Deep Blade Journal

For people who have requested a way to listen to George Galloway’s remarks before Senator Norm Coleman’s Subcommittee on Investigations, I am temporarily posting this mp3 file recorded from Air America:

George Galloway/Al Franken clip (mp3 audio, 9 min, 4.3MB)

Update (17:10): Crooks & Liars has audio and video posted

A partial transcript of George Galloway’s remarks follows…

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time.

I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for war was a pack of lies. I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist an American invasion of their country, and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong. And a hundred thousand people have paid with their lives. Sixteen hundred of them American soldiers — sent to their deaths on a pack of lies. Fifteen thousand of them wounded, many of them disabled forever — on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster we are in today.

Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth. Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad — the first 14 months — when 8.8 billion dollars of Iraq’s wealth went missing — on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and the other American corporations, that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer. Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went, who knows where. Have a look at the 800 million dollars that you gave to military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it, or weighing it. Have a look at the real scandal, breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee, that the biggest sanctions busters were not me, or Russian politicians, or French politicians — the real sanctions busters were your own companies, with the connivance of your own government.

Right on. This is the meatiest portion of Galloway’s appearance. Prior to what is printed here, he did a fine job of demolishing the allegations against him that he profited from oil allocations given him by Saddam Hussein. The “new” evidence Coleman has is shown to be recycled versions of documents already known to be forgeries, and uncorroborated statements by a US prisoner from the old Iraqi regime, Dahar Yassein Ramadan, whose treatment at Abu Ghraib Prison is shrouded in secrecy, and who faces a death sentence.

Meanwhile, here is a print reference to today’s breaking story Galloway mentions:

US ‘backed illegal Iraqi oil deals’: Report claims blind eye was turned to sanctions busting by American firms

Julian Borger and Jamie Wilson in Washington
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

The United States administration turned a blind eye to extensive sanctions-busting in the prewar sale of Iraqi oil, according to a new Senate investigation.

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The audio file also includes some trenchant analysis from Air America host Al Franken, who may become a candidate in 2006 to replace Mark Dayton (Minnesota Democrat) in the US Senate.

If you listen to the clip, you’ll note Franken’s comments concerning Republican disinterest in investigating the real corruption of Iraq — that of the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority). Franken reports the pathetic response of Republican Senator George Allen, who claimed not even to be aware of the Inspector General for Iraq’s conclusion that nearly $9 billion of Iraq’s oil money disappeared during the first 14 months of the US occupation. Franken continues,

AL FRANKEN: …This administration, this Congress — is so corrupt — that they will not investigate this. And that is a sin. These guys have blood on their hands….It is a crime…

…The Oil-for-Food Program, even the accusation is, less than $2 billion of money came back to Saddam…that was administered…the Oil-for-Food program was administered in the Security Council, largely by the United States and Great Britain. And their main goal, from what I understand, was to make sure that Saddam did not use this kickback money to arm himself, and spend it on weapons of mass destruction. Evidently they did a damn good job of doing that, a damn good job. But it looks like we were the ones, more than the rest of the world combined, who were involved in the sanction breaking. And of course, …, we had a no-fly zone,…how else were they shipping oil?… this was before food-for-oil…Oil-for-Food. They were shipping oil to Syria,…, Jordan, and Turkey. We were the only ones in the air, we were the only ones who could see it, we let it happen.

Right on again. Al nails it — these Republican scoundrels are the ones who really have the crime and blood on their hands, the black ink facts of which the right wing flack machine will forget to mention.

Update (15:45): I added the partial transcripts you see above. See this BBC story. It supposedly has a video link, but I could not get that to play. I’ll update this post [again] later, after I find a good video archive. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out yet if C-SPAN will carry this hearing at all. They might replay it after the Senate adjourns for the day…

Update (16:40): I see in the news a post-hearing quote from the jackass. Coleman said, “If in fact he lied to this committee, there will have to be consequences.”

Asked whether Galloway violated his oath to tell the truth before the committee, Coleman said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to look over the record. I just don’t think he was a credible witness.”

