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911-Truth * Chavez & oil kings * Bush poll drop
30 August 2005
"America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-- Abraham Lincoln1) Getting Agnostic About 9/11 - David Ray Griffin & LA Times- - C-SPAN to air McKinney congressional Briefing on 9/11
2) Chavez challenges the oil kings- - Jamaica signs on to Venezuela's oil plan
- - Thanks to Pat Robertson..
3) Bush Polls Continue to Wobble Downward- - Swami Beyondananda: ‘at the junction of love and fear'
"You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."
– George W. Bush,
joking? at a Gridiron Club dinner,
Washington, D.C., March 2001.Editor's Notes:This issue begins with another special David Ray Griffin interview; this one published by the LA Times. David Ray Griffin must worry the Bush administration since his moral character, background, and investigative arguments are near impossible to discredit. David Ray Griffin and 9/11 Truth are allies. Another profile in courage, Cynthia McKinney, this Wednesday August 31st on C-SPAN, is being featured in a two-part series on the McKinney congressional Briefing on 9/11. Part 2 will be aired on 02 September 2005.
The second item is on Venezuela, about independence and unity spreading in Central and South America. US Bush administration plans for Peak Oil and "Vision 20/20" for raping the world with peak oil and nuclear military domination is not what it's cranked out to be, as George W must be learning (or totally crazed by a fear-greed disillusionment). A future for humankind is questionable. And while the Bush agenda could not convince the Sunni Iraqis to sign on the dotted line for a Constitution, how can anyone blame them for not trusting a conquering nation, killing more than 100,000 civilians, and a nation that dishonors its own Constitution for global domination and oil-greed-fear interests? So, to wind up this issue, we link to the wise words of Swami Beyondananda on 'love and fear.'
"History, we don't know. We'll all be dead."
George W. Bush
[For quote source,
see link-item 1.]
1) Getting Agnostic About 9/11 - David Ray Griffin & LA Times- - C-SPAN to air McKinney congressional Briefing on 9/11
Getting Agnostic About 9/11
A society of nonbelievers questions the official version
MARK EHRMAN
August 28, 2005
Anyone who types the words "9/11" and "conspiracy" into an online search engine soon learns that not everybody buys the official narrative of what took place on Sept. 11, 2001. As a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, 66-year-old David Ray Griffin would seem to have more affinity for leather elbow patches than tin hats, yet after friends and colleagues prodded him into sifting through the evidence, he experienced a conversion. Now he's spreading the bad news. Griffin compiled a summary of material arguing against the accepted story that 19 hijackers sent by Osama bin Laden took the aviation system and the U.S. military by surprise that awful day in his 2004 book "The New Pearl Harbor" (published by Interlink, a Massachusetts-based independent publisher covering areas including travel, cooking, world fiction, current events, politics, children's literature and other subjects). He recently followed up with the book "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" (Interlink), a critique of the Kean commission document in which he suggests that a chunk of the blame for the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil lies closer to home than the caves of Afghanistan. We contacted him at his Santa Barbara-area home for a report on his journey from mild-mannered scholar to doubting Thomas.
How did you join the ranks of those questioning the official account of the 9/11 events?I was rather slow getting on board. For the first year and a half I just accepted the conventional view, really the blowback thesis, that this was blowback for our foreign policy. When a colleague suggested to me about a year after 9/11 that he was convinced our own government or forces within our own government had arranged it, I didn't accept that. Then several months later another colleague sent me [a link to] a website that had a timeline. Once I started reading that and saw all those stories drawn from mainstream sources that contradicted the official account, I decided I needed to look into it more carefully, and the more I looked, the worse it got. I considered it an obligation to kind of organize, compile the evidence and put it out there for the public.
The Internet is full of 9/11 conspiracy theories. What have you contributed to the discussion?My main contribution has been the second book, [showing] that the 9/11 commission report is not worthy of belief, and the implication of that is that they were covering up the government's own guilt.
What would constitute a "smoking gun" against the official 9/11 account?There are many. By just ignoring them, the 9/11 commission implicitly admitted they couldn't answer them. The towers coming down into a pile only a few stories high is a smoking gun. Many laws of physics had to be violated if the official story about the collapses is true. [The collapses] had all the earmarks of a controlled demolition by explosives. One of those is total collapse into a small pile of rubble. The fact that Building 7 [a skyscraper near the towers] collapsed when it had not been hit by an airplane, and collapsed in seven or eight seconds, that's a smoking gun. The fact that standard operating procedures were not followed that morning, and we've gotten three different stories now by the U.S. military as to why they did not intercept the planes, that's a smoking gun. The Secret Service leaving the president and themselves wide open to being attacked by [not responding immediately], that's a smoking gun. I can't say one is bigger than the other. You've got six or seven that are equally big.
