no one else would; because the whole history of our culture was being twisted and smeared with dishonor, and none of our nation’s guardians of justice, whether they be lawyers or investigators ordained and sworn to uphold the law, or journalists with a softer but no less essential duty, has taken even the first step to learn the truth or tell it.
Now twice, Federal Courts have stated that the allegations contained in this lawsuit are “implausible.”  This opportunity is taken to ask the Governments’ and the Defendants’ representatives, as they are called upon to respond to this Response to the Order to Show Cause, to set out for the Court and the world just what it is about the allegations that makes them implausible.  Is it implausible that evil exists in the world?  Is it implausible to conceive that that evil is attracted to power?  Is it implausible to propose that American citizens possess no immunity to the contagion of evil?  Is there implausibility in the remembrance of American policy that has exercised power for immoral purposes throughout its history?  Is the tactic of the “false flag” a figment of an ahistorical imagination, or rather, a weapon in the arsenal of every nation since the beginning of time that has been employed by American leaders repeatedly?  One might finally ask of our opponents, what, in the formidable mass of factual assertions contained in this Affidavit is inaccurate or irrelevant and how, and why?

I declare that the foregoing is true and correct.
Dated: July 9, 2011
/s/
_________________________
William W. Veale.