Mark Crispin Miller sat down with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently for a fascinating conversation about, among other things, mandates on the wearing of face masks and how and why they came about. Click HERE to listen and watch. It’s an hour long but well worth the time.

There should be a transcript. Among the related topics touched on are the left, diminished democracy, propaganda, and censorship (including “shadow banning”).

Miller and I are not related. He is a tenured professor in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication and is currently taking heat for asking his students to do their own research into the wearing of face masks.

Miller runs a free service called News From Underground. Click on that link for more about it and him.

— Mark Channing Miller

The biggest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution that has to start with each one of us. — Dorothy Day (1897-1980) 

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. — Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895)

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In Black and White

The latest issue of The Catholic Worker came today. Leading page 1 is a reprinted article by Christina Ellsberg that begins:

“In the hours and days following the massacre of an unknowable number of hundreds of thousands of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers christened it ‘the greatest scientific achievement in history.’ President Harry Truman went on the air in grainy black and white to describe it as a victorious ‘scientific gamble’: ‘We won,’ he said simply.”

Over it, the headline “People of God, Rise and Disarm.”

Elsewhere on page 1: 

*  A reprinted 1959 essay by Dorothy Day titled “On Pilgrimage.” Its third paragraph reads: “We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice….” 

and

*  What looks like a woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg. In it a perching eagle surveys a scene in which a young Angela Davis lookalike astride a lion holds aloft a dove, as a bear, a lamb and a panther stand nearby and a dragon naps, while in the background another dragon straddles an airborne rocket trailing smoke.

The publication is in black-and-white on newsprint. Among other things the eight-page October-November issue also includes a look back at the police shootings of unarmed black Jackson State (Mississippi) students 40 years ago last May 4; Dorothy Day’s funeral homily 30 years ago this Dec. 2 in New York City, and book reviews.

A subscription costs a penny. One may mail one cent or more to The Catholic Worker, 36 East First St., New York, NY 10003 with a mailing address. Contact info is HERE. For more about the Catholic Worker Movement, click HERE.

Happy Halloween! It has been a busy week or so for news, but some of it has not been reported or has been undercovered, or has been buried or has appeared outside of the news columns or their digital editions or on news shows.

For example, Thursday’s New York Times had four full-page ads for “The 5G America’s been waiting for.” (Verizon’s.) Friday’s Times had two more. It’s not unreasonable to assume a connection between these and the newspaper’s downplaying into nonexistence health and other concerns about the newest and most powerful broadband cellular networks. (Verizon’s and everybody else’s.) Just as it would not be unreasonable to assume a connection between corporations’ money in politics and governments’ treatment of corporate interests.

Wikipedia assigns concerns about 5G to the “conspiracy theories” corner, where Wikipedia also puts challenges to official narratives of the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s and the mountain of fabrications that is the official story of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Wikipedia and the Times have that in common.

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The New York Post has been having a ball with its exclusives about Hunter and Joe Biden’s involvement in lucrative business affairs of questionable correctness in Ukraine and about Hunter and Jim’s involvement in potentially lucrative business affairs in China — spoon fed to the pro-Trump tabloid by Rudy Giuliani. Most mainstream news media outlets have not. For them, these matters are nonmatters. Nothing at all. Not that there’s nothing to the allegations, but coverage anywhere near in proportion to their validity and significance could help re-elect President Trump.

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This week journalist Glenn Greenwald left The Intercept, the online news organization he helped start in 2013. He asserts that the editing of his story on the Post series and its reception amounted to unacceptable censorship. HERE is his most recent draft of the story. He titled it “The Real Scandal: U.S. Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter’s Emails.” The Post reporting and articles about it elsewhere, Greenwald writes, “provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.”

HERE is Matt Taibbi’s version of the whole thing on Substack, the same Internet platform Greenwald used to publish his article. And HERE is New York Times reporter Katie Robertson’s brief story on it buried inside the business section of Friday’s Times.

The Intercept’s website says it “gives its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it.” 

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HERE is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivering his “International Message for Freedom and Hope,” which has appeared online recently. Among other things, he talks about Children’s Health Defense and the goal of getting views expressed fairly on subjects that tend to get one-sided treatment in the media. HERE he is in August speaking before a throng of several thousand in Berlin at a Rally for Freedom and Peace..

