Is it just me, or do I detect a Truther hidden somewhere within the Washington Post these days?

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/09/obama_adviser_faces_...

Barack Obama
Obama Adviser Faces Scrutiny Over Mortgage Deals
By Shailagh Murray
Here's the trouble with running a squeaky clean campaign: there's very little margin for ethical error.

James A. Johnson, former Fannie Mae CEO and consummate Washington insider, is leading Sen. Barack Obama's vice-presidential search process. He just conducted an early round of interviews on Capitol Hill today. But Johnson also is proving a ripe target for Republicans looking to spot hypocrisy in Obama's pledge to reject business as usual in Washington.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that Johnson had received mortgages worth more than $7 million from beleaguered lender Countrywide Financial, including at least two loans below market average. The article noted that the transactions may have been perfectly aboveboard -- but several could prove too cozy, depending on how much they overlapped with Johnson's Fannie Mae tenure.

"There is nothing illegal about a mortgage firm treating some borrowers better than others," the Journal article noted. "But if Fannie Mae officials received special treatment, that could cause a political problem for the government-sponsored, shareholder-owned company."

Countrywide was severely battered by the subprime mortgage crisis and is in the process of being bought out by Bank of America Corp. for a fraction of its former value. The lender also is under federal investigation for possible securities fraud, the Journal noted.

The Republican National Committee responded as if it had won the lottery. "Barack Obama routinely rails against lobbyists and corporate insiders, yet his campaign is stocked with both. Now it turns out that the man leading his vice presidential selection team is receiving highly questionable loans," spokesman Alex Conant declared in a statement. "With millions of Americans struggling to pay their mortgages, it raises serious questions about Obama's judgment when we learn members of his campaign leadership are receiving favors that the average American would never get."

Sen. John McCain piled on during an interview this afternoon with Carl Cameron of Fox News. "I think it suggests a bit of a contradiction, talking about how his campaign is gonna be not associated with people like that. Clearly he is very much associated with that," McCain said, according to statement circulated by his campaign.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor shot back, "It's the height of hypocrisy for the McCain campaign to try and make this an issue when John Green, one of John McCain's top advisors, lobbied for Ameriquest, which was one of the nation's largest subprime lenders and a key player in the mortgage crisis. As President, Senator Obama will crack down on fraudulent lenders and bring real relief to Americans struggling in the grip of the housing crisis-the kind of change that works for the American people."

In a town where even the lowliest campaign aides bill themselves as "political advisers" on cable news, Johnson is a master of discretion who rarely gives interviews, much less overstates his usefulness. He also vetted running mates for John Kerry and Walter Mondale.

But as adroitly as Johnson has navigated the political world, he also has risen to the highest levels in the business one. After an early career spent teaching at Princeton University and running the public affairs office of Target Corp., Johnson went to work for Mondale, a fellow Minnesotan, when he was vice president.

In 1985, Johnson rose to the highest ranks of Wall Street when he was named managing director of Lehman Brothers.

In 1991, he moved to Fannie Mae, serving as CEO of the mortgage-guarantee behemoth for most of the Clinton administration. He later became vice-chairman of Perseus LLC, a private banking firm, and joined the boards of Goldman Sachs, Gannett Co. Inc., and United Health Group, among other high-profile companies.

He chaired the Kennedy Center for the Arts and is a member of exclusive clubs such as American Friends of Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He chaired the Kennedy Center for the Arts and is a member of exclusive clubs such as American Friends of Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

___________________
Freedom is an inside job

You're kidding. Even her own congregation tossed her from congress, twice. She panders to the naivest od dreamy liberals with too much money, too much time, and too little purpose.

Truth seeker? Hardly. McKinney is just an opportunist trying to get another free ride.

First the Washington Post, Now the Financial Times.

The truth is out there
By Peter Barber

Published: June 7 2008 01:22 | Last updated: June 7 2008 01:22

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King’s cadence.

“A time comes,” declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, “when silence
is betrayal.”

The congregation answers with whoops and calls of “That’s right!” King was talking about America’s war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government’s war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.

Last winter, “Investigate 9/11” banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by “truthers” in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Truthers picketed the Academy Awards in LA – despite this year’s winner of the best actress Oscar, Marion Cotillard, reportedly being one of them. But then, she’s French. Literature lovers in that country pushed Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable imposture (The Appalling Fraud) – which asserts that 9/11 was a government plot to justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan and increase military spending – to the top of the bestseller list in 2002.

Country music star Willie Nelson, a week or so before the Oscars he described as naive the notion that the “implosion” of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened the Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about the official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the “9/11 Truth” movement.

The events of 9/11 were recorded in many thousands of images, from crisp agency photographs to amateur camcorder footage. Every recorded trail of smoke, every spray of sparks is pored over by an army of sceptics, collectively described as the 9/11 Truth movement. They believe that the key to the mystery is hidden somewhere within the pictures, just as some people think that clues are contained in the Zapruder film which captured the moment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Allied against them is a smaller group of rival bloggers who have taken it upon themselves to debunk what they claim are dangerous conspiracy theories.

