Happy Joe Biden Day! Today is the first full day as president of the United States of America for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and as vice president for Kamala Harris.

Biden hit the ground running. His signing of more than one executive order on the day of his inauguration was a first; only two or three brand-new presidents had signed even one on Inauguration Day—he signed a stack of 15, most reversing executive orders of his immediate predecessor.

He is the first president to be both the father of a former state attorney general (the late Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III) and the president who as a candidate had chosen a former state attorney general (Harris) as his running mate. Moreover, Harris and the younger Biden were friends.

Biden is the first president having a son (the late Beau Biden) who had served in the Armed Forces in a continuing war begun during the administration of a recent predecessor as president (George W. Bush).

He is the first president in recent history who as a young lawyer considered himself closer to the major political party other than the one he became a member of.

President Biden is the first in recent memory to have run for the office out of a sense of duty, having felt or been persuaded that he would be the only nominee of his party who could defeat an incumbent from the other major party whom he sensed was a threat to the Republic and to the world. At his age he would probably much rather be the father of a could-be future president (Beau Biden) than president himself.

He is one of the individuals most experienced in national politics and government in recent history to assume the presidency, joining Presidents Nixon and George H.W. Bush in that group.

Biden is the first known president who every day has carried Rosary beads in his pocket.

He is the first president in recent years to be known as a past senator who routinely commuted to Washington by train.

Biden is the first Democrat since 2008 for whom this blogger voted for president even though he hardly needed the extra vote in Massachusetts.

— Mark Channing Miller

A partial look at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration

Transcript and Video: HERE, courtesy of Politico and msn.com.

What a Truther Hears: “There is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it, if only we were brave enough to be it.” … “The plea for justice for all will be deferred no longer.” … “History, faith and reason show the way, the way of unity.” … “Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.” … “Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans. I think I know. Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And, yes, the truth. Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit.” … ”This is a time of testing. We face an attack on democracy and on truth.” … “Before God and all of you I give you my word. I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution. I will defend our democracy. I will defend America.”

The National Anthem, ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ and ‘Amazing Grace’: Sung by Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks. (Courtesy of Yahoo News, Billboard, and TVLine.)

The Two Mikes: Those watching on NBC had the potential of  President Biden’s inaugural address diminished for them by historian Michael Beschloss and commentator Mike Barnicle, among others. Beschloss couched the speech entirely in the context of the last four years as if Biden were not the oldest U.S. president ever and had not been a U.S. senator for 36 years and Vice President for eight — all before Donald Trump became president. For Beschloss, Biden’s three words “Democracy has prevailed” meant that the storming of the Capitol two weeks ago had not toppled “democracy,” nor had Covid, economic crisis, nor racism. Barnicle, a longtime friend of Biden’s, focused on the personal: Biden’s resilience, humanity, generosity, tolerance, and optimism.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I said, “Don’t tell me things can’t change. They can.” And they do. That’s America. That’s Delaware. A place of hope, life and limitless possibilities. — Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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The top quote above is from a political cartoon (cartoonist’s name indecipherable) on a newspaper’s editorial page Monday, Jan. 18, 2021, next to an editorial headlined “Message of Dr. King is timeless.” A paragraph: “As we observe the national holiday today commemorating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. let us hope we can reflect on his template for peace and understanding. The theme offered this year by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change is ‘The Urgency of Creating a Beloved Community.’”

The second quote is from the Washington Post story in today’s Berkshire Eagle headlined “‘Don’t tell me things can’t change’: Trip to Washington to take presidential oath is fueled by a raw goodbye to his home state.” In it Joe Biden, still president-elect, recalls himself, 12 years earlier, speaking on a train platform while awaiting then-president-elect Barack Obama. The story’s second-to-last paragraph: “And now, Biden said, he was headed to Washington to meet up with Kamala Harris, who will be the first female, the first Black and the first Asian American vice president.”

Ms. Harris will also be the first vice president with Caribbean roots and at least one of the first who previously served as a district attorney and then a state’s attorney general.

