Demographic

In February 2007 it came to light that on 9/11 both the BBC and CNN reported the fall of World Trade Center Building 7 well before it happened. The BBC was 23 minutes premature. Broadcast footage shows Jane Standley, the BBC correspondent, referring to the fall as a past event. At one point as she talks, the onscreen caption beneath the picture says the building “has also collapsed,” in addition to the Twin Towers. But WTC 7 continues to stand, clearly visible. As she moves slightly, the building is mostly behind her left shoulder on the viewer’s right. The live feed from New York breaks up before the actual collapse.

Aaron Brown on CNN announced that WTC 7 “has either collapsed or is collapsing” more than an hour before it fell. “We are getting information now,” he says onscreen. Again, the standing building is clearly visible in the background. He turns around, sees it, and begins to backtrack.

Footage from these broadcasts has appeared on the Web. It has disappeared from some Web sites, but seems now beyond effective recall. The counter on one of the remaining sites records over 300,000 visits, suggesting that the footage is in the hands of a great number of people who’ve downloaded it. A search on the combination of “BBC” and “9/11” and “WTC 7” quickly turns up copies. For CNN’s coverage, substitute “CNN” for “BBC” in the same search combination.

Accurate prophecy of a skyscraper’s collapse would be extraordinary. Apart from the three claimed instances on 9/11, no steel frame skyscraper has ever collapsed due to fire. On Feb. 13, 1975, the north WTC tower suffered a six-floor, three-hour fire with no suggestion of a collapse. On Feb. 23, 1991, One Meridian Plaza, a 38-floor office building opposite Philadelphia City Hall, burned for 19 hours. An online analysis tells us that:

Beams and girders sagged and twisted—some as much as three feet—under severe fire exposures, and fissures developed in the reinforced concrete floor assemblies in many places. Despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage. (Emphasis added.)

One Meridian Plaza remained standing for another eight-and-a-half years, seemingly impossible to get rid of. Other examples of steel-frame indestructibility abound, such as the First Interstate Bank Building fire in Los Angeles on May 4, 1988.

WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane. Its collapse, straight down and nearly at free-fall speed—neat as a top hat—was so mysterious as a matter of physics that the official 9/11 Commission report omits to mention it at all. On 9/11, Dan Rather, playing videotape of the WTC 7 collapse, told the CBS audience it looked just like the controlled demolitions “we’ve all seen too much on television before,” involving “well-placed dynamite to knock [a building] down.” That part of Rather’s broadcast, at least at this writing, is also available online.

The BBC has issued a response that doesn’t deny the hysteron proteron in its coverage,[1] but doesn’t explain it either:

We’re not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.

The premature reporting from the BBC and CNN is reminiscent of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s admission on 9/11, to Peter Jennings of ABC News, that someone told him in advance that the WTC towers would fall:

I went down to the scene and we set up headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the police commissioner, the fire commission-er, the head of emergency management, and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. And it did collapse. . . . (Emphasis added.)

Some have wondered who told Giuliani the buildings would collapse. The 9/11 Commission apparently never bothered to ask. Its report is silent on the point. See also Larry Silverstein’s well-known account of the decision to “pull” WTC 7, on the PBS documentary “America Rebuilds,” broadcast Sept. 14, 2002:

I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire [in Building 7], and I said, “We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.” And they made the decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.

“Pulling” a building is jargon for controlled demolition. Silverstein was head of the group that entered into a 99-year lease for the WTC Twin Towers in the summer of 2001 and then greatly increased the insurance on the buildings. (Silverstein’s group already controlled WTC 7.) Terrorist attacks were specifically covered under the augmented policies. The matter can be explored by searching on “Larry Silverstein insurance,” which on Google brings up “about 202,000” items.

The BBC now says it no longer has its own archived footage from 9/11. It does not say who authorized this space-saving economy. That’s led someone to post the official BBC News policy on creating and retaining archives. The policy requires that two broadcast-quality copies be preserved, plus one copy of “browser quality,” to be used internally to spare the better copies. The policy does not state a time limit. On January 7, 2007, only a few weeks before the controversy erupted over its 9/11 footage, the BBC posted an online story that began:

In other words, footage is still available after 40 years, and probably a good deal longer. At least that’s so with respect to particularly memorable events like a soccer championship in 1966. Who’d say 9/11 was less of a spectacle than that? Or of less importance than the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? And who’d care to bet the BBC has thrown out its coverage of the coronation of the present queen, all the way back in 1953?