Critics of the official 9/11 account seem to draw sinister inferences from instances where people, buildings or physical objects didn't react or behave as one might expect in theory. For example, if the hijackers were devout Muslims, why were some drinking, eating pork chops and cavorting with lap dancers? Doesn't real life unfold inconsistently, even bizarrely?That's true, but the 9/11 commission simply ignored those questions. They're creating this image of fanatics who were so devout and convinced of the truth of their religion that they were ready to meet their maker, yet here's all this evidence that suggests they were not devout at all. [The commission] simply ignored evidence.
Dissenters also seem to find it suspect that in a dire emergency, individuals and agencies bumbled, fumbled, delayed, dropped the ball or choked. Won't that occur in any emergency?Well, of course, that is the official theory. It's a coincidence theory that just happened to be that on those days, everybody became terribly incompetent. Take the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. They've got these standard procedures: If a plane goes off course, if you lose radio contact or lose the transponder, you call the military. On this day we're told these FAA officials hit the trifecta. They got all three of these things, and yet they would stand around debating, "Should we call the military? No, I don't think so." And when they finally call, the people at headquarters won't accept their calls because they were in conference or wouldn't pass the call on. They have roughly about 100 hijack warnings a year where planes have to be scrambled, but suddenly they become just all thumbs. The whole thing is just implausible. The other thing is, if you've got accidents, screw-ups, some ought to go one way and the others the other way. Here everything goes the same way. Everybody fails to do their jobs in relation to something to do with 9/11.
With others, you have alleged that inconsistencies, omissions or lies in the 9/11 record point to a cover-up, or even collusion or orchestration, by the American government. What would motivate such a scenario?You've got liberal Democrats and Republicans and Independents who are appalled by what Andrew Bacevich [a professor of international relations at Boston University] called "the new American militarism" in the book "American Empire." New meaning, qualitatively different than before. This post-9/11 push to a new level has made the world an enormously more dangerous place. Many people apart from thinking about 9/11 as an inside job have decided that the United States is doing what [Princeton University emeritus international law professor] Richard Falk calls a "global domination project." Chalmers Johnson [Japan Policy Research Institute president], a previous conservative, now says that we have become a military juggernaut intent on world domination.
Have you followed polls on what the public believes about 9/11?There was a Zogby poll in New York. The question asked was, do you believe the government had advance knowledge of the attacks and consciously let them happen? Forty-nine percent in New York City said yes. I believe it was 43% statewide. That is a pretty remarkable figure. In this country there has not been a poll that asked, do you believe the government actually planned and orchestrated the attacks? The question has been raised in Europe and Canada and has gotten to somewhere around 20%. It would be interesting to have such a poll in the United States.
Conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as marginal types. Where do your views on 9/11 place you in the eyes of your peers in academia? One thing to point out is, the official account itself is a conspiracy theory. It says that 19 Arab Muslims under the influence of Osama bin Laden conspired to pull off this operation. The question is not whether one is a conspiracy theorist about 9/11. It's which conspiracy theory do you find most supported by the evidence?
Does your role as a 9/11 dissenter depart from your life's work as a scholar and theologian?At first glance it may seem strange, but the task of a theologian is to look at the world from what we would imagine the divine perspective, [which] would care about the good of the whole and would love all the parts. [So] 9/11, if it was brought about by forces within our own government for imperial reasons, is antithetical to the general good.
Evil has been a subject of your academic writing. It's also been a recurring theme in administration rhetoric. Is that strange?In these politicians' mouths, it's used to describe certain groups and organizations when it's politically convenient to do so, and then to overlook even greater evil when it's politically convenient to do so. If you understand the divine as an all-powerful and wrathful creator who seeks vengeance, and uses overwhelming power to destroy its enemies, why then, if you've got the political power, you're probably going to think you're acting like God if you do that. The [Christian] church during the early centuries was anti-empire. Rome was the enemy. With Constantine, the empire accepted Christianity, and Christianity started accepting empire and all that entailed. There has been a long history of support for militarism, so from that perspective, it's not so strange.
