9/11 updates: schools, software, questions & controversy

9/11 t-shirt stirs school controversy - but not how you think*
bin laden family members evacuated from US in wake of 9/11*
audio: lionel has questions about 9/11, what's wrong with that?*
9/11 commission 'played with fire'*
video: challenging journalists to investigate jenningsmystery.com*
'al-qaeda' releases 'new' 9/11 video showing 'zawahiri'*
if you want another 9/11, leave afghanistan, rice says*
nyccan: the march for answers*
alleged 9/11 perpetrator studying vietnam war atrocity film*
leading gps software suggests superior augmented gps service at wtc during 9/11 attacks*
video: chertoff pounded with 9/11 questions by c-span callers*

ron paul's rally for the republic gathers 20k in st paul

ron paul convention hits minnesota
from ap: There's no room at the Xcel Energy Center for maverick Ron Paul, so his acolytes have packed their cars, hitched rides on "Ronvoys" and will pitch tents at Ronstock '08 in Minneapolis in defiance of next week's GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn. More than 9,700 tickets had been sold for the Rally for the Republic, which seeks to bring together activists who are anti-war, anti-government regulation, anti-immigration, anti-taxes, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-outsourcing, pro-individual liberty, pro-civil liberties and pro-Paul...

Speakers at the Paul rally include former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, tax activist Grover Norquist, former California Rep. Barry Goldwater Jr., political commentator Tucker Carlson, former two-term New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and the baby-delivering doctor supporters call Dr. Paul. A few entertainers also are joining in, such as country star Sara Evans; pop singer Aimee Allen, known for the song "Cooties" from Hairspray but whose favorite song among rally-goers is "Ron Paul Anthem"; and Texas blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.

ron paul: gustav, personal responsibility & the nanny state


c-span2 to cover the entire rally for the republic
from campaign for liberty: Great news! We received confirmation today that C-SPAN 2 will cover the entire Rally for the Republic from start to finish. Yesterday, we announced “Take over the net Tuesday“, and your mission to once again spread the message online. Now, we have another channel to broadcast Ron Paul’s legendary speech.

ron paul nation: the other convention in town
from christian science monitor: If some John McCain supporters suffer from what pollsters have called an “enthusiasm gap,” those of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul might be accused of an enthusiasm surplus. More than 10,000 members of the Ron Paul Nation paid $17.76 (get it?) to attend a convention in Minnesota to celebrate the Texas congressman’s candidacy and advance his antiwar, anti-government, pro-Gold Standard agenda among Republicans at the official GOP convention in nearby St. Paul.

video: paul downplays reports of negotiations with mccain team
from raw story: While Republican party officialdom has been largely dismissive of Ron Paul's performance in this year's presidential primaries, there are reports that some party members are courting Paul's support - or at least his silence - in exchange for access to this week's convention in St. Paul.


ventura speaks 9/11 truth to crowd of 10k at rally
from 9/11 blogger: During an impassioned speech in which he called for a revolution to take back the country, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura voiced 9/11 truth to the 10,000 in attendance and the millions watching on C-Span and You Tube at the Rally For The Republic yesterday. Ventura also strongly hinted that he is considering running for the presidency in 2012.

(here are parts 2 & 3 of ventura's speech)

update: ventura endorses a 9/11 conspiracy theorist for congress
from ap: Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura has endorsed a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist for a congressional seat. Ventura came out Thursday in support of Kevin Barrett, a Libertarian running against incumbent Democrat Ron Kind for western Wisconsin's seat. Barrett is a former University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer who believes the U.S. government was behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has discussed his views in class.

video: ron paul on washington journal
from c-span junkie: Ron Paul talked about his “Campaign for Liberty” rally set for today and his thoughts on the current campaign, and he responded to telephone calls and electronic mail.


video: ron paul says it's time to end the empire
from the real news: Paul Jay interviews Ron Paul from the "Rally for the Republic"


ron paul's 'counter-convention'
from al-jazeera: Call it the real Republican convention. At least that is how Ron Paul, a US congressman for Texas, and his supporters billed their campaign's Tuesday night "rally for the republic", in which they called on the party to "return to its roots". From the looks of it, Paul, who suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination in June, could almost be accepting the party's presidential nomination himself. Almost 15,000 people came from all over the country to hear him speak.

ron paul steals mccain’s thunder
from russia today: Texas Congressman Ron Paul may not be the next US President. But the firebrand Republican, who failed to win the party’s nomination this year, is still hugely popular with grassroots supporters. He staged a rally in Minneapolis as an alternative to John McCain’s Republican Convention in nearby St Paul, stealing much of the limelight from the party’s official presidential candidate.


