Happy New Year Folks. May it be a happy and productive one for you.

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“I know many qualified engineers and scientists have said the WTC collapsed from explosives. In fact, if you look at the manner in which it fell, you have to give their conclusions credibility.”
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of Treasury under Reagan.

“What I saw on September 11th was a perfectly executed act that could have happened only with the support of the Intelligence services.”
Andreas Von Buelow, former German Secretary of Defence.

Before I arrived in the US, the only major article I had read which challenged the official version of events of 11th September 2001 was written by Michael Meacher, the British MP and Environment Minister between 1997 and 2003. In the Guardian newspaper of 6th March 2003, Meacher questioned the fact that not one single fighter plane was scrambled to intercept the hijacked planes until after the 3rd plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38. He pointed out that between September 2000 and June 2001 fighter aircraft were launched on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft.

Meacher recorded the fact that the FBI turned down the request of US agents to search the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, after it was discovered that he had radical Islamist ties. A month before 9-11, one agent wrote that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the twin towers. Meacher also quoted a whistle blowing FBI agent, Robert Wright, who revealed that the FBI had not wanted any arrests. In November 2001, the US airforce had apparently had Al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders in its sights at least 10 times in a 6 week period but had been unable to secure permission from on high to attack.

Shortly after I arrived in Tucson, I saw an advert in one of the local papers for a screening of a film called ‘September 11th Revisited – Were explosives used to bring down the buildings?’ (http://www.911revisited.com/) I went to see it and discovered that, far from being a fanciful conspiracy theory, it was a serious and credible piece of work. I found out that there is a huge body of work out there which falls within the ambit of the 9-11 truth movement. There are many scholars, politicians and intellectuals who believe that the US administration was complicit in the 9-11 attacks. The following link:

http://patriotsquestion911.com/professors.html contains the names, biographies and brief statements of 100 such professors. You can see straight away that these individuals are well respected, often brilliant people, who have reached the top of their fields of study. You may have heard of some of them. Not even the most militant defenders of the official line can dismiss this array of talent as crackpot conspiracy theorists.

There are scores of forceful arguments made by the 9-11 truth movement which cast serious doubt on the US government’s explanation of the events of 9 – 11. Here are some of the principal points:

1:
Office fires burn at temperatures of 600 – 800 F. Jet fuel is an ordinary hydrocarbon; its maximum burning temperature is 1200F. Steel melts at 2700F. Neither jet fuel nor the burning contents of the buildings could have caused the towers’ steel structures to melt and then fall.

2:
No steel framed building before or since 9-11 has ever collapsed due to fire. The Project manager of the World Trade Centre (WTC), Frank DeMartini, has confirmed that the buildings were designed to withstand the impact of planes hitting them.

3:
The collapse of the South Tower in 10 seconds and the North in 9 is even faster than free fall with only air resistance. Even if the steel had melted the buildings would have displayed completely different behaviour, in the manner of some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow.

4:
Building 7, a 47 –storey skyscraper which was part of the WTC complex, but was not struck by a plane, collapsed symmetrically, in the exact manner of a controlled demolition, in 6.5 seconds, at 5.20 p.m. on September 11th. This event was, incredibly, omitted from the 9-11 Commission Report. It turns out to have been occupied by the Intelligence services.

5:
‘Redundant’ welded steel buildings like the Twin Towers, built with more than 100,000 tons of steel, are not even capable of ‘pancake collapse’ which normally only occurs with concrete structures of ‘lift slab’ construction.

6:
The rubble from the Twin Towers’ collapse was carted away and the steel immediately sold and shipped overseas without examination.

7:
Prior to the attacks, enormous profits were made by insiders on the plummeting stock prices of United and American airlines. Why did the head of AB Brown Trust, where $5 million of those stock winnings were made, quietly resign on 9-11?

8:
The owner of the WTC, Larry Silverstein, insured the buildings against destruction by terrorist attacks for billions of dollars, weeks before 9 – 11.

9:
Multiple air – defence drills were planned for the morning of 9 – 11. These exercises left only 2 fighter jets available to protect the entire northeastern United States.

10:
The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757. No wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail. The Pentagon’s own videotape does not show a 757 hitting the building, even though, at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 71-foot Pentagon is high.

11:
The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory – flying at high speed barely above ground level – physically impossible; and if it had come in at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater.

