Matters concerning justice at the local level and at the national/international level have been on display this month: Voters in a number of Massachusetts counties voted to keep their district attorneys or elect new ones. And the 17th anniversary of the mass murder of 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, provided an opportunity to revisit that atrocity including the U.S. government’s response and that of this country’s “free” press.

For a letter-to-the-editor combining the two, click here. The Berkshire Eagle published it last Saturday.

Its headline was “DA race, Sept. 11, / and issues of justice.”

— Mark

The book under review is 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2018).

The review is by Edward Curtin. It is titled, in part, “The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.”

Read it here.

Readers are unlikely to find the book reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or any other mainstream news outlet.

Find an interview here with Dr. Leroy Hulsey, whose study of the collapse of Building 7 at the World Trade Center is nearing completion. The 47-story structure was the third skyscraper at the WTC to come down on September 11, 2001.

Hulsey is chair of the civil engineering and environmental engineering department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Find a list, here, of activities planned around the country to raise awareness of the need for a real investigation of the events of September 11, 2001. Two are in West Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston. Perhaps most interesting are those in Washington, D.C., described here.

Thanks to the 9/11 Truth Action Project for the list.

And please scroll down to read recent entries of this blog.

— Bruce Henry and Mark Miller

Hundreds of questions remain unanswered about the collapse of three World Trade Center skyscrapers on September 11, 2001. A long article, here, goes into detail on many of them.

Titled “Security Alerts, Disabled Fire Alarms, and Unused Elevators: Suspicious Events at the World Trade Center Before 9/11,” the article concludes, “it is surely important that these events be investigated thoroughly. Closer examination of them could help determine how the 9/11 attacks were carried out and who was responsible for them.”

Originally posted last June 18 on the blog site Shoestring 9/11, it was reposted yesterday by https:/Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

— Mark

Seventeen-year-old Jackie Duddy was shot to death by British paratroopers along with thirtheen others in Derry, Northern Ireland, on “Bloody Sunday” in 1974. The passage below, by Jackie Duddy’s niece, is about the father of a victim of the September 11 mass murders of 2001 in the United States. It’s from a longer article comparing the two events and their subsequent coverups.

Bob McIlvain’s Quest | By Julieann Campbell

Since losing his son, 26-year-old Bobby, in the September 11th attacks in 2001, Pennsylvania man Bob McIlvaine has pursued the truth. One of the few families to have had a whole body returned, Bob learned his son’s injuries were consistent with an explosion which occurred as he entered the lobby of the North Tower. Bobby’s body was already in the morgue before the towers came down.

Last year, with support from AE911Truth, Bob spearheaded the launch of draft legislation called the Bobby McIlvaine Act, which, if passed, would compel the U.S. Congress to reinvestigate the destruction of the World Trade Center. This act needs support.

“The idea that Bobby died because of a fireball just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” Bob Sr. insists. “This happened before the first plane even hit, and a fireball couldn’t have done this damage to my son. His face was blown off and his arm was blown off. He was literally blown out of his shoes. Could a fireball travel so far and do that? No, it couldn’t. This has consumed my life since, I just can’t let it go, and yet it was given two lines in the final Commission Report.”

Bob Sr. attended almost every day of the Commission hearings. “I went to 99% of the hearings and I thought it was a travesty, an absolute joke. I was so angry. I just think we’re a country of cowards, and I’m specifically speaking of Congress when I say that. I have no faith in this government to do the right thing, but I’m getting older and I just can’t sit around and wait.

“Bobby’s Act is going great,” his father adds. “Every day I’m in touch with people from all around the world who agree that we need a new investigation. The main message I want to send out to the world is that Muslims had nothing to do with the death of my son on 9/11, I can specifically speak of Bobby when I say that. This was blamed on Muslims. We can prove Bobby died in explosions before the first plane hit, and so Muslims had nothing to do with that. I could die any day, so that’s important to me.”

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Juliann Campbell’s article in its entirety is “From Widgery to Washington: A Bloody Sunday Family Member’s Perspective on 9/11.”

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— Mark Miller

Just received from a friend who wrote, “To bad he didn’t live to see a grand jury selected.” 

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Dan Barnum: The Moral Compass of AE911Truth

July 20, 1938 – August 15, 2018

As of August 15, 2018, Daniel Barnum, FAIA, a member of the Board of Directors who served our organization faithfully for six years, is no longer with us.

