Very good arti­cle, Dave. Truth­fully, how­ever, I must be hon­est and say that I don’t think all the Truthers are bad peo­ple and that there should be dis­tin­guish­ment between the good peo­ple who may be just mis­led in a vari­ety of ways and the bonafide fas­cists, provo­ca­teurs, dis­info agents(Eric Huf­schmid may a damn good exam­ple), and use­ful idiots of all kinds, and I was kind of hop­ing this arti­cle could per­haps be edited to bet­ter reflect these realities.

Speak­ing of use­ful idiots, ever ran into this char­ac­ter by the name of Daryl Brad­ford Smith who runs ‘The French Con­nec­tion’ web­site? Guy’s from New Eng­land orig­i­nally and lives some­where in France, which, btw, is the rea­son for the nam­ing of his site(and not as a homage to the clas­sic movie from 1971, in case that thought could cross someone’s mind). Some of his early mate­r­ial was interesting(back then, but not now.), but it seems that he was ‘turned’ about 5 years ago or so and he’s been allow­ing, and even par­rot­ing some pretty screwed up B.S., mainly of the anti-Zionist vari­ety, on his show(one guy claimed that Jews invented jazz as part of a con­spir­acy the­ory!). (I have to admit I was kind of a dupe back in the day so I ended up just tun­ing out the cra­zier stuff, instead of con­fronting it like I would today.)

What’s really ironic about all this is that he doesn’t actu­ally seem to hate on ALL Jews, and has even spo­ken fondly, ever so often, about a Jew­ish lady who actu­ally kept him fed and clothed dur­ing his col­lege days in Man­hat­tan. Frankly, this guy may be in some need of psy­cho­log­i­cal ther­apy of some kind, it seems to me.

BTW, for those who are REALLY curi­ous, you can check out the web­site over at iamthewitness.com. But be care­ful, there is a LOT of B.S. on there. If you are eas­ily offended, please just move on and avoid this URL. Thanks.

(P.S., one last note: This guy seems to be reg­u­larly fea­tured on a South Africa based net­work called ‘Chan­nel Islam Inter­na­tional’. Does any­one know any­thing about this com­pany? It smells a lit­tle off to me but I don’t hon­estly know much myself.)

Also, one last thing: Daniel Hop­sicker is a real frack­ing hero! =) For­get Daryl Smith and Dylan Avery, Mr. Hop­sicker is the real deal, and so is Dave!

@Steven L.–

Sev­eral points: First, that post does express a very real ele­ment of bit­ter­ness, dis­taste and frustration.

I did so, how­ever, through my acer­bic, dark sense of humor. Nitzsche observed that “A joke is the epi­gram on the death of a feeling.”

The Truthers have noth­ing going for them. I com­mit­ted four com­ments by them to the trash. None of them showed any evi­dence of hav­ing exam­ined any of the infor­ma­tion in the post or FTR #599.

I have no prob­lem with intel­li­gent dis­agree­ment, but I absolutely insist that it be pred­i­cated on care­ful exam­i­na­tion of the infor­ma­tion I present. Pre­dictably that was not the case.

I was think­ing of approv­ing them and then tear­ing them each a new one, but fig­ured it was cruel, gra­tu­itous and, above all, a waste of space and time.

One of them just repeated the same old nonsense–scary sto­ries told by liars and fools.

Slick Willie Rodriguez describ­ing the “explo­sions” he heard and sim­i­lar tales of woe by other ignoramuses.

I encour­age you, Steven, and any lin­ger­ing Truthers to care­fully exam­ine Items #3, 13 in the web­site I linked.

You will notice that, before a build­ing is imploded, IT HAS TO BE COMPLETELY GUTTED FIRST!

Implo­sion (con­trolled demo­li­tion) is a form of exact­ing de-construction. Just as the sup­port­ing ele­ments of an edi­fice pre­serve the struc­ture upright and intact, so, too, those ele­ments must be care­fully and sys­tem­at­i­cally removed so that the remark­able implo­sion phe­nom­e­non can be real­ized after the det­o­na­tion of the cut­ter charges.

In addi­tion, the cut­ter charges are not only impos­si­ble NOT to hear (and feel) but they bring down the shell of the build­ing in a mat­ter of a num­ber of sec­onds from the det­o­na­tion of the first charge.