12:
If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there would have been a debris field of about a city block in size. In fact, the debris was distributed over an area of about 8 square miles, explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government’s official scenario. All that was visible at the crash site was a smoking hole in the ground.

13:
In his testimony to the 9 – 11 Commission, Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta, stated that whilst in an underground bunker at the White House, he saw Vice-President, Dick Cheney, castigate an officer who, as a plane drew ever closer to the Pentagon, asked ‘Do the orders still stand?’

14:
Audio tapes of interviews with air traffic controllers on duty on 9 – 11 were intentionally destroyed.

15:
William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower, and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the sub basements, prior to the airplane’s impact. This has now been corroborated in a study which shows that there was seismic activity some 14 to 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.

16:
George Bush’s brother, Marvin P Bush, was a principal of Securacom, the company in charge of security at the WTC. The buildings were evacuated on several occasions in the weeks prior to 9 – 11.

It seems to me that the debate around conspiracy theories has long been skewed. Why are people who have the audacity to suggest that a state or government is behind a shocking event usually dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theorists? As Scholars for 9 – 11 Truth (http://st911.org/ http://st911.org/petition/) have pointed out, the official line is no more or less a conspiracy theory than any alternative version of eve
nts.

Here is a link for an excellent fictional piece entitled ‘Confessions of a 9-11 hit man.’

http://www.rense.com/general73/confess.htm

‘Osama Bin Laden is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive.’ Donald Rumsfeld October 2002

‘And it is not knowable if force will be used (in Iraq), but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks, I doubt six months.’ Donald Rumsfeld February 2003

PRETTY IN PINK OR A PALE IMITATION?

What a great day! The Democrats seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the first self-proclaimed socialist, yes socialist, is elected to the Senate, Rummy resigns and the Nicaraguan cold war warrior, Daniel Ortega, is returned to power after 16 years. The great unwashed, aka the much maligned American electorate, have spoken. It looks like it may be the beginning of the end for the nasty neo-cons and, just to rub it in, one of their own backyard betes noires comes back to haunt them.

So can we now look forward to a more enlightened period in which progressive and rationalist elements are able to reassert themselves? Will some of the sacred cows that have been jettisoned i.e. adherence to the rule of law and a strict prohibition on torture, be reinstated?

With regard to the US, there’s clearly been a small shift back towards the centre and a desire for a more consensual politics. The black Democratic Senator and potential Presidential candidate, Barak Obama, has said that Americans are tired of the ‘slash and burn’ politics of the last few years and are searching for ‘common values and common ideals.’ That may be true but Obama himself is a good example of the lack of radicalism and continued allure of social conservatism. He wore God on his sleeve during his campaign as did other Democratic candidates, in a bid to break the Republican stranglehold on the Almighty. Bob Casey, the Democrat who was elected to the Senate in Pennsylvania, is a pro-life, Catholic. Support for stem cell research and gay marriage or legal union is about as good as it gets at the liberal end of the Party.

In Arizona, referendums proposing a whole raft of hard line immigration measures were all passed, as was one advocating a zero – tolerance approach to methamphetamine users. Illegal immigrants charged with a serious felony cannot now obtain bail and have had their access to public services severely restricted. English is now the official state language. On a more positive note, the minimum wage has been increased from $5.15 to $6.75 an hour and, last but not least, great news for calves and pregnant pigs who will now be guaranteed enough space to fully extend their limbs and turn around in their cages. Now that’s what I call radical!

And what of Ortega? He’s sold himself as a reformed character, saying that he’s no longer a revolutionary Marxist. Indeed, he actually adopted pink as his campaign colour. He’s insisted that foreign investment is welcome and that private capital would not be under threat. Astonishingly, his Vice – Presidential running mate is a former Contra rebel (right – wing American backed paramilitaries who fought against his regime). To add insult to injury, he managed to change the electoral rules by cutting a deal with a reactionary former President in the country’s Legislature. He says that he still wants to put the country’s poor first and there are many of them. After Haiti, it’s the poorest country in Central America.

Following the Sandinista movement’s accession to power in 1979, production and consumption of food doubled and serious malnutrition disappeared. Not one single baby died for a year. But, in terms of redistribution etc, when he was voted out of office in 1990 (people, desperate for an end to civil war and the US blockade, were paid $40 each to vote for Violetta Chamorra, the Washington backed candidate) most of the economy was still in private hands. So, even then, the rhetoric was unable to be translated into reality.

