New Blog!  www.crookedshepherds.wordpress.com 

New pentagon overflight evidence: www.thepentacon.com 

The Five Sided Fantasy Island -- an analysis of the Pentagon explosion

Rebutting "Pentagon 9/11 Getting the Facts Straight"

Eyewitnesses and the Plane-Bomb Theory

Update 4/6/2003: Justin Raimondo slurs 911-strike, then apologizes!

In his March 31 column, Justin Raimondo wrote "I am ceaselessly attacked by real anti-Semites for not facing up to 'the Jewish question'." This was accompanied by two links, one to my web page, www.911-strike.com, and the other to a site called "Carol on the Web".   That same day, I sent a letter to antiwar.com in response to their slur, demanding that they retract this insinuation that my website is in any way "anti-Semitic."  Thankfully, in his April 2 column, Raimondo apologized:

In my last column,  I mistakenly described this website,  911-strike.com, as anti-Semitic. It is actually just plain loony, and not anti-Semitic as I first surmised. My apologies.

Aside from a certain lack of grace in Raimondo's mia culpa, I am glad that he set the record straight as to his earlier carelessness.   I think it's perfectly obvious that I am no more anti-Semitic than Justin himself.  Raimondo is well aware of the difference between criticisms of powerful elites, and expressions of hate directed at the vast majority of citizens of any nation, or people of any creed or ethnic heritage. Visitors to my website know that I would never indulge in the latter.

In a broader context, Justin Raimondo is still carrying out his old agenda of scurrilous attacks on the antiwar left (which makes up the vast majority of the antiwar movement.)  For a long time his rallying cry was "I ain't marchin' any more," but presumably Raimondo caught too much heat for that position, and he finally did endorse the huge worldwide peace marches.  Now he is back to making disproportionate attacks on innovative new "fourth generation" protest techniques.  Raimondo is always willing to let the antics of a few bad apples (COINTELPRO agents?) serve as a representative of the whole gestalt of an antiwar action.

When I read his March 31 column, I was sufficiently upset at Justin's libel against 911-strike, that I temporarily failed to notice the fascinating tidbit in the column just above his attack.  Justin said:

Israel's amen corner in the U.S. is a coalition of Christian and neoconservative nutballs, in which Jews are a small minority. Without Jews, there would in all likelihood be no antiwar movement worth noticing – and there certainly would be no Antiwar.com.

I have respect and great affection for the Jewish people. My mentor and teacher, the late Murray N. Rothbard, was Jewish – along with virtually every major libertarian theoretician in modern times. 

Now, here's the column that first prompted Raimondo's sniper attack.  The column is a bit dated, in that I no longer believe there is any significant possibility that Joe Vialls was correct in his claim that all 757 and 767 aircraft are equipped with computerized remote flight control systems for the purposes of rescuing the planes from attempted hijackings.  Other than that, Raimondo's failure to address these issues is just as serious now as it was when this was first written.  

Justin Raimondo and the poverty of imagination

Justin Raimondo, the lead columnist for antiwar.com, has been uncritically accepting of US government and mainstream media descriptions of the events of Sept. 11.  However, in his column of March 22, Justin made a remarkable confession:

A BABE IN THE WOODS

I include myself among the unsuspecting. My first reaction to statements coming from the Arab world that "the Zionists" were really behind the terrorist attacks was to dismiss them as authored by certifiable nutballs: I devoutly wished they would shut up. Little did I know, or want to know, that our best friend, valiant little Israel, was involved in any way, shape, or form. 

Now, I suppose I should be pleased that Justin is finally starting to connect the dots.  And from a certain perspective, it's good journalism to refrain from reporting on a story where the evidence is below a certain standard.  But Raimondo has gone well beyond that -- he has gone out of his way to ridicule a position that has now proven out to be true.  

Has Raimondo really learned anything from his embarrassing error?  He goes on to write:

TWO EXPLANATIONS

As the story developed, however, one thing became all too clear: the Israelis could well have had foreknowledge of 9/11, and, as Carl Cameron averred, failed to inform the US. With the publication of "the ‘Israeli Art Student’ Papers," however, we are faced with only two possible explanations:

1. The Israelis knew, but didn’t tell us, and Cameron’s surmise is confirmed, or:
2. The Israelis knew and did tell us, but the incompetence of the US government got in the way of effective preventive action.

Now, Raimondo has moved from the realm of the factual into the realm of speculation.  He doesn't know exactly what happened, but he imagines two scenarios.  How can Raimondo's imagination be so impoverished?  Why does he assume that the US government could not possibly be afflicted by anything worse than "incompetence"?

Here is another possibility.  George W. Bush is a religious man, and his religion is related to the peculiar sect known as Christian Zionism.  Like Islam and Judaism, this religion dates its heritage back to Abraham.  Could it be that George W. Bush, like some orthodox Israelis,  worships the ancient tribal warrior God of the Old Testament?

While the attacks of Sept. 11 took place, George W. Bush remained in a classroom, reading a story about goats.  Meanwhile, the entire US military and aviation establishment stood down and completely failed to follow their own well-established procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes.  These procedures, and the completely traitorous failure to carry them out, have been detailed by Jared Israel.  His research was endorsed by George Szamuely of the New York Press, who wrote an excellent summary.

Raimondo now acknowledges that the ranks of the alleged "hijackers" were infiltrated by Israeli spies.  But it gets worse -- the "hijackers" may very likely have been trained to fly courtesy of the United States CIA.  (That is, except for the ones who were carrying fake ID, so we really have no idea who they were.) And their presumed leader, Osama Bin Laden, is himself tied to the CIA by long association -- and was enough of a phony to address the world masquerading as an Islamic revolutionary, while wearing a United States army surplus jacket.

Researcher Joe Vialls claims that all 757 and 767 aircraft are equipped with computerized remote flight control systems for the purposes of rescuing the planes from attempted hijackings.  If this were true, it would raise some very interesting questions.  On the one hand, if the systems were used to control the aircraft and pilot them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then who was at the controls?  How did they get access to the secret codes?

But on the other hand: if these systems were on the aircraft, and they were not compromised by some enemy trick of espionage, then why weren't they used on September 11 to save the four ill-fated flights?

Let me spell it out for you, Justin Raimondo.  Explanation Three.  The Israelis cooperated and possibly even organized the attacks, while George W. Bush and his cronies approved and encouraged them.

You may disagree now, you may even call me a "nutball".  But some day I will be reading about all of this at your website, and you will claim that you broke the story first.