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Griffin: 9/11 and Press * Bush/Cheney Indicted
02 August 2005
It does not require a majority to prevail,
but rather an irate, tireless minority
keen to set brush fires in people's minds.
Samuel Adams1) David Ray Griffin at the National Press Club- - Bush installs Bolton as U.S. ambassador to U.N.
2) Bush and Cheney Indicted?Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth
Publius Cornelius TacitusEditor's Notes:This issue highlights item 1, which is from David Ray Griffin called "9/11 AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS", which he presented at the National Press Club. Item 1 had originally been an update from Tom Flocco, but his story was retracted, but for archival purposes, we leave this article posted in item 2.
If there is one principle more deeply rooted
in the mind of every American,
it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest
Thomas Jefferson
1) David Ray Griffin at the National Press Club- - Bush installs Bolton as U.S. ambassador to U.N.
9/11 AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS
by David Ray GriffinAddress at the National Press Club
June 22, 2005
After the attacks of 9/11, I accepted the blowback thesis, according to which the attacks were payback for US foreign policy. About a year later, a colleague suggested that the attacks were orchestrated by our own government. My response was that I didn't think the Bush administrationeven the Bush administrationwould do such a thing.
A few months later, another colleague suggested that I look at a website containing the massive 9/11 timeline created by Paul Thompson. This timeline, I found, contained an enormous number of reports, all from mainstream sources, that contradicted the official account. This started a process that led me to publish The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, which summarized much of the evidence that had been discovered by previous researchersevidence, I concluded, that provided a "strong prima facie case for official complicity."
In a criminal trial, once the prosecution has presented its initial case, the defense asks the judge for a dismissal on the grounds that a prima facie case for guilt has not been presented. However, if the judge declares that such a case has been made, then the defense must rebut the various elements in the prosecution's case. The defense cannot simply ignore the prosecution's case by stating that it is "too outrageous to be dignified by a response." If the defense fails to offer a convincing rebuttal, the prima facie case is presumed to be conclusive.
The Bush administration responded to the charges against it as a defense attorney would, declaring them too outrageous to be taken seriously. President Bush himself advised people, perhaps especially reporters, not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." What the president really meant is that people should not tolerate any outrageous conspiracy theories except his own, according to which 19 Arab Muslims defeated the most powerful and sophisticated defense system in history and also defeated the laws of physics, bringing down three steelframe building in a way that perfectly mimicked controlled demolition.
In any case, what was needed at that stage was someone to play the role of the judge, determining, from an impartial perspective, whether a prima facie case for the guilt of the Bush administration had been made.
This role should have been played by the press. But the mainstream press instead offered itself as a mouthpiece for the administration's conspiracy theory.
The role of the impartial judge has, nevertheless, been played by civil society, in which tens of millions of people in this country and around the world now accept the 9/11 truth movement's contention that the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks.
The fact that the president was finally forced to appoint a 9/11 commission provided an opportunity for the Bush administration to rebut the allegations made against it. You might assume that the 9/11 Commission would have played the role of an impartial jury, simply evaluating the evidence for the competing conspiracy theories and deciding which one was more strongly supported.
The Commission's investigative work, however, was carried out by its staff, and this staff was directed by the White House's man inside the Commission, Philip Zelikow, a fact that the mainstream press has not emphasized. Under Zelikow's leadership, the Commission took the role of the prosecution for the Bush administration's brief against alQaeda. In doing so, it implicitly took the role of the defense for the Bush administration. Accordingly, an important question to ask about The 9/11 Commission Report, especially since we know that the Commission had many copies of The New Pearl Harbor, is how well the Commission rebutted the prima facie case against the BushCheney administration, which was summarized in that book.
In a second book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I showed that the Commission simply ignored most of that evidence and distorted the rest. I will summarize a few of the 115 sins of omission and distortion that I identified.
The New Pearl Harbor reported evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers are still alive. David Harrison of the Telegraph interviewed two of the men who supposedly died on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, one of whom said that he "had never even heard of Pennsylvania," let alone died there. The Associated Press reported that Waleed alShehri, supposedly on Flight 11, contacted the U.S. embassy in Morocco about two weeks after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report, nevertheless, suggested that alShehri was responsible for stabbing one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
The New Pearl Harbor cited reports that although Mohamed Atta, the supposed ringleader, had been portrayed as a devout Muslim ready to meet his maker, he actually loved alcohol, pork, and lap dances. Zelikow's commission, however, said that Atta had become "fanatically" religious.
They also claimed that they could find no credible explanation as to why Atta and the other hijackers went to Las Vegas. The mainstream press has let the Commission get away with these obvious contradictions.
People who have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 know that President Bush was in a classroom in Sarasota when he was told that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, a sign that the country was suffering an unprecedented terrorist attack. And yet the president just sat there.
Many critics have asked why he did not immediately assume the role of commanderinchief, but the more important question is why the highly trained Secret Service agents did not immediately rush him to safety. Bush's location had been highly publicized. They should have worried that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on them at that very moment. And yet they allowed the president to remain at the school another half hour, thereby implying that they knew the president was not a target.