For the entire Los Angeles Times article, see:http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-crgriffin35aug28,1,3835884.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - C-SPAN to air McKinney congressional Briefing on 9/11August 31 - Part 1
8:00 pm to 11:30 pm on Wednesday, August 31
Friday, September 2 - Part 2
8:00 pm to 1:00 am.
The two-part, nine-hour Congressional 9/11 briefing with Rep. Cynthia McKinney concerning remaining issues about 9/11 and the Commission's report, and will be broadcast on the main C-SPAN channel.
Details from the C-SPAN website follow:
*C-SPAN to broadcast the entirety of the McKinney congressional Briefing on 9/11*
Date: Aug 14, 2005 - 08:06 PM Representative Cynthia McKinney organized a day-long briefing on July 22 to address the 9/11 Commission's Final Report one year later. The event included leading victims' family members, former government and intelligence workers, academics and authors speaking on the flaws and weaknesses of the 9/11 Commission's investigation, assumptions, omissions, conclusions and recommendations. It was filmed in entirety by C-SPAN.
C-SPAN has now set some times and dates for airing the event.
August 31st from 8:00 pm to 11:30 pm
And on Friday, September 2 from 8:00 pm to 1:00 am.
Part I
Forum
September 11 Commission Report Results, Pt. 1
U.S. House of Representatives, McKinney, C. (D-GA)
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 187857 - 07/22/2005 - 3:30 - No Sale
Daugherty, Rebecca, Director, Freedom of Info. Service Center
Smith, Wayne, Member, Center for International Policy
Gage, Kit, National Coordinator, National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom
Kleinberg, Mindy, Relative
Judge, John, Co-Founder, 9/11 CitizensWatch
McKinney, Cynthia, U.S. Representative, D, Georgia (State)
Families of victims, former intelligence officials, and authors speak at a day-long forum on the September 11 Commission Report, focusing on the methodology of the investigation, recommendations made by the
commission, causes of the attacks, and government responses to the attacks.
Part II
Forum
September 11 Commission Report Results, Pt. 2
U.S. House of Representatives, McKinney, C. (D-GA)
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 187857 - 2 - 07/22/2005 - 5:00 - No Sale
McKinney, Cynthia, U.S. Representative, D, Georgia (State)
Families of victims, former intelligence officials, and authors speak at a day-long forum on the September 11 Commission Report, focusing on the methodology of the investigation, recommendations made by the commission, causes of the attacks, and government responses to the attacks.
For full details on these see:
http://www.c-span.org and click the "TV Schedules" link at the top right of the lead page, just above the flashing ad for C-SPAN pod-casting.
2) Chavez challenges the oil kings- - Jamaica signs on to Venezuela's oil plan
- - Thanks to Pat Robertson..
Chavez challenges the oil kings
28 August 2005 By Michael Smith and Peter Wilson
On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron, the second-largest US oil company.
They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela €2.4 billion in back taxes.
The raid is part of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's push to squeeze more money out of foreign companies that want to pump oil from the world's fifth-largest petroleum exporter.
Since last October, he has raised heavy-oil royalty fees to as much as 30 per cent from 1 per cent, begun paying for some services in nonconvertible bolivares instead of US dollars, and ordered oil well contracts converted into government-controlled joint ventures.
Chavez wants to use the revenue to pay for homes, clinics and schools for the 58 per cent of Venezuelan families who live on less than $200 a month.
Since taking office in February 1999, Chavez has embarked on a socialist revolution, seizing ranches to hand over to the poor and starting a TV news network with promotional ads featuring a swastika painted on a US flag.
Chavez says he's using oil money to bankroll a quest to become Latin America's leader against US-style capitalism.
In a May 4 speech, he said: "Being rich is bad˜ and "Jesus Christ was a socialist".
Chavez, a close friend of Cuban president Fidel Castro, sends crude oil to Cuba in exchange for doctors to staff 3,000 neighbourhood clinics.
In June, he pledged subsidised oil for poor Caribbean nations, such as Grenada.
But Chevron and its competitors haven't been scared off, because Venezuela has the largest reserves in the western hemisphere. The oil companies want to invest $30 billion in Venezuela, which is the fourth-largest supplier of crude to the US, according to the Venezuelan Hydrocarbons Association.