Hamstrung by external interference, this has long tended to be the case as far as the left in South and Central America is concerned. Salvador Allende in Chile was hardly a Marxist but was always capable of convincing class – war rhetoric. His purpose was to stimulate the economy by implementing Keynesian (stimulating demand for goods and pursuing full – employment in a mixed economy) economic policies. He never sought to dismantle the Capitalist system and initiated moderate land reform and partial nationalization.

Today, for all his anti – Bush / American imperialist polemic (welcome though it is in terms of someone as high profile as a head of state being bold enough to challenge the world’s super power) Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has a bark which is worse than his bite. His anti – imperialist and redistributionist measures constitute irritants to rather than a full – frontal assault on Capital. In 2001, he introduced a law requiring the sale of untilled land to the landless and subsequently, the Venezuelan Congress voted to compel private banks to dedicate 20% of their lending portfolio to ‘micro – loans’ for small businesses and small plot farmers. He also instituted a new hydrocarbons law in 2001, such that the major oil multinationals (Exxon, BP, Shell etc), would only get to keep 70% of the revenues from the sale of Venezuelan crude, instead of 84%. In 2005, Chavez withdrew $20 billion of Venezuela’s petrodollars from the US Federal Reserve and deposited the money in an account with the International Bank of Settlement for Investment in Latin America.

I guess our perception on all these things depends on whether we see the glass as half full or half empty. Liberals in the US tend to put a positive gloss on any gains, however miniscule, which is fair enough. Unreconstructed socialists who hark back to a pre-Reagan / Thatcher era are less easily placated.

It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can re-claim the Presidency in 2008 and if those sacred cows can ever be fully restored. As for the first self-proclaimed socialist in the Senate, his name’s Bernie Sanders and he was elected in Vermont. He calls himself a ‘democratic socialist’ and has vowed to fight for the rights of working families and immigrants and against the war in Iraq.

Check out an excellent magazine called Dissent. On the Home Page there’s a great article by Daphne Aviater on Bolivia as well as the postscript to Nicholas Jahr’s article entitled ‘Corruption and Reconstruction in Liberia’ which I also highly recommend and can be found at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=653

A MEMORABLE KISSINGER DIATRIBE

I wanted to share with you this delicious Henry Kissinger put down by Molly Ivins in the October 7th edition of the Arizona Daily Star:

The Old War Criminal is back. I try not to hold grudges, but I must admit I have never lost one ounce of rancour towards Henry Kissinger, that cynical, slithery, self-absorbed, pathological liar. He has all the loyalty and principle of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, whom Napolean described as “a piece of dung in a silk stocking.”

Come to think of it, Talleyrand looks pretty good compared to Kissinger, who always aspired to be Metternich (a 19th-century Austrian diplomat). Count the number of Americans and Vietnamese who died between 1969 and 1973 and see if you can find any indication he ever gave a damn.

As for Kissinger’s getting the Nobel Peace Prize, it is a thing so wrong it has come to define wrongness – as in, “As weird as the time Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.”

TUCSON TOPS THE MILLION MARK

Tucson’s population has reached a million, making it the 39th most populace city in the US. It’s growing rapidly and is expected to be the 5th most populace by 2040. Maybe I was the mil
lionth resident, I better get myself down to the Town Hall to see if there’s a prize on offer. You never know, maybe I’ll get a gift token for the local Reptile Store (photo on the way). Quite fancy a pet snake. Could call it Henry Talleyrand or Charles Maurice de Kissinger which I’m sure would please Molly! But I digress……

The population mix here is as follows: White: 58%; Hispanic: 32%; Black: 3%; American Indian: 2.5%; Asian/Pacific Islander: 2.5%; 2 or more races: 1.5%; Other: 0.5%. I have been pleasantly surprised at the diversity in Tucson, it’s greater than I expected. Tucson was under Spanish rule until 1821 when Mexico won its independence. In 1853/4, it became part of the US following the purchase of 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory for $10 million. Most of Arizona, along with nearly half of Mexican territory, was transferred to American ownership in 1848, following the Mexican / American war.

