Some coverage of the war in Ukraine follow from the Spanish newspaper El Pais, beginning at 2:15 or so p.m. EST. — MCM

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Russia and Ukraine agree to humanitarian corridor with possible ceasefire during evacuations. Negotiators plan third meeting

By Javier G. Cuesta in Moscow and María R. Sahuquillo in Dnipró (Ukraine) | El País

In the eighth day of the Russian offensive against Ukraine, delegations from Kiyv and Moscow returned Thursday to talks aimed at bringing an end to the conflict. A ceasefire was not achieved, but a third meeting is envisioned for the beginning of next week.

“We have agreed on the creation of humanitarian corridors for departures of civilians,” said Mijailo Podoliak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodímir Zelenskyy, although a truce for these is not certain. “There could be a ceasefire in the evacuation areas,” he added, according to Interfax.

“The key question we resolved today,” said Vladimir Medinsky, chief of the Russian delegation, “has been the protection of the civilian population. He would only say a ceasefire was “possible” for the civilian evacuations.

Talks took place in the Belarusian region of Gómel, with that country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, acting as mediator.

Pollak said the two sides agreed to continue talks “as soon as possible,” noting he was not happy with the meeting. “Unfortunately, we did not achieve the results we had hoped for.” READ MORE in Spanish . . .

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Russia attacks intensify in south  and east. ‘We are being destroyed,’ Mariupol mayor says

By María R. Sahuquillo | El País

Putin’s army is sharpening its offensive to take control of the whole Ukrainian coast. The Russian forces’ advance toward the capital city of Kyiv remained stalled, according to U.S. and British reports.

Russia is attacks continued on Ukraine’s east and south. The military forces sent by Vladimir Putin have intensified bombing in costal zones and in the east, completing a week of the Kremlin-launched invasion. The Russian army has besieged the city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and entered the port city of Jersón, a strategic point on the mouth of the Dnipro River near the Black Sea. It is also advancing toward Zaporiya, an enclave closer to the country’s interior and near a major central nuclear plant. READ MORE in Spanish . . .

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TO BE CONTINUED

Some news and views on the war are below, most with the titles as they appeared elsewhere. — MCM

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The Associated Press is continually updating its main war story that appeared in today’s Berkshire Eagle headed “Russian forces continue shelling: Barrage targeted at Ukraine’s No. 2 city as ceasefire talks continue. For a version in the Huffington Post, click HERE.

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From the Spanish news service EFE: Huge Russian Convoy Descends on Kyiv as Shelling Kills Dozens of Soldiers “A huge Russian military convoy inched closer to Kyiv on Tuesday as day six of Moscow’s invasion began with the shelling of a northeastern military base that killed dozens of Ukrainian soldiers, and a missile strike hit the center of Kharkiv. The latest photos of Moscow’s armored convoy descending on Ukraine’s capital shows it is larger than initially thought. According to new satellite images from Maxar Technologies, the convoy northwest of Kyiv stretches from near Antonov air base, about 30 kilometers from the center of the capital, for 64 kilometers (40 miles) and consists of armored vehicles, tanks, artillery and other vehicles. Images taken earlier Monday gave the impression the vehicles stretched around 27km.”

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A page just turned in Europe’s history book: James Brooke begins a column in the weekend edition of the Eagle: “In the future, we will remember Feb. 24 alongside 9/11 and Dec. 7. Although Russia’s invasion is not a bolt from the blue like Pearl Harbor or the attack on the World Trade Center, many people did not believe last week that Russia would actually invade Ukraine.” Brooke’s views are informed by his experience as a reporter in many countries, including Russia, for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Voice of America, and by his residence for six years in Ukraine. Eagle subscribers can read the whole column HERE.

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Putin the Apostate: Matt Taibbi begins his latest essay like this: “The president of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, made an extraordinary statement over the weekend. ‘Just days ago much of the world was focused on the unwanted prospect of regime change in Ukraine,’ he tweeted. ‘Now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.’ Senior Brookings Institute fellow Benjamin Wittes was even more explicit: ‘Regime change: Russia.’” For the whole thing, click HERE.

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Putin’s Nuclear Threat: “Vladimir Putin is a madman. He’s lost it. At least that is what the leaders of the West would like you to believe,” Scott Ritter begins a column for Consortium News. “According to their narrative, Putin — isolated, alone, confused, and angry at the unfolding military disaster Russia was undergoing in Ukraine — lashed out, ostensibly threatening the entire world with nuclear annihilation. In a meeting with his top generals on Sunday, the beleaguered Russian president announced . . . “ READ MORE . . .

