New York Times

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www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003544462

Krugman Warns About Hyping Iran Threat -- That His Own Paper Pushed
By E&P Staff
Published: February 11, 2007 10:45 PM ET

NEW YORK In a Monday column for The New York Times, Paul Krugman warns of the dangers of hyping the use of weapons from Iran against U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- stories based on anonymous sources that his own paper had featured prominently on its front page and the top of its Web site all weekend.

www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003544369

'NYT' Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims
By Greg Mitchell
Published: February 10, 2007 10:30 PM ET Friday updated Saturday

NEW YORK Saturday’s New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. The author notes, “Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile.”
What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.”
Sound pretty convincing? Well, almost all the sources in the story are unnamed. It also may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

 

New York Times skewers 9/11 truth - June 5, 2006

www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05conspiracy.html
500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11

By ALAN FEUER
Published: June 5, 2006

CHICAGO, June 4 -- In the ballroom foyer of the Embassy Suites Hotel, the two-day International Education and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth was off to a rollicking start.

Joe Tabacca for The New York Times
Tonya Miller Bailey, of Indiana, in the rally at Daley Plaza on Friday that served as the conference kickoff. "We've done a lot of solid research," one participant said.

David Kubiak, one of the speakers at the International Education and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth.In Salon Four, there was a presentation under way on the attack in Oklahoma City, while in the room next door, the splintered factions of the movement were asked -- for sake of unity -- to seek a common goal.
In the foyer, there were stick-pins for sale ("More gin, less Rummy"), and in the lecture halls discussions of the melting point of steel. "It's all documented," people said. Or: "The mass media is mass deception." Or, as strangers from the Internet shook hands: "Great to meet you. Love the work."
Such was the coming-out for the movement known as "9/11 Truth," a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks. In colleges and chat rooms on the Internet, this band of disbelievers has been trying for years to prove that 9/11 was an inside job.
Whatever one thinks of the claim that the state would plan, then execute, a scheme to murder thousands of its own, there was something to the fact that more than 500 people -- from Italy to Northern California -- gathered for the weekend at a major chain hotel near the runways of O'Hare International. It was, in tone, half trade show, half political convention. There were talks on the Reichstag fire and the sinking of the Battleship Maine as precedents for 9/11. There were speeches by the lawyer for James Earl Ray, who claimed that a military conspiracy killed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and by a former operative for the British secret service, MI5.

[note: Ray's attorney William Pepper was also a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. who helped persuade King to speak out against the War on Viet Nam. A reader unfamiliar with this connection might not know that the King family came to understand that Ray was innocent, a "patsy" set up to be the fall guy. Pepper's book "An Act of State" was endorsed by Coretta Scott King as a definitive account of what was done to her husband, and is a solid piece of investigative journalism that was largely ignored by the US media. Some links to his work are at www.oilempire.us/mlk.html - among many other places on the web.]

"We feel at this point we've done a lot of solid research, but the American public still is not informed," said Michael Berger, press director for 911Truth.org, which sponsored the event. "We had to come up with a disciplined approach to get it out."
Mr. Berger, 40, is typical of 9/11 Truthers -- a group that, in its rank and file, includes professors, chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, college students, a former fringe candidate for United States Senate and a long-haired fellow named hummux (pronounced who-mook) who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.
The former owner of a recycling plant outside St. Louis, Mr. Berger joined the movement when he grew skeptical of why the 9/11 Commission had failed, to his sense of sufficiency, to answer how the building at 7 World Trade Center collapsed like a ton of bricks. It was his "9/11 trigger," the incident that drew him in, he said. For others, it might be the fact that the air-defense network did not prevent the attacks that day, or the appearance of thousands of "puts" -- or short-sell bids -- on the nation's airline stocks. (The 9/11 Commission found the sales innocuous.)