What the Truthers would have us believe is that no one in either of the Twin Tow­ers or WTC 7 noticed that the build­ings in which they worked had been com­pletely gutted–a process that would have required months of work, an army of con­trac­tors, and a fleet of trucks to haul away the debris!!

What is so funny about the horse s* dis­sem­i­nated by the likes of Slick Willie Rodriguez and the oth­ers who claim they heard explo­sions, con­cerns the obvi­ous fact that if they had heard the det­o­na­tion of cut­ter charges they would have been DEAD within seconds!!

Again check out the build­ings in Item #3 in the linked web­site. They go down pretty damn quickly!

They may well have heard explosions–computer ter­mi­nals, for exam­ple, explode when enveloped by flames. Do you think, Steven, that there just MIGHT have been some com­puter ter­mi­nals in the World Trade Center?

It should also be noted that one does not det­o­nate bat­ter­ies of high explo­sives in a crowded down­town area of one of the world’s largest cities on the sly!

That would, to say the least, draw attention!

I sug­gest that peo­ple on the West Coast take the time to go down to San Clemente, about an hour south of L.A.

Best known as the home of Nixon’s West­ern White House, it’s a nice lit­tle town with two main attractions–The Tres­tles, one of the world’s pre­mier surf­ing beaches and Camp Pendle­ton, a major Marine Corps base.

You can spend a delight­ful day by the beach watch­ing the surfers and you will cer­tainly hear (and FEEL) the artillery prac­tice MANY MILES AWAY at Pendleton.

I will close by not­ing that the Truthers gen­er­ally fall back on “Box Boy” Gage’s hustle–“Architects and Engi­neers for Truth.”

To make a long story short, it isn’t an orga­ni­za­tion, not in the sense that peo­ple have come to believe.

It’s ONE guy–Gage. He is an archi­tect (and life­long Repub­li­can), but has never designed a build­ing taller than 3 stories.

He has a few shills who func­tion as, in effect, stage props, but the big group of engi­neers and archi­tects rep­re­sented to the gullible are peo­ple who have signed peti­tions after hear­ing one of his presentations.

They are signatories.

There are all kinds of engi­neers in the world–software engi­neers, water purifi­ca­tion engi­neers etc.

We should note, in this con­text, that the rel­e­vant pro­fes­sional cat­e­gory here are struc­tural engi­neers, of whom there are about 130,000 work­ing in the United States.

At last count Gage had man­aged to hood­wink a grand total of four into sign­ing his petitions,and they prob­a­bly never checked out the dubi­ous verac­ity of his orig­i­nal claims.

When chal­lenged by a retired NYFD offi­cer who had writ­ten a book about WTC 7’s col­lapse to appear oppo­site him on an inter­net TV show, nei­ther Gage nor any of the rest of the crew would appear, includ­ing David Ray Grif­fin. This sug­gests VERY strongly that The Usual Sus­pects know that they are lying, and are not sim­ply “deceived” or “mis­in­formed.” That would make them acces­sories after the fact to 3,00 counts of first degree murder.

A Well-Placed Source, very cred­i­ble, alleges that there were some charges used to col­lapse WTC 7 so that the flames would not reach the thou­sands of gal­lons of heat­ing oil in the build­ing, nor the power sub­sta­tion under­neath. When trans­form­ers go, they explode like bombs and start intense fires.

In effect, the source alleges that the flames were suf­fo­cated, not unlike the way that Red Adair, the famous, Texas-based oil well fire-fighter, det­o­nates charges to suf­fo­cate oil well fires by deny­ing them oxygen.

This was done to WTC 7, accord­ing to this source. I’ve seen no cor­rob­o­ra­tion and have my doubts. This per­son is, how­ever, nei­ther a liar nor a fascist–unlike the Truthers, who are both–Alex Jones, in particular.

Again, I have my doubts–the per­son was describ­ing a broad­cast inter­view on the day of the attacks. The inter­vie­wee may well have been dis­cussing a con­tin­gency plan. I’ve seen no cred­i­ble evi­dence that cut­ter charges were used on 9/11.