— Mark Channing Miller

A detailed account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination is reprinted here in slightly edited form without the permission of the author, who emailed friends a message titled “Sad that on MLK day nobody talks about how he was executed by the US government.” A footnote follows.

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The April 4, 1968, execution of Martin Luther King by the FBI, the U.S. Army, the Memphis Police Department, the New Orleans and Memphis mob, the cover-up by local and national attorneys general, the 1999 jury trial that found them guilty, and the complete censorship of all of it by the U.S. mass media *

By Richard Krushnic, February 2014 

In December 1999 in Memphis, Tenn., following a three-week trial with over 70 witnesses, a jury of six whites and six blacks took 59 minutes to find agencies of the U.S. government 75 percent guilty and Lloyd Jowers 25 percent guilty of the murder of Martin Luther King.  While the charges brought in the civil trial did not specify the U.S. government agencies, the evidence presented focused on the FBI and the U.S. Army, with substantial circumstantial evidence incriminating members of the Memphis Police Department.  Some evidence indicated that one man who was the handler of the patsy, James Earl Ray, also played a direct role in the assassination. Some evidence indicated that he worked for the CIA. The evidence was well presented in the 2003 book Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, by William Pepper, the attorney who brought the case to trial on behalf of the King family.  

Forty of the more than 70 witnesses presented overwhelming and overlapping and mutually supporting evidence of the execution as an act of state, with coordinated planning and execution by federal agencies, the New Orleans and Memphis mafias, and the Memphis police. In essence, therefore, while the jury found only agencies of the U.S. government and Lloyd Jowers guilty, they certainly found the gestalt of the planning and execution involving the Memphis Police Department, the FBI, the U.S. Army, a New Orleans mob figure contracted by the FBI to kill King, Memphis mob figures who got the subcontract, and probably the CIA.  

Before returning to some of the details of the government’s execution of King, let us note the trajectory which led the government to kill him. The civil rights movement buildup from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s accomplished the elimination of widespread segregation of public and private institutions and business establishments, won the Voting Rights Act, other progressive legislation, and contributed much to the establishment of the War on Poverty programs. These gains were peaking at the same time that several hundred volunteers were working with MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the summer and fall of 1965. 

But that same year the Vietnam War’s mammoth escalation began, and by 1967 it became clear that guns were overshadowing butter, and the body bags were largely filling with black youth. These momentous developments had not escaped the attention of MLK, and a young freelance journalist covering the war, William Pepper, brought its genocidal aspects to Martin’s attention.  In 1967 William became Martin’s consultant on the war, and his friend.  King was painfully aware that the civil rights gains had not altered the economic inequality between blacks and whites, and that the war had stalled further progress on that front for poor whites and blacks alike. It was one thing to gain the right to eat at a formerly segregated lunch counter, but quite another to be able to pay the bill.  When the profound immorality of the genocidal racial aspects of the war was added to the mix, King’s practical and moral sensibilities led him into open opposition to the war, and into a plan to unite poor blacks and whites in a Poor People’s Campaign and mobilization culminating in an encampment on the Washington Mall in 1968—a tent city of 500,000.  He called for a cessation of the bombing of Vietnam before an audience of 250,000 demonstrators on the Washington Mall on April 15, 1967.  By July, several of the nation’s largest cities had burst into flame with exploding black rage. The National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) was established to catalyze people nationwide, and King asked Pepper to be its executive director. King would run for president, with Dr. Benjamin Spock for vice president.  

Enough of the power elite had come to understand that the civil rights movement was not a threat to the established system, but rather advantageous to it.  Once racial inequality had been exposed to the world, undermining the propaganda about the United States as the land of equality of opportunity, it became useful to enact a significant improvement in racial  justice, so the credibility of the land of the free could be re-established. But [King’s] assuming a leadership position in the antiwar movement and in cross-racial working class organizing for economic justice was seen as a serious threat to the system, which could not be tolerated. 

