It’s still Christmas in the Christian calendar and will be until the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So here, just below, is Madeleine L’Engle’s poem “First Coming,” which I learned of during Advent through a retired Episcopal priest, David De Smith. It may be an inspiration for “truthers” of all stripes. The Jesus of Scripture was a truther as well as a great pragmatist. “He came when the need was great.”

Following the poem will be another view of Christmas, a chiding one, pointing out the paradoxes and hypocrisies of the season.

“First Coming” is from the 2007 book The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L’Engle

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He did not wait till the world was ready, / till men and nations were at peace. / He came when the Heavens were unsteady, / and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time. / He came when the need was deep and great. / He dined with sinners in all their grime, / turned water into wine.

He did not wait till hearts were pure. / In joy he came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt. / To a world like ours, of anguished shame / he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh, / to heal its tangles, shield its scorn. / In the mystery of the Word made Flesh/ the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane / to raise our songs with joyful voice, / for to share our grief, to touch our pain, / He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

–   –   –

Courtesy of The Intercept, the meditation linked HERE is by Jon Schwarz, who sees the observation of Christmas in the United States as the negation of Jesus’ birth, “a berserk bacchanal celebrating an Opposite Jesus.” It’s headed “On Christmas, America Celebrates the Birth of Reverse Jesus: What if we were to actually use the life of Christ as a basis for Christmas?” Click on the link and see if it clicks with you.

Here’s hoping that either view, or both, might stir readers, just once more before Jan. 1, to contribute to an outfit dedicated to getting this country to the bottom of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other matters the facts of which need to come to light.

“The suspects are still at large,” writes David Meiswinkle of the Lawwyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry about the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks. In a year’s-end letter asking for funds (quoted just below) he reminds readers the Committee has petitioned Congress to investigate the attacks.

“Shortly after the  9/11 attacks, anthrax sent in the mail killed five individuals, injured 17, and targeted two US Senators for assassination. Recently, the Lawyers’ Committee completed their investigation into these anthrax attacks and submitted to Congress a 76-page Petition with 69 Exhibits  requesting a new anthrax  investigation. The Lawyers’ Committee found that the FBI’s investigation was greatly flawed and deceptive, an innocent man appears to have been scapegoated and blamed for the crimes and more likely suspects not considered. There is a conflict of interest for the FBI/Justice Department to investigate itself. The suspects are still at large. Congress needs to get involved and address these crimes. Any donation will help continue this investigation and others related to the crimes of 9/11.

“Opinion polls show many believe important questions raised after the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001, have not been addressed. Excessive government secrecy contributes to a growing loss of trust in our institutions and undermines democracy. The Lawyers’ Committee pursues government accountability, including release of classified and other key documents through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as doing investigations which gather evidence for Grand Jury Petition submissions and  for strategic litigation to create the transparency required to restore a trustworthy democracy.”

Meiswinkle, president of the Lawyers’ Committee, expands on the letter in this SHORT VIDEO message. It contains a GoFundMe link for those so inclined to donate to the organization’s year-end appeal. In it he reminds viewers that “the [antrax] killers have never been apprehended.” He notes that the New York Times and the Washington Post have editorialized strongly in favor of an independent investigation. 

Below is a transcript of the end-of-the-year fundraising appeal Attorney Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry makes in the video described in the entry of earlier today. He emphasizes that the committee’s efforts are not about merely “historical” occurrences of the “9/11” attacks and the anthrax attacks, both in 2001, but rather about their ongoing consequences and U.S. government corruption related to them that affect Americans “in the moment.”

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I’m Mick Harrison, the litigation director for the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. The Lawyers’ Committee is a non-profit. We’re dedicated to transparency and accountability regarding the tragic attacks of 9/11, the crimes that were committed leading up to 9/11, the crimes that were committed during 9/11, and the crimes that have happened because of 9/11, which are ongoing, and our investigation of the anthrax attacks shows that there was government corruption involved. 

Our goal is to bring the full truth out about those crimes, to hold the wrongdoers accountable, which hasn’t happened yet, and hopefully in the process eliminate these unjustified wars on terror and compromises to our civil liberties.

The unique aspect of the Lawyers’ Committee in our work, so far, has been, one, our independence and integrity, which lets us go where no one else is willing to go, politically, and to bring the truth out.

Because we bring the force of the law to bear on these issues, which really no other 9/11 group has done until now, we’re able to bring the pieces together not only from a scientific and investigatory venue but in terms of what they mean legally, and what are the legal implications and how can they be acted on legally.

As part of our investigation, not only did we interview a number of Army officials who were very knowledgeable about [the anthrax attacks], we talked to the former FBI project director of the anthrax investigation, which they call “Amerithrax,” Richard Lambert, and he did review our petition—we asked him to look at it, the petition we submitted to Congress—and he basically said it was the most thorough and competent work on the subject that he’d seen so far. And given that he was the FBI investigator in charge for four years, you know, it means something.