The fires on numer­ous floors were trig­gered when a 48 story sec­tion of one of the Twin Tow­ers (which did NOT col­lapse in their foot­print) laid out across WTC Plaza, trash­ing WTC #‘s 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the process, and rip­ping the cor­ner off of WTC 7 to the height of 18–20 stories.

You’ll notice that nei­ther Gage, nor any of these front-running morons EVER talks about what hap­pened to WTC 3, 4, 5, or 6! again, all of those build­ings (in addi­tion to WTC 1, 2, and 7) were trashed on that day.

To be valid, an hypoth­e­sis must be able to explain all observed phe­nom­ena and to accu­rately pre­dict future occurrences.

Because the so-called “Truthers” don’t even deal with 3, 4, 5, and 6. They not only aren’t in the game, they haven’t even paid the fee to get into the park­ing lot.

This, too, sug­gests VERY strongly that they KNOW that they are lying in their teeth and are not just “mis­in­formed.” Again, that makes them acces­sories after the fact to 3,000 counts of first degree murder.

NYFD had lost too many fire­fight­ers and equip­ment in the col­lapse of the Twin Tow­ers to con­tain the mas­sive con­fla­gra­tion in build­ing 7 and didn’t want to risk any more loss of life.

BTW–this same source not only scoffs at the notion of a “con­trolled demo­li­tion” or implo­sion of WTC 7 or any of the rest of the build­ings, but claims in no uncer­tain terms that the “con­trolled demo­li­tion, cruise mis­sile hit the Pen­ta­gon” dis­in­for­ma­tion was cre­ated and financed by the very male­fac­tors, in the U.S. and the Mid­dle East, who planned and launched the attacks in the first place!

Specif­i­cally, the source alleges that the ini­tial infu­sion of funds to gen­er­ate the “Truther” move­ment came from the short-selling of equi­ties in the run-up to the attacks.

Again, this is Some­one Who Would Know.

BTW–I have years of expe­ri­ence in the build­ing trades.

The Truthers are part of the cover-up, acces­sories after the fact to 3,000 counts of first degree mur­der and treason.

And the dupes who fill the inter­net forums with their non­sense couldn’t tell a dirt road from a chicken with lips.

Best to you Steven,

Dave

@ Steven: I agree with you that “Truthers” are not all bad peo­ple, and the same can be said of a vari­ety of folks who are involved in groups that are ques­tion­able. To give a con­crete exam­ple, and you know I like to talk about that, every week I meet peo­ple who are frankly anti-zionist and anti-Israel, but I can see in their eyes that they are sin­cere about it and con­vinced to do the right thing. We may find peo­ple like that in every kind of enterprise.

That is why it is so hard to fight the crowd belong­ing to any fifth col­umn in any coun­try in the world. You have the few screw­ers at the top who con­trol the pro­pa­ganda and then you have the rest of the sheeple, a mix­ture of either mis­in­formed, sin­cere, seek­ers, men­tally ill, des­per­ate, naive, unin­tel­li­gent, etc.

I think I have a good capac­ity to sep­a­rate the good from the crap, so as soon as I got to know For The Record show, I put aside the trash of the “Truthers”. Their mate­r­ial doesn’t stand crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion, and mostly, it doesn’t stand just good com­mon sense either.

I agree with Dave. The Truthers, the lead­ers at least, are the media staff of those who pulled off, or facil­i­tated, 9/11, and their job is to cover the tracks of the per­pe­tra­tors. Our job, is to con­vince as many peo­ple as we can to always use their intel­li­gence before any­thing and to always COUNTERCHECK every­thing by your­self. Don’t trust any­one, is the best advice I can give to the peo­ple I meet. Do the research yourself.

Keep up search­ing for the truth. You and Pter­rafractyl have shown so far a lot of good qual­i­ties and it is a good sign for the future.

