- "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set
you free." --John 8:32
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- My buddy Bill lives in Phillie and reads a lot of books,
mostly non-fiction. A former cop and fellow USAF veteran, "Harbo"
believes Oswald acted alone, despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise.
An avowed skeptic, agnostic and intelligent man, Bill keeps me honest.
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- "What proof do you have to offer? You tell me you're
right and all those other people are wrong?" Bill confronts me in
a lengthy email. God bless him, Bill also thinks I'm full of baloney about
911. "If you are correct in your views, then our military leaders
are blindly stupid."
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- Maybe not blind or stupid, just blindly loyal.
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- Since time began, people have believed in various scientific
premises based upon fragmented knowledge, observations and an unexplainable
interior faith. The first navigators who returned to land and declared
the world round, based on their observations of the curvature of the earth
and the shape of the sun and the moon, were met with derision and, too
often, hostility. The shape of the sun or moon as proof? What a wacko theory.
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- Faced with unconventional theories, most humans resisted
these ideas. They preferred the orthodoxy of whatever rulers or witch doctors
happened to be in power.
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- The possibility that things could be vastly different
from the official government version disturbed them. They distrusted the
skeptics and questioned their motives. Until, that is, too many ordinary
folks began to see things with their own eyes.
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- For example, UFOs so disturbed our government in 1952,
during a huge number of reported sightings by ordinary citizens, government
leaders assigned the US Air Force the task of debunking them (years before
Bill and I served).
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- And although I've stared at the sky hundreds of nights,
I've never seen a UFO. But enough intelligent and honest people have reported
seeing them in the last 50 or 60 years that I believe they exist. Even
if my government does not.
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- I've also never seen planet earth from outer space but
I believe our globe looks pretty much like the early navigators imagined
it. Makes you wonder why small-minded men from an earlier age resisted
the idea of a round earth.
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- Maybe the official government doctrine of a flat earth,
with the surrounding waters filled with sea monsters and flying dragons,
was meant to keep people terrified. Keep them at home. Meant to keep them
so subservient to the whims of their government that they could be controlled
by fear.
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- Like the official, government versions of major events.
Like JFK, Oklahoma City or 9-11. Not only do many folks accept the official,
government versions but many highly intelligent people, like my buddy Bill,
dispute the premises of people like me. Where's the proof, they ask? We'd
love an objective courtroom and judge just for that purpose, we reply.
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- "We have some very incriminating documents as well
as eye-witnesses," said Stanley Hilton, former top Republican and
presidential advisor. "Bush personally ordered this event to happen
in order to gain political advantage, to pursue a bogus political agenda
on behalf of the neocons and their deluded thinking in the Middle East...I
went to school with some of these neocons. At the University of Chicago,
in the late 60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others and
so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff
all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject - how
to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus
Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least
35 years."
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- Because we amateur investigators haven't got media millions
behind us we have to work harder to debunk the deceivers, clever as they
are. We examine every statement or eye witness report or interview or scrap
of debris because we believe we're examining the first ice floes, sniffing
the first poisonous gas. We're the lookouts on the Titanic; we;re the canaries
in the coalmine.
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- We ask the painful questions, not because we love our
country any less but because we love the idea of what free speech means.
A duty and responsibility to see that it's used.
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- "Why no photos or videos of the Pentagon plane?
And there's not a single credible frame of film or second of video of this,"
observed a skeptical Nico Haupt. Cameras surround the fortress on the Potomac
so hiding a jumbo jet is a stretch. But all footage from the Pentagon plane
actually striking the building has been kept hidden.
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- Jumbo jets and gigantic doubts. Pilots-in-training flying
300 ton jumbo jets like fighter pilots, better than our own top guns? And
magically leaving little wreckage behind. Indeed, you'll see more wreckage
from a Cessna crashing on your local golf course than you ever saw at the
Pentagon.
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- But trust us, say the government spokesmen, and most
Americans do.
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- Among his 500 questions about that day--questions any
good detective or newsman would have asked, had any been available--Haupt
noted many more puzzling anomalies. Now these anomalies do not, in themselves,
prove anything more than complete and utter criminal incompetence, but
they do begin to add up suspiciously.
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- "Why was metallic debris found 8 miles from the
crash site of the plane that went down in Penn
Secondary Debris Field)? They said it went straight down and left a
small hole in the ground," wondered Haupt. "If they found metallic
debris from the plane 8 miles away it was either shot down or a bomb exploded
in the plane. Why did they not let the media or any reporters take video
or photos of the crash site? Why did all 19 names (of the hijackers) not
appear on the passenger list 2 days after the hijacker list was released?
Why do none of the names appear on the passenger lists UA and AA gave
to CNN?"
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- These are just a few of the discrepancies related to
official government claims. But people--like my buddy Bill--say we're wrong.