BBBBBppppppppp, do you see the water spraying from my mouth? What the hell is going to happen, Norm, if in fact you are the one who is telling lies? Just to remind, all the evidence from Iraq agrees that we in the anti-war movement have been right since day one, and you have been wrong.

But I know the wingnuts know how to read that code and talk about Galloway only before the backdrop of their scurrilous pointed fingers. But I’ll be more inclined to accept the possibility that Norm Coleman has an ounce of integrity if he begins to address the large questions of US and CPA corruption in Iraq. But so far Coleman has chosen the path of blissful ignorance (purposeful deflection?) on these issues.

President Bush: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.” (January 20, 2005)

President Bush chums with Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov in March 2002 for signing of the U.S.-Uzbek Declaration on the Strategic Partnership and Cooperation Framework.

Today the news from Uzbekistan is stark following the massacre of hundreds in the City of Andijan:

Andijan city centre and especially Babur Square were awash with the blood of men and women, young and old, who had come out, for the first time in many long years of oppression, to express their discontent with the regime’s policies. The blood of children was spilled there, too.Body parts, brains and other internal organs along with personal items and children’s shoes were scattered within a radius of two to three kilometres of the square where the shooting began.

There were still 30 dead bodies on the square itself, and near the monument to Babur – the local boy who invaded India and founded the Moghul dynasty – lay ten more which people had collected together.

Men and women cried as they surveyed the scene.

“To the government, we’re just dirt. They don’t regard us as human beings,” said one of the women.

Eyewitnesses claimed that more than 1,500 people were killed by government bullets, although the nearest thing to an accurate estimate came from a local doctor who saw 500 bodies.

There is evidence to suggest that government security forces carried out deliberate extrajudicial killings once the mass shooting was over. The initial assault by security forces began when a convoy of armoured vehicles raked the crowd, estimated at 10,000-15,000, with gunfire without even stopping to take aim.

Thanks to the excellent Ruth Group for that link. See more here.

White House spokesman McClellan receives the Outrageous Irony of the Year Lost on Most Americans Award for this:

The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence.

Deep Blade Journal carried some extended comments on Uzbekistan with many links on November 10, 2003. Also see The Memory Hole for photos of an amazing array of US officials warmly greeting their Uzbek counterparts.

There is plenty of it on the record. Newsweek backing off the story has more to do with the fallout than the truth

Gitmo haircut: humiliation using belittling and denial of cultural and religious practice is routine in US detention

For months now the US hegemon has been naked concerning torture and abuse practices against its detainees. But the story the right wing noise machine has latched on to is the stand-down of Newsweek on its Koran-flushing story.

I’m puzzled. Given the extraordinary amount of anti-Islam rage found on these rightist sites, and the extant proof and photos of detainee torture and abuse, why should it be so hard to see Koran desecration as at least plausible?

True, we do not have a specific confirming memo on the Koran-flushing practice like we do on many other similar practices. And the US government has stated that Koran desecration claims are “not credible.” Condoleeza Rice chipped in that, “Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States. Disrespect for the Holy Koran is abhorrent to us all.”

But claims of desecration are consistent amongst persons who spent time at Guantanamo and other US torture centers. Look at this report entitled Statement of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed from the Center for Constitutional Rights, for example:

They were never given prayer mats and initially they didn’t get a Koran. When the Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it happened it was always said to be an accident but it was a recurrent theme….Asif says that “it was impossible to pray because initially we did not know the direction to pray, but also given that we couldn’t move and the harassment from the guards, it was simply not feasible. The behaviour of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it. It is clear to me that the conditions in our cells and our general treatment were designed by the officers in charge of the interrogation process to `soften us up”’.