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NATO Too Weak to Face Russia: Ritter chats for 40 minutes, HERE, last Thursday with Richard Medhurst. Although five days old, the interview is well worth watching if only to see which of Ridder’s predictions have come true and which haven’t, and to guess which could.

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Vladimir Putin’s Clash of Civilizations: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat begins, in the Eagle and (among other papers) the San Juan Daily Star: “When the United States, in its hour of hubris, went to war to remake the Middle East in 2003, Vladimir Putin was a critic of U.S. ambition, a defender of international institutions and multiculturalism and national sovereignty. This posture was cynical and self-interested in the extreme. But it was also . . .” READ MORE . . .

This blog will carry some news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and related developments from various sources. Below are reports from EFE, the Spanish news agency, and teleSUR, the Venezuela-based television network. — MCM

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Ruble plummets as Western sanctions on Russia take effect (EFE) The ruble plunged nearly 30 percent against the US dollar, trading as low as 119 per dollar as markets opened Monday after Western sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came into force. It was the first day since the European Union, United States and allies cut off a number of Russian banks from the Swift international payment system and the EU “paralyzed” transactions with Russia’s central bank (CBR).

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U.S. Freezes Dollar Assets of Russian Central Bank Telesur reports: “The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday prohibited American companies and financial institutions from carrying out any operations with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (CBRF) and froze all dollar assets of this institution. Announced before the opening of the U.S. markets, the prohibition took effect immediately and prevents the Russian government from accessing its dollar reserves around the world. The ban also covers operations with the Russian National Investment Fund (RDIF). Besides freezing the CBRF dollar-denominated assets, the measure affects the use of the dollar throughout the world for operations with the Central Bank of Russia. ‘Our prohibition affects any dollar in the world, from any institution, which cannot be transacted with the Russian Central Bank,’ the U.S. authorities insisted. These new sanctions will have a negative and immediate impact on the ruble, a currency that has been losing value in international markets for a few days.” READ MORE . . .

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Russian and Ukrainian Negotiators Return to Their Countries (teleSUR) After holding a first round of talks on Monday in Pripyat on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, the representatives of the governments of Russia and Ukraine returned to their countries to hold “respective consultations” with their authorities. The Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said a new meeting would take place “soon” on the border between Poland and Belarus. “The parties established a series of priorities and issues that require certain decisions,” said Mikhailo Podoiak, a Ukrainian negotiator, suggesting that there would be a second round of talks. “The meeting is over after five hours of talks,” the chairman of the Russian Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutsky said, mentioning that negotiators had identified several points on which they could move forward. “The main result,” Slutsky added, “is that the negotiations took place, the parties listened to each other. We found a number of important points where progress is possible.” READ MORE . . .

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Kyiv reduced to ghost town as Russian tanks approach EFE’s Ignacio Ortega reported on Saturday: “Kyiv, a bustling European capital of 4 million people, has been turned into a ghost town. Amid air raid sirens and a curfew, the city’s residents are either fleeing or sheltering from the shelling as Russian forces close in. The eerie silence is only broken by sirens, church bells and the sporadic bombings and gunshots that can be heard across the city that hasn’t seen a foreign army since Nazi troops invaded more than 80 years ago. Those who remain only go outside for food. Only a couple of stores have stayed open in the city center. Even the fast food restaurants stopped serving on Thursday.”

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Russia vetoes UN resolution against Ukraine invasion, China abstains EFE reported Saturday: “Russia used its veto power Friday on a resolution against its invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations, which otherwise was supported by a clear majority of the Security Council, although three countries abstained, among them China. The resolution, doomed to fail from the outset since Moscow could block it, had been pushed by the United States to condemn Russian military intervention and demand the withdrawal of its troops from Ukraine.  READ MORE . . .

“Putin puts nuclear forces on high alert, escalating tensions,” is the headline over an Associated Press report Sunday afternoon EDT. Other AP stories linked to that one are headed: “Ukraine invasion spotlights the delicate state of democracy,” “Sorting fact, disinformation after Russian attack on Ukraine,” “Ukrainian invasion: What to know as Putin alerts nuclear force” and “Explainer: How is Russia-Ukraine war linked to religion?”

