Shenon only scratches the surface of 9/11

[KNOWTHIS]

www.democracynow.org/2008/2/5/new_book_alleges_9_11_commissioner
New Book Alleges 9/11 Commissioner Phillip Zenikow Minimized Scrutiny of Bush Admin Failure to Prevent al-Qaeda Attack


We have yet another whitewash disguised as an expose’. This is just more strategic incompetence nonsense. The author/NYT reporter Philip Shenon and the MSM are pretending as if they’ve actually uncovered some earth shattering news here. The 9/11 truth movement has known about these conflicts of interest for years now. The Jersey girls had originally called for Zelikow’s resignation. Where was the media’s reporting when it mattered? On 'Democracy Now', Shenon offered just enough criticism in an attempt to create a false illusion of accountability. A few points from the interview that expose his true colors.

He said that the Bush administration had a strong case for not swearing under oath citing the Warren commission and how previous presidents had not been expected to do so.

He stated that Guiliani performed heroically on 9/11.

Amy Goodman asked him about the inside job theory and building seven. He answered that he didn’t see the evidence and that it required a level of government competence that wasn’t in his mind possible. As David Ray Griffin says, you can’t find the evidence if you’re not really looking for it in the first place.

When asked about Sibel Edmonds he vastly understated the facts. He claimed that perhaps they didn’t listen to her as closely as they should have as if it were just a mere oversight on their part. He made no mention that she was forced to testify in secret and then gagged.

On the most important issues, he bowed down and licked boots.

[KNOWTHIS]

wamu.org/audio/dr/08/02/r1080205-18145.asx

They were just "confused".

That was Shenon's answer to a caller that had asked about Cheney’s stand down order. Alex Jones might be right. They could be preparing a “new” investigation which will come to the conclusion that “some mistakes were indeed made”. A few lower level fall guys might be held out to dry. Then the public will be told, "You see?... Two investigations now and still no proof of an inside job".

[KNOWTHIS]

crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

'Incompetent' Criticism: 9/11, Phillip Shenon and the Biggest Lie in History

I'll cut to the chase: the cover up of 9/11 was all about hiding incompetence; that is the opinion of Philip Shenon (NY Times) and the gaggle of book reviewerswho promote his tome over at Big Media.

Let's make the crucial distinction up front:

It's not "incompetence"
if done intentionally.

This unthinkable concept has never made it up to the editors and reporters of America's well-paid professional journalism class. There can only be unintentional incompetence, and never purposeful malfeasance: never agency of treason.

Such myths would be comforting if there weren't a long and despicable history of such government crimes to draw upon -- something professional journalists are supposed to be aware of, yet never seem to write about.

"SHENON: It does appear that above Richard Clarke there wasn't much interest in the subject. The new President saw terrorism as sort of a Clinton Administration issue that they weren't interested in. Bush Administration was interested in missile defense, American relationship with Russia and China, rogue states like Korea and Iraq; they just couldn't [get] their arms around this concept of terrorism. And, many people would argue, we all paid a price
for that." -Philip Shenon Interview, February 23, 2008

To accept this official "incompetence theory" of 9/11 requires a suspension of disbelief that boggles the mind.

Several important developments:

September 2000: The Project for a New American Century writes favorably
about a "catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor." This is signed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams and other Bushies.

May 8, 2001: Dick Cheney placed in charge of counterterrorism training. He has never been called to account for his actions in that role, specifically the numerous rescheduled war games running simultaneously during the actual 9/11 attacks.

June 1st 2001: "Air Piracy" regulations rewritten, evidently contributing to the slowdown of fighter response on 9/11, where Secretary of Defense "approval" is never granted to launch interceptors to defend New York or the Pentagon from air attack.

July 20, 2001: Bush and entourage moved out of high rise hotel because of alleged threat of suicide skyjacking in Genoa Italy. Presidential party sent to secure undisclosed location in response to assassination threat.
August 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

So many additional warnings made it to the top of the government that there is a farcical quality, a level of absurdity to the statements of white house officials that alleged serious journalists accept at face value. One cannot look at such a mountain of evidence of guilt, of complicity, and just pretend that conclusion does not exist. The Bush team have been notoriously suspicious, and they should be removed and investigated for complicity in the attacks. Inthe real world, the suspected perps aren't allowed to investigate themselves,or to control the release of incriminating evidence! The 9/11 farce has such a surreal quality, removed from the real world, that it's difficult to explain the gullibility of people like Shenon.