The same interest groups that executed President John F. Kennedy in 1963 eliminated King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. The 1963 coup d’etat against the cold warrior who became a peacemaker as president was followed by the elimination of the two people most likely to threaten the consolidation of the warfare state and the multinational oil and mining interests relying on military and CIA coups to seize control of new resources. 

This is why MLK was executed as an act of state.  For anyone who cares to examine the readily available evidence, there is no question regarding the executions of the Kennedys and King (among others) as acts of state. Yet even the thousands of civil rights activists of that decade spanning half of the 1950s and 1960s have not found the commitment to bring the truth of King’s execution into the light. 

Following King’s execution, Pepper worked an an attorney with the King family for 23 years to prove the innocence of the patsy, James Earl Ray.  They were fought tooth and nail by every level of the U.S. justice system. Finally giving up on that effort, Pepper and the King family succeeded in bringing to fruition the wrongful death suit in 1999—31 years after King’s execution.  The evidence presented at the three-week trial is overwhelming, is very well and understandably presented in Pepper’s three books on the matter,* and is corroborated by the 750-page trial transcript. 

The earlier evidence to surface seemed adequate to acquit confessed MLK “assassin” James Earl Ray, so many years were devoted to getting a trial for him. Since he had pled guilty, Ray had never been tried. King was killed in Memphis. The Memphis district attorney and police department, the Tennessee attorney general and the U.S. attorney general did all they could to frustrate the effort to get Ray a trial. Only when a British TV studio produced a mock trial, with a volunteer U.S. judge and volunteer citizen jurors, did witnesses who had been afraid to speak for nearly three decades come forward.  After more than two decades of experience with the U.S justice system arrayed against them from the local to the national level, Pepper and the King family decided the best they could do was a wrongful death suit, which they succeeded in bringing off in Memphis in 1999—31 years after King’s execution. 

The evidence came to light due to the King family, their dedicated attorney, William Pepper, and an amazing host of witnesses who came forward decades after the event to tell their stories.  One of them, Lloyd Jowers, was the bar and lodging house owner whose establishment was across the street from the motel balcony. Jowers confessed to many persons on many occasions that he was hired by local mob figure, Frank Liberto, to receive the rifle, store it, give it to the shooter at the time of the execution, take it from the shooter after the execution, and dispose of it. Two of the members of the Army assassination team testified to every detail of their assignment. 

Frank Liberto confessed to his mistress, La Vada Whitlock, that he had had King killed. La Vada repeated this to her son, Nathan Whitlock, a Memphis cab driver. Nathan, a naive 18-year-old at the time, asked Liberto directly if he killed King. Liberto told him he had arranged the killing. Nathan testified to this at the trial.  A number of witnesses gave heresay depositions indicating that the contract had been given to New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Marcello subcontracted it to Liberto in Memphis.

There is a long history of the CIA hiring mob groups at home and abroad to assassinate high-value targets to make sure that the U.S. government can’t be fingered for the killings. In the case of MLK, however, it was so important that he be killed that the U.S. Army had a backup assassination team in place at the same time and place, to take him out on the motel balcony if the mob contract failed to accomplish the job, and considerable evidence indicates heavy involvement of the Memphis police department in the execution and cover-up. 

Several witnesses who presented testimony to the Memphis police and to the district attorney at the time of the execution and were completely ignored, testified to seeing the shooter and smoke in the field adjacent to Jower’s bar, to seeing a man jump over a wall and flee, and to seeing another man run down the block, enter a police car and drive away. 

One of them, taxi driver recalled by a witness only as Buddy, was not so lucky. He testified to police at the police station right after the hit.  He was found dead the next morning. 

Considerable circumstantial evidence indicates that the actual shooter was the Memphis Police Department’s best marksman, Earl Clark, but there is no certainty that this was the case. 