Many Saturday morning newspapers carried an AP story headed, in one of them, “Kyiv Under Threat.” A teleSUR report on Saturday was headed “Lavrov; ‘Russia Does Not Plan to Occupy Ukraine.’” 

Below, this weekend’s Weekender leads with a news release from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth on the efforts of a family in England to get a new inquest into the death of Geoffrey Campbell  in the collapse of the North Tower at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. It is followed by several articles of news and analysis on the war in Ukraine. — MCM

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British 9/11 family says newly disclosed report used at son’s 2013 inquest proves ‘insufficiency of inquiry’ Following the February 11th disclosure of the sole document entered as evidence at Geoff Campbell’s inquest in 2013, Mr. Campbell’s family on Feb. 23 sent a letter to the office of UK Attorney General Suella Braverman in which they bolstered their claim that the first inquest involved an “insufficiency of inquiry” and thus that a new inquest into Mr. Campbell’s death on 9/11 should be ordered.

The family’s pending application for a new inquest, submitted on August 26, 2021, is based on two separate grounds. First, they argue there is significant additional evidence not considered at the first inquest that has a reasonable possibility of overturning the original verdict. Second, they contend that the coroner at the first inquest did not conduct a sufficient inquiry because she concluded that the North Tower’s destruction was due to the airplane impact without considering any evidence at all as to the cause. READ MORE . . .

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President Biden was right this past week that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Click on each to read AP accounts Friday and Saturday. They have been updated above on Sunday afternoon. What follows is a selection of views related to the war under way. Several are from the website popularresistance.org.

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Chronicle of a War Foretold: Chris Hedges writes, “After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail. I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. READ MORE . . .

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How the U.S. Instigated the Ukraine Crisis: Rick Sterling begins, “Russia has sent troops into Ukraine and attacked Ukrainian military forces. In a one hour address, President Putin said the goal was the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. It is now clear the Russian statements and proposed peace treaty in December 2021 were deadly serious. At that time the Russians said the US and NATO were crossing red lines, they felt threatened and would not abide this endlessly.  Now they have taken action. In his address Thursday, Russian President Putin gave a frank explanation which comes after years of complaints. The Russians have complained bitterly about the U.S.-promoted 2014 coup in Ukraine, the eastward expansion of NATO, the installation of missiles in Romania and Poland, the pretense that the missiles were for defense against Iran, the 2019 US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, the aggression against Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. READ MORE . . .

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Britain Forgets Its History of Unleashing War in Europe. By Gavin O’Reilly.  In the early hours of Thursday morning, in what will perhaps finally result in the COVID-19 mainstream media narrative being permanently banished from the headlines, almost nine years of Western provocations via its Eastern European proxy state Ukraine would culminate in Russia launching a military intervention into its Western neighbour – with attempts to resolve the situation peacefully by Moscow over the past several months ultimately proving fruitless due to Kiev failing to implement its side of the Minsk Agreements, which would see a federalisation solution in which the breakaway pro-Russian Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, located in the predominantly ethnic Russian Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, being given a degree of autonomy whilst still remaining under the rule of Kiev – both Republics being given formal recognition by Moscow on Monday instead, in response to the breakdown in negotiations. READ MORE . . .

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‘Russia Hits Back.’ Consortium News begins a two-hour program on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its causes, aims and likely results, HERE. Commentators include Alexander Mercouris, Mark Sleboda, Scott Ridder and Tony Kevin. From an introduction: “After 30 years of NATO expansion towards its borders, and eight-years of a coup regime’s attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Russia has taken military action to ‘demilitarize’ and ‘de-nazify’ the country. The world has rallied against Moscow, seeking to destroy its economy. It seems like that was the plan along. Russian President Vladimir Putin fully explained the reasons for Russia’s military intervention, which has been totally ignored by the corporate media. Instead it portrays him as a madman hellbent on conquering Europe. If you disagree with that assessment, of course, you are his puppet.”

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Nuclear Reactors and Ukraine: In an emailed message, Richard Heinberg recommends an article by Bennett Ramberg titled The Risk of Nuclear Crisis in Ukraine examining “an important angle of the unfolding geopolitical contest that most people are ignoring. Ukraine has 15 aging, poorly designed civilian nuclear reactors and the smoldering legacy of Chernobyl. Nuclear power supplies half of Ukraine’s electricity, but these reactors are vulnerable not just to bombs and artillery fire, but also cyberattacks. The results of a direct hit or power outage could be apocalyptic for the region. Radiation is no respecter of national borders, and Russia could be among the countries impacted. Nuclear power and war are both things we should work against; where both exist in one place, the dangers are simply unmanageable. There is a lesson here for those who recommend nuclear power as a climate solution: Don’t go there.” Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, asks readers with thoughts on this topic to please share them with me when you get a chance.