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There’s a blue moon in the sky tonight. For Billie Holiday singing “Blue Moon” in 1952, click HERE. For The Marcels singing about it in 1961, click HERE.

There’s some kind of moon in the sky every night. For The Capris singing about it in 1961, click HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

This is Craig McKee’s summary of “Big Picture Sunday,” the third and final day of the online “Justice Rising: 9/11 in 2020” conference held seven weekends ago. Click HERE for the same summary presented more legibly plus three videos of the day’s sessions, on the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, for which McKee wrote it.

Justice Rising Day 3 – 9/11 Truth in Wider Context

By Craig McKee

Over the first two days of the Justice Rising conference, we learned about where the 9/11 Truth Movement has been, what it is doing now, and where it is heading. On the third and final day, we heard about how 9/11 and related events fit into the “big picture.”

“Big Picture Sunday” featured three outstanding speakers who outlined different ways that our rights to think and speak as we choose are being steadily taken away.

In “False Flags and Wars of Terror,” Swiss historian Daniele Ganser provided us with an overview of where the “war on terror” has taken the world since 9/11 almost two decades ago. It was obvious, Ganser pointed out, that Afghanistan had not carried out 9/11 and that its people didn’t deserve the war against their country that was launched less than a month after 9/11 and that is still going 19 years later.

“It’s insane that these people are being bombed and killed for something they clearly haven’t done,” Ganser remarked.

He described how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was likewise carried out under false pretenses — in this case under the guise of searching for weapons of mass destruction. According to Ganser, 85 percent of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2006 believed they were there to retaliate for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11.

“This is really very, very sad,” Ganser said. “Saddam Hussein clearly had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with 9/11. But the corporate media just always linked 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. And so these soldiers were really brainwashed and invaded a country they didn’t know; they killed people they didn’t know.”

Iraq is far from the only example of a country being invaded based on a lie, he observed, citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident — a supposed attack by North Vietnam on U.S. naval ships that was later proved never to have actually happened. This lie was used to dramatically expand the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, which ultimately led to the deaths of some three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

Ganser also talked about “terror” attacks in Europe that turned out not to have been carried out by leftist extremists — as the world was told at the time — but by NATO and the CIA in a decades-long campaign known as Operation Gladio. His book NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe chronicles the deception.

The second speaker was constitutional lawyer and activist John Whitehead, who outlined how the U.S. is being turned into an increasingly Orwellian police state that punishes dissent and restricts free speech.

He recounted the story of decorated Marine Brandon Raub, a veteran of the Afghan war who was arrested and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital because of Facebook posts he had made that were critical of President Barack Obama (suggesting he should be in prison) and that opposed the official story of 9/11. It took the filing of a lawsuit by Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute on behalf of Raub to get him released.

Whitehead explained that the U.S. government is increasingly considering those who are critical of the government or who challenge official narratives as extremists and even potential terrorists. He added that people need to understand that the “deep state” is really about the merging of corporate and government interests.

“The government we have is not the government we think we have,” he said.

Whitehead also described how the country’s police forces are being militarized under the guise of keeping people “secure.” He talked about the “donation” of military equipment to local police forces by the Pentagon based on the claim that the equipment is simply surplus to the government’s needs. The reality, Whitehead explained, is that about half of what has been donated is brand new and was acquired from large corporations for the express purpose of transferring it to police.

Closing the conference was investigative journalist James Corbett, who raised alarms over rapidly intensifying internet censorship that has been silencing alternative and dissenting voices — particularly those challenging the official narrative of 9/11 — in recent years. His talk, “The Library of Alexandria is on Fire: Internet Censorship from 9/11 to Today,” chronicled the way information challenging the truth about events like 9/11 is being purged from the internet or at least made much more difficult to find.

He compared the burning of the great, ancient Egyptian library to the censoring of data from our modern internet. While the true story of the loss of the library may not match what we’ve come to understand (he suggests that it really fell into disrepair rather than being destroyed in a single blaze), the story continues to resonate with us because it encapsulates the idea of the fragility of human knowledge, Corbett said. What we face today, he added, is that, “Those who want to make history disappear can make it disappear by starting a fire.”