 

[note: the Commission said that the "put options" were made by a firm with no conceivable connection to al-Qaeda, and therefore the fact that bets were made just before 9/11 that American and United Airlines would see a sharp drop in value was coincidental. However, the questions centered on the connection of the investment firms to the CIA. See "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert for details.]

 

Such "red flags," as they are sometimes called, were the meat and potatoes of the keynote speech on Friday night by Alex Jones, who is the William Jennings Bryan of the 9/11 band. Mr. Jones, a syndicated radio host, is known for his larynx-tearing screeds against corruption — fiery, almost preacherly, addresses in which he sweats, balls his fists and often swerves from quoting Roman history to using foul language in a single breath.
At the lectern Friday night, beside a digital projection reading "History of Government Sponsored Terrorism," Mr. Jones set forth the central tenets of 9/11 Truth: that the military command that monitors aircraft "stood down" on the day of the attacks; that President Bush addressed children in a Florida classroom instead of being whisked off to the White House; that the hijackers, despite what the authorities say, were trained at American military bases; and that the towers did not collapse because of burning fuel and weakened steel but because of a "controlled demolition" caused by pre-set bombs.
According to the group's Web site, the motive for faking a terrorist attack was to allow the administration "to instantly implement policies its members have long supported, but which were otherwise infeasible."
The controlled-demolition theory is the sine qua non of the 9/11 movement -- its basic claim and, in some sense, the one upon which all others rest. It is, of course, directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which held that jet-fuel fires distressed the towers' structure, which eventually collapsed.

 

[note: Controlled demolition is NOT the central claim for complicity, it is a sideshow at best. There is evidence that suggests it is not a real claim, there are some intriguing claims made for it, although structural engineers are not among the group making these claims for demolition. It is an approach that puts 9/11 skeptics on the defensive, and distracts from evidence that is proven beyond any reasonable doubt -- such as how the intelligence systems ignored numerous warnings about what, when, where in the months and weeks and days before 9/11. Those pieces of evidence are not as sexy as speculations about demolition theories, but they have the advantage of being provable with very solid evidence that could form the basis for a renewed investigation or prosecution, assuming that there was any space in our media, political system or judicial system for these things to happen.]

["The power to see to it that regular government operations don't occur is one of the greatest controls over power you can wield in a government."
-- Colonel Fletcher Prouty, Pentagon liaison to CIA, interview with Joseph Spieler, (archived on the CD-ROM available from prouty.org)]

 

The movement's answer to that report was written by Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and the movement's expert in the matter of collapse. Dr. Jones, unlike Alex Jones, is a soft-spoken man who lets his writing do the talking. He composed an account of the destruction of the towers (www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html) that holds that "pre-positioned cutter-charges" brought the buildings down.

 

[note: Professor Jones does not explain how the electronics for alleged explosion charges would survive an hour and a half of raging fires between the plane crash and the collapse of the North Tower. The collapses originating at the point of collision suggests some "problems" with the demolition theories. However, the fact that the most extreme "truth" activists are attacking him with vitriolic nonsense suggests he may be on to something. Whatever the truth of the demolition claims, proving Bush/Cheney complicity is not dependent on this issue.]

 

Like a prior generation of skeptics -- those who doubted, say, the Warren Commission or the government's account of the Gulf of Tonkin attack -- the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts.
"Elvis and Area 51 -- we're sort of lumped together," said Harlan Dietrich, a recent college graduate from Austin, Tex. "It's attack the messenger, not the message every time."
To get the message out, the movement has gone beyond bumper stickers and "Kumbaya" into political action.
There is a plan, Mr. Berger said, to create a fund to support candidates on a 9/11 platform. There is a plan to create a network of college campus groups. There is a plan by the British delegation (such as it is, so far) to get members of Parliament to watch "Loose Change," the seminal movement DVD.