This weekend’s Weekender begins with a link to a longer interview with mechanical engineer Tony Szamboti than was in the documentary film “The Unspeakable.” Next are several looks at the Ukraine-Russia crisis. The first of these is an Associated Press news report. The second is by Joe Lauria of Consortium News. The third is by retired Central Intelligence Agency analyst Ray McGovern. The fourth is an irreverent take by investigative journalist Greg Palast. — MCM

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Engineer Critiques Official Account of Twin Towers’ Destruction This weekend Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth released what it calls “a powerful extended interview with mechanical engineer Tony Szamboti. (Click on link and scroll down to watch the eight-minute interview.)

 From an AE911Truth news release: “Samboti summarizes the glaring errors in the analysis by engineering professor Zdeněk Bažant, who, in a series of papers published between 2002 and 2011, purported to explain how the Twin Towers could undergo total collapse once the tops of the towers began to fall.

“Bažant’s theory was relied upon by NIST [the National Institute for Standard and Technology] — the federal agency tasked with investigating the World Trade Center failures — which remarkably neglected to conduct any analysis of the towers’ behavior after the point of ‘collapse initiation.’

 “Szamboti also shares how his critique of Bažant’s latest paper in 2011 was astoundingly rejected as ‘out of scope’ by the journal that had published the paper — a decision he is fighting to this day.”

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For the Associated Press story on a presidential news briefing Friday at the White House, headlined “Biden Is ‘Convinced’ Putin Has Decided to Invade Ukraine,” click HERE.

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For an account by Joe Lauria of Consortium News, written after the same briefing, click HERE.

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For the view of retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, click HERE. It is headed, sarcastically, “Ukraine Invasion Scheduled for Wednesday Canceled,” In a less readable format, HERE it is from the Global Research Newsletter.

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For Greg Palast’s piece, headed “7 Facts About Ukraine,” click HERE.

Please find below the beginnings of two opinion pieces on the Russia-Ukraine-U.S.-NATO situation. The first is by a former intelligence officer whose previous contribution to this blog (perhaps unbeknownst to him) is HERE. The second is by a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Further below is linked a segment on the matter from this morning’s “Morning Edition” program on National Public Radio. — MCM

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The Ultimate End of NATO

By Scott Ridder

In the quiet fields outside the sleepy college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sits a bronze monument, in the form of an open book. Known as the “High-Water Mark of the Rebellion” monument, it contains the identities of the various military formations that, in the afternoon of July 3, 1863, fought a life and death struggle on and around the soil where the monument is set.

Here, some 12,500 men under the command of Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, formed into three divisions, and launched a frontal assault on some 10,000 entrenched Union troops commanded by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock.

While around 1,500 confederates managed to pierce the Union line, they were quickly surrounded and compelled to either surrender or die. It is at this point on the battlefield that the “High-Water” monument is located, commemorating what has become to be known as “Pickett’s Charge,” named after one of the division commanders who participated in the battle.

The Confederate Army was able to withdraw from the Gettysburg battlefield in good order to continue to fight for nearly two more years, before surrendering. But it never recovered from the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. It was truly the High-Water Mark of the Rebellion.

Students of history might be experiencing what Yogi Berra once famously called “Déjà vu all over again” when examining the frenetic activities undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) today, as it responds to what it alleges is a provocative Russian military buildup along the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The Trans-Atlantic alliance is a strange amalgam of political, economic, and military belief systems cloaking a mass of 30 nations who manage the day-to-day activities of their organization through a consensus-based, collective decision-making process that is as unwieldy as it is inefficient.

Originally formed as . . . READ MORE

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Today’s Crisis Over Ukraine

By Jack F. Matlock, Jr.

Today we face an avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense.

We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members. President Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy—an agreement with Russia, France and Germany which the United States endorsed.

Maybe I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing . . . READ MORE

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In U.S. claims differ from what Russia says is happening along the Ukraine border, an NPR correspondent interviews retired Brigadier Gen. Peter Zwack. To listen, click HERE and scroll down.