Dan’s beloved wife, Marilyn, informed us last week that he passed on peacefully after a brief struggle with aggressive cancer and a six-week hospital stay. We are so deeply saddened by this news.

An architect of high-rise buildings and other structures throughout his career, Dan was one of our most devoted AE911Truth board members. He was a quiet but powerful presence at board meetings — a voice of reason and conscience who seemed to always guide us to a right solution through the many difficult issues we faced and decisions we had to make. He is absolutely irreplaceable, and we will miss him greatly.

Before the dust had settled in Lower Manhattan, Dan discerned from watching the destruction of the Twin Towers that the official version of what happened on 9/11 was false. He had become well-practiced in detecting lies when he served in U.S. Naval Intelligence in Vietnam. There, he knew as soon as the alleged Gulf of Tonkin incident was reported that the war was based on a fabrication.

As a man of integrity, Dan wasn’t content to keep the facts about 9/11 to himself. After he joined AE911Truth and delved further into the irrefutable evidence for the controlled demolition of the three World Trade Center towers, he became a persistent advocate for that evidence among his fellow building professionals in his Houston community, throughout the State of Texas, and at the national level.

With a mix of earnest, unwavering insistence on truth and gentle compassion for those who weren’t ready to hear it, Dan made it his mission to educate any and every architect who would listen to his message. He both sought out and accepted speaking opportunities on AE911Truth’s behalf at state and national architecture conventions. And even though he was rebuffed by those who were afraid to upset their worldview, Dan never gave up looking for receptive minds and hearts.

We each spent quality time alone with Dan on separate occasions and found him to be every bit as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, empathetic, and genuinely kind in person as he was during our long-distance teleconference calls for board meetings. During our visits with him, we saw that Dan was always willing and available to connect deeply with everyone he met. He truly cared about the future of this worldand strove to make it a better place — right up until his passing.

We sorely miss Dan at AE911Truth and we suspect his absence will be felt throughout the 9/11 Truth community. We hope Dan’s passion for truth, justice, and peace will continue to be a guiding light for our work here and lead us to success in our mission.

 To our tens of thousands of AE911Truth supporters, Dan was most visible and notable for leading our campaigns to have the American Institute of Architects endorse a new investigation into the destruction of WTC 7. Dan’s closing remarks at the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia — delivered alongside Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son on 9/11 — best sum up what this remarkable man stood for.

A celebration of Dan’s life will be held on Friday, September 14, at 11:00 AM at Trinity Episcopal Church in midtown Houston.

With saddened hearts,

Richard Gage, CEO, and Kelly David, COO, on behalf of the AE911Truth board, staff, and volunteers

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(From the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website)

It was FOUR MONTHS AGO today, on April 10, that the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry filed a Grand Jury Petition with the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York demanding that he present to a special grand jury evidence of unprosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. (For background as presented by the Committee, click here.)

It seems like a long time, but in the overall scheme of things maybe it’s not. A lot goes on in that district: Two other cases were page one news yesterday, one in The Berkshire Eagle, the other in The New York Times:

* Of particular interest to some Pittsfield and Berkshires residents, biotech entrepreneur Patrick Muraca was convicted Wednesday by a jury in Manhattan’s Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse of defrauding investors in two companies he founded and lying about it to federal investigators. At least one of the enterprises, MetaboRX or NanoMolecularDX, was seen as a possibility for Pittsfield’s William Stanley Business Park. Assistant U.S. Attorney David Abramowicz delivered closing arguments Monday. See Eagle reporter Haven Orecchio-Egresitz’s two stories here and here.

* Atop page one of yesterday’s Times, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman is seen announcing the unsealing of the indictment of U.S. Representative Chris Collins, charged with insider trading and lying to federal investigators. The congressman’s son and his son’s fiancée’s father face related charges in connection with unloading shares of the publicly-traded Australian pharmaceutical manufacturer Innate Immunotheraputics Ltd. shortly after its only product failed a critical test.

Berman accused the congressman of “brazenly using his private information” as a director of the company “to help his son and others avoid financial disaster.” The case will draw national attention because Collins, an early and influential backer of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, was already the subject of an ethics investigation. See one of the two Times articles here.

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* On July 30, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry filed a First Amended Grand July Petition. According to the Committee, it “references all of the same evidence presented in our original petition, but also has added three additional federal crimes that we allege the submitted evidence shows were committed related to the tragic events of 9/11.”

* On August 6, the Committee “submitted 2,092 names of supporters” to U.S. Attorney Berman.