 

[note: Loose Change is merely a recycling of the multi-year campaign to promote the hoax that Flight 77 supposedly did not hit the Pentagon. This hoax has been debunked, even by 9/11 truth activists, but that doesn't stop bad actors and gullibles from continuing to promote it. Loose Change is a classic disinformation strategy - a conclusion that is largely correct (complicity) based on evidence that is mostly incorrect (no plane hit Pentagon, among other nonsense).
[USA Today recently gave Loose Change front page promotion, which the fans of this film thought was a compliment and a success for "9/11 truth." However, the fact that several USA Today reporters watched Flight 77 hit the Pentagon while on their way to work at their offices in Arlington, Virginia suggests the newspaper promoted this film because they know it's promoting fake claims. You won't see the mass media - or even most 9/11 "truth" groups - promoting the real documentaries discussing credible evidence of complicity since they avoid the "no plane" hoaxes.]
www.oilempire.us/loose-change.html - reviews of the Loose Change hoax film
www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html - how and why the "no Boeing hit Pentagon" hoax was created
www.oilempire.us/media-strategy.html - media focuses on the hoaxes and avoids the real evidence
www.oilempire.us/movies-911.html - a list of the best documentaries on 9/11, Peak Oil and related topics including Truth and Lies of 9/11, Denial Stops Here: From 9/11 to Peak Oil and Beyond, The Great Deception, The Great Conspiracy: the 9/11 News Special You Never Saw, 9/11 Citizens Commission (September 9, 2004 in New York City with Cynthia McKinney, Michael Ruppert, John Judge, Indira Singh, Jenna Orkin, Barrie Zwicker, Nicholas Levis and more). Those promoting "Loose Change" conveniently ignore these documentaries. Truth and Lies of 9/11 was created two months after the "attacks" and its conclusions have withstood more than four years of scrutiny. It doesn't have all of the pieces of the puzzle that we have now (such as the information on the war games) but it is an important prerequisite for understanding these issues.

It would even seem the Truthers are not alone in believing the whole truth has not come out. A poll released last month by Zogby International found that 42 percent of all Americans believe the 9/11 Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" in the attacks. This is in addition to the Zogby poll two years ago that found that 49 percent of New York City residents agreed with the idea that some leaders "knew in advance" that the attacks were planned and failed to act.
Beneath the weekend's screenings and symposiums on geopolitics and mass-hypnotic trance lies a tradition of questioning concentrated power, both in public and in private hands, said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and author of "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture."
As for the 9/11 Truthers, they were confident enough that their theories made sense that on Friday, as a kickoff to the conference, they met in Daley Plaza for a rally (though some called it Dealey Plaza). They marched up Kinzle Street to the local affiliate of NBC where, at the plate glass windows, they chanted, "Talking heads tell lies," as the news was being read.
"I hope you don't end up dead somewhere," a companion said to a participant, hours earlier as he dropped him at the Loop. "Don't worry," the participant said. "There's too many of us for that."


www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060706_questions_grave.shtml

THE NY TIMES PUTS 9-11 QUESTIONS IN THE GRAVE
As Sad As It Was Predictable
Story Marks the End of a Sequential and Planned Campaign to Discredit Authentic 9/11 Research
by
Michael C. Ruppert and Jamey Hecht

[It’s pretty easy to deconstruct and demonstrate, step-by-step, how the 9-11 movement was led into the Valley of the Little Bighorn and massacred before the public eye. It’s too bad that so many of its self-proclaimed leaders acted as willing accomplices while the real 9-11 pioneers; skilled and experienced investigators, journalists, professors and academics could only sit back and watch the “assisted” suicide take place. 9-11 has been sent to the dustbin of history and the sad part is that it has all been done before.
Few would listen to our warnings. There are great lessons here for the future if another opportunity should present itself to break through into the mainstream. But that would have to be something as big as 9-11 and I’m not sure the remnants of this free nation could stand something like that. – MCR]


http://911review.com/reviews/nyt/markup/05conspiracy.html

The New York Times Pegs the 9/11 Truth Movement:
"500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11"
by Jim Hoffman