The book's reviews focus on Zelikow and Rice, two insiders that really should have waited through the 9/11 Commission proceedings in seperate cells, and not as spinmeisters for the official theory of the attacks. Much hay is made by Shenon that Zelikow and Rice are both liars, and not to be believed -- but this as presented as inconsequential. You see, the only thing they were hiding was incompetence. It's a very neat little package, and it has no bearing on the truth whatsoever.
Other fine writers have critiqued the "omissions and distortions" of the 9/11 Commission Report since the moment it was released in 2004. Let's recap some of what got nowhere near that report:

1) Sec. Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony contradicted Dick Cheney's
claim about the Vice President's actions that day. Clearly, the PEOC was monitoring "the plane coming into the pentagon" yet no orders to scramble interceptors, or to fire surface to air missiles in defense of the Pentagon are seen.

2) NORAD and FAA headquarters apparently obstructed fighter response, and did not directly issue scramble orders as threats were known.
3) Sec. Defense Rumsfeld was missiing in action during the entire crucial period of the 9/11 attacks. As the June 1st "Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction" concerning "Air Piracy" required Secretary of Defense "approval" before launching any interceptors at all, this conspicuous lack of "approval"apparently aided and abetted the attacking aircraft, making Rumsfeld and his enablers a party to treason.

4) The head of Pakistani intelligence was linked in the press to wire transfers to alleged "lead hijacker" Mohammad Atta. Not one word explains these press reports.
5) Approximately 200 Israeli agents were detained before and after the 9/11 attacks including several who were filming the first plane impact the first tower, and who then celebrated this event with such zeal that police were notified.

6) The claimed main source for the 9/11 Commission Report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was reported killed in a gun battle in Pakistan before his alleged capture. No positive identification has ever proven that the US government holds the actual suspects it claims.
7) The crucial steel evidence from the World Trade Center buildings was illegally and feloniously shipped off to Asia as "scrap" when the forensic analysis is crucial to any understanding of what happened. Other anomalies like "vaporized steel", observed "pools of molten steel,"and "warping" which required excessivley high temperatures are unexplainable in the official "fire collapse" narrative.

8) The Venice Florida flight school (which allegedly "trained" Atta and others to fly) "Huffman Aviation" was linked to heroin trafficking from South America -- and no legal prosecutions ensued after the "largest drug bust in Central Florida history." Other aircraft have
since been caught trafficking tons of cocaine with links to both CIA front
companies and to the same Venice Florida airport.

Yeah, I could make these lists all day long. The top dog "investigative journalists" like Philip Shenon aren't interested. They are conspicuously uninterested in some of the most damning facts about 9/11. This leads me to distrust them, and to keep seeking information elsewhere.

[Swamp Gas]

I heard Shenon on Sam Sedar the other night. This guy is a "liberal", and yet is saying things like "9/11 Commision Report is the de Facto standard", and "Diesel fires caused WTC7 to collapse"

I think Sedar was skeptical of him, but he is nervous to take a stance since we remember what Air America did to Mike Malloy, Jeneane Garafalo, and Marc Maron.

Shenon is a phony. Period!

[KNOWTHIS]

admin said:

I heard Shenon on Sam Sedar the other night. This guy is a "liberal", and yet is saying things like "9/11 Commision Report is the de Facto standard", and "Diesel fires caused WTC7 to collapse"

I think Sedar was skeptical of him, but he is nervous to take a stance since we remember what Air America did to Mike Malloy, Jeneane Garafalo, and Marc Maron.

Shenon is a phony. Period!

Because he was or still is a NY Times reporter his words are considered gospel by much of the left. This is the same NY Times that helped get us in to the Iraq war with their Judith Miller reporting. Guys like this infuriate me because they predictably receive so much mainstream attention and they set the already faltering truth movement backwards each time they open their big mouths. Even Democracy Now showcases this fool. So many times I hear skeptics say, “if 9/11 was an inside job, the Bush hating NY Times would’ve had the scoop by now”. Books like Shenon’s only serve to reinforce their ignorance. Especially those on the left who still believe that the NY Times is on their side because they tell partial truths at times.

[Swamp Gas]

This is the illusion of "Liberal". The words Liberal and Conservative have been bastardized by Clinton and Bush. Basically, Washington and Jefferson were traditional liberals, which meant "For Liberty". The New York Times is a phony front for a Communist newsroon. Now, the NY Dailynews is the same for Fascism. What the phony right and left are trying to dump on us is a bizarre combination of communism and fascism. One side is drugging the public with Booze and SSRI's, while the other side is getting lulled in a trance by religion. Then, each side is pitted against the other in an imaginary battle, while the elite keep Oceania, Eurasia, and East Asia at perpetual war.