I’m still look­ing at these issues but one big ‘what if’ occurred to me years ago. Let’s sup­pose a sce­nario in which the build­ings didn’t col­lapse but only sus­tained heavy dam­age from plane impacts. Hun­dreds of peo­ple would have died and the plan­ners would have been well pleased with a suc­cess­ful ter­ror attack. The ‘offi­cial’ war on ter­ror and the abro­ga­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion would have pro­ceeded apace. What­ever the evi­dence or lack thereof for planted charges, the sec­ondary attack seems redun­dant and makes the insider expo­sure risk much greater. I’ve never heard any truthers address why they would use such a (to me) non­sen­si­cal twofold strat­egy when the pri­mary attack by planes would have served them well enough. In the puta­tive script the build­ings couldn’t have been imploded with­out plane impacts as the ini­tia­tor, but since the plane impacts of and by them­selves were surely enough to accom­plish any goal, why add the mad flourish?

@Dave: Okay. I did under­stand the humor, btw, but I was a lit­tle con­cerned that some may not. (P.S. good points on the event itself as well. I will also look at the links. Thanks for the info. =) )

@Claude: Well, I have to agree. Sadly, a good num­ber of the Truthers are indeed fraud­u­lent, Eric Huf­schmid and Mike Delaney(known as ‘Pro­Think’), being two really good examples......the lat­ter, btw, was behind the “9/11 Miss­ing Links” so-called ‘documentary’(read: agit­prop dis­info piece).

Daryl Brad­ford Smith is a highly unsta­ble and deranged individual.

His site con­sists of not-so-thinly-veiled anti-semitic filth.

It also con­flates anti-Zionism (ie, the objec­tion to a state based upon reli­gious affil­i­a­tion) with anti-Semitism which is thor­oughly erro­neous and deceptive.

In the past I had lis­tened to sev­eral of his audio pre­sen­ta­tions as an exer­cise in “know thine enemy” and as a study in Fascist/neo-Nazi pro­pa­ganda. Whether he was “turned” or not is irrelevant.

As for “Jews invent­ing jazz...” Fact is that Louis Arm­strong did reside with a Jew­ish fam­ily for a time after being released from the Col­ored Waif’s Home in New Orleans, so there you go. Proof!

@Stu:

Just so you under­stand, Stu, I no longer lis­ten to DBS.
Truth be told, I had been inter­ested by some of his ear­li­est pro­grams, but when I took a good hard look at some of the stuff he was pro­mot­ing, much of which, iron­i­cally, was intro­duced to him by dis­info mon­ger Eric Hufschmid(whom he now claims to hate btw), I soon real­ized that things weren’t what I thought they were. TBH, at first, I tried to see some good in the guy(perhaps out of some naivete, I admit, as well as my good nature.) mainly by tun­ing out the really crazy stuff his guests were feed­ing him, but I even­tu­ally came to the under­stand­ing that such was futile, and so, stopped lis­ten­ing alto­gether, some­time in the era of late 2008/early 2009.

In all hon­esty, though, you do have a good point. Doesn’t really mat­ter now whether he’s been turned or a plant, like his for­mer pal Huf­schmid or Anti­Think Delaney. What mat­ters is that spew­ing bull­shit all over the airwaves.

How­ever, I do believe we can per­haps use some of his pro­grams to edu­cate peo­ple, in a course of ‘know thine enemy’, as you so elo­quently put it, Stu, as exam­ples of just how dis­info agents and use­ful idiots of all stripes oper­ate and how we can counter their B.S.

[...] No, No Nano-Thermite [...]

One more corol­lary to my pre­vi­ous post.. As a fur­ther thought exper­i­ment, it’s not true but assume that the planes only sce­nario and the planes plus some­thing else sce­nario carry exactly the same evi­den­tiary weight. It would be a tossup, except that in the real world the rabid pro­mo­tion of the lat­ter has brought us not one cen­time­ter closer to expo­sure and arrest of the crim­i­nals and, in fact, has had the oppo­site effect. An enor­mous amount of of men­tal and emo­tional energy has been wasted and that was prob­a­bly the point of it all.
For broader human­ity the issues of pri­or­ity in these crimes are 99% the why of them and 1% the how of them. That ratio has been suc­cess­fully reversed by the truth com­mu­nity. They won this round. I’m mov­ing on to other things.

@Dwight: We MAY be able to reverse this, though.

Dave, your “Final Solu­tion to the ‘Truther Prob­lem” riff is THE fun­ni­est thing you’ve ever said. I laughed like a sonic boom.