For the first few years after 9/11, videos that questioned the official narrative were not hard to find on the internet. In fact, they were often marked by YouTube as “recommended” based on that person’s past viewing history. Had he not happened upon some of those videos in 2006, Corbett admitted, he might never have discovered the holes in the official account. Among the subjects he learned of for the first time was Operation Northwoods, a 1962 plan by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and fake attacks on American targets that would be blamed on Fidel Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba.

Coming upon this kind of information is more difficult these days as Google algorithms have been manipulated to make facts that challenge the status quo much more difficult to find, while YouTube videos and Facebook posts are taken down by the thousands.

Corbett suggested that alternative voices can be preserved if people back up all their content on hard drives and post that content publicly using alternative platforms.

“We need to stop using these controlled platforms, or at least stop using them exclusively,” Corbett cautioned, calling platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter “enemy weapons information systems.”

“They are controlled by the people who want to selectively burn the books.”

His strong advice for all of us: “Save everything. Save all those important documents you’ve come across online — text, video, audio. If you think this is information you would want to know in the future, save it.”

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I join with McKee, a Canadian journalist and filmmaker whom I have never met, in hopes that readers will watch and listen to all three of the Day 3 presentations in their entirety, as well all of the presentations from Day 1 and Day 2, “Justice Friday,” and “Science Saturday.”. — MCM

The other day WFCR‘s morning news program included an interview with John Maxwell Hamilton, author the new book Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.

Turns out the chat was with David Brancaccio of the Marketplace Morning Report. Audio and a transcript of it are HERE.

The book’s focus is the Committee on Public Information, better known as the Creel Committee, formed in 1919 to generate support for U.S. participation in World War I and undermine opposition — and  the agency’s legacy since its dissolution in 1919.

A longer interview with Hamilton, longtime journalist and professor of journalism at Louisiana State University, is also online, in an hour-long podcast relayed by the WOUB Center for Public Media at Ohio University’s Scripps College of Communication. Hamilton speaks engagingly with Tom Hodson of WOUB, HERE.

The latter interview (which was probably done before the Marketplace one) gives listeners a glimpse of such Wilson-era characters as Carl W. Ackerman, Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, Josephus Daniels, Eugene V. Debs, Col. Edward House, Charles Evans Hughes, Vera Whitehouse, and a younger Allen Dulles.

In one of them Hamilton uses the phrase “pretzel-thin” to describe the press sorely stretched by the demands of covering World War I in Europe and at home. He likens it to today’s news media and the challenges of covering Covid-19. All sorts of other matters got (and get) scanted as a result.

[ MORE ]

In this article Canadian journalist and filmmaker Craig McKee summarizes the second day of the online “Justice Rising: 9/11 in 2020” conference, held six weekends ago. It is reprinted from the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website, where it may be read more legibly by clicking HERE, for a version accompanied by three videos of the day’s sessions.

Justice Rising Day 2 – On Scientific Research into the Attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that Challenges Official Accounts

By Craig McKee 

The second day of Justice Rising brought the 9/11 Truth Movement back to its roots in a powerful way.

The day, dubbed “Science Saturday,” began with “Lights, Camera, Building 7,” a panel discussion on the historic documentary SEVEN, which AE911Truth is just weeks away from releasing. On hand to discuss the film were director Dylan Avery, creator of the seminal 9/11 film “Loose Change”; producer Kelly David, who is the chief operating officer of AE911Truth; and Dr. Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, whose study on World Trade Center Building 7 is the primary focus of “SEVEN.”

Dr. Hulsey explained how this groundbreaking study came together, while Avery and David shared how the story of the study is told in “SEVEN.”

The discussion also took us back to how Avery became inspired to work on “Loose Change” in the early years after 9/11.

“It was a slow process of discovery,” he recounted, “and it all started with the military’s response, or lack thereof, to the attacks themselves, and it just kind of spider-webbed out from there.”

Both Richard Gage, who moderated the discussion, and David had strong praise for the profound impact of that early film.

“‘Loose Change’ had an enormous effect in helping to create the 9/11 Truth Movement,” David said. “When I ask the people what it was about the 9/11 evidence that woke them up, more than anything else I always hear, ‘Oh, I watched Loose Change.’ I feel that most of us wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that powerful film that a young aspiring filmmaker made on his laptop.”

This panel was followed by “Global Failure: Evidence Engineers Can No Longer Ignore,” a technical presentation of the findings from Dr. Hulsey’s study, which AE911Truth is now disseminating to tens of thousands of engineers across the U.S. (along, of course, with informing them about the evidence for the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers).