The 9/11 Commission's only response was to report that "[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the President] to run out the door." The Commissioners evidently accepted the implied suggestion that maintaining presidential decorum was more important than protecting the president's life. The mainstream press has had no comment on this remarkable response to that remarkable incident.
Another big question created by the official story is how the hijackers, by crashing planes into the Twin Towers, caused them and Building 7 to collapse. One problem is that Building 7 was not struck by an airplane, and steelframe buildings had never before been caused to collapse by fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and longerlasting. The Commission avoided this problem by simply not mentioning this fact or even, incredibly, that Building 7 collapsed.
Another problem, which I mentioned earlier, is that the collapses had all the standard features of controlled demolitions. For example, all three buildings came down at virtually freefall speed. The Commission even alluded to this feature, saying that the "South Tower collapsed in 10 seconds." But it never explained how fire plus the impact of an airplane could have produced such a collapse.
Controlled demolition was also suggested by the fact that the collapses were total, with the 110story Twin Towers collapsing into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each tower had consisted of 47 massive steel columns, which extended from the basements through the roofs. Even if we ignore all the other problems in the official "pancake" theory of the collapses, those massive steel columns should have still been sticking up a thousand feet in the air. Zelikow's commission handled this problem with the audacious claim that "[t]he interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft."
James Glanz, a science writer for the New York Times, coauthored a book in 2003 entitled The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center. This book contains an extensive discussion of the construction of the towers around the 47 interior columns. And yet when the Commission in 2004 published its incredible denial that these columns existed, the Times did not protest.
Another example: Breaking those massive steel columns would have required very powerful explosives. Many survivors of the towers have reported hearing and feeling explosions. But the 9/11 Commission failed to mention any of these reports. William Rodriguez told the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors about feeling and hearing a huge explosion in the subbasement of the North Tower, then rescuing people from its effects, but neither his name nor any of his testimony is found in Zelikow's final report.
The mainstream press has also refused to report Rodriguez's story, even though NBC News spent a day at his home taping it.
The Commission also failed to address the many reasons to conclude that the Pentagon was not struck by Flight 77. The Commission in particular failed to subpoena the film from the video cameras, confiscated by the FBI immediately after the attacks, which could at least clear up one of the questionswhether the attacking aircraft was a Boeing 757.
The Commission did allude to one problemthe fact that Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, was known to be completely incompetent, incapable of flying a Boeing 757, let alone performing the remarkable maneuver reportedly executed by the aircraft that hit the Pentagon. The Commission handled this problem simply by saying in one place that Hanjour was considered a "terrible pilot" while saying elsewhere that he was given the assignment to hit the Pentagon because he was "the operation's most experienced pilot." The mainstream press has not pointed out this contradiction.
The Commission also failed to discuss the considerable evidence that Flight 93 was shot down by the US military, perhaps when passengers were about to wrest control of it. The Commission dealt with this problem only indirectly, by claiming that Vice President Cheney did not give the shootdown order until 10:10, which was at least four minutes after Flight 93 crashed. In support of this claim, the Commission said that Cheney did not enter the Operations Center under the White House until almost 10:00 that morning. To make this claim, however, the Commission had to contradict all prior reports. It also had to delete Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given during the Commission's public hearings, that when he got down there at 9:20, Cheney was already in charge. Even such an obvious lie, supported by such blatant suppression of evidence, has elicited no murmur from our mainstream press.
There are dozens of other omissions and distortions the press has allowed the Commission to get away with. For example, the Commission's endorsement of the claim by General Richard Myers that he was on Capitol Hill that morning ignores Richard Clarke's report, in Against All Enemies, that Myers was in the Pentagon, participating in Clarke's video conference. Also, the Commission's account of why the hijacked airliners were not intercepted contradicts the account that had been told since shortly after 9/11 not only by the U.S. military but also by the press, in thousands of stories. But the press now, like Gilda Radnor, says "Never Mind."
In any case, as these illustrations show, the 9/11 Commission, which had the opportunity to rebut the prima facie case against the Bush administration, failed to do so. This means that the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report needs to be recognized as a decisive event, because it was the moment at which the prima facie case against the Bush administration became a conclusive case.
What we need now is a press that will let the American people in on this developmentwhich is most important, given the fact that the official story about 9/11 has provided the pretext for virtually every other horrible thing this administration has done.
# # #
Received via email from Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster, SeptemberEleventh.org
For an online version of Dr. Griffin's address below:
www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/20050729pressclub.phpFor DVDs of Dr. Griffin's CSpan talk and other 9/11 truth DVDs:
www.septembereleventh.org/donations.phpFor photos of last weekend's 9/11 truth event in DC, with images of Dr.