The CDers (or tran­nies, as I call ‘em) are the worst thing that ever hap­pened to alter­na­tive thought in this coun­try. They’ve com­pletely dis­cred­ited every­one who has ever tried to look past the offi­cial story on ANY topic. Nowa­days, peo­ple lump the JFK assas­si­na­tion researchers in with the WTC goof­balls. Yeesh!

I’ll reserve judg­ment about your “very cred­i­ble source” is on Build­ing 7. When I looked into the mat­ter, circa 2003, I con­cluded that the building’s fall was, in all like­li­hood, due to two fac­tors: 1. The use of trans­fer trusses (an inher­ently unsta­ble design), and 2. The out­ra­geous amount of explo­sive fuels kept in that build­ing in defi­ance of city codes. (As I recall, the WTC tech­ni­cally was under the Port Author­ity and thus did not have to fol­low those codes.) Of course, if either of those causes received offi­cial recog­ni­tion, there would be law­suits aplenty.

So what IS it with the “truthers”? What really weirds me out is the way they fix­ate on cer­tain writ­ers. They latched onto my hum­ble site ages ago and WILL NOT GIVE UP, even though I never print a word they say. This has been going on for six years. They seem to think that scor­ing a con­ver­sion would send them into End­less Cos­mic Orgasm.

No doubt, those clowns are treat­ing you in the same obses­sive fasion. On a more exalted level, they fix­ated on Matt Taibbi and Bill Maher. Why Maher and not (say) Jon Stew­art? Why Taibbi and not (say) Paul Krug­man? Ya got me!

The CDers are the biggest freaks I’ve ever met, and I’ve met way more than my share of freaks.

@Joseph Can­non–

Wel­come to this web­site, fel­low cur­mud­geon! BTW–those not famil­iar with Mr. Cannon’s blog, it’s cannonfire.blogspot.com.

A few points: I, too, can’t find cor­rob­o­ra­tion of my associate’s dis­cus­sion of the down­ing of WTC 7. I know the indi­vid­ual to be of great integrity and this per­son utterly dis­misses the “tran­nies” as you call them.

The most prob­a­ble expla­na­tion, I’ve long thought, is the one you cited. With a cor­ner of the build­ing short off to the height of 18–20 sto­ries and fires burn­ing out of con­trol, it would have blown sky high in time.

There are a num­ber of things I’ve never heard dis­cussed with regard to the events of that awful day, includ­ing what hap­pened to the power sub­sta­tion under WTC 7.

The WTC was indeed the prop­erty of the Port Author­ity of the City of New York, whose build­ings are exempt from New York City build­ing codes

I had a num­ber of Truthers descend on me with their B.S. after I posted that, and, as you might guess, at least one actu­ally thought I was advo­cat­ing killing these creatures.

At a psycho/social level, they are one of the purest exam­ple of fas­cism I’ve ever seen.

Aside from the economic/political analy­sis of fas­cism as “The Cor­po­rate State,” of Mussolini’s chris­ten­ing, fas­cism is a polit­i­cal sys­tem that fea­tures the accu­mu­la­tion of power by the fas­cist through the gath­er­ing of oth­ers around him (or her.)

I call it “bun­dle think.” The Truthers seem to gain momen­tum and psy­cho­log­i­cal rein­force­ment from their com­pa­tri­ots, who echo the same nonsense.

When their dri­vel has reached “un-critical mass” and the indi­vid­ual sticks in the fas­cis are suf­fi­ciently rein­forced, they see them­selves as some sort of exalted entity and its” Katy Bar the Door” after that.

With decades of talk radio under my belt, I’ve seen and heard enough idiocy to appre­ci­ate darker analy­sis of the human con­di­tion than I find nor­mally palat­able. (I stopped tak­ing calls years ago–idiots travel in herds and they latched onto the Sun­day night show I did in the Sil­i­con Valley.)

There is a dynamic I call “INfor­ma­tion” ver­sus “CON­fir­ma­tion.” I seek to dis­sem­i­nate INfor­ma­tion through this site and my show. Many peo­ple seek CON­fir­ma­tion of their beliefs, hopes, fears, whatever.

The Truthers are a prime exam­ple of those seek­ing CONfirmation.

