Researcher Barbara Honegger of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry spoke on March 6 on San Diego’s connections to both the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and efforts to establish the roles of perpetrators not considered in official accounts.

Among other ties, the city was a temporary base for Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the five al-Qaeda operatives who reportedly hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

San Diego is also home to former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, who in retirement worked for passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) which removes the sovereign immunity that prevented lawsuits against governments found to be involved in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

And the FBI’s San Diego Division was where for a time Richard Lambert was assistant special agent in charge, years before becoming better known as highly critical of the “Amerithrax” investigation following the anonymous mailing of anthrax-laced letters resulting in five deaths and 17 victims sickened in the weeks after 9/11.

In Honegger’s 37-minute talk to San Diego 9/11 Truth, HERE, she also recommends a 2008 article she wrote for Oped News on connections between the anthrax scare and the September 11 attacks; and an interview HERE (one of many online) in which Gen. Richard Clarke, adviser to the White House on counter-terror from 1998 to 2002, points out federal government failures to prevent the 9/11 attacks and apologizes for them to victims’ families.

The event also featured Lawyers’ Committee president Richard D. Meiswinkle (see below) and fire commissioner Christopher Gioia of the Franklin Square and Munson fire district on Long Island. A brief summary of the event is HERE.

A board member  of the Lawyers’ Committee, Honegger was a White House policy adviser for several years during the Reagan administration. She is a journalist specializing in military affairs, and authored the 1989 book October Surprise: Did the Reagan-Bush Election Campaign Sabotage President Carter’s Attempt to Free the American Hostages in Iran?

Attorney David R. Meiswinkle, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, took several minutes of a talk in San Diego on March 6 to read off a version of what has happened since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001:

“Over one million dead and injured, … the Patriot Act loss of civil liberties, the use of torture and drone warfare, full-spectrum dominance,* trillions diverted to war profits, the increased domination by corporations, refugee crisis, immunity of high elected officials from war crimes, failure of government to uphold Constitution, economic decline for 95 percent of us, censorship of the media, increased power of the Deep State, constant fear campaign, crackdown on whistleblowers, militarization of police, official coverup, destabilization of Middle East and Afghanistan, clash of cultures, wars for empire, surveillance state bulk data collection …

“As I mentioned before,” he continued, “the Constitution and its Bill of Rights … shredded … eviscerated since 9/11. And everything I mentioned previously sort of confirms that: the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA courts,** Homeland Security, indefinite detention …

“Now I can imagine the Founding Fathers, the Sons of Liberty, at their meetings and the King of England wanting to quarter soldiers in their houses to keep an eye on them, and how they stood up to prevent that.

“Let’s look at it again, the consequences of 9/11: indefinite detention, citizens as enemy combatants, NSA surveillance twenty-four/seven of all our text messages, emails, cellphone communication and web searches, being harvested and stored at a facility in Utah, a giant facility at our taxpayers’ money [sic] …

“So again we think back to the crimes of yesteryear during the colonial period, and our forefathers wouldn’t even allow soldiers to come and squat in their house, but we have surveillance at all times now. And we’ll go into it — G5 and things of that nature, but if you’re into some of the 2030 technology it’s going to get worse.”

The whole talk before a meeting of San Diego 9/11 Truth is 47 minutes long. Meiswinkle mentions some of his colleagues and recounts the committee’s progress over the last three years and plans for the future. Items shown on a screen as he spoke were intended to be shown in the video, but apparently no 14-year-old was present.

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* “Full-spectrum dominance, also known as full-spectrum superiority, is a military entity’s achievement of control over all dimensions of the battlespace, effectively possessing an overwhelming diversity of resources in such areas as terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, extraterrestrial, psychological, and bio- or cyber-technological warfare,” according to Wikipedia.

** “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is a United States federal law that establishes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of ‘foreign intelligence information’ between ‘foreign powers’ and ‘agents of foreign powers’ suspected of espionage or terrorism,” according to Wikipedia. “The Act created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It has been repeatedly amended since the September 11 attacks.” (Wikipedia’s entry on the “9/11 Truth movement,” HERE, has evolved over the years but still contains the dismissive label “conspiracy theorists” favored by the mainstream news media.)

British authorities have had Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange in solitary confinement for the past year while he fights extradition to the United States for espionage. First, he was charged with rape in Sweden.

HERE, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson talks with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who sees it as the powers that be showing Assange’s colleagues in the Fourth Estate what can happen if they go and do likewise. That is, tell the truth.

Waters refers to a report by U.N. special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer. HERE is an op-ed article Melzer finally got published on Assange’s experience, in medium.com.