Gore Vidal, writer:
“If there ever was great cause for impeachment, it would be over 9/11”

There is some evidence that the truthers are swaying the rest of us. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2006 revealed that only 16 per cent of Americans polled believed the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11. More than half thought it was “hiding something”. This is not the same as believing the government actually launched the attacks, but a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll the same year found that more than a third of those questioned suspected that federal officials assisted in the attacks or took no action to stop them so that the US could go to war.

The truthers certainly believe that they are on a roll. The crowd in the Immanuel Presbyterian Church seemed electrified. As the donated sound system pumped out angry rap, a giant video screen showed images of protesters demanding a new investigation into 9/11. The symbols and the language were borrowed from the civil rights struggle, but the truthers are an eclectic group, including anti-Bush, anti-war liberals and anti-government libertarians. A young man in a “Vote Ron Paul” T-shirt scuttled through the hall, filming us as we took our seats on wooden pews.

First up was Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect who founded Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, which now claims to have 379 professional members. Gage told us that the collapse of the Twin Towers could not have been due merely to gravity, the impact of the airliners and the resulting jet fuel fires – which would not have been hot enough to weaken the steel sufficiently. Behind him on the video screen was the south tower of the World Trade Center. Smoke poured from its upper floors. A respectful silence fell over the audience, followed by gasps as the building appeared to dissolve before our eyes.

What happened to building 7?
To the truthers, the third building in the World Trade Center complex to collapse on September 11 is evidence that the mainstream media is in on the plot
While I have seen this footage countless times, it seems that I had clearly never understood what I was seeing. The destruction of the Twin Towers, along with the collapse of the nearby 47-storey World Trade Center 7 building, had all the hallmarks of controlled demolition, according to Gage.

They all came straight down, almost at the speed of a free-falling object, right into their own
footprints. Steel-framed buildings had never collapsed because of fires before. On this day three
did, one of which, “Building 7”, was not even hit by an aircraft.

Gage, who had worked himself into a fever, exhorted the audience to stand up and be counted: “A country is at stake.” Then he welcomed on to the stage the star of the evening, Steven Jones. A softly spoken physicist, Jones is the movement’s designated martyr and seems to promise what the truthers so desperately need: scientific credibility.

Jones entered into truther lore in 2006 when he was put into early retirement by Brigham Young University in Utah after giving public lectures on his paper “Why indeed did the WTC buildings collapse?”, which he published on the website of the university’s physics department. Jones contended that the towers were demolished by cutter charges which had been placed throughout the buildings, probably involving an incendiary called thermite. BYU’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the structural engineering faculty, followed by the university administration, disowned him.

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/jones/StevenJones.html

Still, Jones is no fool. He has published more than 50 scholarly papers, including pieces on cold nuclear fusion in journals such as Scientific American and Nature. He invented a cooker which uses solar power and has donated models to poor families in the developing world. Jones tells us he believes laboratory testing of dust from Ground Zero will reveal residue from a thermite reaction.

As soon as the seminar is over, Jones is mobbed by people asking him to pose for photos and offering their own views on the 9/11 plot, as well as others such as the presence above our heads of chemtrails (deadly toxins sprayed by unidentified aircraft, which some believe are part of a secret global depopulation programme).

This is the world Jones now inhabits – it seems a long way from a Utah physics department.
I ask him later by phone if he has any regrets about publishing that fateful paper: “No regrets.
I’ve thought of Galileo a few times. He got a little worse than I did, I suppose.”

Jones is typical of many 9/11 researchers in that the subject has taken over his professional life. Down the coast in Santa Barbara is another of the movement’s luminaries. On the beach at Isla Vista, one of the most expensive real-estate spots in the US, lives David Ray Griffin, a former theology professor. As his dogs scratch excitedly on the sliding door, Griffin explains that America’s primary faith is not Christianity, but nationalism. “Other countries do really terrible things. Our leaders never would. And that [belief] has been the biggest impediment to getting people to look at the evidence, because they just know a priori that that is ridiculous.”

Michael Meacher, UK politician:
“It is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11”
Griffin now thinks the evidence to the contrary is incontrovertible. Until 2002, he had busied himself far from the rancour of public controversy writing rather obscure philosophical books and teaching philosophy of religion at the Claremont School of Theology. But the course of his research changed abruptly when he heard a visiting British theologian question the official account of 9/11. Two years later, Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor, with a foreword by British MP Michael Meacher, became a touchstone in the 9/11 Truth movement. He has since written others, including one detailing the “omissions and distortions” of the 9/11 Commission, the report of which fits the definition of “conspiracy theory” neatly, he says. “They started with the conclusion that al-Qaeda did it and didn’t even consider the alternative that it was an inside job.”