They are also a good exam­ple of what Edith Whar­ton was ref­er­enc­ing when she noted that “A friv­o­lous soci­ety can only achieve dra­matic sig­nif­i­cance through what its friv­o­lity destroys.”

The Truthers, with their non­sense, have anni­hi­lated the pos­si­bil­ity of any sub­stan­tive inves­ti­ga­tion of 9/11.

BTW–I hope you enjoyed the pic­ture I posted beside the text.

Best,

Dave

“un-critical mass”, indeed. Good term, Dave. On Limbaugh’s long defunct TV show his audi­ence would animal-grunt in uni­son, unabashed that they were repli­cat­ing scenes out of Planet of the Apes. I’m con­tin­u­ally bemused at these advo­cates for the ‘indi­vid­ual’ and ‘free­dom from gov­ern­ment’ who have to run in packs. Real indi­vid­u­al­ity with its often soli­tary nature ter­ri­fies them. On a psy­cho­log­i­cal plane far below ide­ol­ogy, one of fascism’s attrac­tions is that it offers a chance to lose one’s self in mob sadism. Mus­solini should have added “Fas­cism is atavism.”

@Joseph: I gotta admit, Dave does have a pretty decent sense of humor. And at least we got the punch­line. (P.S.: I remem­ber you now, too, btw! I really liked your Blogspot page a while back and thanks to Dave, I’ve just redis­cov­ered it. Time to start brows­ing again. =) )

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/05/29/former-conspiracy-theorist-when-they-say-%E2%80%98illuminati%E2%80%99-or-%E2%80%98reptiles%E2%80%99-they-mean-jews/

For­mer Con­spir­acy The­o­rist: When They Say ‘Illu­mi­nati’ or ‘Rep­tiles’ They Mean Jews
May 29, 2013 7:26 pm 2 com­ments
Author: Zach Pontz

A reformed con­spir­acy the­o­rist is giv­ing an insid­ers look into the world he once sat at the cen­ter of, and it’s not a pretty one.

Char­lie Veitch says that the mod­ern con­spir­acy nar­ra­tive involves the deeply embed­ded belief that the few con­trol the many, and that the “few” are the Jews. Speak­ing to The Tele­graph, Vietch says that anti-Semitism was par for the course, and he was often the target.

“Loads. Loads. I was once accused of being a Jew because of my olive skin and my nose. They said, ‘We can’t trust him’.” When they say the ‘Illu­mi­nati’ or ‘Rep­tiles,’ do they actu­ally mean Jews? the Tele­graph reporter asks him. “It’s slightly com­pli­cated but, mostly, yes,” he says.

Veitch gained a fol­low­ing as a vocal pro­po­nent of the belief that the 9/11 ter­ror attack was an inside job, a con­trolled demo­li­tion car­ried out by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. His online videos sparked the inter­est of high pro­file con­spir­acy the­o­rists such as Amer­i­can radio host Alex Jones.

But the turn­ing point came when Veitch took part in a BBC doc­u­men­tary, Con­spir­acy Road Trip, made to mark the 10th anniver­sary of 9/11.

Dur­ing the film­ing Veitch met experts includ­ing the chief air traf­fic con­troller on duty dur­ing the 9/11 attacks, demo­li­tion spe­cial­ists and archi­tects. At the start, Veitch was defi­ant, but as pro­duc­tion con­tin­ued he began to change his mind.

“This is hard, you know, because I’ve hung on to these ideas for years now,” he told the film’s pre­sen­ter, Andrew Maxwell. “I’ve always hung out with peo­ple who say, ‘Yeah, con­spir­acy! 9/11 demo­li­tion!’ But now I’ve spo­ken to a guy who’s explained it. And it makes sense.”

Veitch now has few kind words for the world he once inhab­ited. He describes it as a world full of “evil-worshipping para­noia. As some­one who’s been deep in it, and seen the hatred and the insan­ity, I think big ter­ror­ist attacks will come from con­spir­acy theorists.”

“Con­spir­acy the­o­rists,” he says, are often “bul­lied peo­ple. Peo­ple who maybe didn’t get the girls at school… So they see a lot of rug­ger bug­ger types and they’re against any­thing to do with them. They will side with the devil, as long as the devil is against the West.”