David Ray Griffin should be the person most associated with getting the word out comprehensively that the U.S. government’s Executive Branch narrative about the “9/11” attacks 18-plus years ago can’t possibly be true, defying the laws of physics and common sense as it does.

He has been researching and writing on the subject since before turning out his first book (of at least 14) on it, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, published in 2004 by Olive Branch Press. That was two years before architect Richard Gage founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth after listening to him being interviewed on the radio. Click HERE for the titles of Griffin’s 9/11-related books as of mid-August of last year.

David Ray Griffin is professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University and a founder and co-director of the Center for Process Studies.

At last someone has written a review of his The Christian Gospel for Americans: A Systematic Theology (2019). HERE is the review, by Edward Curtin, direct from his blog, Behind the Curtain.

Thank you, Ed, for taking the trouble to do this book justice and even urging your readers to look at a 2013 article by Roger Olson detailing why he, Olson, is not a process theologian, linked by a commenter who will not read the book. That’s transparency!

— Mark Channing Miller

It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know – and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything. – Joyce Cary, English author (1888-1957)

 Alongside all our knowing must be the equal and honest “knowing that I do not know.” – Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest (b. 1943)

The rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American President, requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire. – James Reston, U.S. journalist (1909-1995)

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The “mainstream media” gets plenty of blame for shielding the public, to the extent that it can, from the ugly truth that the official accounts of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are full of impossibilities, inconsistencies and scores of outright lies. A couple of distinctions need to be made, however.

First, in the weeks and months after that horrific crime of the century, much invaluable reporting was done and relayed to the public in newspapers and on TV and radio. Independent researchers have used this as well as their own digging to nail down the falsity of the Executive Branch narrative.

Secondly, plenty of reporters would love to be unleashed to continue to track down the truth for the public that depends on a free press in a democracy. Apparently, owners and managers and the advertisers and “underwriters” on which those businesses survive won’t stand for it.

Below is a small example, taken from a book to be reviewed in this blog — three paragraphs of a report in a February 2002 issue of the New York Times by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, under the headline “A Search for Clues in Towers Collapse: Engineers Volunteer to Examine Steel Debris Taken to Shipyards”:

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“From the moment the two towers collapsed on Sept. 11, engineers and other experts have been struggling to answer the monumental questions of exactly why and how the buildings, designed to sustain a jet impact, completely collapsed. But despite promises of a broad federal investigation, and after weeks and calls from victims’ families and others to halt the destruction of the steel that could hold all sorts of clues, the half-heroic, half-comic scenes at the Jersey City scrapyard continue to play out.

“Small teams of engineers plan slightly mad dashes, like mountain goats, into mounds of steel to claim pieces of tower columns. The engineers time their forays to avoid being crushed … Through it all, [they] profess optimism that they are catching and saving what is most useful. But they concede that there is no way of saying for sure; an unknown number of steel columns has been sent off to mills as far away as Asia without ever having been examined or saved.

“‘What they’re doing is extremely noble, ambitious and wonderful and I’m glad somebody is doing that,’ said Dr. James G. Quintiere, a professor in fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland. But, he added, ‘the steel, to me, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it’s gone.'”

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— Mark Channing Miller

The following is a guest editorial by Mark Crispin Miller, no blood relation to Mark Channing Miller of this blog. He puts out a daily email service called News From Underground, to which anyone may subscribe for free. The message below is the latest dispatch, received at 6:37 tonight Eastern Standard time. It may seem unrelated to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, their causes and consequences, the main topic of this blog, but it isn’t. — MCM

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U.S. Cops Kill Citizens at Over 70 Times the Rate of Other First-World Nations

[That rate is] from five years ago. What is the rate today?

This week the Boston Red Sox dismissed Alex Cora as manager less than two years after he led the team to its most recent World Series championship. The reason: the Sox may have won the pennant and World Series in 2018 assisted by the same illegal sign stealing the Houston Astros used in 2017 to neutralize opposing pitchers on the Astros’ way to their World Series triumph.

On Monday Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred identified Cora as organizer of the scheme in 2017 as the Astros’ bench coach. An investigation found that the Astros, as the Associated Press worded it, “used electronics to steal signs during the franchise’s run to the 2017 World Series title and again in the 2018 season.” The Astros’ manager and general manager were first suspended for a season and then fired by the team’s owner. (The New York Mets’ current manager has also been implicated in the Astros’ cheating from his time in Houston.)

So … coaches and players of one or more Major League clubs misused technology repeatedly to defeat their rivals. Within two and a half years the Baseball Commission was on the case, cracked it, and heads rolled.

Compare this with America’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that murdered nearly 3,000 civilians on U.S. soil and were used to start a series of wars that continue today: The 9/11 Commission, appointed and staffed by the White House, ignored compelling evidence, much of it tracked down by news reporters and published or broadcast years ago — evidence which in a sane world would have buried the phony official 9/11 narrative and averted those wars, evidence which news organizations now have virtually disowned.