But of course 9/11 is different. That’s why on Sept. 26, 2001 Giuliani banned picture taking at Ground Zero, and had the police confiscate film, and delete digital photographs from cameras. See http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groundzero/restrictions.html

The blueprints to the Twin Towers and Building 7 remained off-limits to the public for more than five years after the attack, despite the fact that the buildings were built with public money and that the engineering drawings of public buildings are supposed to be public information.

In March of 2007 [however], an extensive set of detailed architectural drawings of the World Trade Center became public through the actions of a whistleblower [an event that went unmentioned in the mainstream media]. The 261 drawings included detailed plans for the North Tower . . . the World Trade Center foundation and basement, and the TV mast atop the North Tower. . . . [S]ince the Twin Towers were of almost identical construction, it is safe to assume that the structural details that the drawings show for the North Tower are largely applicable to the South Tower. (Emphases added.)

The released drawings contradict the 9/11 Commission’s statement that the core of each of the Twin Towers was merely “a hollow steel shaft.” (See the fine print on p. 541, n. 1, of the commission’s un-indexed report, claiming FEMA as the authority![2])

Rather, the drawings confirm what was already generally known, that each of the buildings was supported by 47 massive vertical steel box columns. Per the Web site just quoted:

[T]he sixteen core columns that bounded the long faces of the buildings’ cores had dimensions of 54 by 22 inches. The detailed drawings show that these columns maintained these dimensions through about the 66th floor.

[L]ike steel columns in all tall buildings. . . the thickness of the steel in the core columns tapered from bottom to top. Near the bottoms of the towers the steel was four inches thick. . . .

At the very bottom, the steel was five inches thick. Near the top, where the load was much less, the steel thinned to a quarter-inch.

It would take near-simultaneous collapses of all 47 columns—at a cascading succession of identical levels—to bring either building straight down on its footprint. The 9/11 Commission never explained how that might have happened, because it denied the very existence of the columns. But the collapses are all too readily explained in terms of controlled demolition. Dr. Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University, has posted several papers online suggesting that exactly this was done.

Jones says “the likelihood of near-symmetrical collapse of [WTC 7] due to fires (the ‘government’ theory)—requiring as it does near-simultaneous failure of many support columns—is infinitesimal. . . . I conclude that the evidence for pre-positioned explosives in WTC 7 (also in towers 1 and 2) is truly compelling.” Jones also says “the observations of molten metal (I did not say molten steel!) in the basements of all three buildings, WTC 1, 2 and 7 [are] consistent with . . . the extremely high-temperature thermite reaction: iron oxide + aluminum powder – > Al₂O₃ + molten iron.”

Since making those statements, Jones has previously posted a peer-reviewed paper at http://www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html. Jones says in that paper that bringing a skyscraper down on its footprint is so difficult that only a handful of demolition companies in the world are willing to undertake it. He also says that Al Qaeda would have had no need of such precision because felling the buildings like trees, a much easier task, would have caused vastly more damage to lower Manhattan.

As a result of his outspokenness, Jones has been suspended from his teaching duties. [Editor’s note: Prof Jones has since taken early retirement from BYU.]

The 9/11 story should also be considered in light of such false-flag schemes, American and Israeli, as Operation Northwoods and the Lavon Affair.

Operation Northwoods was a scheme, signed off on by every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, for terrorist activities in the United States that could falsely be attributed to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, so as to justify a U.S. attack. The Joint Chiefs even fantasized hopefully that the astronaut John Glenn might blow up on the launching pad, and that this could be attributed to Cuban electronic jamming. The plan was killed, either by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership or by the Kennedy White House. See James Bamford, Body of Secrets (2001). The story was also picked up in Harper’s, July 2001. The original JCS documents (15 pp.) can be found online.

The Lavon Affair involved an Israeli scheme, actually carried out, to have “Arab” terrorists bomb targets in Egypt that were associated with the U.S. and U.K.—libraries, theaters and the like. The conventional explanation is that Israel was trying to sabotage the relationship between the U.S. and the demonized Arab leader of the day, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

However, at pp. 107-14 of Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (1989), Stephen Green adduces considerable evidence that the Lavon Affair involved a false false-flag operation, designed to go awry and be exposed as the work of the Israelis—and that the real target wasn’t the relationship between Egypt and the U.S., but Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s efforts to negotiate a peace agreement with Egypt. Those efforts were indeed sabotaged, and by that measure the apparent fiasco was a great success. On that telling, the plotters were militarists allied with David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan, and another of their concerns was sabotaging Agaf Modiin, the Israeli military intelligence organization, with which Mossad was contending for turf.