[KNOWTHIS]

I now refuse to identify myself in anyway politically. Not even as an Independent because in the end it’s just another classification. The media tries to impress upon their minds the ways in which they should vote as well. How many times have you heard, “Independents tend to favor the incumbent”? A large percentage of them probably have voted that way because the suggestion was planted in to their heads and they didn’t even realize it. I vote my intuitions, and mine tell me that the more the media endorses a particular candidate, the shittier they probably are. Fuck the trends, go against the grain, conformity is the new death.

[KNOWTHIS]

David Ray Griffin has offered an objective review of Shenon's book considering both its pros and cons.

www.amazon.com/review/R6QTAQWI4JFV3/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

"The Commission" by Philip Shenon has performed a great public service, letting the world know that there are good reasons to be suspicious of "The 9/11 Commission Report." The main problem is the fact that the Commission was almost entirely under the control of Philip Zelikow, who was closely connected to the Bush White House. Although my book "Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11" revealed some of the facts about Zelikow that showed him to be one of the worst possible choices for the Commission's executive director, Shenon has revealed even more facts.

It was already known that Zelikow had been on the National Security Council (NSC) with Condoleezza Rice during the administration of the first President Bush; that he wrote a book with her while the Republicans were out of power; that he helped her make the transition from the Clinton to the Bush NSC; and that he wrote at her request the 2002 version of "National Security Strategy of the United States of America" (NSS 2002), which enunciated a new doctrine of preemptive war that was used, in Shenon's words, to "justify a preemptive strike on Iraq."

But now Shenon reveals more: that in applying to Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, for the position of executive director, Zelikow failed to reveal some of his conflicts of interest, especially his authorship of NSS 2002 and his role on the transition team; that he continued, contrary to his promise, to be in touch with Karl Rove (who was very concerned about the Commission's work), as well as Rice; that Zelikow largely prevented direct contact between the staff and the Commissioners ("If information gathered by the staff was to be passed to the commissioners, it would have to go through Zelikow"); and that Zelikow largely "controlled what the final report would say."

Shenon also reveals that Zelikow, before the Commission's work had begun, had written a detailed outline for the Commission's report, complete with "chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings," and that he and the Commission's co-chairs agreed to keep this outline a secret from the Commission's investigative staff. When the staff learned about this outline a year later, some of them circulated a parody called "The Warren Commission Report---Preemptive Outline," one chapter of which was entitled "Single Bullet: We Haven't Seen the Evidence Yet. But Really. We're Sure."

However, although all of this should have made Shenon suspicious that Zelikow might have used his power to cover up the truth about 9/11, it did not. Shenon believes that the falsehoods in the Commission's report were limited to covering up White House incompetence (especially by Rice) and foreign funding of al-Qaeda (by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia).

Because Shenon simply presupposed the truth of the official story as fully as did the Commission, his book is terrible as well as great. It is terrible because Shenon, in mentioning the contention that 9/11 was an inside job, assures his readers that this contention has been debunked, while showing no sign of having studied any of the books that provide evidence for this contention. In his bibliography, for example, he mentions two defenses of the official account: "Debunking 9/11 Myths," put out by Popular Mechanics, and "Without Precedent," coauthored by Kean and Hamilton. But he does not mention my "Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory," in which I responded at length to both of these books. Also, although one would expect his bibliography to include all major critiques of the 9/11 Commission, it does not include my book, "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," which has generally been considered the major critique of the Commission's report.

Shenon's ignorance of facts contained in this alternative literature is apparent in his assurances that all is well with the official account. For example, claiming that the evidence that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 is "incontrovertible," Shenon points to a videotape in which a bin Laden boasts about the attacks. Shenon is evidently unaware that bin Laden expert Bruce Lawrence called this videotape "bogus" and that FBI spokesman Rex Tomb admitted that "the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Also, claiming that there is clear evidence that "nineteen young Arab men . . . were aboard the four planes," Shenon is evidently unaware that, as I showed in "Debunking 9/11 Debunking" (updated edition), all this supposed evidence falls apart under scrutiny. For example, although we were told that the presence of hijackers on American Flight 77 was proved by Barbara Olson's phone calls to her husband, Ted Olson, the evidence given to the Moussaoui trial in 2006 by the FBI said that no such calls occurred. This same report contradicted the widely held belief that cell phone calls from passengers on United 93 had reported the existence of hijackers.

Shenon could have remained neutral on the question of the truth of the official story. But because he chose to enter the fray, it was incumbent upon him as a journalist to study, and report, the arguments on both sides of the issue. He did not.

