How Easily Fooled Are You? Which will You Believe: Your Eyes or the Official Story?

     Common sense is built upon aphorisms that we regard as true. We have so much faith in common sense that our common sense may be used to mislead us.

     How’s that again? You see, many of our commonsense aphorisms contradict other aphorisms, and they’re often wrong. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

     We’re told, “Many hands make light work,” and we believe it. We’re also told, “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” and we believe that as well.

     We’re told, “Seeing is believing,” and we believe it. We’re also told, “Appearances are deceptive,” and we also believe that one.

     In this article, I’ll focus on the aphorism about seeing and believing. “Seeing is believing,” tends to be our default belief unless we’re given sufficient reason to doubt our eyes and accept the aphorism, “Appearances are deceptive.”

     The earlier in the process our viewpoint is changed, the less we notice the change. If the attempt to shift our viewpoint comes later, it probably won’t be accepted. Thus, if an opinion molder wants us to doubt the evidence of our eyes, he must make the attempt as soon as possible, before first impressions become final impressions.

     You may remember the Star Wars scene in which Obi Wan Kenobi says to a guard, “These are not the droids you want,” and the guard says to his partner, “These are not the droids we want.” From a psychological standpoint, Obi Wan Kenobi was what is called an authority figure.

     Authority figures often have the power to change our perceptions. An authority figure doesn’t have to be a dignified person, and he doesn’t have to be wearing a medical coat, a uniform, or a suit. If an “unbiased witness” is needed, an average-looking person in a baseball cap and a Harley shirt may be that authority figure.

     We’ll revisit the “Harley Guy” later in this article.

     I won’t tell you what to believe about the Kennedy Assassination, 9/11, or other events. I’ll simply ask you what your eyes tell you. You’re free to decide in each case whether seeing is believing or appearances are deceptive.  I promise not to bring up any conspiracy theories.

     You’ve seen dozens of replays of the Zapruder film. Please watch it once more and answer one question for yourself: “If I had never seen this clip before, and I had never heard the ‘official story,’ what would I believe, judging solely from what I see?” From which direction would you think the fatal shot came? (Click here for video.) Place your forefinger on your head to show where you think the bullet struck the President.

     In the next clip, you’ll see an official describing the assassination. This clip was filmed before the “official story” was established. Where does the spokesman place his forefinger? (Click here for video.)

     Then there are the autopsy photos.  No, not the drawings and other illustrations. You can easily find color photos on the Internet; but, in the interest of taste, I'm showing you a black-and-white photo.  (For an enlargement, click on the photo.)
      Judging from this photo, where does it look as though the exit wound would be located?  Is your answer consistent with  what you seem to see in the Zapruder film? 

       Now let’s move to September 11, 2001. Think about your impressions before you heard the “official story.”

     My wife told me that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center and “destroyed” it. Since English is her second language, I thought she had used the wrong word. Common sense told me that even a large airplane could not have “destroyed” the World Trade Center. I patiently said, “You mean that an airplane damaged it.”

     Only when she described the collapse of the buildings did I believe it had happened. She was the authority figure who overruled a commonsense belief; and, without further question, I accepted it as fact.

     You’ve all seen photos and videos of buildings destroyed by earthquakes, floods, or other non-controlled causes of demolition, including photos of tall buildings that were destroyed in such a manner as these. You’ve seen so many, in fact, that you have a fixed image of how these buildings are “supposed to look” after their destruction.

     Which word would better describe them: toppled or collapsed?

     You may also have seen videos of controlled demolitions of tall buildings. From these videos, you have a fixed image of how controlled demolitions are “supposed to look.” (Click here.)  Now let's look at some footage of buildings that were destroyed by other means.Which word would better describe most of these structures: toppled or collapsed?

Shoddy Construction 

Earthquake

Flood 

In India (unknown cause) 

In Turkey (unknown cause)

     Now let’s take a look at the destruction of three World Trade Center buildings. (South Tower) (North Tower) (Building 7) What happened to those three buildings? Did they topple or collapse?