A great deal more along these lines can be found in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2005). Operation Gladio was the subject of a series broadcast in England in 1992 by BBC2. The description of that series at Information Liberation.com is a good introduction:

This BBC series [was] about. . . far-right secret arm[ies], operated by the CIA and MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to blame the deaths on Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades and other left wing groups. Known as “stay-behinds,” these armies were given access to military equipment which was supposed to be used for sabotage after a Soviet invasion. Instead it was used in massacres across mainland Europe as part of a CIA “strategy of tension.” Gladio killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for the purpose of frightening the national political classes into adopting U.S. policies.

That description of Gladio is prefaced with a lapidary epigraph from James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, 1954-74: “Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State.”

Gladio was disclosed by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, in a speech to the Italian parliament on Aug. 3, 1991. For a variety of reasons, including Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait the previous day, Andreotti’s disclosure got little attention in the American media. Nor was there much attention when former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou confirmed to the Greek daily Ta Nea that he had uncovered a similar structure in Greece. Nor was there much attention even when the German television channel RTL revealed that Gladio included former officers of Hitler’s SS. See Secret Armies, pp. 1, 8, 15-16. At p. 61, Ganser says that “due to his large experience in secret operations,” President George H.W. Bush “was presumably well aware of the. . . terror the secret armies had been involved in.” At pp. 251-55 Ganser provides a partial summary of that terror, including the removal and hanging of Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; the false-flag kidnapping and murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro; other coups; the false-flag bombing of a waiting room in the Bologna train station, killing 85 and wounding over 200; and other massacres.[3]

According to the Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception, p. 226 (1994), Mossad was one of the intelligence agencies involved with Gladio. In part that was through Licio Gelli. Now almost 90 and living under house arrest in his Tuscan villa, Gelli has had an interesting career. In his youth, he was a liaison officer between Mussolini’s government and the Third Reich (and allegedly a Gestapo informant). He has often been identified as an organizer of the Bologna train station bombing. He has also been linked to Michael Ledeen of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As to that organization, see Jason Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP,” the Nation, Sept. 27, 2002. (CSP is the Center for Security Policy, which partially overlaps JINSA.) Ledeen is often identified as a source of the crudely forged documents that purported to show Iraq’s recent quest for uranium in Niger.

Ostrovsky’s story about Mossad, Gladio and Gelli concerns the early stages of what became the Iran-Contra affair, after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980. The story can be read to suggest that Ronald Reagan was telling the honest truth some years later when he told the American people he had no intention of trading arms for hostages. Reagan may have been focused instead on the main thrust of American and Israeli policy, which was to keep the Iran-Iraq war going as long as possible by selling arms to both sides. There were strategic benefits in keeping those countries embroiled with each other, and there was money to be made. The costs of the war, by some counts, included over a million Iraqi and Iranian lives, possibly as many as a million and a half, by the time it ended in 1988.

Secret Armies should be read together with Alfred W. McCoy’s classic, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972). McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He tells some of the other things the CIA did to curb leftist politics in Europe. For example, it permitted the “French Connection”—a plague on American blacks, just like the one on the “heathen Chinee” a century before—as a payoff to Corsican Mafiosi who beat up Communist organizers in Marseilles.

Compare Norman Lewis, Naples ’44, pp. 120, 137-39 (1978) on how the U.S. handed over civil administration of that city to Vito Genovese, an erstwhile capo di tutti capi in the American mob. Since 1937 Don Vito, as he liked to be called, had been visiting Italy because of a murder indictment in the U.S. While in Italy he first ingratiated himself with Mussolini, but then transferred his allegiance to the Allied Military Government. By the time he came home after his service, he was happy to have outlived all the witnesses against him.[4]

See also two books by Nafeez Mossaddeq Ahmed: The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005), on the cultivation and sponsorship of militant Islamic terrorism by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain and Russia, beginning in 1979; and The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 (2002), which won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award, in 2003. Ahmed is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex in England.

The 9/11 story should also be considered in light of the steadily growing list of admitted American “intelligence failures” about Iraq. Some of those intelligence failures concerned matters accurately predicted in Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s memoir of the Gulf War of 1991, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, p. 498 (1993): “From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit. . . .” The senior George Bush and his adviser Brent Scowcroft made the same point in A World Transformed, p. 489 (1998).