Apparently, there are 752, 270 vehicles registered in Pima County (in which Tucson is situated), 107,160 licensed dogs, 364 schools, 489 churches (there seems to be one every 200 or so metres), 68,000 residents with asthma,
41,258 swimming pools, 129 ATM’s, 645 traffic lights, 244 gas stations and 20,000 + streetlights. They do love licensing and logging everything here. There’s a notice in the park downtown which says that it’s illegal to drink beer without a license. I think I’ll apply for one just for the hell of it. Watch this space.

A friend of mine emigrated from his native country (he does not want me to specify which one) to the states about 6 years ago after winning an immigration lottery. At his U S citizenship interview a few months ago, he was pressurised by the female officer to say who he would fight for in a war between the US and his homeland. His instant retort was that such a scenario would not happen, particularly as both countries are close allies. The officer was not prepared to let him off the hook. ‘We need to know that you’re with us. We have to know that your loyalty has no limits.’ ‘Yes but…but….’he stammered, as he felt his temperature rise. ‘No buts Mister’, the officer was unyielding.‘Yes but….yes but…..OK, YES.’

After that, he recounted to me, his attitude changed and he answered questions matter – of – factly. ‘I did not care anymore if they accepted me or not.’ He need not have worried. His citizenship was duly granted. Just as well, because he has precious little else to show for his 6 years here.

A qualified and experienced computer programmer back home, he has never been able to secure a job in his chosen profession in the US. 9 – 11 happened a few months after he arrived and the change in attitudes towards a large chunk of foreigners, he says, put paid to his chances of being given a fair crack of the whip. Her has spent most of his time doing night shifts in gas stations or convenience stores.

He even applied to join the National Guard but was turned down because of a large scar on his knee, the result of a ligament operation years ago. Apparently, they were suspicious that he might have been a spy with a chip (micro not fried) implanted in is leg.

A few weeks ago, his shop was held up at gunpoint and he was so shaken up that he has not worked since. From what I can see the victim support network is pretty good, although my friend has turned down the offer of counselling. He has received a letter informing him that the perpetrator of the crime has been caught and has agreed to a plea bargain. The advantage of this, the letter says, is to save the taxpayer the cost of a trial. Furthermore, the offender will be the one responsible for any compensation which may be paid to the victim and will not be eligible for release until he has served a minimum of 85% of his custodial sentence. Thereafter, he will have to undertake community service for the remaining 15%.

No doubt all of this would please Daily Mail readers and the law and order lobby in the UK.

I’m not sure whether it’s a defence mechanism but my friend is professing indifference to everything. ‘I don’t care’ is his stock response. When I asked him what his views on the plea bargain were and whether he thought bail should be granted, he just said ‘I don’t care. In prison, out of prison, not a bother for me.’

Rather like a character from one of the French author, Michel Houellebecq’s books, he’s full of comic nihilism, ennui and misanthropy. He has turned down the offer of counselling and shows no interest in applying for compensation for loss of earnings. ‘But you could use the money couldn’t you? I asked, in the hope that he might change his mind. ‘I don’t care’ he said, ‘what will happen if I get compensation? They will rob me again on street or I will get cancer from 30 cigarettes every day I smoke. What’s going to happen is going to happen. It all sucks.’

After that, I decided to leave him to his own devices. But the next day, I couldn’t resist asking him one last question. I enquired as to whether his capitulation in the citizenship interview still weighed on his mind. In all fairness, he did dwell on the question for a few seconds before replying ‘I don’t care. All the government’s suck.’
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I read that Wal – Mart banned the sale of the 2004 debut album by the Scissor Sisters which sold millions in the UK. Apparently, they objected to the lyrical content. Presumably songs about transvestites selling their bodies whilst on acid did not go down well in the Wal – Mart boardroom. Interestingly, the album is said to have only sold about 283, 000 copies in the US.
The group believe that the fact that 3 of them are openly gay and that they all act and dress flamboyantly does not meet with approval in the highly puritanical atmosphere in the states.

I haven’t been in Tucson long enough to make any meaningful judgements about local people’s attitudes. However, from listening to local radio stations and reading local newspapers I have been quite impressed with the issues being debated. The environment, domestic violence and the advantages of firms employing people in their 50′s and 60′s are all being discussed.

In terms of the immigration issue, it’s clear that it’s every bit as contentious, and divisive, as in the UK.

But I won’t dwell on that right now because I’m off to Whataburger for a quadruple cheeseberger with mayo on the side, hash browns with melted jalapeno peppers, super size fries and a quart of root beer. A big thank you to my friend Smita for suggesting this fab meal.