The National September 11 Memorial Memorial & Museum has been a memorial of the 2001 terrorist attacks since 2011 and a museum since 2014, both at the site of the former Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

The New York Times, headquartered not many city blocks to the north, is a newspaper world famous for its authority and quality, and noted for its influence on the rest of the news media in the United States and abroad.

Yesterday the Times led its Arts section with a feature article geared to museum-world realities. Budgetary nightmares will prevent the non-profit from offering special exhibitions and other 20th-anniversary programming there. About 60 percent of the institution’s staff has been laid off or furloughed, in part because of lost income from months of Covid 19 restrictions.

Headline: “9/11 Museum Vexed by Cuts and Feuds.” Subhead: “New exhibitions are dropped, and critics say the institution seems frozen in time.” Byline: By Zachary Small.

For many who have challenged government and news accounts of “9/11,” the story may be tough going for the first dozen paragraphs. They include, without attribution, this standard summary of the attacks:

“[T]he terrorist group Al Qaeda hijacked several planes and used them as weapons. Two crashed into the World Trade Center towers and a third flew into the Pentagon. A fourth plane was headed toward Washington, but passengers and crew members fought back, bringing it down in a field in Pennsylvania.”

No attribution has ever been needed for the various Pulitzer or Nobel prize winners who tuck such a passage into their articles, let alone a relatively unknown writer for the Times Arts section. If he didn’t put the summary in, the copy desk would have.

Then, though, Small’s story picks up. Weaved into details of attendance figures, budget deficits, government loans, fund-raising efforts and architectural descriptions is some telling information.

The founding creative director, Michael Shulan, is among those interviewed who say the museum balked at having 20th-anniversary programming that would challenge the official government 9/11 story.

Shulan: “Twenty years marks a turning point where one begins to look at things with a certain amount of hindsight. Not asking questions just leads to further crises.”

Memorial & Museum chief executive and president Alice M. Greenwald carries out a thankless job of defending the government 9/11 line.

Some new information may be revealed in “The Outsider,” a documentary film by Pamela Yoder and Steven Rosenbloom, to be released online next month, based in part on extensive footage from years of private meetings at the museum. Rosenbloom speaks of the museum authorities’ “decision … to codify, control and limit,” at the cost of a more accurate picture of the attacks and related matters.

Many researchers see the mainstream news media as places where 9/11 truth goes to die. The Times’s report this week may presage something different.

— Mark Channing Miller

(An article in the New York Times begins to shed the kind of light on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that a growing number of researchers have been looking for in the mainstream news media.

(Headed “9/11 Museum Vexed by Cuts and Feuds,” the story under Zachary Small’s byline leads the Arts section of the newsprint editions of today’s Times.

(Because since a few months after the attacks — at most — Times reporters and editors seemed to have been prevented from delving into a number of aspects of the “9/11” phenomenon, it’s an article of historic importance. Some who have followed the subject, mostly online, may want to purchase a copy of today’s Times at a newsstand.

(More to come. — MCM)

. . . or, If You Prefer, a Must-Listen Interview

This blog has recommended at least several chats Andy Steele has conducted with guests in the 9/11 truth effort.

The one linked HERE, though, may be the best.

Personally, I didn’t listen to this one. Rather, I read the transcript of the half-hour sit-down, and frequently re-read some of the parts.

Steele speaks with Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and Ted Walter of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who are at their best, as is Steele himself (at least the three of them are in print). People who have followed this for years will be rewarded for their attention.

But even beginners to the whole wretched 9/11 saga of Executive Branch coverup shouldn’t find the conversation daunting to understand.

I could quote at length from the brief against the National Institute for Standards and Technology regarding its report about how Building 7 at the World Trade Center came down into its own footprint in the late afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. But that could spoil the best parts for readers and listeners.

Harrison, litigation director of the Lawyers’ Committee, and Walter, author of Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of Towers 1, 2, and 7 of the World Trade Center, are at odds with what they see as NIST’s spurious and dissembling denial of a Request for Correction of its 2008 report on Building 7’s collapse.

In federal court (more details in late August), Harrison’s legal team will challenge NIST’s denial of the RFC as replete with deliberate falsifications and illegal evasions under the Data Quality Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Any lawyer or law student should find the interview compelling, but any adult American concerned about the country’s future should as well.

— Mark Channng Miller

Pogo* said it years ago: We have met the enemy and he is us. A lyricist for the Broadway musical “Li’l Abner”** may also have been right: Progress is the root of all evil, progress is the cause of it all.