Convicted of murdering King, James Earl Ray identified the photograph of a man named Raul from an array of photos, as the man who had controlled his movements and given him money. Glenda Grabow, an associate of Raul’s for many years, testified that he assisted the assassination of King. The man who handled the rifle, Lloyd Jowers, told Andrew Young and King’s son Dexter King that Raul picked up cash from the local mafia figure, Liberto, who hired Jowers to handle the gun and host the planning meetings and the actual shooter on his property. Raul brought the rifle that was used to kill King for Jowers to hold, give to the police department marksman, get the rifle back after the execution and dispose of it.  Raul was the handler who set up the patsy, James Early Ray, and a participant in the hit scenario. 

Other witnesses, black policemen who had always provided security to King in the past when he was in Memphis, were not used that day; no one was. Other black policemen who were to be on detail in the area on April 4, 1968, were told the night before that they were being reassigned. Several witnesses testified to hearing Joe Lombardo, the local mob figure who got the subcontract from New Orleans mob figure Carlos Marcello, talking about the King hit.

Enter the 902nd—the eighth Military Intelligence Group (MIG) under the command of the assistant chief of staff for intelligence (ACSI), Major Gen. William P. Yarborough. A former active duty Army sniper whom Pepper calls “Warren” and another soldier called “Murphy” were reservists assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group at Camp Shelby in Mississippi deployed in 902nd covert operations. In numerous deposition sessions Warren and Murphy set out the details of the Memphis deployment. They were part of an eight-man Alpha 184 team specializing in civilian disguise. 

On March 29, five days before King’s execution, the two were briefed on their assignment to kill King and Andrew Young. Warren identified Eli Arkin of the MPD as the police officer they met with. Arkin was the MPD’s chief liaison with Special Agent William Lawrence, the local FBI field office’s intelligence specialist. Warren and Murphy were taken to the roof of the Illinois Central Railroad Building, overlooking the Lorraine Motel. Warren’s degree of detail leaves no doubt that he was there.  MPD Captain Carthel Weeden confirmed that he put a psy-ops soldier on the roof of the fire station to film the execution.  

Former federal government covert operative Jack Terrell testified to his conversations with John D. Hill, an Army sergeant who was murdered in 1979.  Hill told Terrell that he had been part of the April 4, 1968, assassination team in Memphis.  Officially, Hill was killed at close range by his wife, who was never tried for the murder. 

The only individual charged in the trial was Lloyd Jowers.  The only defense offered by his attorney were witnesses whose testimony shifted more of the blame to the U.S. government and the Memphis Police. Essentially no defense of the police or the government was offered in the trial. More than 40 witnesses presented extensive overlapping corroborating evidence, including, as mentioned above, persons actually part of the hit and the Army backup assassination team. 

The reasons the U.S. government executed MLK, the context in the United States at the time, the process of discovering the innocence of convicted James Earl Ray, the dedicated cover-up efforts of the district attorney and the Tennessee attorney general, the staging a TV trial in England (and the limited coverage of it in the British press), how that brought witnesses out of the woodwork, the unfolding of the evidence, the Memphis trial, and the almost perfect censorship of the trial and the verdict by the U.S. mass media, are all very well presented in William Pepper’s 2003 book, Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King.*

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* A longer book authored by William F. Pepper, Esq., titled The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., was published in 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing. It was the basis of an extensive report in the Washington Post of March 30, 2018, by reporter Tom Jackman, headlined “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.”

Today’s newspapers showcased stories about President-elect Joe Biden’s announcement he will make his chief science adviser a member of his Cabinet and generally elevate the importance of science in his administration.

“Biden: Advisers will lead with ‘science, truth’” reads the headline over a Sunday Republican report by the Associated Press quoting him as saying “We believe in both.”

This is potentially a breakthrough for those of us who contest the official accounts of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks that quickly followed, and the 1960s assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy, all of which accounts have relied on false science and the willingness of government and news media to look the other way.

There is science that matters to those in power, and science that doesn’t. At some point in the next year or so it will become apparent which intentionally neglected science will continue to be neglected by the executive branch of government and the news media.