Also check out this report from cageprisoners.com. Its pages are filled with stories of

The ridiculing of the athaan (call to prayer); forcible shaving of the beard — as punishment; use of sexual enticement during interrogations; derision of the Prophet; withholding of food in Ramadhan; prohibition of Quranic recitation, proscription of athaan and congregational prayer in Bagram, Afghanistan - a Muslim country; derision of Islamic rituals and supplications; forcible removal of prisoners whilst in the act of prayer, in addition to the degradation of the Qur`an have all been categorically reported by men formerly detained by the US military. The reports are far too recurrent, concurrent and consistent to deny, particularly as former US interrogators and soldiers have corroborated these reports.

And one more extended quote partly concerning religious humiliation of a US detainee from The Observer of January 2, 2005:

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the ’strappado’, a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.

The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned.

He says he has also been repeatedly shaved against his will. In one such incident, a guard told him: ‘This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, isn’t it?’

The strappado allegation was one among many made about treatment at both Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan made to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith when he visited his clients Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar at the Cuban prison six weeks ago, having tried for the previous 14 months to obtain the necessary security clearance.

But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been examined and de-classified by a government censor.

He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US.

Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified interrogation methods. [emphasis added]

Unsettling here is the notion that the US desires to cover up such reports with a wall of secrecy, evidently aware of the fallout in the Musllim world of the sort the Newsweek story eventually contributed. Desperate attempts by Scott McClellan to focus an administration response against Newsweek, rather than it’s own responsibilities for prisoner torture, seems too little and too late to prevent serious continued anti-American rioting.

Meanwhile, it would be hilarious watching the right wing bloviators decry the “riots and death” post hoc the Newsweek story if their own hypocrisy and endorsement of administration lying about mass destruction weapons in Iraq was not so tainted with blood.

See also this Kos posting for more on the rightwing hyenas attacking Newsweek. Newsweek’s “mistakes” in reporting the story have everything to do with the reversal of an inside source, but not the essential truth of the story. Juan Cole has even more.

Another smoking gun: US-Iraq Business Alliance was formed to plan post-war transformation in June 2002

It is striking how little news coverage has been given to the secret July 23, 2002 Downing Street Iraq war memo memo published in the Times of London two weeks ago. For those who missed it, the memo, attributed to MI6 head Richard Dearlove (“C” in the memo), read in part:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

…It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change….

Says it all in incontrovertible black ink, doesn’t it? Good commentaries have been published by Ray McGovern on TomPaine.com and Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes. But the major US papers ignored it until Walter Pincus of The Washington Post had a Page A18 story on Friday the 13th!

What happened next was of course the relentless and now-proven-phony weapons hype concerning the actually defenseless Iraq — delivered in hysterical proportions by Bush, Blair, and their minions to provide consent for their amoral taking of the country. Readers should continue to the McGovern link above for commentary with which I completely concur.

Gold Rush planning was underway in June 2002
What I will add is an observation about reported pre-war “writing on the wall” that struck me 1 1/2 years ago when we were protesting the US-Iraq Business Alliance conference that was to have taken place in Maine in November 2003. At that time, an article appeared in the Bangor Daily News entitled “Gold Rush”. This was a provocative and embarrassing title considering what was going on in Iraq at that time, and since. The article featured Dennis Sokol, a creepy businessman [update 01/30/2006: No one should construe any opinion I hold in general about US business in Iraq to be any reflection whatsoever on the integrity of private individuals involved. The adjective “creepy” used here is not meant in the sense of Mr. Sokol’s personal integrity, but rather the pursuit of war profits from Iraq in general.] with deep connections to the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney — residing locally on Mount Desert Island.

Also quoted in the article was James Burrows, at that time Executive Director of the US-Iraq Business Alliance. The buried lead was that post-war economic planning was well under way by June 2002 when Sokol’s and Burrow’s Alliance was formed:

The alliance, initially named the U.S.-Iraq Business Council, was authorized by the Department of Treasury in June 2002 when the Pentagon was “trying to figure out how this thing needed to go” in a post-war rebuilding effort, Burrows, the alliance executive director, said.

We later placed an oped in the Bangor Daily News drawing out the serious questions about the US war, conquest and occupation.