On hand to address this subject were Gage and fellow board member Roland Angle.

Angle pointed out that for the east penthouse of the building to fall as it did, you would have to remove the columns supporting it high in the building, rather than low in the building, which is where NIST claims these columns buckled. However, Angle noted, there were no fires on the upper floors to cause the cause the columns just below the penthouse to fail.

Citing Dr. Hulsey’s report, published earlier this year, Angle ended his presentation with this definitive conclusion: Building 7 was a “global failure involving the near simultaneous failure of all columns in the building over eight stories, not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the building.”

Notwithstanding the excellence of the first two presentations, the highlight of the day was clearly “Reflections from Three Pioneers of 9/11 Truth Movement,” featuring David Ray Griffin, Niels Harrit, and Steven Jones. While they’ve continued to contribute to the 9/11 Truth effort in different ways, it has been years since we’ve seen Griffin or Jones speak at a conference. And having the three of them join Gage was unforgettable, particularly for those who were active in the earlier days of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

A visibly emotional Gage described how important each of these three pioneers was to his awakening and how important they continue to be to the hopes for a real breakthrough that will convince the world that the official account of 9/11 is false.

The three speakers told of their history in the movement along with their contributions in the forms of books and papers. Jones mentioned his 2018 book, 9-11 Research as a Full Professor of Physics, and recounted the story of how he lost his position as a professor at Brigham Young University following his publication of a research paper in 2006.

Jones, ever the professor, also gave “homework” to the audience: He assigned them to read the article he co-authored for Europhysics News, titled “15 Years Later: On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses,” which now has more than one million downloads, and the “request for correction” submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology earlier this year regarding its 2008 report on Building 7.

Griffin, in reviewing his time as a 9/11 scholar, mentioned three of his 9/11 books as particularly standing out for him, both for their popularity and their strength in covering the evidence: The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions; The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé; and Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. He later added that The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 was actually his best book of all.

Harrit focused on the research papers he has authored. He remarked on the clear-cut evidence for the use of nano-thermite in bringing down the Twin Towers and spoke of the ability of nanotechnology to propel the debris from the buildings both upward and outward for hundreds of yards, as was observed.

Using nanotechnology, he explained, allows for the “tuning” of the materials so that they have the properties desired.

“I believe it’s the nano-thermite acting here, not exactly as an explosive, more in between something you would call an explosive or a propellant, because these are one of the virtues or the options of nano-technology . . .,” Harrit said.

Gage brought the conversation around to the subject of American exceptionalism and the unwillingness of Americans to acknowledge deeply troubling truths about their country. Griffin commented that he had been working on a book on that very subject when he turned to 9/11 for the first time to write The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 in 2004. Finally, in 2018, the book he had set earlier aside was published under the title The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?

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Craig McKee’s summary of Day 1 of the conference, “Justice Friday,” is HERE, including videos of its four sessions. His summary of Day 3, “Big Picture Sunday,” should be along soon.

On Sept. 30, we reported that a group of “requesters” had appealed the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s denial of the group’s formal “request for correction” of NIST’s explanation for how the 47-story Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a kind of P.S. to the same report, we tacked on a later radio interview that put the matter in more understandable terms for lay people.

Most sensible visitors won’t want to watch yet another highly technical video (this one is 51 minutes long), mostly of a structural engineer painstakingly going through why NIST’s explanation for Building 7’s collapse can’t be correct. We nevertheless provide it, HERE, because some visitors may wish to forward it to an architect or an engineer who  might enjoy watching it.

It was put together before last month’s appeal by the requesters. The structural engineer is Roland Angle, a member of the board of directors of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He is introduced by AE911Truth’s founder, Richard Gage.