There was tremendous “progress” for “us” in the interstate highway system (see HERE and HERE) that led to the rape of the countryside for suburbia and the gutting of cities throughout the land in favor of asphalt-surrounded malls nearby. Cars and trucks were the way to go; with petroleum used up “we” need to be always on the move electrically. Don’t think — drive.

(The above suggestions originate in comic strips of newspapers of yore. The Berkshire Eagle op-ed page for today, July 6, launched some of what follows.)

Columnist Carole Owens writes (“Mohican dispossession a dark spot in local history”) of the swindling from a band of the Mohican nation of their land in southern Berkshire County and nearby by politically astute — and rapacious — whites. These native Americans had abandoned it and vamoosed entirely by the early 1800s, westward eventually to Wisconsin. A Christian missionary named John Sargeant, a pair of Woodbridge brothers, and, later, the Puritanist theologian Jonathan Edwards come out rather well in this story.

(Readers of this blog from outside Eagle territory are respectfully urged to contact any of the newspaper’s subscribers they know to see this excellent summary, which deals with a mere dot on the whites’ march across the continent; properly importuned, perhaps some of those subscribers will somehow share its contents.

(Owens makes use of a wonderful piece by Lion G. Miles (1934-2020) in the New England Quarterly titled “The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818.” To be able to read it via a free subscription, you may have to find it in on a search engine and follow directions, entering the name of your local library as “institution” and then describing an interest, like “history.” You will be handsomely rewarded.)

Lower on the same op-ed page is Errol Morris’s look at a key Washington insider’s machinations, blandly headed in the Eagle “Donald Rumsfeld’s fog of memos.” Also published in the New York Times, it may be found HERE.

Morris begins, “Trying to understand another human being is often a dismal task.” His sketch of one of the system’s consummate political manipulators, who died last month at 91, is some of the fruit of his following Rumsfeld for years, directing the documentary “The Known Unknown” about him, and writing a series of articles about the neocon who was twice secretary of defense.

The op-ed concludes with this paragraph: “[Author] George Packer recently called Mr. Rumsfeld America’s worst secretary of defense. But this isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not the man, so much as the methodology. And the methodology, alas, seems ubiquitous. It’s not just him. It’s all of us.”

“Methodology.” It’s how Ephraim and Elijah Williams and their ilk, with help from a distant legislature, could dispossess Mohicans of any land and send them packing. It’s how “neoconservatives,” with help from just about everyone including — and this is essential — the news and entertainment media — can wage Cold War and later “the war on terrorism” to keep ruinous imperial games going.

Rumsfeld, his turn-of-the-21st-century “deputy” defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and fellow co-signers of the Project for a New American Century manifesto including Dick Cheney were only the obvious conductors of a system they mastered. They have used entities throughout the world including the United Nations and a controlled international press the way the Williamses & Co. used the General Court in Boston to have their way more than two centuries before.

So don’t go pointing fingers. Just get in your car and drive.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* A comic strip possum created for posterity by Walt Kelly.

** Also the name of Al Capp’s daily comic strip featuring Li’l Abner himself and his wife Daisy Mae, mostly in Dogpatch.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life! America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Words: Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929), alt.
Music: Materna. Samuel Augustus Ward (1848-1903)

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Note: Please see the two announcements in yesterday’s entry, headed “News, 7-3-21.” — MCM

AE911Truth to Sue NIST in ‘Major Lawsuit’: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth announced today it will sue the National Institute for Standards and Technology for “flagrant violation” of the Data Quality Act in connection with NIST’s failing to properly address the group’s Request for Correction of the agency’s conclusion that fire caused the destruction of Building 7 at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The announcement, HERE, has links to NIST’s denial, issued last Wednesday, and a preliminary analysis of it by AE911Truth lawyer Mick G. Harrison, dated yesterday.

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Commemorative 9/11 Event Scheduled for NYC: An all-afternoon and -evening event marking the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be held at the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City on Saturday, Sept. 11. It is sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry in collaboration with two other national groups — the 9/11 Truth Action Project and Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. An initial invitation is HERE.

The article below, the third in a series, is based on Richard Heinberg’s forthcoming book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. (The first two in the series appeared in this blog on Feb. 29 and March 28.) You can read the first article here, and the second here, both on the Post Carbon Institute website. For information about the book and how to join a pre-release reading and discussion group, please go to postcarbon.org/power.

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Too Much Power / by Richard Heinberg

Do some people have too much power over others? Do we humans have too much power over the natural world? These questions get to the heart of our biggest global problems. They also force us to think critically about the way society is organized, and about our own behavior. We often tend to give knee-jerk answers, but too much is at stake for that. We need to think critically and contextually.