Other intelligence failures concerned matters examined and accurately reported by Ambassador Joseph Wilson and Hans Blix. Purportedly, the American intelligence community had no way of knowing what the invasion of Iraq would do to that nation’s stability, or even what Saddam Hussein had been up to in the decade just past.

Of course, there’s another way of looking at the intelligence failures. See Ray McGovern, “Why Cheney Lost It When Joe Wilson Spoke Out,” www.TruthOut.org , March 7, 2007. McGovern says that on the occasion of Wilson’s famous op-ed piece for the New York Times:

Adding insult to injury, Wilson chose to tell Washington Post reporters, also on July 6 [2003], in language that rarely escapes an ambassador’s lips, the bogus report regarding Iraq obtaining uranium from Niger “begs the question regarding what else they are lying about.”

That it does, which is the point of the present essay. On March 27, 2006, the New York Times reported an Oval Office meeting between George W. Bush and Tony Blair, held on Jan. 31, 2003, in which—according to a memorandum by David Manning, then Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser—the two leaders acknowledged (to each other, not the public) that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.[5] Manning’s memorandum says “Mr. Bush [then] talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire. . . .” (Emphasis added.)

Such an operation would be false-flag in the literal sense. It would provide a fraudulent casus belli. Note who suggested it. Assess the character, stability and sagacity of that person. Consider motive, means and opportunity. Think, too, about the background from which George W. Bush emerged—possibly his main qualification in the eyes of the five Supreme Court justices who “elected” him. For Bush, Operation Northwoods, Operation Gladio, the Lavon Affair and the like were all part of the culture, absorbed from childhood. That culture does not favor public candor. It favors manipulation, disinformation, and stampede.[6] Hence the famous smirk.

In 1996, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith among others wrote a report for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break [from the Oslo peace process]: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm [Israel].” That report referred to “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq [as] an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,” but primarily urged Saddam’s removal as a means of putting pressure on Syria. Wurmser and Feith went on to hold high office in the George W. Bush administration, Wurmser as an adviser to Dick Cheney, Feith as the number-three man in the Pentagon, behind Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.. Perle became a high-level consultant to the Pentagon.

As James Bamford points out in A Pretext for War (2004), the authors of “A Clean Break” urged a strategy that now looks suspiciously familiar. As Bamford describes it (pp. 262-63):

As part of their “grand strategy,” they recommended that Iraq [be] conquered and Saddam Hussein be overthrown [and] replaced by a puppet leader friendly to Israel. “Whoever inherits Iraq,” they wrote, “dominates the entire Levant strategically.” Then they suggested that Syria would be the next country to be invaded. “Israel can shape its strategic environment,” they said. This would be done, they recommended to Netanyahu, “by reestablishing the principle of preemption,” and by “rolling back” [Israel’s] Arab neighbors. From then on the principle

would be to strike first and expand. . . . They recommended launching a major unprovoked regional war in the Middle East. . . . Then, to gain the support of the American government and public, a phony pretext would be used. . . .

. . . [A] way to win American support for a preemptive war against Syria, they suggested, was by “drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program.” (Emphases added.)

The “Clean Break” strategy can actually be traced back a good deal further in Israeli planning. According to Oded Yinon, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” Kivunim, a Journal for Judaism and Zionism (Dep’t of Publicity, World Zionist Organization, Feb. 1982, available online):

The dissolution of Syria and Iraq. . . into ethnically or religiously unique areas. . . is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states. . . . This. . . will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.

Yinon had been a senior official of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry. He became a journalist for the Jerusalem Post. Israel Shahak, who translated Yinon’s article from the Hebrew, commented that:

The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down by Israel into small units occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel on this topic) writes about the “best” that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: “The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part” (Ha’aretz 6/2[Feb. 6]/1982). Actually, this aspect of the plan is very old.

[The plan] follows faithfully the geopolitical ideas current in Germany of 1890-1933, which were swallowed whole by Hitler and the Nazi movement, and determined their aims for East[ern] Europe. Those aims, especially the division of the existing states, were carried out in 1939-1941, and only an alliance on the global scale prevented their consolidation. . . . (Emphasis in original.)