Details on that and more are available through the Committee’s website, LCfor911.org/.

— Mark

Seen on the side of Elizabeth’s Restaurant on outer East Street in Pittsfield, in black lettering on a horizontal white sign measuring about 4 by 6 feet:

“Government is not reason, / it is not eloquence — it is a force! / Like fire, it is a dangerous servant / and fearful master; / never for a moment should / it be left to irresponsible action.” / –GEORGE WASHINGTON

The sign has been there for years, the restaurant for about 30. Its outside walls are of white stucco and trimmed with a bright but sun-faded turquoise. In the shade of the front porch hang two small banners, a black-and-white one with an equal (=) sign and one with just the bright colors of the rainbow.

Elizabeth’s is a door or two west of the brick house where Francis Quirico, a state Superior Court judge for 13 years and a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justice for another 12, lived all his life.

Tom Ellis is maitre d’ and his wife, Elizabeth, is in charge of the kitchen. He is a former probation officer in the court system.

It’s one of the last places Bruce and I walked past with our light-reflective “9/11 TRUTH” signs — orange-bordered black lettering on white, 1 foot by 1 foot — fore and aft on the afternoon of May 9 before I went left on Newell Street toward my home and Bruce continued on East toward his on the second-to-last day of walking between Provincetown on Cape Cod to the New York State line.

The food is good there.

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Note: George Washington may never have written or said what is on the Elizabeth’s sign, a variation of similar sayings of yore, but there is no evidence that he did not.

— Mark

From Maine 9/11 Truth:

Headline: Fifty Reasons to Doubt the Official Account of 9/11

1) A proper analysis of the collapse of each of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01 shows that they were not destroyed by the fires and plane impacts.

2) One hundred eighteen first-responders are on record describing explosions both before and as the towers fell — including explosions in the lobby or basement of both towers.

3) The architects who designed the Twin Towers factored in the possibility of airliner crashes, and the buildings were highly over-engineered.

4) An article in the Open Chemical Physics Journal of April 2009 documents the presence of ubiquitous unreacted high-tech explosives in dust samples from lower Manhattan after the attacks.

5) Multi-ton steel girders were hurled hundreds of feet and lodged into nearby buildings. Debris in the footprint of each tower was barely two stories high.

6) High powered debris ejections can be seen remote from the collapse zones in the Twin Towers as the destruction ensues.

7) The Twin Towers each had a massive structural central core. In a gross misrepresentation, the 9/11 Commission Report referred to this core as “a hollow steel shaft, in which the elevators and stairwells were grouped.”

8) Structural failure in a skyscraper would have an entirely different appearance than that of the collapsing World Trade Center towers. A failing building would be prone to topple, buckle or shed debris, instead of being progressively shredded with perfect radial symmetry at close to free-fall speed.

9) The Twin Towers generated vastly more dust and pulverized material than can be accounted for by the total gravitational potential energy of the buildings – the only substantial source of energy available for that destruction.

10) Bright orange molten metal can be seen pouring from the side of the South Tower shortly before it collapses.

11) There are accounts of extreme heat within the debris pile at ground zero including descriptions of red hot and even molten steel.

12) Tiny iron-rich microspheres have been found in dust samples collected from across lower Manhattan on 9/11. The origin of these has yet to be explained in official reports.

13) Mayor Giuliani has stated publicly that he was told the first tower was about to collapse. This is extraordinary considering that in the history of high-rise fires there has never been such a collapse.

14) The second tower to be hit — the South Tower — received less damage than the first yet it collapsed in approximately half the time. Firefighters radioed from the crash zone that they found just two pockets of fire that they could “knock down” with two lines.

15) The 10,000-page NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) report on the destruction of the Twin Towers contains many flaws and does not actually address the collapses. It described events in each tower up to the point at which “collapse became inevitable.”

16) The 5:20 p.m. total collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story modern skyscraper north of the North Tower, has the appearance of a perfectly engineered internal demolition. The official Rube Goldberg collapse explanation is not plausible.

17) The collapse of WTC 7 was reported by the BBC a half hour before it happened, suggesting that the building’s destruction was planned and anticipated.

18) The first few seconds of the collapse of WTC 7 has been officially acknowledged to be at 100% of free-fall, thus essentially proving internal demolition.

19) The owner of WTC 7 stated on a PBS special that he and the fire department commander made the decision to “pull it” and they “watched the building collapse.”

20) WTC debris was hastily sold as scrap metal, allowing no proper investigation of the cause of the destruction.