“The science behind climate change is not a hoax,” Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in association with Biden’s science announcements. “The science behind the virus is not partisan. The same laws apply, the same evidence holds true regardless of whether or not you accept them.”

AP reported that Harris “recall[ed] her mother, a cancer researcher whom she credited with teaching her to think critically.”

Biden’s chief science adviser will be Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, which evolved from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, created in 1982. Lander was co-chair of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during the Obama administration.

Francis Collins, who has worked with him on the human genome project, will continue as director of the National Institutes of Health. Co-chair of Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology will be Frances Arnold, a Nobel Prize winning chemical engineer, and Maria Zuber, who is MIT vice president for research and geophysics.

The AP story included a quote from Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that the new administration’s having the chief science adviser on the president’s Cabinet for the first time “clearly signals the administration’s intent to involve scientific expertise in every policy decision.”

Two organizations, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, have based much of their scientific and legal challenges on evidence showing that key assertions upon which official accounts of the September 2001 attacks are based are scientifically indefensible. Proponents of new investigations into the Kennedy and King assassinations of 1963 and 1968 cite experts’ contentions that the official accounts cannot be true, including ballistics reports on all three.

— Mark Channing Miller  

AE911Truth in 2021: In a half-hour interview (audio and transcript HERE), Andy Steele of No Lies Radio speaks with Ted Walter of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth to update listeners on two legal initiatives on the organization’s agenda in 2021: (a) the Request for Correction to NIST’s report on Building 7 and (b) the campaign for a new inquest in the United Kingdom into the death of Geoff Campbell on Sept. 11, 2001. (In his introduction Steele uses the words “here,” “we” and “us” to describe AE911Truth’s work, indicating that he, like Walter, is part of the organization, which may or may not be something new.)

Internet Censurship and 9/11: In this interview recorded nearly a year ago (on Feb. 6, 2020), Andrew Steele talks with James Corbett of The Corbett Report on why views that challenge official narratives of the 9/11 attacks are so little known by otherwise well-informed people. Corbett, a Canadian based in Tokyo, calls the Internet “the mass media of the 21st century” that “has essentially surpassed the [traditional] media,” which is why much content about a variety of things is so ripe for censorship.  

The Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance: The mission statement of the San Francisco-based group says it “examines the War on Terror based on the pretext of 9/11.” Its very existence was unknown to the blogger whose site you are reading until today (Jan. 16, 2021). Its website, https://sf911truth.org, is well worth a visit, in part as a resource about the 9/11 truth movement — which indeed is, finally, worthy of that designation.

To a 9/11 truther, headlines and top paragraphs of news stories on page 1 of today’s New York Times seem eerily apropos of happenings in a national emergency nearly two decades ago. Here goes:

Headline and subhead: “FLOOD OF FAILURES LET MOB RAMPAGE THROUGH CAPITOL: Ignored Warnings, a Lack Of Preparation and a Slow Response to Danger.” First two paragraphs of story by five reporters: “WASHINGTON — Huddled in a command center, Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington and her aides saw a photograph on Wednesday afternoon [Jan. 6] of blood stains on the temporary grandstands at the Capitol, a makeshift structure built for the inauguration of a new president in two weeks. / The enormity of the deadly failure sank in.”

Headline: “How Leaders Bend Reality With Big Lies.”  First two paragraphs of story: “MOSCOW — In a cable to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, counselor at the United States Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that Soviet rule ‘has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.’ / Foremost among these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, ‘it is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything.’ No matter how untrue something might be, he wrote, ‘for the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth.’’’

The reporter, Andrew Higgins, goes on to say that Kennan’s “insight … now has a haunting resonance for America” because many believe a “truth,” which Higgins writes was “invented by President Trump,” that Joseph R. Biden lost the November election and is president-elect only through fraud. (Trump “invented” the whole stolen-election thing all by himself?)