Chavez says all companies are welcome in his country.
"Foreign companies have been here for the last century exploiting oil and gas, and they'll have all the space they've been able to have so far," he says.
"It's just that they will have to pay the royalties, they will have to pay the income tax. If they don't, we will go after them."
Venezuela's tax agency stated on August 11 that it was seeking to attach more than 280 billion bolivares (€106million) in assets from Royal Dutch Shell in a dispute over what the country says is unpaid back taxes.
The prize in Venezuela is the tropical flatlands north of the Orinoco river, beneath which, according to Chavez, lie 230 billion barrels of heavy crude, one of the largest oil deposits in the world.
Chavez, who has used his clout as leader of the third-largest member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to curb Venezuela's output by 20 per cent since taking office, now says he wants to boost production.
Most of the decline came from the state-owned producer, Petroleos de Venezuela, where Chavez fired half the workforce to break a 2002-2003 strike aimed at ousting him. Daily output at PDVSA has tumbled to about 2million barrels from 2.92 million barrels in 1998.
Foreign oil companies took up the slack, doubling their production to about 1.12 million barrels a day last year.
Now, Chavez says he wants to attract ¬8 billion more from foreign oil companies to help boost Venezuela's total oil production to 5 million barrels a day by 2009.
"This government is your ally," Chavez told foreign oil executives in March.
"We are not chasing anyone away from Venezuela."
At the same time, Chavez claimed that the Bush administration was trying to force him to commit suicide and he threatened that exports to the US would be cut off if he were to meet an untimely death.
Chavez, who refers to US president George Bush as ‘Mr Danger', said on June 5 that the US was trying to install a global dictatorship. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a ‘negative force'˜ in the region.
Last Monday, television evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers of his 700 Club TV programme that the US should assassinate Chavez to stop him from becoming a "launching pad for communists".
Venezuelan vice president Jose Vicente Rangel responded by saying Robertson's remarks were ‘criminal'. US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a press briefing that Robertson's views did not "represent the policy of the United States".
Unless new reserves are tapped in countries like Venezuela in the next 15 years, global oil output won't keep pace with demand, according to a report by New York securities firm Sanford C Bernstein.
The report forecasts that demand for oil will grow by 1.8 per cent a year until 2020 to 102.7 million barrels a day.
Global oil production capacity will be 102.1 million barrels a day, the report says.
Concern about future supply has helped to push crude oil prices up more than fivefold to a record $67.10 a barrel on August 12 from $12.28 on February 2, 1999, when Chavez was sworn in as president.
Venezuela is one of the few major oil producers that allow foreign investment. Saudi Arabia allows only its state oil company to pump crude.
And Venezuela has been more open than other countries in Latin America such as Mexico, which bars foreign companies from exploiting the second-biggest oil reserves in Latin America.
Oil companies such as Shell have acquiesced to Chavez's demands. On July 14, the government ordered Shell, whose 90 years of working in Venezuela includes having its wells nationalised in 1975, to pay $131 million of back taxes.
Shell says it has paid all of its taxes.
Norway's state-run Statoil, Paris-based Total and Chevron have been hardest hit by Chavez's new rules, because they manage wells for PDVSA and are shareholders in the four heavy-crude production ventures in the Orinoco belt.
Statoil, Total and Conoco-Phillips may have to pay €260 million in back taxes for their heavy-oil ventures in the Orinoco belt, according to oil minister Ramirez.
Chavez is also considering a reduction in Venezuela's dependence on oil sales to the US, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the nation's crude exports. He signed agreements to boost oil sales to Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Paraguay and Uruguay.
He also proposed building a pipeline to Pacific Oceanports in Colombia to ship more crude to China.
The US imports 15 per cent of its crude oil from Venezuela, which is just a four to five-day tanker trip from Texas refineries.
Oil is a pervasive part of life in Venezuela, where petrol stations don't even post the price, because it is fixed at 18 cents per gallon. Revenue from crude exports funds half the government's budget, and oil prices have driven Venezuela's economy since the 1920s.
Last year, as crude prices soared again, Venezuela's economy grew a record 17 per cent.
In 1998 Chavez won a landslide election victory by pledging a revolution that would use oil revenue to spread equality. Since taking office, he has taken advantage of surging oil prices by boosting spending on programmes for the poor to a projected €10.6 billion this year - almost half the national budget. This has helped him to survive an attempted coup and recall referendum.