Below please find the beginnings of three articles published this week, with links to the rest of them. The first captures the experience of the late Port Authority police sergeant Sue Keane, a key witness to the collapses of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The second comments on power politics and justice in the United Kingdom and the United States, in part as they relate to the arrest and continued prisonment of journalist Julian Assange. In the third a New York City lawyer expostulates critically on responses to Covid-19. — MCM

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The Untold Story of Sue Keane — a 9/11 hero, eyewitness, and truth-teller

By Ted Walter

A few days before the new year, I was greatly saddened to learn about the passing of retired Port Authority Police Department Sergeant Susan Martha Keane. She had died exactly two months earlier, on October 28, 2021, from a heart attack in her home in Palm Bay, Florida. She was only 62 years old.

I had come to know Sue because she was a first responder on 9/11 and a key witness to the blast wind that ripped through the lobby of the World Trade Center’s North Tower when the neighboring South Tower — along with some 800 people inside it — was blown up at 9:59 AM that morning.

I had tracked her down in December 2020 to ask her to give testimony in support of an application for a new inquest into the death of British 9/11 victim Geoff Campbell, who was attending a conference on the 106th floor of the North Tower when it was struck by an airplane at 8:46 AM. His family is seeking to overturn the verdict of his original inquest — which states that the North Tower collapsed due to the airplane impact — and establish that his actual cause of death was the North Tower’s explosive demolition.

I remember leaving a message on Sue’s voicemail and then calling her again a few days later, doubtful that I would ever get to speak to her. To my surprise, she picked up the phone and told me she had been thinking about my message all weekend. After we spoke for an hour, she agreed to provide a statement for the application and to testify in person if the new inquest were granted.

She was not surprised to receive my call. In fact, she had been waiting for it for almost 20 years. Not long after 9/11, a friend of hers predicted that people would eventually come looking for her — perhaps around the 20th anniversary of the event — asking her to tell her story again. After years of mentally preparing for this moment, she had come to see herself as a living historical document. She felt it was her duty to tell the world what happened that day. READ MORE

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How the Establishment Functions

By Craig Murray

I suggested in my last post that the British Establishment may be looking for a way out of the terrible Assange debacle without raising difficult truths about the United States justice and penal system. The functioning of the Establishment, the way it forms a collective view and how that view is transmitted, is a mystery to many. Some imagine instructions must be transmitted by formal cabals meeting as Freemasons or Bilderbergers or some such grouping. It is not really like that, although different fora of course do provide venues for the powerful to gather and discuss.

I have a bit of a feel for it all, having been a diplomat for 20 years and member of the Senior Civil Service for six. And if I was advising someone who wanted to think of it seriously, I would say human nature doesn’t change; read Thackeray and Trollope, Harold Nicolson and watch the amazing Brian Cox in Succession. All these sources give genuine glimpses of insight.

Former Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan appears to fancy himself as something of a Harold Nicolson, though sadly lacking the wit or writing ability. Duncan has published his diaries. Duncan is the former . . . READ MORE

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From My Cold, Dead Hands!

By Lionel

Let us start with the benediction. All rise and repeat after me.

• COVID is a religion.
• Vaccines are its sacrament.
• Masks are its vestments.
• Fauci is its Pope.
• The CDC is its Vatican.

Ah, yes. Milgram. How perfect. How relevant. Follow orders. Question nothing. Selectively. You will wear masks indefinitely. Question nothing or else. Sockpuppet media will sort through every episode of the Joe Rogan Show looking for the slightest veiled or blatant reference to the dread N-word but as far as the flight logs of the Epstein human trafficking airlifts, who cares? Follow orders. Follow directions. Trust the science. Trust (some) science. Trust (our) science. Shut up and comply. Get the picture? I knew you would.

But mask regulations are going by the wayside. Good news, right? One would think. . . . READ MORE

Around 7 this morning the sun shown beautifully on snow-covered Greyock. I could see how the mountain could remind Herman Melville of a big white whale as he looked from a north window of his brother’s farmhouse on what is now Holmes Road. He had been part of a whaling crew himself and of course knew of the sinking of the Essex by an enraged sperm whale the year after he was born. He fictionalized a version of the ill-fated Essex voyage in Moby-Dick based in part on the only available first-person written account, by first mate Owen Chase, published nine months after he and four others were rescued, barely alive, off the coast of Chile.

Thanks to historian Nathaniel Philbrick, we know a lot more. For his 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, he drew from other sources, including notes written in 1871 by the cabin boy, who at 14 and 15 was the lowest-ranking member of its crew. These were discovered in an attic in an Upstate New York village in 1960 and reached Nantucket two decades later.