Noting that “lying as a political tool is hardly new,” Higgins quotes the 16th-century Italian diplomat and philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli that “one who deceives will always find those who allow those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

Headline: “A Web Haven For Trump Fans Faces the Void.” The story by two reporters relates how the Parler “free speech” social network, to which millions who doubted the legitimacy of Biden’s victory had hoped would give them a voice after Facebook and Twitter started censoring their posts, had itself been bottled up by Apple and Google and “was set to disappear from the web on Monday.”

Like the storming of the Capitol last week, the extent of the murder and destruction of the 9/11 attacks of September 2001 has been attributed to a flood of failures, ignored warnings, a lack of preparation and a slow response to danger — in addition to the evil genius of Muslims in Afghanistan. Both historical events were spectacular, seen over and over on TV and computer screens. 

Somewhere in heaven another Italian, the playwright Luigi Pirandello, may be cheering. What’s transpiring down here on earth illustrates why in 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his abilities to “turn psychological analysis into good theatre.” The title of Pirandello’s 1917 play “Così è (se vi pare),” translated as “So It Is (If You Think So),” fits the 2021 world to a T. I like to think he would see through much of what’s going on.

— Mark Channing Miller

“2020 Taught Us How to Fix This” was the headline over a late December column by David Brooks in the New York Times and any number of other newspapers and websites.  

In 2020, Brooks wrote, “millions of Americans seemed impervious to evidence.” The year “called into question the very processes by which our society supposedly makes progress.” “[T]he key to change is education. We can teach each other to be more informed and make better decisions.”

I’ve taken his words out of context. The column is about racial diversity training and reasons it is not working in the United States. But  parts apply to the challenge “truthers” face in fighting the lies about the September 2001 terrorist attacks fed to the public by the executive branch of the federal government and news media including the Times.

Millions of Americans are impervious to evidence about those attacks because news media managers have barred evidence contrary to executive-branch mythology wrapping the attacks. They effectively tell readers, viewers and listeners, “You don’t want to know.”

If the key to change is education, the news media are playing hooky.

Although the column is about flawed diversity training, Brooks notes that it’s only one topic to which some of his examples apply. What can truthers learn from the idea that “our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed. … [I]f you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief”? Or the idea that “people don’t like to be told what to think, and may rebel if they think they’re being pressured to think a certain way”?

With luck, the years 2002 through 2020 will teach us how to fix this. 

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A news story over the byline of Carol Rosenberg in the New York TImes, headlined “Pandemic Delays Start of 9/11 Trial at Cuban Base,” included this: “Hijackers seized control of four commercial airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,976 people.”

Among the dubious elements in the sentence are that four commercial airliners were what crashed at the four sites, and that the crashes alone caused the deaths of nearly that number of people.

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In a column about troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq, Mark Shields or an editor at Creators Syndicate stated as fact that on 9/11 “al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial U.S. airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, resulting in the deaths of nearly 3,000.” (The column left the Pennsylvania part out but, unlike the Times news story, tacked blame for whatever happened in the airliners solely on al-Qaeda.)

— Mark Channing Miller

Nineteen years and 114 days ago the United States and the world were terrorized by the most brazen and murderous one-day massacre of civilians* in most people’s memory. And the terrorists of September 2001 succeeded. Billions throughout the world saw on television saw what they were told were hijacked civilian airliners commandeered by Muslim extremists (quickly identified as al Qaeda members) armed with box cutters flying the craft into two World Trade Center skyscrapers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

The head of al Qaeda, Osama bin laden, didn’t take credit but rather repeatedly denied involvement. Officials and news media didn’t buy his denials.

Even if the news media managers wanted to comprehensively question the nascent official story, news operations were hampered from doing so by a second terrorist event that began one week later, the anthrax attacks against civilians. Alhough these killed only five people, these attacks sickened 17 others and appeared to target two U.S. senators. The anthrax episode competed with the 9/11 atrocity for the news media’s resources, as well as for the attention of people following events in the news. 

Together the two terrorist events were a one-two punch to the American psyche. Preparations for the 9/11 attacks had to have been under way since well before the 2000 election was decided, and perhaps the anthrax attacks were as well.