First, what do we mean by power? While the word is used many ways, there are primarily just two kinds of power: physical power and social power. Physical power can be defined as the rate of energy transfer, or as the use of energy to do something; social power is the ability of one person or a group to influence the thoughts and behavior of others.

Nature provides examples of excessive physical power. MORE . . .

UFOs Are Now UAPs: As forecast here on June 16 (“Aliens Did 9/11?”), a report was issued last week on things flying around out there that “authorities” can’t figure out. In the New York Times the story was headed “U.S. Can’t Explain U.F.O.s, Report Says, and Doesn’t Rule Out Aliens.” An AP story is headed “No ET, no answers: Intel report is inconclusive about UFOs.” UAP stands for unidentified aerial phenomena.

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Condo Collapse in Florida:  Confirmed deaths this weekend from the collapse of the 13-story beachfront condominium building in Miami Dade County are at five, with the unaccounted-for at 150. Among the stories online are two from the Associated Press, HERE and HERE. The collapse will prompt comparisons to the destruction of three skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 — the Twin Towers and the 47-story Building 7. Will the mainstream media continue to shield the U.S. government’s Executive Branch from questions about its impossible narratives cloaking the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

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Fake News? Word yesterday out of Iceland that 28-year-old Sigudur Ingi Thordarson now says he made up some or all of his testimony against Julian Assange was unexpected. Thordarson is apparently a seasoned criminal and con artist cultivated by the FBI for testimony thought helpful to the U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of the Wikileaks founder, currently imprisoned in England. HERE is our first look at it. HERE is Consortium News’s coverage. HERE is something from ParsToday, an Iranian outlet. These and other online services got the jump on mainstream media. The development originated from the Icelandic biweekly Stundid.

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Always on Guard: Dusty Bahlman, a weekly columnist for The Berkshire Eagle, concluded his tribute to a fallen “reporter’s reporter” and weekly newspaper founder with these words: “Pittsfield was lucky to have such a tireless sentry overlooking its civic affairs for so long. Jonathan Levine was a plain-spoken, scrupulously honest and deeply principled journalist. His work and the work of others like him, always will put the lie to the evidence-free, paranoid blather peddled by the many manufacturers of ‘fake news.’”

— Mark Channing Miller

The Islandic newspaper Stundid reported Saturday that a man it calls a major witness in the U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has recanted important parts of his testimony.

The man, a 28-year-old Islander with a varied criminal record named Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, reportedly told the biweekly newspaper he made up important accusations in the case built by the FBI.

The Stundid story, headlined “Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment,” is HERE.

“A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange,” it begins, “has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history [of] sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.”

The story about the interview (which was presumably conducted in Icelandic) does not quote Thordarson, but it does quote Ögmundur Jónasson, Iceland’s minister of the interior from 2011 to 2013:

“They were trying to use things here [in Iceland] and use people in our country to spin a web, a cobweb that would catch Julian Assange,” Jónasson said.

“What I have been pondering ever since,” he said, “is if the spinning of the web had already started then with the acceptance of the letter rogatory establishing cooperation that they could use as a pretext for later visits.”

An entity called wikileaks.shop, which sells items of clothing bearing pro-Wikileaks and pro-Assange messages, quotes the fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden as saying, “This is the end of the case against Julian Assange.”

— Mark Channing Miller

Consider the 9/11 Truth Action Project

For more than three years I have promoted and applauded the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, repeatedly and deservedly — but have given short shrift to the 9/11 Truth Action Project. I apologize.

9/11 TAP may (or may not) be less known, but it is out there doing valuable citizen service to the overall truth effort. There’s no “left” or “right” to it, although people who are sometimes identified as left-wingers or right-wingers are part of it as well as workaday people who are not “political” as described by neighbors, by friends, or in the media.

At any rate, please take a look at the 9/11 Truth Action Project website.

9/11 TAP is not confined strictly to matters concerning the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but also to things that are related because they are a part of a whole syndrome of events and realities of which “9/11” is part.

In their June newsletter, for instance, are two articles with these headlines (click on each to read):

“Activist Voices:  Interview with Cat Watters” and “Punishing Syria with Deception and Economic Trickery: Part I.”

From the April newsletter is this: “Academic Media Censorship Conference Censored by YouTube: ‘At First I Thought it Was a Joke.’” A long subhead: “The entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — was mysteriously disappeared from YouTube, say conference organizers.” 

Here is the first paragraph of Alan Macleod’s article:

— Mark Channing Miller