On the legal front . . .

Application for New Inquest to Be Submitted: Is the British legal system is any better than the American for people trying to get to the bottom of the September 2001 terror attacks? Members of the Campbell clan are hoping it is. This week they take the next step in their quest. Read a news advisory about it HERE. Titled “UK Family to Seek New Inquest for Son Who Perished on 9/11,” it was sent out today by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Readers of this blog may recall accounts (even in one British newspaper!) of earlier steps in the Campbells’ effort. Find three of those entries HERE, HERE and HERE.

News advisories are sent to media outlets (and other recipients) by organizations hoping to get coverage of events. They are followed by news releases closer to the event and afterwards.

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— Mark Channing Miller

 

Two examples of how newspapers in the United States are seeking readers’ views on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and how they and the government’s response helped shape the next two decades:

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From the Sunday Republican: One of the dailies in Western Massachusetts (which is at the moment preparing for the effects of the approaching Hurricane Henri) is the Springfield Republican, whose executive editor Cynthia Simison penned a column for today headlined in the newsprint edition “Legacy of 9/11: 20 years later, share your views,” inviting readers to do just that. (Open for digital subscribers.)

”We look at the work and activism taken on by families of those lost, how they turned their personal grief into powerful and positive actions to benefit us all,” Simison writes.

The Republican will “look at how young people not yet born then view 9/11, how they are learning about it and how they think it should be remembered,” she continues. And “Here’s my question for readers: What do you think the legacy of 9/11 is for our nation?”

Near the end of her column, Simison quotes from two parts of  “an editorial written in haste that morning” (of Sept. 11, 2001) for the Springfield Union-News:

”The nation knows now that it is fragile and vulnerable; that a determined group of terrorists poses a greater and more volatile threat to our safety than any previous enemy.”

And . . .

”Yes, there will be hell to pay — and we hope that someone will pay dearly for the death and destruction they have caused. America must respond, but not quickly or blindly. It will likely take months, if not years, to determine who is responsible for the attack. It is a day of darkness for America, but we must be a source of light for the rest of the world in the fight against terrorism.”

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From the Berkshire Eagle: “9/11 then and now: Where were you, and what are your current thoughts?” reads the headline over an invitation in Friday’s newsprint edition of the Pittsfield-based Eagle. (Subscribers, including those on a one-month free subscription, may read.)

“Tell us where you were on Sept. 11, 2001, and share your world two decades later.” The newspaper will “gather the responses and publish a selection of them in a special report next month commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11.”

Participants are asked to limit responses to 300 words maximum and get them in by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 1.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

 

 

In less than three weeks it will be 20 years since the misreported terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. There is so much competition for the public consciousness that Sept. 11, 2021, could pass with untold millions still not questioning the Executive Branch myths about them. Competing events include the current U.S. exit from the war they kicked off, continuing planetary heating and consequent climate change throughout the Earth, which continue to change economies and living patterns worldwide and generate ever more severe weather — and the megastory of the last 17 months, Covid.

Each of these in turn generates its own stories out of every continent to keep news consumers busily occupied paying attention to them . . . rather than to attacks that, after all, killed fewer than 3,000 people on American soil at the start.

Someday, perhaps well past next month’s anniversary, vital truths about those attacks, their causes and their coverups may be widely known. For now, however, for the powers-that-be driving the mainstream media and usually succeeding in driving public consciousness . . . now is not the time. Now is never the time. There’s too much else going on. To watch or read on various screens, to read on newsprint or listen to on the radio.

For now, the whos, whats, wheres, hows, whys and whens of the attacks will have to wait. Or, on or around the 11th of next month, the efforts to reveal important truths about what happened 20 years before will begin to bear fruit despite coordinated efforts to keep them buried. Or not.

There is still news and commentary about the topic. Here is some of it:

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What Will the Supreme Court Do? Is the Lawyers’ Committee’s “Certs” petition to the Supreme Court going anywhere? It may not yet have been placed on the court’s docket, or official summary of proceedings. That is, there is apparently no record of the petition having been filed.