     Of course, the videos use the word collapse is used for both forms of destruction, but the word topple is used only in a very few 9/11 videos: the ones intended to debunk all theories other than the official conspiracy theory. Again, judge for yourself. What do your eyes tell you? Is seeing believing, or are appearances deceptive?

     We’ve also seen how people react to sudden disasters. We have a fixed concept of how they tend to look, how they choose their words, and what happens to their enunciation under conditions of excitement. We also have a sense of the difference between the way people speak and the way people write.

     Watch the following clips and see the differences in the way the “witnesses” look, act, and sound.

     New York City firemen, the same day the World Trade Center collapsed.

     The Harley Guy, only minutes after the World Trade Center collapsed:, killing almost 3,000 people.

     Now let’s turn to the attack on the Pentagon. Look at the photo of an American Airlines Boeing 757—the type of plane said to have crashed into the first floor of the Pentagon. Does it look as though the nose cone of this plane could crash into the first floor without messing up the lawn?

     Take a look at the flight path of the vehicle that crashed into the Pentagon. Does that look like the flight path of a hijacker who indiscriminately crashed into any old section of the Pentagon? In case you’re wondering, if the vehicle had flown straight into the Pentagon, it would have struck Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office. By making a 380-degree turn around it, he struck the comptroller’s office—the guy who was busily trying to find out what happened to $2.3 trillion that was missing from the Pentagon.

     Throughout this article, I’ve avoided bringing up conspiracy theories. All I did was show you videos and photos and asked you how they looked.

     Now that you’ve seen them, ask yourself: Is seeing believing, or are appearances deceptive?
Other September 11, 2001, articles in this blog

Leo Tolstoy and the Three Little Wars

     Those who learn the lessons of history are condemned to repetitions of what Santayana said about not learning them. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s difficult to learn from history without having some conceptual framework as to what causes historical events to happen in the first place.

     When I try to make sense of Man’s quest for peace, I think of Tolstoy's view of history. I also think of America’s Three Little Wars (1898-1903) that foreshadowed the history of the world since they were fought. If we are to learn the lessons of history—to avoid fulfilling them—I believe that a review of Tolstoy and the Three Little Wars can be a useful guide.

     In his novel War and Peace, Tolstoy attempted to reconcile fatalism with free will. I won’t force myself to separate his words from my thoughts about his words, but they go something like this:

1. The world is filled with choices.

2. Each choice we make (or avoid making) determines what our future choices will be.

3. Regarding specific future events, these choices tend to narrow our range of choices as to whether and how future events will unfold.

4. By the time a specific event takes place, there are no remaining choices; the event has become inevitable.

     I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I have found that wise choices (from this point, let’s call them decisions) broaden our possibilities. To take a simple, familiar example, look at how we handle money. We all want to have possessions, experiences, time, and security; but we can’t spend the same dollar twice. If we make the wisest decisions, we may eventually have all four of the things we want. If we, like the Prodigal Son, make the most foolish decisions, we’ll end up with none. Most of our decisions are a mix of wisdom and folly, and we get mixed results and at least some leeway in our future decisions.

     I’m intrigued by the second of America’s Three Little Wars: the China Relief Expedition of 1900. The other two were the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1903).

     Of the nine nations that provided troops, not one of them wanted war. As of June 16, 1900, options remained and war was still avoidable. At 1:20 on the morning of June 17, 1900, however, no one had any option but to go to war.

     How did that happen? Let’s back up another hundred years.

     The sixty-year reign (1735-1796) of Emperor Chien Lung  was truly China’s golden age. China was admired throughout the world. European philosophers spoke of China as an example for the world to emulate; to them, China was a great nation ruled by philosophers and sages. Ships hauled gold and silver to China and returned with silks, porcelains, and many other high-quality Chinese products. China had little use for the products of other lands.

     The hairstyle we call the ponytail was a Western adaptation of the Ch’ing Dynasty queue. In England, Josiah Wedgwood began producing chinaware for domestic consumption. Thomas Minton's Blue Willow chinaware pattern—still popular today—was an attempt to emulate the porcelain style of the late Ming and early Ch’ing Dynasties.

     China’s greatness seemed assured; but, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “Evil things in robes of sorrow assailed the monarch’s high estate. (Ah, let us mourn!--for never morrow shall dawn upon him desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory that blushed and bloomed is but a dim-remembered story of the old time entombed.”

     After 60 years on the throne, Chien Lung abdicated so as not to outshine his grandfather, who had been emperor for 61 years. Corrupt rulers followed in succession, and the royal courts became scenes of conspiracy, graft, and wholesale embezzlement. Chinese sages had always cautioned that the goodness of society—or lack of it—is influenced by the degree of good and evil in a nation’s rulers. China decayed from within.

     This tragedy holds a lesson for America, whose supposed representatives routinely embezzle trillions of dollars on behalf of the international bankers, the military-industrial complex, Big Pharma, disaster capitalists, and other interlocking coteries of robber barons.

     This tragedy also holds a lesson for the government of today’s China. Chinese rulers are trying to clean up corruption and the problems of dangerous merchandise, but they’re making two major mistakes: They’re trying to do it from the top down, and they’re trying to do it while preserving their own privilege to embezzle and enslave. It didn’t work for the Ch’ings, and it’s not working for the Chicoms.

     Throughout the nineteenth century, the Chinese countryside was a stage for revolts, rebellions, and attempts at outright revolution, pretty much as we see in China today. Each year in China, there are around 70,000 riots involving more than 100 people, and most of them are protests against the government. Several European countries and the United States are headed in that direction, however distant this state of affairs may seem.

     Just as China’s current rulers took advantage of weaknesses in Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt rule, and later weaknesses in Mongolia, Tibet, and East Turkestan—and now in Nepal—Western nations and Japan, from the 1830’s onward, took advantage of weaknesses in China, carving up “spheres of influence.” Today’s Chinese rulers complain about the “unequal treaties” forced on China during the nineteenth century. Those treaties were no more bullying or imperialist than the treaties that the current rulers of China inflicted upon Tibet and East Turkestan.

     In his classic work, The Prince, Machiavelli wrote that men are more apt to forgive the killing of their parents than the theft of their patrimony. At the end of the Opium War (1859-1860) British soldiers looted the Summer Palace and stole tens of thousands of valuable Chinese artifacts that eventually found their way into Western museums. These acts of theft and wanton destruction thoroughly embittered the sixteen-year-old girl who would later become the Empress Dowager.  It also clouded her judgment in ways that worked against the British and other foreigners.  To this day, the museums refuse to return the Summer Palace artifacts to China, claiming that they had bought the stolen items from Chinese antique dealers.
     Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Chinese rulers decided to make a giant leap forward in economic reforms. Agrarianism would make way for industrialization. Just as it is today in China, the needs of the people were ignored.

     Since the thirteenth century, boatmen along the waterways were a mainstay of China’s economy. The Grand Canal, in particular, bustled with transport from the Yellow River in the south to the Bai He (White River, a.k.a. Bei Ho, a spelling of North River) at Tientsen (renamed Tianjian) just south of Peking (renamed Beijing).

     With the coming of the railroads, the livelihoods of thousands of boatmen—as well as tens of thousands of related jobs—were in ruins. Discontent against the government multiplied accordingly. This time, though, much Chinese anger was directed at the foreign industrialists who had brought the railroads and other industries to China. It would later spill over to Christian missionaries, who were the most visible symbols of Western imperialism.

     Westerners brought much of this anger on themselves, just as they often do today. They enjoyed privileged positions and, in many cases, exemption from Chinese laws. At the hands of Westerners, many Chinese were subjected to discrimination  and other abuses in their own land—just as people in a number of other countries today suffer abuses at the hands of Western governments and major corporations.