The war was Bush Administration policy that by summer 2002 was fait accompli. The serious questions raised in the Dearlove memo and other recently-leaked memos from the UK underscore how even in the halls of power there existed deep unease about the legality of creating what could seem to be tantamount to a US-UK Fourth Reich in South Asia.

Recurring Galloway allegations a sideshow intended to deflect attention from the colossal current and long-term corruptions of the US in Iraq

Who is most trustworthy? Top left: Recently returned-to-office British MP George Galloway; Top right: US Senator Norm Coleman, Republican from Minnesota; Bottom, shaking hands: Current US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein in 1983 when Rumsfeld was Special Envoy to Iraq.

The story today about British anti-war MP George Galloway being called out by the slithering senator, Norm Coleman, is just outrageous. See this previous Deep Blade post, and also this related story, for more background on Coleman’s hatchet shop of an investigations subcommittee and the disingenuous right-wing media circus surrounding the so-called Oil-for-Food Scandal.

The reason for outrage is that insane levels of corruption associated with twenty-plus years of US-sponsored destruction and the current devastating US occupation of Iraq are being all but ignored in the public machinations of US officialdom, and peeps are barely heard in the media. Here are two links into the very convenient Iraq Occupation Watch newsblog that supply many details on the outrages:

Inspector General: The Big Corruption Cases in Iraq “Yet to Unfold”
US government official charged with auditing Iraq reconstruction is quoted, “…There has also been evidence of corruption in some U.S.-funded deals. As of April 11, his office had received 131 potential criminal cases, and of these 62 have been closed, 35 referred to other agencies and 34 remain open.

‘The big ones are yet to unfold … We are talking tens of millions of dollars and not just thousands,’ he said in an interview with Reuters, declining to provide further details of ongoing investigations.”

This story is barely above water with the Republicans vigorously acting to drown it — in part with Oil-for-Food noise. Read too this transcript from last February of a hearing featuring Iraq occupation corruption whistleblowers held by Congressman Henry Waxman and other Democrats (the Republican leadership will not allow a regular Congressional hearing on these issues). Let’s scratch the surface of this amazing hearing: “There were numerous examples of padding payrolls. For example, the inspector general found 8,206 guards were on the payroll at one Iraqi minister — 8,206 — but they could account for only 602. So who’s paying 8,206 when only 602 are working?”

Straight to Bechtel
According to Counterpunch author Jeffrey St. Clair, “For the year 2004, Bechtel brought in more than $17.4 billion, a record haul for the company. That makes two record years in a row. Last year Bechtel earned more than $17 billion for the first time. Both peaks were all the more impressive given the senescent condition of the economy.

“Much of that robust income stream is coming from its operations in Iraq, where Bechtel is the king of contractors.”

St. Clair’s piece from Counterpunch recounts with flair and pith the whole tale of Bectel’s dealings in Iraq, including an excellent backgrounder on Rumsfeld’s handshake with Saddam pictured above:

Rumsfeld landed in Baghdad in December 1983, where he held a series of meetings with Saddam and Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister. This secret conclave occurred at on of the bloodiest moments of the Iran/Iraq war, a war the US tacitly backed as a way to destabilize the revolutionary mullahs of Iran. By this time, it was well known by US intelligence that Saddam had used poison gas against Iranian troops, killing and maiming thousands.

Two decades later, as the Bush administration ramped up the war rhetoric against Saddam, Rumsfeld would claim that his journey to Baghdad was a heroic and virtuous mission, where he chastised the Iraqi strongman to his face for committing crimes against humanity.

Saddam, however, had the foresight to videotape several of the parlays. One infamous clip shows a deferential Rumsfeld smiling and shaking the hand of the Tiger of Tikrit. Later Rumsfeld, like a witness before the Iran/contra committee, would claim he had no clear recollection of pressing the flesh with Saddam.

However, the true motives behind those missions are now coming into focus, thanks to internal Reagan administration documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archives and through the excellent reporting of Jim Vallette. Rumsfeld did not browbeat Saddam over gassing Iranians and Kurds or for his pursuit of a nuclear bomb. He was there to beg the dictator’s indulgence on behalf of Bechtel’s dream pipeline to Aqaba.