As readers of this blog know, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry reported that on July 16 it filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the high court concerning the FBI’s failure to heed a “mandate from Congress to assess all evidence in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” We had follow-ups on July 21, July 23 and Aug. 7.

Questions: How political is the FBI? How political is the Supreme Court — or any of the lower courts whose inactions necessitated the Writ? Congress has acted, only to have its actions entirely ignored by the news media, effectively nullifying its actions. Was the Congressional action only perfunctory? Was the Writ properly filed? Or does it take a while for such a petition to find its way onto the docket (what with Covid and all)? Would the news media pay any attention if it could avoid it?

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Snowden on the March to War: Last Tuesday, Edward Snowden posted “A Hell Of Our Own Making: Reflections on the road to Kabul.” This retrospective by the renegade intelligence consultant now living in Moscow is well worth reading.

Among other things, Snowden notes that this war, the longest in U.S. history, was undeclared. He also describes how he, like nearly all Americans, was misled about the alleged culprits of the September 2001 attacks by the media serving as megaphones for “official sources.”

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The ‘Post-9/11 Era’ Is Over? More typical of mainstream commentary on the war (but not its causes) is this analysis found the next day on page 1 of the New York Times by Roger Cohen under the bland and misleading headline “Post-9/11 Era Ends Painfully, for America and Afghanistan.” It’s a masterpiece of deflection. The curtain has come down on the post-9/11 era. It’s over. Time to move on.

It’s not for the New York Times or Roger Cohen to note that this country’s military-industrial-newsmedia-entertainment complex was thrown into action by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others of an administration bent on war. The analyst had the good sense not to mention any of them or even Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. To mention Bin Laden or his gang could cause some people to inquire about their origins in the whole scheme of things. That’s not for now.

Non-subscribers to the Times can find the article HERE.

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Externalize Costs, Maximize Profits: Events that followed the September 2001 attacks are textbook examples of cost-externalizing, of how businesses maximize profits by off-loading negative effects to third parties — including other societies, the environment, taxpayers. When thinking of “9/11” and its consequences, it helps to remember this standard business concept, which is summarized HERE, HERE and HERE. 

— Mark Channing Miller

President Names U.S. Attorneys for Manhattan and Brooklyn: President Biden on Tuesday nominated Damian Williams as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and Breon S. Peace as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Williams has been a prosecutor in the Manhattan office for nearly a decade, most recently overseeing a unit specializing in securities fraud. Both are African American.

For an Associated Press report on their nominations and several others, click HERE. To read the New York Times account, subscribers may click HERE.

Previous entries in this blog on a petition by the the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry to have a previous U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, report to a federal grand jury to evidence concerning federal crimes in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks not considered in official Executive Branch narratives can be found HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

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* Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump has received a lot of attention in mainstream media outlets. For reviews in the New York Times and the Guardian (for which he once reported) and New York magazine, click HERE, HERE and HERE. The Intercept’s, HERE, includes an interview with Ackerman, a national security writer.

— Mark Channing Miller

NBC News & Boston Herald Break Ranks: A rare and unexpected headline on page 1 of the Herald on newsstands Saturday: “9/11 families to Biden: Back us, or back off.” The president is pictured in an inset head-and-shoulders photo wearing his aviator sunglasses. To the left the Statue of Liberty holds her torch aloft at night amid a bit of sparkling Manhattan skyline. At the bottom of the page: “STAY AWAY!”

Herald executive editor Joe Dwinell’s story inside is subheaded “Group wants prez to skip anniversary unless docs are released by govt.”

Sixteen hundred or more survivors of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks apparently say the nation’s chief executive is unwelcome at World Trade Center ceremonies 20 years later if he doesn’t use the powers of his office to reveal suspected Saudi government involvement.

NBC News broke the story, HERE, in a report Friday by Pentagon correspondent Courtney Kube, and Dwinell hopped on it. She said family members, first responders and survivors released a statement earlier in the day.