PDVSA dispenses €3.2 billion a year for everything from cooperatives that make the red T-shirts Chavez supporters wear to monthly stipends for 700,000 people enrolled on adult education courses.
On some days, PDVSA's 13-floor concrete headquarters in Caracas draws scores of people seeking funds for social programmes, known as missions.
"For a long time, our oil went to the rich, but as you can see, here that's changed," says Wuikelman Angel, 35, who manages workshops, a youth centre and a clinic that PDVSA built last year on a three-hectare shuttered gasoline depot in Caracas's Catia slum.
Article Truncated, for the complete article see:
www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqid=7421-qqqx=1.asp= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - Jamaica signs on to Venezuela's oil planASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, August 25, 2005
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica - Jamaica became the first Caribbean nation to finalize an agreement with Venezuela on a new plan for the South American nation to supply oil to countries throughout the region under below-market terms.
Prime Minister P.J. Patterson emerged from a private meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez late Tuesday to announce the details of Jamaica's participation in the Petrocaribe initiative - a plan to offer oil at flexible terms to 13 Caribbean nations.
Chávez announced the Petrocaribe project in June, though he disclosed few of the details. He and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a close ally, have said the plan would lead toward greater solidarity for small nations as oil prices continue to rise.
[Article Truncated]
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - Thanks to Pat Robertson..Published on Monday, August 29, 2005 by The Nation
In Defense of Pat Robertson
by Richard Kim
Ladies and gentlemen, though it pains me to do so, I rise in defense of Pat Robertson. Pat's been taking a lot of heat lately for saying on The 700 Club that the US government should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. "I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war," Robertson mused on an August 22 broadcast. And then, with unanimous contempt, the establishment press whipped out their razor blades.
"Wacky," the Chicago Tribune exclaimed in an editorial christening him "the new Terminator." The LA Times pronounced Robertson "notorious for remarks of questionable sense or even sanity." "Unchristian" and "outlandish," declared the Houston Chronicle. "Just a garden-variety crackpot with friends in high places," the New York Times dissed. The Miami Herald opined that Pat's "gangster rhetoric has no place in a public forum" and that his views "do not reflect US policy at any level." But it was the folks at the Washington Post who got into a real swivet. "We won't even pretend to have given television evangelist Pat Robertson's latest obnoxious utterance much thought," they began before doing exactly that for the next 500 words: "Witless," "an act of stupidity only he could outdo," "ill-advised," "moronic," "callow" and "downright loopy," they bitched. "We would have preferred to allow the Christian Coalition's founder to continue his slide from America's mainstream into the obscurity he has so richly earned." Even Pat's friends like the World Evangelical Alliance and right-wing radio host G. Gordon Liddy repudiated him.
What's all the fuss about? In my estimation, Robertson's done us all a service in at least two regards. First, if there is a US plot to assassinate Chávez--as Chávez has long maintained--Robertson has unwittingly scuttled it for the time being. "Our department doesn't do that kind of thing," Donald Rumsfeld insisted, noting that political assassinations are "against the law." Now, legality hasn't exactly been much of a barrier for this administration, but I'd like to think even the spooks at Langley are smart enough to realize that any "accidents" that might befall Chávez would be "untimely," to say the least.
But more important, the gaffer's coughed up a breath of fresh air on a wartime media disturbingly oblivious to US atrocities, and he should be commended at least for his honesty.
[ARTICLE TRUNCATED]
For the complete article published in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050912/kimthis article was also posted at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0829-28.htm
3) Bush Polls Continue to Wobble Downward- - Swami Beyondananda: ‘at the junction of love and fear'
Bush Suffers Ratings Tumble as Sunnis Reject Iraq Charter
Published on Monday, August 29, 2005 by The Independent (UK)
By David Usborne
President George Bush's exit strategy from Iraq suffered a severe setback yesterday when Sunni negotiators rejected a new constitution, increasing the chances of outright civil war.
For this article, see:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0829-04.htm= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
- - Swami Beyondananda: ‘at the junction of love and fear'"Do We Go for ABunDance or Stay Stuck in ScareCity?"
By Swami Beyondananda
A great Yogi -- I think it was Yogi Berra -- once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Well, here we are at the junction of love and fear..
For this chuckle-wisdom peace, see:
www.wakeuplaughing.com/news.html
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