conspiracy theorists, unite!
from msnbc: That's what the dozens of Ron Paul supporters shouting outside of the Xcel Energy Center yesterday afternoon were telling Americans to do. They said the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job... So why are Ron Paul supporters, many of them Republicans themselves, protesting the Republican convention? "We want to bring the GOP back to its roots," insisted 24-year-old Adam Gross of Kansas City, Mo, who said he’s a registered Republican. He had slapped a bumper sticker onto his Ron Paul sign that read, "9/11 was in inside job."

video: more 9/11 truth on msnbc during rnc


'black hats' keep lookout for troublemakers
from washington times: Fearing demonstrations from Ron Paul delegates here at the Republican National Convention, the party has created a "black-hat" squad to track the Paulites and other potential troublemakers to make sure they don't cause a scene on the convention floor.

Identified by their black baseball caps emblazoned with a white star, squad members keep an eye on delegates they fear might cause a scene. The squad is empowered by the convention managers to take delegates' credentials and kick them off the convention floor - a step one convention official said would be unprecedented.

Squad members have made "their presence known, to let all people know big brother's watching them," said a Republican official familiar with the squad who has been involved in the last 10 GOP conventions.

lewis lapham of harper's magazine on 9/11

from 9/11 blogger: On Sunday June 3, Lewis Lapham was featured on a 3-hour program on C-SPAN's "In Depth" program. The program focused on Lapham's intellectual life and times, and took calls from the live C-SPAN viewership. During the course of taking calls, one caller asked about Lapham's views on 9/11 as being something other than the Official Conspiracy Theory. Here is what Lapham had to say:

"As to the question of what happened at 9/11, I am reading at the moment a book by a man named David Griffin, on the debunking of the 9/11 debunking, and he raises a number of sharp questions... which I think deserve further questioning and investigation, but I am not as yet prepared to think that the bringing down of the... trade towers was the work of the Bush administration."

Harper's magazine reflects the current political and social thinking of a segment of America's elite, namely, a segment that reads. It is also a magazine for the reading American public that consider themselves "progressives" generally. Harper's was one of the first publications to print a long critical essay about the 9/11 Commission's Final Report, that still resonates today; Whitewash as public service by Benjamin DeMott.

When a serious thinker, writer, and shaper of the American cultural soul is reading David Ray Griffin, I would have to say that progressives and Leftists who will have no truck with questions about 9/11 need to pause and reflect on this. Knee-jerk time is over. It's time to pick up Griffin's books and become familiar with them, and become familiar with the serious aspects of 9/11 skepticism. Lapham is reading Griffin. After Gore Vidal's endorsement of The New Pearl Harbor, an open-minded Liberal really has no excuse not to give 9/11 skeptics like Griffin a fair shake anymore. This means actually reading the books, not just snarking at them.

See the stream from the C-SPAN archive (approx. 53 minute mark)

Big tip of the hat to "alexjonesfan" who posted a condensed version of this news item at The Randi Rhodes Message Board. Take a minute to write to Harper's and ask Lapham to review Griffin's book: letters(at)harpers.org

also, here is a link to the pertinent audio from alexjonesfan.com

ron paul roundup

gop hopefuls debate abortion, tax cuts
from ap/my way: On defense for much of the evening, Giuliani switched gears nearly an hour into the debate, challenging Rep. Ron Paul's suggestion that the U.S. bombing of Iraq had contributed to the terrorist attacks of 2001. As mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, Giuliani said sternly, "I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations." His rebuke to Paul drew some of the loudest applause of the night from the partisan audience.

rudy in rage at 9/11 diss
from new york post: An irate Rudy Giuliani blasted a fellow Republican candidate at last night's GOP debate for trying to blame the United States for 9/11. Giuliani unloaded both barrels at Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a fringe Republican White House hopeful with little support...

republicans need reagan's courage
from raw story: Long-shot Republican candidate Ron Paul said the current slate of candidates need the "courage" of former President Ronald Reagan to be able to withdraw US troops from Iraq. The Texas Congressman, who has become an internet favorite but does not register much support in polls, said the Middle East is too unstable a region in which to maintain an indefinite US military presence.

fox rigs debate to savage ron paul
from propaganda matrix: In a sickening display of cronyism and as a consequence of the sheer terror elicited amongst the establishment after his previous success, Fox News rigged last night's entire presidential debate in a crass effort to smear Ron Paul - yet the Texas Congressman still beat Rudy Giuliani in Fox's own poll.

If you thought the MSNBC debate was somewhat unfair towards Ron Paul, then this was an absolute debacle.