Those were indeed Nazi aims for Eastern Europe, especially for the Soviet Union and Poland. No copies of the Generalplan Ost survived the war (although it is referred to in other documents), but we have Heinrich Himmler’s memorandum, “Einige Gedanken über die Behandlung der Fremdvölkishen im Osten” (May 5, 1940), stating a policy of fostering theretofore-nonexistent nationalities that would have mutually-antagonistic separatist tendencies. Himmler’s marginal notes say Hitler personally approved that policy.

Such a policy for the Middle East, with that provenance, might have been hard to sell by honest means to Americans. But there were other ways.

On August 14, 2006, Bill Christison—like Ray McGovern a veteran of long, high-level service in the CIA—published “Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11,” at www.DissidentVoice.org Christison says that:

After spending the better part of the last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted serious time to actually studying them. . . . I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the “official story” put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false.

Those are brave souls all. David Ray Griffin, a retired professor of the philosophy of religion, has written of how Bush took the official version of 9/11 to the level of religious myth (i.e., master societal narrative) by declaring war the next day from the pulpit of the National Cathedral. That myth draws its power from the primal American nightmare about have-nots and nonwhites. Hollywood has repeatedly sent Indiana Jones with a bullwhip to deal with Arabs. Would he carry that whip in Europe? Possibly in Muslim neighborhoods he would.

Casting 9/11 as religious myth means doubters can be punished as heretics—in some cases with loss of their jobs, word of which tends to travel—silenced, and held up to obloquy, all without need of reasoned argument.[7]

[1] It appeared for a time that the problem might simply be that the parties who turned up this broadcast footage had confused standard and daylight saving time; or perhaps that they had identified some other building as WTC 7—but the BBC doesn’t assert either of those defenses. Rather, it says its magically prescient reporting was a “cock up,” a mistake on a chaotic day. CNN likewise forgoes any such defense.

[2] The same FEMA that did “a heck of a job” with Hurricane Katrina. What expertise FEMA has (if any) in the design, engineering or construction of skyscrapers is a mystery. One might have expected the 9/11 Commission to take testimony from architects and engineers, or appoint neutral experts to investigate and report. Moreover, if flimsy construction were a cause but for which the towers would not have collapsed, there would surely have been litigation, which has never materialized.

[3] Ganser also describes (p. 29) secret protocols under which Italy would be kept in alignment with the West “by any means” necessary, even if its electorate voted otherwise, and under which West Germany, as a condition of its admission to NATO in 1955, agreed to refrain from active legal pursuit of known right-wing extremists.

[4] Relations between the CIA and the mob remained cordial, as with their joint attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro in the 1960s, a matter brought to light in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s. See, e.g., Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, p. 35 (1972); and Scott’s book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993). Scott is particularly interested in the CIA’s complicity in drug trafficking.

[5] The Times article reports that “Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides: Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street memo.” The “Downing Street memo” is the famous document of July 23, 2002 that says “. . . the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [of war on Iraq]”—rather than the war policy being a response to intelligence or facts.

[6] For another aspect of the culture, having to do with CIA infiltration of the news media, search on “Operation Mockingbird.” The leading article is Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977. As to a similar problem, also relevant in this case, see Alison Weir, “U.S. Media Coverage of Israel and Palestine: Choosing Sides,” in Peter Phillips, ed., Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories (2004). Cf. Alfred M. Lilienthal, in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June, 1989 (available online) as to the near demise of the New York Times in the late 1940s when Arthur Hays Sulzberger rebuked the Zionists for their “coercive methods” and “attempts at character assassination,” a mistake he and his successors have avoided making again. The Washington Report is published by the American Educational Trust, founded by retired Foreign Service officers. Two former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have sat on its board, J. William Fulbright (D. Ark.) and Charles H. Percy (R. Ill.).

[7] In early April 2007 it came out that Walter Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Princeton, had found himself on the national terrorist watchlist (i.e., the no-fly list). Murphy’s sin was giving a televised lecture last fall on Bush’s transgressions against the Constitution. The no-fly list was used earlier to punish Doug Thompson, the editor of CapitolHillBlue.com. Thompson had published a series of articles on George W. Bush’s psychological problems. Thompson’s sources included anonymous White House staffers—and Justin Frank, M.D., a psychiatrist at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Frank considers Bush a classic “dry drunk,” unable to deal with reality or responsibility, except that he has serious doubts about the “dry” part.

On August 14, 2006, Bill Christison—like Ray McGovern a veteran of long, high-level service in the CIA—published “Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11,” at www.DissidentVoice.org Christison says that: