the day america discovered that superman was not real...

superman

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I woke up around 8:30 a.m., took a shower, and made a mug of Nescafé instant coffee. By the time I opened up my laptop and maneuvered to Common Dreams — the favorite website of all progressives of that time — it was 9 a.m.

Common Dreams was then designed with the important stories in the middle of the page, with brief snippets about less significant issues in a column on the left. It was the left-hand column that featured one sentence in red: “Plane hits World Trade Center.”

This gave me three minutes of delicious ignorance during which it was possible to believe that a plane had hit the World Trade Center’s north tower by accident, three minutes to live in the post-9/11 era without realizing it. Then, at 9:03 a.m., like everyone who’d turned on a television, I saw United Flight 175 smash into the south tower.

The Most Terrifying Thing About 9/11 Was America’s Response

The fear I experienced that terrible day in New York doesn’t begin to compare with the dread I’ve developed watching our path since.

BY Jon Schwarz

I soon left my apartment and walked to Seventh Avenue, where there was an unobstructed view of Fulton Street two miles to the south. What I’d seen on TV was also there, in reality: thousands of people dead or about to die in the most excruciating ways imaginable.

I’ve thought about that moment in one way or another every day since. As a cosseted, white, male, college-educated American, I’d had fulsome opportunities to consume history’s many hideous events mediated through movies and books. Yet the mortifying truth is that I’d never genuinely understood, not just with my brain but also in my stomach and intestines, that the victims of all of them were as real in every way as I am. World War II, I’ve realized, was not a long-running show on the History Channel. The Rwandan genocide was not a movie starring Don Cheadle. The El Mozote massacre was not an artful article by Mark Danner in the New Yorker.

Before long, I was back at my building, where my upstairs neighbor was describing her morning to several attentive listeners. She’d been at her job on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center’s south tower at 8:46 a.m. and by happenstance was glancing out the window at the north tower as American Flight 11 flew into it. She said she and her co-workers were advised not to evacuate, but half of them did anyway, and had made it down in the stuffy stairwell to below the 78th floor when their building was hit by Flight 175. So they lived. They hurried to the ground floor, and then she’d just walked home, as the south tower collapsed behind her.

There she was, in her wee Greenwich Village apartment, every inch utilized like in a cabin on a ship. She’d been grazed by the wings of — not the Angel of Death, exactly, since that constantly visits everywhere on Earth, but a more specific celestial being, the Angel of Humanity’s Love of Ultraviolence.

And there I was, almost exactly the same as her. My monkey brain slowly reasoned to itself: If it could almost happen to her, it could happen to her, and if it could happen to her, it could happen to me. That night I dreamed that I was in Baghdad, the U.S. was about to start bombing, and though I ran and ran, I couldn’t escape.

WE NOW KNOW that later that day then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was barking instructions at one of his minions, who faithfully wrote them down. The minion’s notes, later obtained by a blogger via a Freedom of Information Act request, included this line of Rumsfeld’s: “go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”

Ever since I read that, I’ve pondered this question: What exactly was this “it” — related to 9/11 and not — that Rumsfeld was so desperate to sweep up? And why did we have to keep at it for 20 years, at the cost of $8 trillion and 1 million lives?

There’s a spectrum of possible answers. Some of them are quasi-rational and are articulated in the effluvia continually generated by the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. But I’ve come to believe that we can’t stop there, and a deeper, more accurate explanation can only be found in the murky psyches of the people like Rumsfeld at the top of U.S. society.

Rumsfeld himself wrote a memo months before 9/11 in which he explained the core problem facing the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union: There were now “new regional powers” that were “arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis.” In other words, we did not face the threat of being attacked; rather, we faced the threat of being deterred by other countries when we wanted to attack them.

The same perspective was expressed at great length in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” a famous paper produced in 2000 by the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. First of all, it stated, all in bold, “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”

But there was a snake in this Garden of Eden. Technological developments might “soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action. … When their missiles are tipped with warheads carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, even weak regional powers have a credible deterrent. … America and its allies, rather than the Soviet Union, have become the primary objects of deterrence. … Projecting conventional military forces or simply asserting political influence abroad, particularly in times of crisis, will be far more complex and constrained.”

This was too brutal a worldview for American politicians to articulate. But it at least was logical: We’re going to run the world for as long as possible, and it’s therefore impermissible for countries we don’t like to prevent us from bombing them.

Things went downhill from there, however. In a 2004 Esquire article, a “senior [Bush] administration official” explained why the U.S. had needed to invade Iraq. It turned out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued existence in power “resulted in a very bad message to the world, including to Islamic terrorists, that America … could be defied.”

This emotionalism about Saddam was bipartisan. In 1993, the Clinton administration proclaimed that Iraq, having been defeated in the 1991 Gulf War, had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush while the elder Bush was taking a victory lap in Kuwait. This later turned out to have been made up in exactly the same way as all the tales about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, Clinton officials were filled with rage about it. As the New Yorker reported at the time, they were furious about Saddam’s “near-suicidal defiance of American pressure. … Many officials in the Pentagon and the State Department had become increasingly angry with Iraq in the early months of the Clinton Administration, feeling that Saddam Hussein had been ‘getting away with things.’”

This is clearly not the language of adults discussing how to deal with other adults. Rather, it’s the mindset of frustrated parents whose children won’t do what they’re told.

Even this, though, was more sober than the quasi-sexual perspective of others in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Thomas Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, famously explained in 2003 a few months after the invasion of Iraq, “We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world. … Well, suck on this! [That] is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. … We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s similar worldview was described in journalist Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial”:

“Why did you support the Iraq war?” [Bush aide Michael] Gerson asked him.

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”

Why are all these people lost in these disturbing fantasy worlds? After witnessing the last two decades, I’d suggest that we need to understand a peculiar quirk of human psychology: The powerful always loathe those with less power. My grandfather was a historian who spent his life studying the Spanish conquest of the so-called New World, and as he put it:

The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called inferior because they are different — because they are others, the strangers — has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be the dominant theme in human history.

The “it,” then, that Rumsfeld wanted to destroy on 9/11 was almost certainly every frustration he felt at the rest of humanity. This started with Al Qaeda and easily extended to Saddam and Iraq. But we can be sure that he also hoped to cow all the non-white people around the globe who were generally failing to comply. Next he could overwhelm the obstinate Europeans with their affectations to a higher morality. Obviously the Democrats, who continually tried to steal his money, would have to be crushed. And then at long last his daughter, going to Oberlin and dating that white guy with dreads, would see the error of her ways.

Of course, this doesn’t make “sense” in the way we want to think of it. But neither has the “war on terror.” It’s been 20 years of mindless violence, cruelty, and waste, the U.S. lashing out like a gigantic beast without a functioning frontal cortex, visiting numberless 9/11s on innocents as it staggered around the globe. But that does make sense if you ignore all the speeches and op-eds and instead start from the presumption that the political class running this country is overflowing with the primate wrath of the powerful who are nonetheless not omnipotent.

In the weeks after 9/11, I told friends who didn’t live in New York that Al Qaeda had really put the terror back in terrorism. But the fear I experienced that terrible day does not begin to compare with the dread I’ve developed since. On September 11, 2001, I realized that I was on Al Qaeda’s list. Since then, I’ve learned that I’m also on the list of the far more mighty people in charge of America, just a little further down. Even with the most concrete dangers facing us — the destruction of a livable biosphere, an enduring pandemic, and much more — they are absolutely committed to following the same path, driven onward by complex delusions. Power tends to corrupt, not just in a standard moral sense but also intellectually and emotionally, and they’ve held extreme power for a very long time. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that if we let them, their corruption will surely destroy us all.

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/10/september-11-america-response/

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By Gus Leonisky at 11 Sep 2021 - 6:46am
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I woke up...

I don't know why. I had a nightmare something terrible had happened. I woke up in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep. I turned the TV on to distract my mind. It was just before 3:00 AM in Sydney. By then, for the previous three or four hours the news had been ablaze with the attack on the Twin Towers... GL.

By Gus Leonisky at 11 Sep 2021 - 6:55am
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the "crackpot" theories...

First a view from Gordon Duff...

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

We all remember 9/11 as we remember so many other days, the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy murders or, for me, the fall of Saigon.

For me, 9/11 began a new journey. I had some years ago tried to move my own career from defense and intelligence endeavors to the sane and rational, real work with real people. Defense and intelligence work is hardly real, it involves platform upon platform of lies and fantasy. The whole thing is a con, spies, wars, terrorism, the entire multi-polar world is pure theatre.

Let’s go back to that day. It began with hijacked planes. There had been hijackings for decades but there had also been efforts to end hijacking. Sky Marshals were put on planes to mollify the public but behind that other things were done, including “shoot down” orders for any plane flying over North America with a terrorist in control.

That decision was made and implemented many years ago based on a “Black Sunday” scenario, an aircraft hitting a Super Bowl or similar target, killing up to 100,000.

The US keeps supersonic aircraft armed on the tarmac across the country that can reach any hijacked plane on afterburner in minutes.

There is no choice they are to be shot down. Thus, 9/11 wasn’t real.

Then there is that other thing, for fly-by-wire planes and that is an override that will land planes that is part of the engine management system. It is run by the CIA. Satellite communications can override flight controls and auto-land any advanced aircraft. MH 370 had one of these systems, so did the planes listed as “hijacked” on 9/11.

All military and intelligence people know this, around the world. Wonder why it was never mentioned?

Then the Pentagon, the idea of a plane flown just above the Potomac at 550 miles per hour. Problem here, at below 25,000 feet, any plane with fuel filled wings, like an airliner, will come apart. All the 9/11 planes violated physical laws.

They can’t fly that fast that low and if they could, the control surfaces would have quit working meaning they would have simply augured into the ground totally out of control.

Of course, I know this because a close friend is a longtime airline pilot and head of security at a major airline. Two of my friends are engineers at Boeing.

Then a group of Architects and Engineers claimed even planes at impossible speeds could not have seriously damaged the buildings, not just hundreds, more, and they are highly qualified people.

But then even they began offering strange solutions, claiming energy weapons that don’t exist or thermite powder took down the towers.

Their most important point is that Building 7, a third tower that was only slightly damaged and never hit by a plane collapsed also.

Their other claims, like thermite powder, are not just unlikely they are outlandishly false. There is always the “how did they do it” issue where that ploy ends in failure.

As all of this is happening, quite predictably, the world is immersed in war. America has set up secret prisons and a massive program of kidnapping and torturing “suspected terrorists.”

For those working in defense and intelligence, the Global War on Terror has drawn all into a single effort, not to defeat terrorism but rather to join the queue in raking in a portion of the endless billions paid to anyone willing to join the insanity, a war on imaginary terror.

You see, some of us were around for the conflict in Afghanistan that began so many years ago. The US, then aided by Pakistan, created terror groups to overthrow the Kabul government and war on the Soviet Union.

Around the same time, the US also set up a similar capability, secretly headquartered in Libya, to fight a terror war in Europe in case the Soviets staged a successful invasion of Western Europe.

This effort was called Operation Gladio, where terror groups were armed, taught bomb making and put in “cold storage” for a day they would be needed.

But then they brought themselves out of cold storage, Black September, the Red Brigades and other CIA created organization, as with ISIS and al Qaeda.

For the next 20 years they kidnapped, bombed and terrorized Europe.

They did the same thing in Central and Latin America as well.

This puts us back at the usual questions. Why would the US do this? What capabilities make something like this possible? This kind of operation or set of operations would require broad corruption in both military and intelligence.

What is obvious is that however corrupt of mismanaged the United States had been in the past, and the war in Vietnam is evidence of massive corruption and control of government by those who profit from war, but this is worse.

At some point, the press began to stop supporting the Vietnam War and, as activist veterans, a group I joined after returning from the war, began leading protests, the war was exposed for what it was.

So, what changed? Why no more protests? Why no more independent press? Where did America’s “left” go?

That last question is easy. It was Benjamin Netanyahu that told us that 9/11 was very good for Israel. Well, Jewish Americans, with up to 1 million holding Israeli passports, make up America’s “left.”

What happened in America is that After the Reagan presidency, the last American strong enough to stand up to Israel, every president since has been answerable to the billionaires that control both political parties in the US, billionaires who are in most cases also Israeli citizens.

Opposing the will of these billionaires and the organizations they run, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia along with congress and the Supreme Court, let us not forget they run the stock markets as well, is suicide.

You see, they also run the press, they own it and that isn’t conjecture.

Thus, any who oppose Islamophobia or Russophobia or who question who really funds terror groups like ISIS or those who really staged 9/11 face charges of anti-Semitism.

No one survives that kind of smear, just ask Jeremy Corbyn.

Conclusion

For 20 years, reality itself has been assaulted. We have a worldwide duality, the ignorant and “led” against those who understand but choose silence and survival.

Planes don’t knock down steel framed buildings.

Steel doesn’t burn from kerosene and ethylene glycol and kerosene fires, meaning “jet fuel.”

You can’t hijack a plane in the US, it will either be shot down or, since some time in the early 1990s, simply be robotically landed.

You see this done on TV all the time and it isn’t new. If a Tesla can drive through New York traffic at rush hour, a jet airliner can be landed using “fly by wire” that has been around forever. From Wikipedia:

Servo-electrically operated control surfaces were first tested in the 1930s on the Soviet Tupolev ANT-20. Long runs of mechanical and hydraulic connections were replaced with wires and electric servos.

In 1941, an engineer from the Siemens, Karl Otto Altvater developed and tested the first fly-by-wire system for the Heinkel He-111, where the aircraft was fully controlled by electronic impulses.

In 1934, Karl Otto Altvater filed a patent about the automatic-electronic system, which flared the aircraft, when it was close to the ground.

The first pure electronic fly-by-wire aircraft with no mechanical or hydraulic backup was the Apollo Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), first flown in 1968.

The first non-experimental aircraft that was designed and flown (in 1958) with a fly-by-wire flight control system was the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow, a feat not repeated with a production aircraft (though the Arrow was cancelled with five built) until Concorde in 1969, which became the first fly-by-wire airliner. This system also included solid-state components and system redundancy, was designed to be integrated with a computerised navigation and automatic search and track radar, was flyable from ground control with data uplink and downlink, and provided artificial feel (feedback) to the pilot.

In the UK the two seater Avro 707C was flown with a Fairey system with mechanical backup in the early to mid-60s. The program was curtailed when the air-frame ran out of flight time.

In 1972, the first digital fly-by-wire fixed-wing aircraft without a mechanical backup to take to the air was an F-8 Crusader, which had been modified electronically by NASA of the United States as a test aircraft; the F-8 used the Apollo guidance, navigation and control hardware.

This was preceded in 1964 by the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) which pioneered fly-by-wire flight with no mechanical backup. Control was through a digital computer with three analog redundant channels. In the USSR, the Sukhoi T-4 also flew. At about the same time in the United Kingdom a trainer variant of the British Hawker Hunter fighter was modified at the British Royal Aircraft Establishment with fly-by-wire flight controls for the right-seat pilot.

The Airbus A320 began service in 1988 as the first airliner with digital fly-by-wire controls.

Today, the last fake 9/11 controversy is over the role of Saudi Arabia in funding and organizing 9/11. This, of course, is a “con” as well and predicated on the false belief that the Saudi Royal family, which is “Saudi Arabia” was a “blood enemy” of Israel.

The years since and the partnership, an open one, between Israel and Saudi Arabia against Syria, Iraq and Lebanon is long a matter of fact though not “official history.”

When we travel back in time, knowing what we know, watching the videos of planes flying 550 miles per hour at near sea level, and the massive explosions that brought down the three towers, the dread some of us felt that day wasn’t over those killed.

It was over those we knew would die, perhaps even in the millions, and the assault on world order, human rights and reason itself that would ensue.

Second, we "need to know" otherwise we invent crackpot conspiracy theories... It's in our curious nature... Because we don't know the universe, we invent the "idea of god". And we enshrine this stupid idea in "freedom of religion" which basically demands us to accept loony "conspiracy theories" that we've committed a sin before we were born and that at the end of time, we'll be judged by the supremo — either good or bad... But back to 9/11 where the US government has hidden many facts and figures, in the same vein as the murder of JFK. Documents are hidden. It is likely that these documents that Joe Biden wants to release to the horror of the "intelligence" services, contain as much crappot (or crackpot) concept as what the ignorant public, us, have concocted so we can believe in something godly...

The BBC does a fact check of course, without any of the REAL facts in hand, but who cares:

The first 9/11 conspiracy theories appeared on the internet just hours after the attacks, on 11 September 2001, and with the rise of social media, have grown in scope and scale ever since.

Extensive reports by the 9/11 Commission, US government agencies and expert groups have refuted the existence of any hidden conspiracy.

But activist groups in the US and elsewhere, the 9/11 Truth movement, say the facts have been hidden.

Some leading members of the movement have also embraced conspiracies about Covid-19 and vaccines.

And some senior politicians, celebrities and media figures have also disputed the official account.

'World government'

The rise of new conspiracy movements online, such as QAnon, whose followers, among other conspiratorial views, believe a US "deep state" responsible for the attacks, has kept these conspiracy theories in circulation and brought them to a far larger audience.

And online clips from a series of films known as Loose Change have reinforced many of the falsehoods circulating.

Some claim the US government staged the attacks or knew of them in advance and allowed them.

And these falsehoods mesh with more recent online movements' belief global elites plan to curtail civil liberties in response to the attacks and facilitate the establishment of an authoritarian world government.

A claim widely shared online, "Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams," suggests the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were demolished by explosives.

But according to an official report, the crashed planes considerably damaged support columns of both the towers and dislodged fire-proofing.

Additionally, the fires reached up to 1,000C in some areas, causing the steel beams to warp and the eventual collapse of the buildings.

Uncontrolled fires

The collapse of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-storey skyscraper in the vicinity of the Twin Towers, has attracted many conspiracy theories, some of which were trending on major social networks on last year's 9/11 anniversary.

This building - containing offices of the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Office of Emergency Management - collapsed hours after the Twin Towers without being hit by a plane or directly targeted.

The evolution of 9/11 conspiracy theories

But in 2008, a three-year investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded it had collapsed because of intense and uncontrolled fires - lasting for nearly seven hours - started by debris from the fall of the nearby North Tower.

7 World Trade Center was the first tower of its kind to collapse because a fire.

But in 2017, the Plasco tower in the Iranian capital, Tehran, became the second.

Go viral

The fact the collapse of 7 World Trade Center was announced in a live report by BBC News correspondent Jane Stanley - while it was still visibly standing behind her - has been cited by conspiracy theorists as evidence major media organisations were part of the inside-job plot.

The Reuters news agency had mistakenly reported the collapse of the building, which was also picked up by CNN, just before the live report.

Reuters later issued a correction - but clips of the report continue go viral in the days leading up to 9/11 anniversaries.

Was the BBC part of the 9/11 conspiracy?

Business jet

Some online conspiracy theories suggest US missiles were fired at the Pentagon, as part of a government plot, and the hole left in the building was too small to have been caused by a passenger plane.

But a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers told Popular Mechanics magazine the size and shape of the hole was due to one wing of the Boeing 757 hitting the ground and the other being severed on impact with the building.

Meanwhile, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to take control of the plane from the hijackers.

Online theories claim it was shot down by a white business jet flying into a nearby airport.

But aviation officials had requested the jet inspect the area, which it did, reporting back evidence of a big hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it.

Vice-President Dick Cheney later revealed in his autobiography that following the attack on the Twin Towers, he had ordered the shooting down of any commercial airliner believed to have been hijacked.

But in the chaos and confusion that followed the attack, his order was not passed to fighter pilots, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

'Jewish elites'

Another theory falsely claims no Jewish people were killed in the attacks because 4,000 Jewish employees at the World Trade Center had received advance notice not to turn up for work.

Believers conclude the Israeli government mounted the attacks to goad the US into attacking its regional enemies or responsibility lies with powerful Jewish elites who control world events from the shadows.

But of the 2,071 victims of 9/11 who worked at the World Trade Center, 119 were confirmed to be Jewish and at least a further 72 were believed to be Jewish.

That would constitute 9.2% of the victims, according to research by BBC documentary Conspiracy Files, broadly in line with the 9.7% of New York's commuting population believed to be Jewish at the time.

And some estimate up to 400 Jewish people might have died that day.

Similar theories surround other states, including Iraq and Iran, but no evidence of their direct involvement has ever been found.

radio-controlled flying machines...

The first pilotless vehicles were developed in Britain and the USA during the First World War. Britain’s Aerial Target, a small radio-controlled aircraft, was first tested in March 1917 while the American aerial torpedo known as the Kettering Bug first flew in October 1918. Although both showed promise in flight tests, neither were used operationally during the war.

....

During the inter-war period the development and testing of unmanned aircraft continued. In 1935 the British produced a number of radio-controlled aircraft to be used as targets for training purposes. It's thought the term 'drone' started to be used at this time, inspired by the name of one of these models, the DH.82B Queen Bee. Radio-controlled drones were also manufactured in the United States and used for target practice and training.

Reconnaissance UAVs were first deployed on a large scale in the Vietnam War. Drones also began to be used in a range of new roles, such as acting as decoys in combat, launching missiles against fixed targets and dropping leaflets for psychological operations.

Following the Vietnam War other countries outside of Britain and the United States began to explore unmanned aerial technology. New models became more sophisticated, with improved endurance and the ability to maintain greater height. In recent years models have been developed that use technology such as solar power to tackle the problem of fuelling longer flights.

Drones now have many functions, ranging from monitoring climate change to carrying out search operations after natural disasters, photography, filming, and delivering goods. But their most well-known and controversial use is by the military for reconnaissance, surveillance and targeted attacks. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States in particular has significantly increased its use of drones. They are mostly used for surveillance in areas and terrains where troops are unable to safely go. But they are also used as weapons and have been credited with killing suspected militants. Their use in current conflicts and over some countries has raised questions about the ethics of this kind of weaponry, especially when it results in civilian deaths, either due to inaccurate data or because of their proximity to a ‘target’.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-brief-history-of-drones

Read Duff's article (the "crackpot" theories...) above this one...

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By Gus Leonisky at 11 Sep 2021 - 6:15pm
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