21) In 2006 700+ bone fragments were found on top of the 40-story Deutsche Bank building several hundred feet from where the South Tower stood.

22) On the eastern seaboard on 9/11, air defense was deployed from unnecessarily remote bases after unexplainable delays and the planes traveled at a fraction of their top speed — all to arrive too late in both New York and Washington.

23) There were an unprecedented number of domestic war games taking place on 9/11, including ones with simulated hijackings.

24) Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta witnessed Vice President Cheney confirm what appeared to be a stand-down order from the White House bunker just prior to the Pentagon being hit.

25) There is evidence that five of the hijackers had lived at, and/or trained at, U.S. military bases.

26) We have only ever seen a few grainy seconds from what should have been minutes of video from airport security cameras.

27) The passenger lists for all four flights, published by the airlines and CNN after September 11, contained none of the hijackers’ names. The flights were only about 30% full.

28) The documented behavior of the hijackers before 9/11 was decidedly un-Muslim.

29) The paper trail for a $100,000 payment to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta points back to the United States.

30) The FBI’s most-wanted list did not mention 9/11 as a crime that Osama bin Laden was sought for. An FBI spokesperson has stated that this was because of no hard evidence.

31) A much touted December 2001 video of Osama bin Laden confessing has been proven to be phony.

32) Numerous pre-9/11 Al Qaeda and Bin Laden investigations were thwarted or hampered by higher-ups.

33) President Bush twice stated in public that before he entered the Emma T. Booker Elementary School classroom he looked at a television and saw the first WTC tower being hit by a plane. Such footage was not shown on TV until the next day.

34) The President and his Secret Service behaved irrationally on 9/11, lingering at the elementary school a half hour after the second crash as the full blown national crisis unfolded.

35) The public has never seen clear pictures or video of the Pentagon being hit by a plane. After an FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request the Department of Justice acknowledged that it had 85 videos confiscated from cameras on or near the Pentagon that it has declined to release.

36) The extreme and roundabout maneuvering of “Flight 77” led to it hitting the only part of the Pentagon that was under renovation. Virtually no plane wreckage was visible after the attack.

37) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is on film carrying stretchers just after the Pentagon attack, begging the question “how did he know there were not more attacks on the way?”

38) Plane debris in Pennsylvania was found five miles from the crash site, suggesting that flight 93 was destroyed while in the air. No obvious wreckage was visible at the stated crash site.

39) Of eight pilots on the four planes, none of them entered the four-digit emergency hijacking code on their transponders.

40) Singed but intact hijacker passports were found on a street in New York and in the impact hole in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Such obviously planted evidence raises the question of who would plant it and why.

41) A brother and a cousin of President Bush were affiliated with one of the security companies (Securacom) for the World Trade Center complex.

42) Calls for an investigation into the attacks were repeatedly brushed aside by the Bush administration. Finally, after 14 months, the 9/11 Commission was formed. The Commission ended up being packed with insiders with conflicts of interest and it took as its starting point that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks.

43) Of the questions submitted to the Commission by the victims’ family members 70% were left unanswered in the final report.

44) Max Cleland resigned from the Commission stating that the limited scope of its work was a “national scandal.” A majority of the commissioners, including the two co-chairs, have since spoken out about a range of problems with both their process and the resulting report.

45) The 9/11 Commission Report’s case against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden is based on third-hand CIA accounts of detainee confessions while undergoing “enhanced interrogation.” We are told that the videotapes of these sessions have been destroyed.

46) There were many stock market anomalies just prior to 9/11, indicating individuals with inside knowledge of the planned attacks. The 9/11 Commission absolved the investors behind these anomalies with comments such as that they had “no conceivable ties to Al Qaeda.”

47) The technique of creating war-fever through a staged or fabricated attack on oneself has extensive historical precedent. In 1962 the Pentagon drew up such a plan, called Operation Northwoods. It proposed attacks on Americans that would be blamed on Cuba.

48) There is a large body of material expounding on the aggressive role that the U.S. could or should play on the world stage. This includes frank references to imperial aspirations and to the usefulness of a new Pearl Harbor-type event. The point of view is akin to that of Manifest Destiny.

49) Plans for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were set in motion before 9/11/01.

50) The 9/11 attacks and the threat of terrorism have been invoked repeatedly to gain support for domestic and foreign policy initiatives that otherwise would not be popular. We are told that the new “war on terror” justifies a wholesale shift in our priorities and that that war may not end in our lifetimes.