Dwinell reported that U.S. Senators Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Thursday asked the Biden administration to “finally expose Saudi connections to 9/11 hijackers” (as that editor worded it).

No mention yet of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, which have worked for years in the shadows of a mainstream media blackout. Or of the U.S. Senate’s resolution (S. Res, 610) nearly three years ago calling for declassification of “all documents related to the events of September 11, 2001.” Click HERE for more on that resolution, which has been reported by no mainstream media organization.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered: Friday, Aug. 6, marked 76 years since the first use of the atomic bomb in war, followed three days later by the second. The Truman administration justified the bombings as the best way to end World War II. Kevin Barrett of No Lies Radio’s Truth Jihad Show spoke with Edward Curtin about them and a host of related subjects. Get to the interview and comments about it HERE. It is titled “The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The wide-ranging interview comes about three years after Curtin’s similarly titled essay “The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” One of 47 in his 2020 book Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, it is worth re-reading as the world commemorates the two bombings.

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‘Good Power’: That’s the label on Richard Rohr’s thoughts for today, HERE, on the website of the Center for Action and Contemplation. I got to them after listening to the Curtin-Barrett talk. The theme of this week’s CAC thoughts, “Good and Bad Power,” fits in with Curtin’s on the same.

— Mark Channing Miller

Note From Student of SCOTUS: The emailed message below refers to the Lawyers’ Committee petition to the Supreme Court concerning FBI intransigence in the face of a Congressional mandate to assess all evidence from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (Scroll down for related entries from July 19, 21 and 23.)

“Hi Mark,  I’ve been trying to find out how Certs proceeds and I came up with this item. As I understand it the court must hear the petition and vote. It cannot be ignored or swept under the rug or dodged as SCOTUS has in the past with 9/11 cases. I cannot find it on the docket as being filed on 7/16/21 if that is the right date. Great blog, always interesting and informative.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/election-law-explainers/the-certiorari-process-seeking-supreme-court-review/

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Have You Had Your Shots?  If you have, should you have? If you haven’t, should you get them? (I have, both of them. Should I have? I got them out of convenience and because I hate the masks and the social distancing. Then came the “delta variant.” What’s next?)

Well, HERE is Edward Curtin on the subject, and on someone who has been on target through the years on various subjects and who for months has dedicated himself and the Centre for Global Research to studying the novel coronavirus and is, not surprisingly, defying the powers that be on the subject. Curtin’s essay, posted on Aug. 4, is titled “‘The Fog of Propaganda’: Professor Michel Chossudovsky: Truthteller Extraordinaire.” Please read it and all the comments.

There’s a distinct possibility that billions of people have been bamboozled by the PTB on Covid, and a less distinct possibility (because so many people still rely on the organs of the PTB for their news and entertainment) that a turning point is coming.

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We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. — Joni Mitchell

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I’ve knocked the news media repeatedly for failure to report on anything that differs from the official Executive Branch mythology on the September 2001 attacks. But the media — captive though it seems on certain things — does well on a host of topics. To show that 9/11 truthers are not all monomaniacs focused solely on the lies of commission and omission surrounding the attacks, below are two of many possible examples from the New York Times this past week; the colored words are the Times’s headlines, and the quoted material is from each story:

“Experts Say Extreme Weather Will Continue Across the U.S.”: 8-2-21 [This summary had five sections under the following subheads: * “Wildfire season began sooner with giant blazes in Oregon and California” * “Despite a return of monsoon rains, the West’s drought is getting worse” * “Scorching heat waves have shattered temperature records” * “Wildfire smoke is creating dangerous air quality thousands of miles away” * “Hurricane season got off to a swift start, bringing deadly flash floods.” 

“Record Heat Wave Fuels Fires in Southern Europe”: 8-3-21 ATHENS — “While scientists have yet to draw a firm connection between this barrage of stifling temperatures and global warming, it fits an overall trend. Heat waves around the world are occurring more often and with higher intensity as the climate changes because of greenhouse gas emissions.” The report concerned Greece primarily, and Croatia, Italy and Turkey.