Griffin was a script consultant on Loose Change Final Cut, part of the internet phenomenon that set off the current explosion of low-budget 9/11 DVDs. The previous version was viewed more than 10 million times on Google Video, according to Vanity Fair. In 2002, armed only with a laptop and off-the-shelf video production software, Dylan Avery, an 18-year-old resident of Oneonta, New York, set about making a fictional film about discovering, with his friends, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. At some point in his research, Avery had a “Dude, this shit is real!” moment and Loose Change entered the realm of agit-prop documentary. Final Cut makes a bold new allegation: the Twin Towers were packed with deadly asbestos, which would have cost billions to clean up. “If you bring down the buildings,” says Griffin, “not only do you not have to pay ... to clean them up, somebody is going to make billions of dollars on the insurance.”

David Ray Griffin

Griffin offers one further speculation, this time on a question which is controversial even among 9/11 sceptics: what hit the Pentagon? Thierry Meyssan was the first to claim that it was not Flight 77 – an American Airlines 757 carrying 64 passengers – but a cruise missile that hit the west wall of the Pentagon at 9.37am on September 11. Websites have followed suit, pointing to the apparent lack of plane debris on the Pentagon lawn and the fact that the hole left in the outer ring of the building looks too small to accommodate the wingspan of a 757. Retired US Air Force captain Russ Wittenberg from Pilots for 9/11 Truth asserted that no inexperienced pilot could have performed the manoeuvre the 9/11 Commission concluded that al-Qaeda conspirator Hani Hanjour pulled off that morning: a 330° turn, 2,200ft descent, a full-throttle dive and then a 530 miles per hour plunge at ground level into the Pentagon. Call it “the magic plane theory”: doubters believe that, just as the bullet that killed Kennedy appeared to defy the laws of physics, so the plane that struck the Pentagon was like no other in existence.

There is also another obvious problem: if a missile hit the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77? “There was a rumour that an airliner had gone down on the Ohio/Kentucky border and that was taken very seriously early on by the Federal Aviation Authority,” says Griffin. It later rejected the story. But Griffin claims the only evidence that Flight 77 was aloft after that was an alleged phone call from Barbara Olsen to Ted Olsen, the solicitor-general of the United States.

So how does he explain that phone call? Ted Olsen is a Bush administration insider, he says. Another possible answer, though, is “voice-morphing technology”. This would also explain the flurry of phone calls from United Airlines Flight 93, which, as the official story has it, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers revolted against their hijackers.

Truthers who believe the US government “Made it happen on purpose”, “it” being the destruction of September 11.

A more moderate strain of truther who believe the government “Let it happen on purpose”.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth
Started by James Fetzer, the group advocates looking at all possible explanations of what happened on September 11, no matter how improbable.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice
The more moderate splinter group of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, led by Steven Jones. Endorses an “evidence-based approach” to questioning the 9/11 story.

If the 9/11 truth movement is fighting a kind of asymmetric war against official sources of knowledge, it is also battling itself. As the movement morphs into an international activist group, it recognises that if it is to convince middle Americans, it must distance itself from its exotic fringe.

Hearing this, you either experience the thrill of revelation or the sinking feeling that the person you are listening to is having some kind of breakdown.

The answer, of course, is that there is only one conspiracy. Pearl Harbour, the moon landing,
JFK, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Black Helicopters, Skull & Bones, chemtrails: all faces of the same
demon. The plot goes all the way to the top, and all the way back in time. You could come to believe
that it involves everyone except yourself – at which point it’s all over for you. And as I listened, I just
waited for him to say the Word. And, inevitably, Webre brought it all back to the “international
neo- Zionist organisation”.

The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission – the official story – is that the 2001 attacks got through because those charged with protecting America had not truly conceived of the threat: in its author’s evocative phrase, they had suffered a “failure of imagination”. After trawling the internet in search of 9/11 Truth, it seems to me the American imagination is strong. “Americans are very good at dreaming up these scenarios,” says Lewis Lapham, the former Harper’s magazine editor and a prominent critic of the Bush administration post-September 11. “We are open to all kinds of magical theories,” he says, citing the continuing fascination with the assassination of JFK. “We are also good at creating religions.” Lapham thinks the theory that 9/11 was an inside job follows in this long tradition, but also reflects cynicism among Americans towards their government. He does not accept that the Bush administration planned 9/11 or even allowed it to happen. Nonetheless, he thinks a new investigation is warranted. In 2004, Harper’s ran a trenchant piece describing the 9/11 Commission as a “whitewash” and a “cheat and a fraud” for downplaying evidence that warnings of the al-Qaeda threat were ignored. Such flaws allowed space for alternative theories to develop, Lapham says.

In this, there are shades of the Warren Commission into the assassination of President Kennedy, which served merely to deepen popular distrust. But if we have seen the likes of the 9/11 Truth movement before, it also represents something new. “With the Kennedy assassination, pretty soon after the events themselves there were fairly significant questions being raised by people of all types and stripes about what actually happened,” says Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. “But whereas then it was a generalised, amorphous kind of response, the amount of organisation – politically and through alternative media – is far more striking now than it was back then.”

“It’s very interesting to see,” he says, “particularly in the United States, how the anti-war movement has been largely co-opted in many places by the 9/11 Truth movement. And we desperately need an active anti-war movement, because there is a lot of reckoning to be done.”

Peter Barber is the FT’s deputy comment editor

___________________
Freedom is an inside job