The worldwide pandemic, accepted by billions of people as attributable to the Covid-19 virus, has this in common with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, accepted by billions as attributable to a Muslim terrorist group called Al Qaeda. Both events may have been misdiagnosed. Or not. The following email string began last Friday and ended the next day. At least two of the correspondents are 9/11 “truthers,” as am I. I have substituted “N.D.” (for name deleted) for the name of each and added numbers for the order in which they entered the discussion but otherwise left their messages alone. The title of the original message was 

Symptoms in common with CV19 and Zinc deficiency:

cough, nausea, fever, pain, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, loss of taste and smell, loss of appetite, fatigue and apathy, inflammation, decreased immunity, etc.

no “virus” needed!  love.  –N.D.1

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Thanks for the sharing of information. I think that it is really important to share what we are thinking and discovering so that we can use each other as sounding boards. In that positive spirit, I am finding the statement “lack of zinc causes CV19” confusing. It inspires me to consider whether there were very few cases of zinc deficiency prior to last December/January and then a large number of zinc deficiency cases suddenly developed across the globe in the span of a few month. That doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Alternatively, perhaps cases of CV19 are being misdiagnosed. But for all of its failings, mistaking a virus for a zinc deficiency by the medical industry also does not seem very plausible on a large scale. I think that there are any one of a number of ways in which information about CV19 is controlled and mis/disinformation distributed, but this zinc hypothesis doesn’t seem like a strong candidate to me. I always try to be open to learning, however, and therefore open to changing my opinion. 

My 2 cents,

N.D.2

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 General nutritional deficiency by neglect in nursing homes could easily cause sending them into early distress..(not enough C Zinc, D from food. so right now,  if nursing homes were to Supplement their residents with Extra D , C and Zinc and were certain getting enough nutrition and hydration,   (per the Irish Trinity College study) at least 50% of the people would not die of serious infection or from Covid (if they test positive) . Nursing home residents

if neglected are going to get bed sores that turn to infections- and if these are not treated with High dose IV vitamin C  they could turn deadly.   If patients dont move in their beds or get out of bed – their lungs will get inflamed and  cause pneumonia-   can turn to Sepsis – treatment is also IV Vitamin C.

Im thinking the reason people are dying are 2 fold-  Neglect induced illness,  over medication induced illness, then FALSE positive tests resulting in wrong  treatment or lack of treatment.  if a false positive test then puts the patient on a ventilator-  they are going to die.  If they are given meds they dont need they could die……CDC site also shows they are labeling people with FLU A and B and H1n1,  Pneumonia and Sepsis as COVID.    OLD people die . Any small virus common cold bacteria would send them into distress.    Is the most proper treatment of say the (Eastern Virginia Dr Marik MATH protocol of Vitamin C IV and Prednisone and Vitamin B and D going to save them?  who knows…but a ventilator and the sedation meds will definitely kill them.  I ask the question: Do we  force  Unnatural death or let people just die a natural death and we just give them the best natural preventive care instead  via nutrition and community and their loved ones near them ? As many doctors have said , If there was No Testing, we not know more people are dying than usual.

and given we have a much older demographics – more are going to die anyway…

N.D.3

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To All,

N.D.4

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In addition to elderly people diagnosed with covid and murdered by being put on a ventilator, I have also heard about elderly people being diagnosed with covid and murdered by neglect. I mean some places if someone is diagnosed with covid then there is an assumption that the patient will die and they are not given any life-saving treatment only palliative care.  A good friend of mine’s mother-in-law died from sepsis following hip surgery because they said she had covid and refused to give her antibiotics to treat the sepsis. 

~ N.D.5

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That’s awful! Is he suing? [N.D.6]

–   –   –

No. He is not suing. His girlfriend is brainwashed by mass media. She thinks her mother died of covid. She is paranoid of the virus and makes my friend wear a mask and face shield when he goes out. [N.D.5]

–   –   –

What are exosomes? The second link mentioned by N.D.4 is to a short video on them. — M.C.M.

This week Craig McKee wrote a nice summary of “Justice Friday,” the first day of the Justice Rising: 9/11 in 2020 conference five weekends ago. His article is reprinted below from the Architects & Engineers website. Click HERE for the same thing printed more legibly and accompanied by videos of each session.

Justice Rising Day 1 — On 9/11 Truth Legal Efforts

By Craig McKee

The first day of the “Justice Rising: 9/11 in 2020” conference, dubbed “Justice Friday,” was marked by fascinating information and encouraging signs for the 9/11 Truth Movement. After an introduction to the conference by AE911Truth founder Richard Gage, AIA, which included a video history of the organization, the Friday session turned to what has recently been the hottest 9/11 Truth topic: use of the legal system to expose official lies about 9/11.