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Views in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: * A friend observed this week that global warming in their native countries is the driving force behind the flow of hundreds of thousands of refugees into Western Europe and the United States from the south in recent years. News operations tend to give most attention to the desperate migrants’ plight and the challenges of governments on the receiving end, and minimize the roles played by accelerating climate change and population growth. * In late July a Facebook friend posted a photo of the sun overhead looking that day like a round red pill, owing to smoke from western U.S. and Canadian wildfires combining with humidity to make smog here. The night before, for the same reason, the half moon over downtown was a vivid orange rather than the usual pale yellow. * Pittsfielders returning from a few days on the Massachusetts North Shore reported that the smog caused by those wildfires out West was noticeable and remarked on in Gloucester, Manchester by the Sea, Salem, and Beverly.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

 

Every day I come across something that makes me think of the Executive Branch / mainstream media untruths about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (In the case of the media, it seems, the untruths were not invented but rather tolerated or encouraged, swallowed whole and then served to readers, listeners and viewers.)

In the face of official mendacity and the media’s mendacity-once-removed, a fondness for truth — or for endeavoring to arrive at it and insist on it — can be contagious. And intolerance of untruths can leach from, say, those about the Sept. 11 attacks to other untruths officially sanctioned for years and years as truths.

So today, while reading a guest columnist’s column in this past Sunday’s New York Times headlined “What if There Wasn’t a Coup Plot?,” I had to stop six paragraphs into it, held up by the author’s apparent ignorance of something that he as a presumably well-informed citizen should be aware of. Actually, three things — at least.

The guest columnist is Christopher Caldwell. He writes engagingly about various aspects of a possible attempted coup d’etat seemingly encouraged by then-President Trump on Jan. 6 of this year when he spoke outside to a crowd of supporters, some of them aiming to storm the Capitol to prevent the Electoral College’s certification of the Biden/Harris victory over Trump/Pence. The burden of the column was about the firm opposition to any coup by most military brass including Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Overall, a fine column. Click HERE for a reprint of it somewhere else.

Here’s the sentence that caused me to stop and wonder before continuing:

“On the one hand, it is hard to think of a more serious assault on American democracy than a violent entry into a nation’s capitol to reverse the election of its chief executive.”

It is?

*  How about the extensively choreographed assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, by coordinated federal and Dallas officials that resulted in the presidency of a man he had defeated in 1960 for his party’s presidential nomination, a man who immediately reversed steps Kennedy had put in place to begin ending this country’s participation in the Vietnam War?

* How about the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy (less challenging to its perpetrators than his brother’s had been five years before) as he seemed bound to win the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nomination and quite possibly that November’s  presidential election? And . . .

* How about the “9/11” attacks which, per Executive Branch accounts, were pulled off by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist band in an impossible scenario only believable by millions — still — because of the lockstep support of controlled media, but which have resulted in significant intrusions of American freedoms thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act and its successors?

These were three much more serious assaults on democracy, in part because they were carried out in complete secrecy, apparently by well-organized elements of the state apparatus itself, rather than in broad daylight by rank amateurs who had telegraphed nearly every step of their attack for weeks in advance.

Barely noticeable sentences like those 33 words in Caldwell’s otherwise well-considered column are serious assaults on common sense and on democracy.

— Mark Channing Miller

This second edition of the x-ma911truthwalk Weekender will be skimpier than the first, owing to family vacation and other obligations, at least to start out. It may be added to later.

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Born on 9/11: An Epic Graphic Novel:  Andy Steele has authored a new graphic novel, which everyone who can click HERE may listen to and read an interview about. I won’t spoil for this blog’s readers the gist of AE911Truth’s news release concerning the book and the interview . . . except to note that Steele, host of the weekly “9/11 Free Fall,” is interviewed by Craig McKee, who is “guest-hosting” this episode of the show. Full disclosure: I think I have already ordered my copy, at a 20 percent discount; if I haven’t I will.