The official stories of both don’t stand up, and are being progressively challenged. The evidence put forward by challengers—primarily through Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry—is not openly acknowledged by the political class or news media powers. It is not deemed invalid; instead it is treated as if it does not exist. Whatever breakthrough successes challengers achieve are not recorded outside of a handful of Internet sites and on social media.

Results of any research by journalists have not yet been shared with the public by news organizations—showings on PBS of the trailer for the documentary “Seven”** were paid for by money raised for the showings. In any case, distractions from the crime of the century, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abound; the public’s attention has been consumed by election campaigns, the “Great Recession,” an erratic showman president (a professional actor), the new coronavirus, a new severe economic recession, the development and rollout of new vaccines, and the wars begun shortly after the September 2001 attacks. 

“Good riddance to 2020” has been a common refrain over the last week as if 2021 just has to be an improvement and “things,” with luck, will “get back to normal.” For us 9/11 “truthers” normal would be a continuation of 19 years of willfully ignoring challenges to official accounts of the crime of the century. Normal amounts to institutional and societal whistling past the graveyard. This truther is hoping for an abnormal year ahead.

— Mark Channing MIller

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* The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 may not count. The United States and Japan were at war and the bombing was done openly by the U.S. military and geared toward (a) ending Japan’s participation in the war quickly and (b) warning the rest of the world, especially the Soviet Union, that the United States could do the same thing elsewhere another time. If the bombings of those cities count as two separate geopolitical events, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were the third most murderous one-day massacre in most people’s memory in 2001. Brazen? No. It was wartime, there were factories in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the cruelty of Japanese against Allied forces’ prisoners of war may have been a factor.

** See past and future entries about “Seven” in this blog.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks of September 2001 people who with good reason questioned government accounts have had difficulty gaining much attention. Each year, though, efforts by independent researchers and analysts have built upon those of previous years to begin gaining critical mass—this in the face of near-total refusal of news-media managers to acknowledge the validity of their work. 

The most heartening development of 2020 has been the completion and beginnings of dissemination of the 45-minute documentary “Seven.” I looked at it this afternoon. It focuses on more than four years of intensive study of the collapse of Building 7 at the World Trade Center, a 47-story skyscraper that—unlike either of the Twin Towers nearby—was not reported to have been struck by an airliner.

“Seven” was released on Dec. 8. True to form, mainstream news outlets have not acknowledged it. The only review I have come across so far is Kevin Ryan’s, HERE, in the OffGuardian. Titled “Seven, AE911Truth’s new documentary about groundbreaking new study on WTC7,” it hit the Internet yesterday. Because Ryan has been for years allied with the challengers of the official accounts, as Bruce Henry* and I have, his piece is not so much as review as a promotion of it, an ad for it.

This is another such promotion, by someone who is neither a film critic nor schooled in any discipline akin to those of the authorities who speak in “Seven.” So I can’t be said to be objective about it. I can say that the film is superb and will probably help tremendously toward unearthing truths that have been buried for the past 19 years. 

Here are some facts. “Seven” is presented by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has been in business since 2006 and raised the money for it. It was directed by Dylan Avery, creator of the 2009 film “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.” It is narrated by the actor Ed Asner. It revolves around the University of Alaska Fairbanks study of the Building 7 collapse and structural engineer Leroy Hulsey, the professor who led it. Other key speakers are civil engineer Roland Angle, fire protection engineer Scott Grainger and structural engineers Kamal Obeid and Tony Szamboti. 

I may add some quotes from it another time.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Bruce re-introduced me to the 9/11 puzzle around 2015 by lending me his copy of a study coauthored by the Danish chemist Niels Harrit on the World Trade Center building collapses. Years before I had read David Ray Griffin’s first book on the attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, but had found no interest around me in the topic. In spring 2018 Bruce and I walked across Massachusetts from Provincetown to the New York State line with phosphorescent “9/11 TRUTH” signs and this blog began.