Ray Griffin, Nafeez Ahmed, Paul Thompson, Ray McGovern, Danny Schecter,
Jenna Orkin, Charles Key, Gael Murphy, Peter Phillips and many others
(photos by Jan Hoyer, John Gannon, Chris Emery, Jonathan Gold):
http://truthemergency.us/PhotoAlbum/EmergencyTruthConvergence%20version%201/index.htmlFor Flyby News updated resource see:
The Bush Conspiracy and 9/11 Investigative Reports,
looking into the unanswered questions.= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - Bush installs Bolton as U.S. ambassador to U.N.http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=615&e=1&u=/nm/20050801/pl_nm/bush_bolton_dc
2) Bush and Cheney Indicted?First here is a part of the retraction statement from Tom Flocco,
after August 2nd from Tom Flocco, posted from his re-constructed web site,
Tom Flocco posted:"A rough draft story about the Chicago prosecutor being fired, including many paragraphs and a title that had long since been removed over the last 24 hours was placed online by a new webmaster who was collecting all the files from our previous website. He placed the rough draft file online by mistake and feels very badly about it. This was only a working draft and should never have been placed online. So we retract the rough draft post in its entirety.."
From
TomFlocco.comA Chicago grand jury has indicted the President and VicePresident of the United States along with multiple high officials in the Bush administration
Chicago August 2, 2005 TomFlocco.com U.S. federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's Chicago grand jury has issued perjury and obstruction of justice indictments to the following members of the Bush Administration: President George W. Bush, VicePresident Richard Cheney, Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, imprisoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Senior Cheney advisor Mary Matalin.
There were no indications given as to whether the President and his top staff members would appear publicly before cameras at the grand jury proceedings, given the gravity of the charges.
Besides the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, the Fitzgerald probe is reportedly farreaching and expanding much deeper into past White House criminal acts involving BushClinton drug money laundering in Mena, Arkansas to White House involvement in 9.11; but also for sending America's young people to their deaths or to be maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was indicted for obstruction of justice and is reportedly consulting with members of Parliament and legal aides regarding how to avoid appearing in the U.S.A. for interrogation before Fitzgerald in Chicago.
The revelations emanated from sources close to the grand jury who spoke with federal whistleblower Thomas Heneghen in California who said White House Senior Advisor to the President Karl Rove was also indicted for perjury and was reportedly involved with Mary Matalin in a major Bush administration document shredding operation to coverup evidence.
Heneghen had reported over ten days ago on a TruthRadio.com broadcast [Every Monday and Tuesday evening from 89 pm EST–
truthradio.com special briefing on Wednesday evening August 3 at 8 pm EST]] that his sources close to the grand jury said former Secretary of State Colin Powell had been subpoenaed and had testified against President Bush, telling the citizen panel that the President had taken the United States to war based upon liesa capital crime involving treason under the United States Code.
Heneghen also reported a week ago that Gonzalez and Card had been subpoened and that Tony Blair had defied his subpoena after the response time limit had expired.
Sources close to the investigation report that members of the House, Senate, 9.11 Commission and other members of the media are also under investigation as potential targets by a grand jury regarding obstruction of justice and other oversight failures linked to the 9.11 attacksindicating that citizen panelists working with Fitzgerald may be seeking a wholesale cleansing of what many have said is a crimewracked White House and Congress.
Also last Monday, the whistleblower reported that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts was planning to obstruct justice by calling Fitzgerald for Senate hearings to question the prosecutor's motives for the farreaching investigation.
This, giving rise to questions as to whether Roberts and other Republican legislatorssome now under secret investigationwould join President Bush in seeking to fire Fitzgerald in the same manner that President Nixon had fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in order to obstruct justice and cut off further investigations into White House crimes.
Two weeks ago Heneghen said he had talked to sources just ten minutes prior to French and U.S. intelligence agents intercepting British intelligence agents who were attempting to bomb the subway underneath the Dirksen Federal Building where Fitzgerald was presiding over grand jury hearings.
Serious questions can also be raised as to whether intelligence forces linked to President Bush and Tony Blair had participated in a failed attempt to scuttle the Fitzgerald probe by literally blowing it upat a time when UK reports reveal that militarygrade explosives were used to blow up the London subway on July 7.
Sources say the alleged Chicago subway bombing attempt has been attributed to an underground and closeted enmity involving warring intelligence and military factions within the United States government.
Moreover, reports indicate that the disturbance occurred at the same time that the Chicago Tribune and local web blogs had reported that the subway had been evacuated for 4550 minutes regarding a "suspicious package" late on Monday afternoon, July 18.
Also confirming the undertheradarscreen hostilities involving agents loyal to the administration and others who are disturbed about the coverup of government involvement in the 9.11 attacks was a recent contact made with this writer by a major New York media outlet which called seeking "names of those who could confirm its own reports of warring factions within the government which were threatening the safety of U.S. citizens."
developing.....please link or copyand distribute widely.
_________________
TomFlocco
Last edited by TomFlocco on Tue Aug 02, 2005 12:26 pm; edited 6 times in total [which was posted at following URL:
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