Those same organizations participate in the continuing 9/11 coverup by refusing to report on a unanimous U.S. Senate resolution voted fifteen months ago that the Justice Department and the FBI declassify all sequestered 9/11 documents.

I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like anything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time … At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participant in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family … but those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. — Abraham Lincoln, 1838 (emphasis his)

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. — John Stewart Mill (1806-1873)

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At the beginning of his 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility, the commentator George Will devotes page ix to the top quote above. It is from an address the future President Lincoln, then an Illinois state legislator and a Whig, delivered in Springfield.

As befits a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and TV personality (Washington Post, MSNBC and NBC), Will eschews anything that might be construed as an overt challenge to the impossible Executive Branch narrative about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed an estimated 3,000 on American soil and go on killing today. But he is likely uneasy about having to toe the line.

However, the words of the 28-year-old Lincoln, speaking 55 years after the War of Independence ended, contain a hint or two, whether or not Will meant this, as to why so many Americans are oblivious to the truth that the official narrative about the September 11th attacks is nonsense. “The silent artillery of time” keeps beating away at facts, choking them with dust.

Many who were shocked by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, are dead or past caring. Most of today’s teenagers were yet to be born. To many of their parents, older brothers and sisters and cousins the false accounts are engraved in history and, if anything, reinforced by academia and the news media even as wars touched off by 9/11 continue. The perpetrators counted on this, figuring that even if the phony 9/11 story disintegrated owing to its ridiculousness, they could somehow contain the damage to it by further feats of mass mind control through the media.

To me, “the silent artillery of time” recalls the title of James Reston’s 1966 The Artillery of the Press: Its Influence on American Foreign Policy. “My theme,” he says on page vii of the valuable book, “is that the rising power of the United States in world affairs, and particularly of the American President, requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire.”

Tonight six of the remaining candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination will be on stage in a “debate” hosted by the CNN and the Des Moines Register newspaper. As always, the mainstream media hosts, tightly scripted, will be in charge, this time led by CNN’s aptly named Wolf Blitzer. Whatever independence journalists may have had is no longer. Over the years it has been silenced on orders from their organizations’ owners, advertisers, and funders. That silencing accounts in large part for whatever credence the Executive Branch’s preposterous 9/11 narrative may still enjoy.

George Will is no fan of either President Bush, judging by what I’ve read so far in The Conservative Sensibility. One indication is his quote from the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-1794) on page 437: “The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries.”

But is Will naive, or being disingenuous? Has he not considered that perhaps the idea isn’t to win over these foreign people, but rather to keep the wars going?

— Mark Channing Miller

Today, Jan. 6, is the day of Epiphany, starting a Christian season that ends right after Mardi Gras in Lent. An email message last week said the word epiphany is from the Greek epiphanein for “reveal.” A modern definition of epiphany has it as “an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.”

More important to those who challenge the Executive Branch lies that make up the official narratives of “9/11,” today marks the birth in 1912 of Jacques Ellul, the French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian and “Christian anarchist.” Ellul, who died in 1994, is best known for his works on propaganda but is virtually unknown in the United States. (His Wikipedia entry is HERE.)

His works show why and how the scores of epiphanies laying bare the falsehood of official lies, easily available online, are no match for news media organizations acting in concert to stifle them.

— Mark Channing Miller

“Once upon a time there was a little boy; a nice little boy, whom you would have liked if you had known him—at least so his mother says. He had been brought up in the traditions of the old South, to which the two most important things in the world were good cooking and good manners. He obeyed his mother and father, and ate his peas with a fork, and never buttered the whole slice of his bread. On Sunday mornings he carefully shined his shoes and brushed his clothes at the window, and got into a pair of tight kid gloves and under a tight little brown derby hat, and walked with his parents to a church on Fifth Avenue. On week-days he studied hard and obeyed his teachers, and in every field of thought and activity he believed what was told him by those in authority. He learned the catechism and thought it was the direct word of God. When he fell sick and the doctor came, he put himself in the doctor’s hands with a sense of perfect trust and content; the doctor knew what to do, and would do it, and the little boy would get well.”

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The paragraph above begins Chapter One of Part One of a book written just over a century ago by a writer who may have met Mark Twain. He certainly seems to have read Mark Twain. So far, this is all I’ve read of the book. I’ll explain another day what the book has to do with 9/11 truth and how many copies of it exist in central and western Massachusetts public libraries and provide its title and subtitle.

The title is not “Those Were the Days.” Click HERE for a link to a song with that title.

— Mark Channing Miller