     The de facto ruler of China, Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, advised by the scheming Prince Tuan, took the approach that is favored by today’s Chinese rulers. They diverted anger away from themselves and toward foreign nations (particularly the Russians, Japanese, nationals of eight European nations, and the United States) and foreign nationals (particularly missionaries and businessmen.)

     As you’ll see in part two of this article, that strategy blew up in their faces and led to the downfall of the Ch’ing Dynasty. The present-day governments of the United States, China, Israel, and certain other nations may profit from this lesson.

     The road to war was not all greed, folly, and conflict. In part two of this article, I’ll mention inspiring acts of wisdom, nobility, and sacrifice by several notable people in the quest for mutual understanding and justice. These peacemakers included Prince Fu, of the royal household; and Hudson Taylor, the founder and head of China Inland Mission.
     [When I first posted this article, there seemed to be so little interest in it that, for some months, I didn't bother to write part 2.  I eventually included information about Prince Fu and Hudson Taylor in a later article.  Since then, I've learned that this article, "Leo Tolstoy and the Three Little Wars," has become the third most popular article I've ever written, and that readers have recently shown unexpected interest in the later article.  Please read article "When Americans were Foreigners, and Christians were Marked for Extermination."]

Israel's 9/11 Opportunities

     This is part 4 of a 4-part series on motive, means, and opportunity in the false-flag attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. To assign guilt in a criminal investigation, one must find out who had the motive for the crime, the means of committing the crime, and the opportunity to commit the crime.

     In part 1—“September 11’s Lucky Winners”—I described many ways that Israel benefited from the attack. Benjamin Netanyahu even went as far to say that 9/11 was "good for Israel."  I also showed that Israel not only benefited from the attack; I laid out proofs of Israeli foreknowledge of the attacks.

In part 2—“The ‘Official Story’ of 9/11: A Fairy Tale”—I proved that the nineteen Middle Easterners accused of the 9/11 attack could not possibly have done what they were accused of doing.  The words Official Story, in the title, are placed in quotation marks because of my discovery that there's often a stunning difference between what the corporate media tell us that the 9/11 Commission Report  says and what the 9/11 Commission Report actually says.

     In part 3—“Suspicious Timing: More Evidence of Israeli Prior Knowledge and Planning of 9/11”—I showed that an Israeli front group, supposedly formed in response to the needs of the post-9/11 world, had been formed several months before 9/11. I also proved that the group's leadership considerably overlapped with the leadership of the Project for the New American Century—the neoconservative group whose position papers cited the need for “a new Pearl Harbor” in order to bring about the changes they desired.

     Now we come to part 4: “Israel’s 9/11 Opportunities,” in which I show that most of the opportunities for bringing about the events of 9/11 were in the hands of Israelis and Americans who fronted for Israelis. High-level American officials had the power to help cover up the crime (here), but only Israel and their henchmen had the opportunities to carry out the crime every step of the way.

     What excuses did President Bush, de facto President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice—the unholy trio who lied to the American public over 90 times to get us into an illegal war in Iraq—and their allies make? They made two excuses:

     1. It was a failure of imagination; that is, (as Rice put it) no one could have foreseen that someone would use a commercial airliner as a bomb.
      2. The Bush Administration had relied too heavily on technology.

     The first excuse was disproven almost as soon as it was uttered. Terrorist Ramsey Yosef proposed it in 1993, and Philippine intelligence conveyed the message to the CIA. The CIA studied the possibility that same year. In 1994, author Tom Clancy described such an event as this in his book Debt of Honor. 

     In 1996, the movie The Long Kiss Goodnight was about a false-flag terrorist act killing a projected 4,000 people and blaming it on the Muslims.  (Click here for video clip.) 