In “A UK Family Fights for Truth,” we heard from Matt Campbell, whose brother Geoff was killed in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Matt explained his ongoing fight to reopen the inquest into his brother’s death, which is now more possible than ever thanks to crucial fundraising help from AE911Truth. On the final day of the conference, Matt and AE911Truth finished raising the $100,000 needed to get the case going. Once the inquest is reopened, we will see, for the first time, powerful evidence presented in a courtroom that the three World Trade Center towers were destroyed in controlled demolitions. This will be a huge breakthrough for the 9/11 Truth Movement.

In the next presentation, “Closing in on NIST,” conference viewers were given a detailed review of the Request for Correction submitted earlier this year to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding its 2008 report on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. Ted Walter and Tony Szamboti of AE911Truth and Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry (LC911) outlined the demands being made on NIST under the Data Quality Act to correct the fraudulent claims in its report.

The evening concluded with “The Expanding Legal Front,” an intriguing presentation by Harrison and two other key members of LC911 — David Meiswinkle and Barbara Honegger — about the group’s plans. They focused on LC911’s latest initiative, a petition calling on Congress to reinvestigate the 2001 anthrax attacks. The attacks are believed by many to be a critical but often overlooked element of the 9/11 operation.

Meiswinkle explained that the anthrax petition is the first step in a five-step plan for LC911. He added that the organization’s anthrax committee, which has been meeting for six months, includes Honegger and Graeme MacQueen, the author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, along with four attorneys.

A grand jury was convened to examine the anthrax attacks but this was closed down upon the alleged suicide of supposed suspect Bruce Ivins in 2008. According to Honegger, not only did Ivins not carry out the anthrax attacks but he could not have. LC911 recently interviewed Richard Lambert, who headed the FBI’s “Amerithrax” investigation. Lambert left the post when he realized he was being undermined and that there was no basis for suspecting Ivins.

Honegger described the anthrax attacks as one of 9/11 Truth’s “Holy Grails” — which she defined as “burning facts” that could, standing alone, “prove that the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is both an immense lie and a psychological operation.”

The day after Indigenous People’s Day in the United States, I’m turning this section over, without permission, to a commentary by Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Readers can decide for themselves what it may have to do in a blog that is mostly about “9/11.” Three footnotes may be found HERE. — MCM

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An Agreed-upon Delusion

The world (or “system” as we use the word now) is a hiding place for unconsciousness or “deadness” in the words of Paul. Both Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis taught that the triumph of evil depends entirely on disguise. Our egos must see it as some form of goodness and virtue so that we can buy into it.

If evil depends on a “good” disguise, cultural virtue and religion are the very best covers of all. The leaders of both religion and empire colluded in the killing of Jesus (Matthew 27:1-2). In Luke’s Gospel, Herod and Pilate just passed him back and forth and affirmed whatever the other one said (Luke 23:12). Christians were forewarned that the highest levels of power can and probably will be co-opted by evil.

Is there a culture in this world that does not operate out of this recipe for delusion? This is what Paul means when he names “the world,” or what I call “the system,” as one of the sources of evil. What Paul already recognized, at least intuitively, is that it is almost impossible for any social grouping to be corporately or consistently selfless. It has to maintain and promote itself first at virtually any cost—sacrificing even its own stated ethics and morality. If we cannot see this, it might reveal the depth of the disguise of institutionalized evil.

Consider the religious rationale for the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which justified the conquest of the Americas and the African slave-trade. Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah write:

The doctrine [of Discovery] emerged from a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls, which are official decrees by the pope that carry the full weight of his ecclesial office. . . . On May 4, 1493, the year after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera . . . and offered a spiritual validation for European conquest, “that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread. . . .” It gave theological permission for the European body and mind to view themselves as superior to the non-European bodies and minds. The doctrine created . . . an identity for African bodies as inferior and only worthy of subjugation; it also relegated the identity of the original inhabitants of the land “discovered” to become outsiders, now unwelcome in their own land.

Evil finds its almost perfect camouflage in the silent agreements of the group when it appears personally advantageous. Such unconscious “deadness,” will continue to show itself in every age, I believe. This is why I can’t throw the word “sin” out entirely. If we do not see the true shape of evil or recognize how we are fully complicit in it, it will fully control us, while not looking the least like sin. Would “agreed-upon delusion” be a better description? We cannot recognize it or overcome it as isolated individuals, mostly because it is held together by the group consensus.

— Richard Rohr