We haven;t any evidence, they say. And how could we have "evidence"
if all the crash sites were cordoned off and information-gathering denied.
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- But what if we're right and the current bungling, grossly
incompetent, inflexibly wasteful and secretive government is wrong?
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- Can you imagine the terrible, disturbing doubts that
must be forced out of the minds of millions of Americans each day? That
their leaders might, just might, be vicious villains?
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- To reject this premise each day, the premise of the sinister
capacity of their government leaders to plan and commit major crimes, is
what good Germans had to do. Not think. Not ask questions. Not resist.
Not protest. Better not to know, they thought (or tried not to think).
Better just to shut up. Safer too.
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- Faced with terrible choices, we often reject the possibility.
My sister, who is a brilliant lawyer, believes the Kean Commission conducted
a worthy and thorough investigation. She bought the book and defended the
findings.
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- When I argued that no jet engine ever bounced miles from
any crash site, as
Flight 93 had, allegedly shot down according to many 911 skeptics,
her spouse (another lawyer) stalked angrily from the room, rather than
consider the facts and the laws of physics.
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- When I wrote Count
the Bullets: Blow Away All Arguments I wanted to demonstrate the absurdity
of the official government version of events in the JFK slaying. But even
if I could have amassed every person and object struck that day in Dallas,
and put them all in a warehouse, and put a placard on each bullet hole,
and neatly numbered each placard, and counted the objects loudly to the
number ten, many people would still continue to trust the state! The government
said three shots were fired--only three--so it must be so. To believe otherwise
is too terrible to consider.
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- Yet while you're reading this on your computer screen,
safe at home or work, thousands of people all over this country must silently
wrestle with their thoughts: What if those wacko conspiracy theorists on
the Internet are RIGHT?
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- What if all the screwed up events that followed from
each diabolical day (JFK and 911), were the result of years of secretive
planning between a few dozen, or even a few hundred, like-minded, powerful
men?
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- Absurd! Too terrible to believe! Impossible to plan in
secrecy and to execute to near perfection!
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- But that is the kicker. The indicators are everywhere,
all around, (documented even) perfectly observable to anyone with an open
mind, like the curvature of the earth to those landlubbers who refused
to see sailing ships disappearing over the curving horizon or to consider
the unexplainable collapse of WTC-7.
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- Nothing indicates a smoking gun so much, however, as
the aftermath of the events and who profits immensely. And continues to
profit. Enormously.
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- If a bank is robbed in a small town and one family suddenly
begins spending wads of cash, the evidence is only circumstantial. But
detectives are alerted. If that same family, however threatened a bank
manager a week before the theft, circumstantial evidence grows. A judge
considers a warrant. And if family members had been hired to guard that
bank branch (Bush family members were part of WTC security), honest authorities
might conclude the evidence was overwhelming. Might even conclude all those
coincidences were no longer circumstantial but incriminating. Arrests would
be made.
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- Let me wipe my memory clean for a moment and become a
person without deductive reasoning.
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- Given a terrible choice--whether to accept the possibility
my government was terribly incompetent, too ignorant to heed the warnings
of FBI agents like Colleen Rowley and John O'Neil--or that my government
was criminally complicit in the crime, I might believe my government simply
fucked up.
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- That is, if I refused to connect all the bits and pieces
of circumstantial evidence into a pattern and possessed not a shred of
deductive reasoning.
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- I too might ignore the hundreds of disturbing pieces
of evidence--too many things that just don't add up--that indicated a massive
crime. Sure, those five different military exercises just happened to occur
the same day those hijackers swiped those planes. Sure, those Israeli furniture
movers were just celebrating the attack on America in Liberty State park
and their explanation sounded plausible. They were just celebrating America's
entrance into the War on Terror, a war that chiefly benefited Israel, the
arms industry, oil industry and security firms, nothing more. Sure those
white vans that were stopped containing Israelis just happened to contain
an explosive residue. People move explosives all the time. Circumstantial
evidence is all.
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- The fragility of belief, the delicacy of trust in systems,
once smashed, can destroy people, rip societies apart, wreck the unity
of nations. Maybe we few thousand 911 skeptics should just shut-the-fuck-up.
Better to avoid the terrible possibility of trying to alert the country,
than to pull it apart. Right? Because some things are better left alone,
just too terrible to consider.
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- Heretics are rarely remembered, not even when their heresies
become common knowledge. And would we heretics really want our theories
to become common knowledge if it meant pulling our country apart like Martin
Luther pulled apart Europe?
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- Well, from what I can see, four years later, the country
is morally and economically fragmenting before my eyes anyway. Tearing
apart in about the same time it took America to tear apart after that
coup in 1963.
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- _____
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- Amateur historian, USAF veteran, and Alaska commercial
fisherman, Douglas Herman writes regularly for Rense and is the author
of the suspenseful murder mystery, Guns of Dallas, that examines what likely happened
in the JFK killing.
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