The allegations against George Galloway are a sick joke by comparison. In the absence of anything other than unsubstantiated documents very likely generated in Ahmed Chalabi’s forgery shop, I am inclined to believe Galloway when he calls them “patently absurd.”

And news blackout

Aspects of actions by the UN mission in Haiti suggest complicity with the clear US desire to put down the forces of Lavalas, the party of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Violent outbreaks and the hunger strike by constitutional Prime Minister Yvon Neptune reveal the cracks in the false propaganda front erected by the US and its UN partners in Haiti, Canada, France, and Brazil. Neptune, now near death, has been jailed for nearly a year on trumped-up charges that have not even been formally filed.

But Democracy Now! and Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio have been on the truth of the story since the kidnapping of the democratically-elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in a US-backed coup on February 29, 2004. The widely-reported notion that Aristide left voluntarily is US-government-created disinformation, pure and simple.

Aristide himself makes this very clear. Please listen to Amy Goodman’s extensive interview with Aristide broadcast today on Democracy Now!.

All US readers: Please contact your Congresspeople now and demand that they join Congresswoman Maxine Waters in demanding the truth about the coup and an end to US interfence in the return of Aristide to Haiti.

And get yourself informed! The place to go are the radio sources mentioned above, including the excellent, very extensive reports from Haiti by Flashpoints correspondent Kevin Pina. Written transcripts of many of these are available here from ZNet.

This is hysterical: Friday cat blogging

Scared yet?

Read this.

From the summary to, Crisis on the China Rim: An Economic, Crude Oil, and Military Analysis (Kevin B. Skislock, Partner and CEO, Laguna Research Partners LLC, 2005.04.14):

There is a crisis rising on the China Rim, a crisis made of economic imbalances, energy insecurities, ancient hatreds, and unsettled scores. The catalyst for this crisis is success itself, the success of the People’s Republic of China (China) (PRC) in its de facto rejection of a failed experiment in communism and its rapid transformation into a thriving market economy.

The inseparable companion of this success, though, is an insatiable hunger and thirst for precious and scarce resources… most important among these, crude oil. In a world that has been frozen in denial over the impending depletion of crude oil reserves, the emergence of China’s 1,298,847,624 citizens as a vibrant global economic force is thrusting every net importer of crude oil—particularly those on the China Rim—into an urgent quest for energy security. And it is thrusting every net exporter of crude oil—particularly those on the China Rim—into a rare concern over national sovereignty. Simply put, there will be far greater demand in the China Rim region for crude oil over the next five, ten, twenty, and fifty years, than there will be supply. And the China Rim is already deep in a fierce competition for energy security that the quick and strong will win, while the slow and weak succumb….it is our opinion that the “likely direction of surprise” in crude oil prices will continue to be to the upside….

Then read this. (You’ll need a subscriber login to The Atlantic Monthly, or access to the printed version). I read most of this article in the college library a couple of days ago. Do not expect peace in our time. Planning for Cold War II, World War III, and beyond is already well underway. Kaplan begins the article thusly:

For some time now no navy or air force has posed a threat to the United States. Our only competition has been armies, whether conventional forces or guerrilla insurgencies. This will soon change. The Chinese navy is poised to push out into the Pacific—and when it does, it will very quickly encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. It’s not hard to imagine the result: a replay of the decades-long Cold War, with a center of gravity not in the heart of Europe but, rather, among Pacific atolls that were last in the news when the Marines stormed them in World War II….

Mothers, and Fathers, what will you do now to stop it so your children and yourselves will not perish in the rapidly approaching imperial energy war?

Kos diarist Jerome a Paris rapidly has become indispensable

For everyone who likes the energy coverage in Deep Blade Journal, also please visit Jerome a Paris on a regular basis. I am adding his feed to my RSS Owl reader, and placing a link to him in my left-side panel under “hydrocarbon” right now.