What we bring that’s unique to the task of exposing the truth about what happened and correcting the problem is bringing the power of the law to bear. And as a lawyers’ organization we can not only put the pieces of the puzzle together in terms of an investigatory effort and the evidence, but we can see how the law applies to the evidence and how we can use legal tools to hold the wrongdoers accountable, to force more evidence out that has been kept secret by the government, to work with Congress and to use the laws to fix the problem.

It’s important to realize that this is a problem of the moment. It’s not a historical problem. Our organization has “9/11” in the title, but we’re really not just focused on 9/11. We’re talking about government corruption, the need for transparency and accountability in the moment. We’re talking about ongoing wars that are unjustified in the moment. We’re talking about compromises to our civil liberties in the moment.

The problem I think we’ve seen in the last few years is how far the government of the United States can go astray if we don’t do what we need to do to hold it accountable.

We hope we’re entering a new era where we may have a chance to get back to what America should be. And the Lawyers’ Committee is doing what we can to move us in the right direction by exposing the corruption of the past that is still influencing our present and our future.

And we need your help to solve the problem. I hope you all will do what you can do to help us, and we’ll do what we can to help you.

–   –   –

At the end of Harrison’s presentation these words appear:

Please visit our homepage at 

LCfor911.org 

and donate as generously as you can.

Thank you for your consideration.

“Let Your Voice Be Heard TODAY”

Attorney Mick Harrison is litigation director for the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. HERE, he talks about the committee’s work in seeking justice for the crimes of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadly anthrax attacks that quickly followed.

He does not try to summarize the legal efforts (which would take much longer than four minutes) but couches them in terms of an orderly quest for the transparency and accountability needed in government to expose the kind of corruption the perpetrators of the murderous 9/11 and anthrax attacks exemplified.

It’s an end-of-the-year appeal for money to keep the legal work going. Much more information can be found at the Lawyers’ Committee’s website, https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org. (Ideally, there will be a transcript of Harrison’s presentation, which may be the only way to do it justice in print.)

Below is a brief professional bio of him from the website:

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Mick Harrison, Esq., Director of Litigation, is a Public Interest Attorney, graduate summa cum laude of the University of the District of Columbia School of law. Attorney Harrison has a national practice focused on cases that involve whistleblower protection, government accountability, corporate fraud and false claims, and dangers to public health or the environment.

Over the last 25 years he has worked in partnership on such cases with The Government Accountability Project (GAP); Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER); the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG); the National Sierra Club; Greenpeace; and Vietnam veterans organizations, among others.

Attorney Harrison is licensed in Pennsylvania and admitted to practice before the U. S. Courts of Appeal for the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, District of Columbia, and Federal Circuits, as well as the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

I know about interrogation. I’ve done interrogations, and I can tell you this: by extracting information under torture, you make a fool of yourself. You obtain information that isn’t true, you receive names of people who are supposedly guilty and who aren’t, and you land yourself with a wild-goose chase and miss what is being handed to you on a plate, and that is the possibility of bonding with someone and engaging with them. — John le Carré in an interview

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I have just read the New York Times obituary of spy novelist John le Carré and hasten to recommend it. The headline “Author of Cold War Thrillers / Defined by Moral Ambiguities” over the portrait of his life and works by Sarah Lyall (great last name for someone writing about le Carré) only begins to do it justice.

The obituary and others should sell untold millions more of Le Carré’s books and spur a like number of borrowings of them from libraries.

Naturally, I wonder what he thought about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, how they were crafted, who “did it.” The extent to which Le Carré touched on matters related to “9/11” or the waves of murder ignited by it may (or may not) be found in his later novels. With luck, this will lead readers to buying and borrowing books that, unlike his, never get reviewed in newspapers or displayed in bookstores.

— Mark Channing Miller

In THIS piece for Consortium News, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern advocates against president-elect Joe Biden’s appointing former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell as CIA director. It is titled “Why Michael Morell Cannot Be CIA Director.”

(Before becoming a CIA analyst, McGovern was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer. A specialist on Russia, he also prepared and delivered The President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. In retirement, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.)

Yesterday I recommended two recent pieces of writing on energy and mentioned in passing Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute. I just visited PCI’s website and a post-election piece by Heinberg originally published by Common Dreams. 

HERE it is. It’s titled “The Real Plan? Make America Ungovernable.” It is dated Nov. 20 but is still fresh.

“The Real Plan?” is unlike other post-election summaries. It will not be comforting to many people, except those who have despaired of what the mainstream media and social media have been serving, and especially what they leave out. For many it paints an unrecognizable and impossible picture of reality.

“The Real Plan?” combines political, social, cultural and energy-resources analysis and has some recommendations at the end, the best of which is to talk with a lot with people you don’t think you agree with and listen carefully and respectfully to what they have to say.

— Mark Channing Miller 

This week has been a good one for looking into energy resources and their futures, among other things.

On Tuesday, James Howard Kunstler, a “peak oiler” since at least the start of this century, emailed out THIS essay, titled “Degrowth and How It Will Define How We Live in the Future,” which was put online last week by The American Conservative magazine.

Today, the New York Times put on page 1 Clifford Krauss’s straightforward business story headlined “As Oil Demand Declines, Exxon Is at Crossroads.”