     On March 4, 2001, television director Chris Carter chillingly portrayed the events of 9/11 several months before they took place.  In the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, an X-Files spin-off, high-level government officials in the intelligence community used remote-control technology to electronically hijack an airliner, intending to crash it into the World Trade Center and blame it on the Arabs.

     In 2003, the Bush Administration admitted that, on the morning of September 11, 2001, a war games scenario was taking place which posited the use of hijacked commercial airliners as flying bombs.  (Click here.)

     So much for a “failure of imagination.” What about the over-reliance on technology? Who controlled the technology?

     Whoever pulled off 9/11 had to have had the means to get nineteen misfits through security screening. Who was in charge of security at those airports?

     Whoever pulled off 9/11 had to have had the means to prevent America’s military pilots form following normal procedure by scrambling as soon as the airliners veered off course. Who designed the technology on which the military relied for that purpose?

     Ground controllers were confused by computer-simulated planes as a result of the war games that were taking place at the same time as the hijackings. Several orders were given to delete those signals, but the problem continued until after the real terrorist attacks were over.    Who designed the program they were using—the program that made it impossible for air traffic controllers to tell where the real airliners were?

     Who was in charge of security at the World Trade Center up to the day it was destroyed? Who was in charge of port security at New York Harbor? Who designed other security systems that facilitated the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

     Demonstrating who had the technological opportunities to bring about 9/11 leaves me with two unpleasant options. Either I can refer you to the research others have done, or I can, so to speak, try to re-invent the wheel by copying their research. To save both you and me the trouble, I’ll refer you to what others have found.

     The answer to all these questions and more can be found in the Vatic Project article “Israel Did 9/11: All the Proof in the World.” In support of Vatic’s findings, here is an article from the web site What Really Happened, showing that Israelis were in control of security at all three of the airports involved in 9/11.   
     More recently, Vatic has uncovered evidence that the 9/11 mastermind was Dov Zakheim, a reputed dual-citizen Israeli who was well positioned for several opportunities to effect 9/11. I mention this particular video because it addresses one question that “All the Proof in the World” didn’t address: Who designed and marketed the technology that made it possible for airliners to be electronically hijacked (a standard safety feature on all commercial airliners for several decades)? Until Zakheim began working for the Pentagon, he was the CEO of the company that designed and marketed the software that made it possible to precision guide commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. (Click here.)

     There you have it. The Israelis, with their long history of false flag attacks, benefited most from 9/11. Muslims gained nothing but suffering, death, rejection, and ruin from it.

     By the Bush Administration’s admission, 9/11 happened because America’s over-reliance on certain technology. At every turn, that technology was either designed by, or controlled by, Israelis. They, and only they, had the means and the opportunity to use the technology necessary for bringing about the events of 9/11.

     People who are prone to cry, “Conspiracy theorist,” will undoubtedly say that what I’ve written in this series of articles contradicts the 9/11 Commission Report. It doesn’t. Of the 585 pages in the 9/11 Commission Report, only 13 pages describe the Commission’s version of the hijacking. Only 86 pages describe events that occurred that day. Mostly, the 9/11 Commission Report is about terrorism in other parts of the world.  Pages 325 through 585 are devoted entirely on anti-terrorist strategies for the future.
      Bear in mind that the Bush Administration had resisted calls for any investigation of 9/11 at all.  Only public outrage and demand led to the 9/11 Commission convening 441 days after the attacks had occurred.  By contrast, the Monica Lewinsky investigation began less than two weeks after the news broke.  Some $100 million was spent on the Lewinsky investigation, as compared to $14 million for the 9/11 Commission. 
     Even a glance at the table of contents is enough to convince you that the real purpose of the Report was to justify the Bush Administration's war on American liberties and the U.S. government's illegal intervention in other countries.

     Read it. (For a free PDF download, click here.) You’ll be amazed at how little the 9/11 Commission Report says about 9/11. After reading it, you’ll probably ask, “Why?”
Other September 11, 2001, articles in this blog