C-SPAN brings alternate 911 theorist to national TV

David Ray Griffin speaking in Madison, WI, broadcast on C-SPAN 2 on a Saturday afternoon

The perfect thing to do over my lunch on this rainy afternoon in Maine was to try to find some baseball on TV. No such luck, the Red Sox game at Fenway has been rained out. So totally by accident I ran into a 90-minute talk by David Ray Griffin, author of a couple of books that basically promote a variety of 911 conspiracy theories.

While I am not one to off-handedly dismiss such discussion, Griffin does bug me. His case is very provocative and deserves to be taken seriously. But it is weakened by uncritical acceptance that certain aspects of the 911 events are automatically indicative of a government conspiracy.

For example, he mentions the common conspiracy complaint that the “pancake” theory of how the twin towers collapsed is impossible because the buildings dropped in “freefall”. As one of the thousands of websites promoting this idea describes it, this theory says that the buildings fell so fast because there was “virtually no resistance from the floors below, or the 47 massive steel columns in the central core of each Tower. As many analysts agree this defies the laws of physics.”

Well, they did not exactly drop as if in freefall, and the rate they dropped is in fact totally plausible from a pancake theory of floor-by-floor failure. This is because the dynamic forces on a structure after it begins collapse, in the manner of the twin towers, are much, much bigger than the static forces while a structure vertically is at rest. When resting gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, the stopping forces that must be generated to prevent collapse due to required change of momentum compressed into very small periods of time quickly become enormous. Those who promote the conspiracy on the basis of “physics” I have often found to be sorely lacking in knowledge of physics.

To convince yourself of the huge increase of force from the static to the dynamic situation, set an egg on a hard table. The shell is just fine while sitting there still. Now drop the egg from a height of one inch or so. Cracks pretty easy, doesn’t it!

Not only that, despite what Griffin says about the conspiracy of silence, I just cannot buy the notion that the utterly massive job of wiring the towers with explosives could be kept quiet. I’ll remain agnostic, but you’ll have a harder time convincing me of this one than you will of convincing me that there exists an interested God who actually listens to prayers.

Meanwhile, I do have my own deep questions about 911. The site I like that raises a ton of them is Paul Thompson’s Center for Cooperative Research. To his credit, Griffin in his C-Span talk pointed listeners in Thompson’s direction. I like this site because it relies exclusively on public information relayed by mainstream sources. There is so much information in Thompson’s “timelines” that I could not even begin to discuss it all here.

I’ll mention an area that has troubled me about the official 911 investigations and stories for a long time — accounts of financing of the 911 terrorists. I have blogged about this before, shortly after the 911 Commission report was issued. Do read Thompson’s essay on Saeed Sheikh. Afterward, you will not take a thing that is reported about the “capture” of terrorists and propaganda lines that usually begin with “significant victory in the worldwide effort to destroy the al-Qaida” without a grain of salt and a huge dose of skepticism.

Here’s a good question to pile on to the ones I raised last July about al-Qaida paymaster “Sheikh Saeed al Masri” mentioned in the 911 Commission Report. About a month or two after the Commission report was published, a monograph concerning terrorist financing was issued by Commission staff. The monograph is completely inconsistent with the main report, in that no paymaster named Sheikh Saeed al Masri seems to exist. Instead, we learn from the monograph that

The hijackers received assistance in financing their activities from two facilitators based in the United Arab Emirates: Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a.k.a. Ammar al Baluchi (Ali), and Mustafa al Hawsawi. To a lesser extent, Binalshibh helped fund the plot from Germany.

As I asked in July with respect to Sheikh Saeed al Masri: Is “Mustafa al Hawsawi” another pseudonym for Saeed Sheikh? The Thompson article reveals a tangled web of names and misdirected media references to this terrorist, who possibly has deep connections to US intelligence through its long and sordid cooperative role with the Pakistani ISI. Untangling some of these threads would help illuminate the origins of 911. I am sure David Ray Griffin and I would agree that the public deserves such illumination.