The audience for the debate was clearly pre-screened and pre-selected to include only mainly geriatric 75 year old plus Fox News viewers who are scared of their own shadow. How else can the bizarre applause for warmongering and torture, which polls show are both clearly opposed by the majority of American people, be explained?

Guantanamo Bay is uniformly abhorred, even to the point where George W. Bush himself said he wanted to close it down, and yet Romney is applauded for saying he would like to double it!

Are these audience members robots or did Fox News dub the audio to include the applause?

Giuliani clearly endorses torture and the mindless drones in attendance rapaciously lap it up! Fox News manufactured a fictitious scenario to rig the debate - the notion that terrorists are about to detonate a nuclear bomb and that only torture can lead to its discovery.

Host Brit Hume failed to mention the fact that obtaining confessions from torture is notoriously unreliable because the victim simply tells the interrogator what he wants to hear, and not necessarily the truth. In fact, using torture in place of more traditional investigative techniques would only create false leads, waste more time and put the country in more danger.

Under the Constitution of the United States, which any of these potential Presidents will have to swear an oath to uphold, evidence obtained from torture is not admissible in court. In effect, Giuliani, Romney and Tancredo (who has now completely discredited himself) have promised to violate the Constitution before they even get into office.

After the show, Hannity and Colmes double-teamed Paul in an attempt to discredit him in the eyes of both liberals and conservatives, with Colmes going after him on abortion and Hannity chomping at the bit to smear the Texas Congressman as weak on terrorism.

This followed a showdown between Giuliani and Paul in which the Texas Congressman pointed out the fact that U.S. foreign policy has bred hatred of America throughout the world, a self-evident truth that is even embraced by the CIA itself, and was scorned by Giuliani in response.

Despite the fact that Paul was given the more difficult questions and less time to answer them and was then savagely attacked after he debate, he still came out on top when the early polling began, eventually finishing a close second to Romney and easily ahead of Giuliani.

Fox News were obviously desperate to prevent Ron Paul winning the poll because they restricted it to text message only, no Internet voting, and closed it down declaring Romney the winner after just three hours.

Fox News anchor Carl Cameron immediately tried to spin Paul's success in the poll when it became apparent he was winning with 30% of the vote shortly after 11PM. Cameron roared that Paul had been "slapped down" by Giuliani in the debate and that his success was merely because his office was unfairly flood voting - ignoring the fact that McCain had openly told his supporters to spam the polls on his own website.

An MSNBC poll again shows Ron Paul trouncing the other candidates, beating his nearest contenders hands down in every category.

ABC News' poll has Ron Paul at 18,500+ votes, with his nearest rivals Romney and Giuliani barely making it into the 200's. This is an emphatic win for the Texas Congressman.

Despite the fact that this whole event was a giant orchestrated smear job on behalf of Fox News to eliminate Ron Paul from the race, his message of liberty and real conservatism still resonates with the American people and no amount of vitriol on behalf of Neo-Con Rupert Murdoch and his underlings is going to change that fact.

update: fox news smear job on ron paul
from paul joseph watson: Fox "News" anchor John Gibson was joined by diehard Neo-Con Michele "put every Muslim in a concentration camp" Malkin last night to attack Ron Paul, Alex Jones and suggest that people in the Middle East enjoy being bombed and to state otherwise is a tin-foil hat conspiracy theory...


update: ron paul discussed on c-span
from blacklisted news/you tube: Tons of phone calls endorsing Ron Paul on C-Span's Washington Journal this morning following last night's debate. Washington Journal is typically a program viewed by an older demographic. This shows that people across the political spectrum are not fooled by the cartoon like antics Fox News tried to pull on Ron Paul in yesterday's debate.

biden on iraq bill: shove it down his throat

from politico: Blunt talk from Joe Biden, picked up by C-Span answering a man's question at Jim Clyburn's fish fry April 27 in Columbia, S.C.

Biden is asked what he'll do when Bush, as is expected, vetoes the Iraq funding bill.

First, he talks about his son, and the equipment soldiers need -- "The idea that we're not building new Humvees with the V-shaped things is just crap. Kids are dying that don't have to die."

And: "Second thing is, we're going to shove it down his throat."

'9/11 & american empire' on c-span

from 9/11 blogger: The September 24 KPFA event from Berkeley, CA, will air on C-Span's Book TV this weekend.

Featured speakers:

David Ray Griffin
Kevin Ryan
Peter Dale Scott
Peter Phillips
Ray McGovern

Friday Nov 24th: 4:00 pm EST / 1:00 pm PST
Saturday Nov 25th: 3:30 am EST / 12:30 am PST
10:00 pm EST / 7:00 pm PST

http://www.booktv.org/schedule/

Spread the word!