Philbrick’s research and reporting yields a fuller, much more accurate explanation of events than Chase’s alone, including why a whale would repeatedly attack a ship resulting in its sinking. The whole thing may also provide clues not only to what happened to a crew of 21 sailors (and hunters) two centuries ago in the Pacific — it could presage what’s in store for billions of the planet’s humans much less than two centuries from today.

What’s this rumination doing in a blog that got started shortly before a 2018 walk across Massachusetts by two Pittsfielders wearing four “9/11 TRUTH” signs between Provincetown and the New York State line? This: Succeeding accounts have depended on more and more information becoming available about that voyage, focused research into that information, and enthusiastic reception of the findings by a publisher and ultimately readers.

In the case of the world-changing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more and more information has been turned up since that Tuesday morning, from plenty of determined research. A big difference is that findings and reasonable conclusions at odds with official government accounts (some coming from those accounts) of “9/11” have met with hostility from mainstream media. Much of it, no matter how painstakingly nailed down and factual, is called misinformation or disinformation, and so-called “truthers” are routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

Similar hostility greets those not in agreement with the government’s approach to Covid-19. A report, HERE, from today’s NPR’s “Morning Edition” news program is typical in its avoidance of relevant context. Simplistic, politicized and scaremongering, it concerns “what a bottle of ivermectin reveals about the shadowy world of telemedicine.”

Or consider THIS Associated Press report from last December headlined “How RFK Jr. built anti-vaccine juggernaut amid Covid-19.” By Michelle R. Smith with help from five other AP contributors, it shows no sign that any of them read much of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War of Democracy and Public Health.

The good news is, AP’s “global investigative team” now can do a followup showing what in that best-seller is helpful for a better understanding of how public health works in this country and the world, and what in it is dangerous garbage.

Presumably Dr. Michael Specter is at work on a review of it for The New Yorker and someone at The New York Times or The Washington Post is as well. So far, I’m eight and a half chapters into it and find practically every page revealing.

Meanwhile, the sun still shines on Mount Greylock.

— Mark Channing Miller

While tidying up a desk this week I came across a DVD with the words “911 MYSTERIES” and in smaller type the name Sofia Smallstorm on the sleeve containing it. The 90-minute video was released in 2006 or 2007, and I must have received my copy at least several years later but until this week had not looked at it. It is well worth watching, which one can do HERE or HERE for free. One reason to do so is to consider how few if any of the mysteries it presents about the collapses of the Twin Towers and the Building 7 skyscraper, all at the World Trade Center in New York City, have been solved. Just below is the documentary’s Postcript. — MCM

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Postscript

There are perhaps a dozen blasting companies that handle the world’s major demolitions. Family-owned and widely respected, their knowledge is derived from experience, and the materials they use are conventional.

The World Trade Center demolitions were highly advanced and unconventional. Explosives have always been the domain of the military, and what took place at Ground Zero is not even fully understood by civilian blasters.

The destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 was conducted in broad daylight, in full view of news cameras and reporters, thousands of New Yorkers, and millions who watched on live TV.

Shock and awe.

Fearing worse and ignorant of scientific principles, the public mind was readily manipulated.

This film was made to present possibilities and raise questions. We do not control our airwaves. We have consigned them to large corporations who create scripted sound bites serving as “news.”

911 MYSTERIES gives you what the airwaves have failed to. The footage used is in some cases authorized, in other cases not, borrowed within the realm of the Fair Use Doctrine and U.S. Copyright Code Section 107.

Use of copyrighted footage does not imply endorsement by its owners.

The incorporation of experts does not imply that these individuals agree with the content of this film.

911 MYSTERIES is offered in the spirit of the American Constitution as an alternative analysis, an invitation for dialogue, a tool for awareness in the interest of the public good.

Ask questions. Think for yourself.

Wake up, and you will make the difference.

911 is a keyhole into Consciousness. If you can get through it to the other side, everything looks different.

Don’t be afraid.

This is the First Awakening. Follow your curiosity, like Alice in the rabbit hole. You are becoming free.

Keep stepping forward. Share your discoveries. You will make new friends. You are not a conspiracy theorist, but part of a whole.

We are all in this together.

Know it, feel it, use it. This is the Second Awakening.

Thank you for thinking.

Get out there and make more consciousness.

Something will happen when enough of us know.