Shenon's book is terrible not only because he endorses the official account without engaging any of the serious critiques of that account, but also because his complacent acceptance of that account leads him to ignore dozens of signs in the Commission's report that Zelikow used his position as executive director to cover up far more than incompetence. In "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," I showed that it contains over 100 omissions and distortions of the type that would be expected if Zelikow had indeed used his position to cover up official complicity. Here are a few examples that Shenon fails to mention.

Believing that the claim "that the Twin Towers were brought down by preplaced explosives" had been debunked before the Commission began its work, Shenon does not mention the Commission's silence about the fact that over a hundred members of the Fire Department of New York, in giving oral histories of that day---which were made publicly available by Shenon's own New York Times----spoke of apparent explosions in the towers. Shenon also fails to mention the Commission's silence about evidence that steel in the buildings had melted and even evaporated---evidence that a New York Times article called the "deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation," because the fires could not have come close to the temperature needed to produce such effects. Was Shenon unaware of these revelations provided by his own paper?

Shenon ignores the Commission's failure even to mention the fact that WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane and had fires on only a few floors, also collapsed. Shenon perhaps considers this omission unimportant because there was no mystery. "t was determined," he says, "that a fire that . . . destroyed WTC 7 on September 11 was probably caused by the rupture of the building's special diesel fuel tanks." That is indeed the official theory. But the FEMA report---which is still the only official report on this building---suggested what it considered the most likely version of this theory but then admitted that it had "only a low probability of occurrence."

Although Shenon mentions that Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta testified before the Commission, he does not mention Mineta's report that Vice President Cheney was in the bunker under the White House by 9:20 AM, which contradicted the Zelikow-led Commission's later claim that Cheney did not arrive there until almost 10:00.

Although Shenon mentions Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press" five days after 9/11, he does not mention Cheney's statement that he learned about the attack on the Pentagon after (not before) he entered the bunker---which the Zelikow-led Commission later contradicted.

Although Shenon points out that Zelikow and Clarke hated each other, he does not point out that Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, is not mentioned by the Zelikow-led Commission's report and that it contradicted that report on several points, saying that Cheney was down in the bunker before 9:15, that Clarke received shootdown authorization from Cheney before 9:55 (not at 10:25), and that General Richard Myers was in the Pentagon between 9:00 and 9:45 AM (not on Capitol Hill).

Although Shenon points out that the Commission failed to ask Rudy Giuliani any tough questions, he does not mention the Commission's failure to ask the toughest question that should have been asked: How did Giuliani know in advance that the Twin Towers were going to come down?

In sum: Whereas Shenon's book has performed a great service by revealing things about the Zelikow-led Commission that should lead people to suspect that its account of 9/11 covered up the truth, it is also a terrible failure: Because of Shenon's lack of journalistic skepticism with regard to the official account of 9/11, he failed to raise the most important question about the Commission's report: Did it cover up complicity by forces within our own government? Although the Commission's report contains dozens of signs that it did just this, Shenon's book mentions not a single one.

[KNOWTHIS]

www.911blogger.com/node/15787

Philip Shenon, author of "The Commission," asked 9-11 truth question during "Checks and Balances" panel at LA Times Book Fair

[Swamp Gas]

It seems like Shenon is just creating another diversion from the real story behind 9/11. It is like a "sane" version of particle beams and aliens, but still in denial of the most logical of them all.......Thermite and demolition.

[KNOWTHIS]

I agree, I really don't trust him. The strategic incompetence card is a popular card to play these days. Many on the left will tell me (who probably buy in to Shenon), "Just look at how they mishandled the Katrina debacle." This to them represents certifiable proof that the Bush administration isn't capable of carrying out an inside job. When I look back at their lackadaisical response in New Orleans though I see something much different. What it shows me is their blatant disregard for human life. Whether it be bloated bodies floating face down in a flooded city, thousands of soldiers and innocent Iraqis shot dead in the Middle East or 3,000 bodies blown to bits on 9/11, they have no human connection to other people’s pain and suffering. This is the psychopaths psychological makeup. Death is a small price to pay for power. Never underestimate the cunningness of evil.

Shenon is the controlled opposition. Bush is more than happy to accept such watered down criticism because stupidity is not a criminal offense. No one in government does anything wrong anymore, everything is just written off as a "careless mistake". Commit your crimes, play dumb and then walk away free without charges. It's easy to do when the mind manipulating media is your personal bitch.

[Swamp Gas]

I think Katrina was somwhat planned, and the reaction to it was also planned. Look at all of the bizarre patterns of that hurricane, veering north, away from the Gulf of Mexico.

We have to be careful not to give too much power to this NWO and government because then it seems fruitless in resisting them. The best approach is to know what they are up to, and keep speaking truth to power, be it OIl companies, pharmaceuticals, the NWO, or fundamentalists.