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What Is ‘the Postmodern Panic’?Readers of this blog can get a bit of one commentator’s idea by clicking HERE. That commentator is brother Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation fame. I won’t spoil his entry for last Sunday by attempting to summarize it. For all of last week’s contemplations from the cac.org site, by Rohr and others, click HERE. What do they have to do with 9/11 truth? Everything. Or Covid? Everything.

(p.s. to the paragraph just above: The CAC entry for last Sunday, July 25, was  introduced by Rohr. Most of it is by his colleague Barbara A. Holmes. It is titled “When Crisis Comes.”)

— Mark Channing Miller

A good number of us 9/11 truthers tend to be truthers when it comes to official Executive Branch narratives about the JFK, MLKJr., and RFK assassinations. Many are also skeptics when it comes to government / mainstream news media narratives on the subject of what is variously called the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, and, “the Covid.”*

Late this week James Howard Kunstler** sent out the second of his twice-a-week blog posts, which as usual blasts President Biden up and down. The first of several items below is about a link at the very end of the post.

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‘Big Fail’: The essay before that link is standard, readable Kunstler. For many, the rip-roaring news begins afterwords, separated by a centered asterisk. There begins a fascinating interview with the non-physician Dr. David E. Martin. I regard this as a must-listen conversation. So filled is it with authoritative-sounding assertions worth examining that I have urged Kunstler to get a transcript out so people can read it instead of or while listening to the audio. Readers clicking on “here” in this squib (the one  you now are reading on  a screen) will get just “Big Fail” and need to scroll down and click that “here” for themselves, perhaps after reading Kunstler’s twice-a-week post. Two pieces of common sense apply while listening: Consider the source. And, as Martin advises, follow the money.

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Daniel Ellsberg & Company: An annual event is announced, belatedly, HERE by Andrew Kreig of the Justice Integrity Project, under the headline “Whistleblower Summit This Week Highlights 50 Years of the Pentagon Papers and Investigative Journalism.” The 10-day “summit,” accessible only online because of Covid restrictions, begins tomorrow (Sunday, July 25) and includes more than 50 documentary film screenings, a number of panel discussions,  and … well, you read it. Kreig’s news release includes a link to “ticket information for the sessions, which may be accessed individually (some for free) or with a full-conference pass for $150.”

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The Sermon on the Mount: One fine day Jesus got baptized by his cousin John, according to accounts in the Gospels. Not long after, he started (or ramped up) his own ministry. A week’s worth of commentaries on the best-known and most influential encapsulization of Jesus’ teachings is found HERE, courtesy of Richard Rohr and friends at and around the Center for Action and Contemplation. Today’s is found after a scroll through the links of the first six. The Sermon on the Mount is not exactly news, but some of these views about it may be.

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Tired of All the Lies?: Edward Curtin begins his latest essay, HERE, facing east on the Cape Cod National Seashore noting that 60 years ago next month President Kennedy signed a bill to preserve the considerable stretch of the Cape for posterity. HERE’s how the National Park Service describes that park. Curtin invokes Thoreau and his contemporary Matthew Arnold in the captivating post. Author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies, a 2019 collection from his Behind the Curtain, he doesn’t doesn’t stay on the beach for long.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Take my non-kissing non-cousin, Mark Crispin Miller (no relation) of News From Underground, perhaps the foremost extender of news and opinion on the “other side” of the dominant issue of our day.

** Kunstler is no 9/11 truther, though. For all his bravura on other topics, he has yet to venture a peep that I know of on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or the followup anthrax attacks. Why not?

A further brief addendum to Update, 7-21-19 and News, 7-19-21, this one from same friend:

* . . . this certs petition will be very telling. The decision will probably be delayed as it will be very difficult to avoid taking the case without SCOTUS losing credibility. All the justices know that the story is just so simplistic and childish and they are on the spot and you can bet that the CIA and others will be all over them. . . . What a country we have become