I recommend reading both carefully starting with Kunstler’s, which summarizes some of the arguments he and other peak oilers including Richard Heinberg at the Post Carbon Institute have been putting forth for years.

From one paragraph: “Oil supports [our techno-industrial economy], and has for the past 100 years, and it makes all our fabulous amenities possible. Oil has been heading for trouble for a couple of decades and now it has arrived at the crisis point. Our supply of oil is dwindling because it costs too much to pull it out of the ground. It’s that simple. Our basic business model is broken.”

Kunstler talks mostly about what, in his view, is in store for the future.

Krauss, in today’s article, focuses on Exxon Mobil in recent decades, its competition with other energy giants, and pressures from large shareholders. He quotes Daniel Yergin, author most recently of The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations: “We’ve moved from the shale era to the energy transition era, so there is a greater divergence of strategies among the companies, the widest it’s been in modern times.” 

Yergin is the energy historian most acceptable to mainstream publications, and his books are available to check out at plenty of libraries. For Kunstler’s and Heinberg’s, readers are more likely to have to use an interlibrary loan option.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

“Deep state” is not in my dictionary. It would be between “deep space” and “deep structure,” followed by “deep throat” (you can look them up). If Merriam-Webster gets around to it it may have to have two or three definitions.

(Predictably, Wikipedia’s begins with “a conspiracy theory which suggests that… .” Conspiracy theories, apparently, are things left out of high school and college textbooks, going as these theories (often based on solid research) do against agreed-upon lies that Napoleon, among others, have said constitute much of history (of which journalism is said to be the first draft).

In last Thursday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni salutes some of his “deep state” heroes, according to the term’s more wholesome, benevolent sense. His include elected and appointed officials who publicly pushed back against President Trump’s more outlandish attempts to avoid leaving office in January and becoming a private, vulnerable, albeit outspoken, citizen. Bruni’s column is headed “The Deep State Is on a Roll.” He includes Republican officials in Georgia and Michigan, Anthony Fauci, and CIA and EPA people. For him, in this column, the figures in the deep state engage in “a righteous defense against the corruption of democracy.” Bruni forthrightly co-opts the term to celebrate them (just as President Trump co-opted it for his purposes), so the “rearing up” of this deep state “should be music to our ears.”

These days “deep state” has been used to describe powerful individuals in government, business and organized crime (and their operatives) suspected of assassinating people inconveniently in their way including President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Thomas Merton, all in the 1960s, and possibly Panama’s “Maximum Leader” Omar Torrijos and Ecuador’s elected president Jaime Roldós Aguilera, both in 1981.

Tuesday marked the 79th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and on Monday the Springfield Republican carried a feature highlighting the recollections of Harry Chandler, 99, who as a Navy medic on the scene was in the thick of saving lives following the attack. “You were American then,” he is quoted. “It was as simple as that. Everybody in the country was together. We were all in it.”

His is a gripping story, buttressed by a photo of page 1 of that day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin “extra” edition “WAR! OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES” and the news of President Roosevelt’s announcement of the attack. The next day FDR (a former undersecretary of the Navy) said, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion the American people in their righteous might will win through to victory. … With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.” 

Harry Chandler again: “When you stop to think about it, every family was involved [in World War II ], some war or another. They either had children in the war or were working in a factory. Or they were selling war bonds. Everybody was doing something to help our country and each other.”

The newspaper’s feature by executive editor Cynthia Simison, is headed “Date still lives on in  infamy, vet yearns for united America.” (As of today no reference to it appears online.)

“Premeditated.” Roosevelt was describing the Japanese planning for the invasion, but he knew it could also be used for his administration’s efforts to compel the Japanese to attack, efforts so successful that he knew from intelligence intercepts days or weeks before that the air invasion was imminent, knew well enough so that although Navy admirals on site were kept ignorant of this knowledge others saw that some ships were sent out of the harbor to keep them from being destroyed.

It was a case of high-stakes gotcha, and Japan fell for it. China, the Soviet Union, Britain, the Free French (France was occupied by the Germans) and other allies or allies-to-be, wanted the United States in the war. Many Americans didn’t. The “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor would change that, as Roosevelt calculated it would.

Accounts of this may be found HERE and HERE. Of course the “inside job” characterization of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is based on deep state involvement. The neocons at the Project for the New American Century hoped for a Pearl Harbor-like event that would kick off new wars. There’s a link to this wish HERE. And David Ray Griffin’s books on 9/11, from The New Pearl Harbor (2004) on, allude to it.

To quote Harry Chandler out of context, “Everybody in this country was together. We were all in it.”

— Mark Channing Miller

Testimony of a third eyewitness was added today (Dec. 7) in a months-long effort to get the National Institute of Standards and Technology to change its conclusion that on Sept. 11, 2001, fires caused the sudden, total destruction of World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper that was not struck by an airplane.

Click HERE to read a news release on the testimony, headed “9/11 Families and Experts Submit New Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in Building 7.”

The release includes videos of reports by TV news correspondents and links to documents in the so-far nearly eight-month “request for correction” effort.