On "Democracy Now TV" March 27, 2006
See an Amy Goodman Interview with Charlie Savage, who works as a reporter for THE BOSTON GLOBE. He with his excellent journalist abilities, not to mention his gargantuan youthful chutzpah, reports on a little known dirty secretive tool of the NEOCONS AND BUSH. An almost illegal maneuver to help them break the back of our Constitution called a "SIGNING STATEMENT". TALK ABOUT CONSPIRACY! Which brings me to the first reason for today's posting...

911 CONSPIRACY THEORY

Please read Mark Morford's take on the 911 Conspiracy Theory. Then scroll down to watch Amy Goodman's Interview with Charlie Savage. The young man who broke the "SIGNING STATEMENT" Story. Thank you, thinkingblue

PS: Please read these excerpts from INSIDE SCOOP ON 911 CONSPIRACY THEORIES:

Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were the demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta.

The second ring, marked MOLES, contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government,” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush.

The third circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed “technicians,” “CIA special forces,” “old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept their mouths shut.

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Your "HOP" Level In his paper "What Is Your ‘HOP’ Level?" Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September 11. The options essentially boil down to four.
(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. "The Official Conspiracy Theory"). The received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there was “no warning.”
(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, "Reno Wall" Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission Report.
(C) LIHOP (or "Let It Happen on Purpose"). Many variations, but primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector were aware of the hijackers’ plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

(D) MIHOP ("Made It Happen on Purpose"). The U.S. government or private forces planned and executed the attacks.
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Long Live The 9/11 Conspiracy!
Anyone still care about the heap of disturbing, unsolved questions surrounding Our Great Tragedy?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Here is your must-read for the month. Here is your oh-my-God-I'm-sending-this-piece-to-every-smart-person-I-know hunk of outstanding, distressing, disquieting media bliss.

Here it is: an absolutely exceptional inside scoop on the white-hot world of Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, writ large and smart by Mark Jacobson over at New York magazine, and it's mandatory reading for anyone and everyone who's ever entertained the nagging thought that something -- or rather, far more than one something -- is deeply wrong with the official line on what actually happened on Sept. 11.
See, it is very likely that you already know that Sept. 11 will go down in the conspiracy history books as a far more sinister affair than, say, the murky swirl of the Kennedy assassination. You probably already know that much of what exactly happened on Sept. 11 remains deeply unsettling and largely unsolved -- or to put another way, if you don't know all of this and if you fully and blithely accept the official Sept. 11 story, well, you haven't been paying close enough attention.
But on this, the third anniversary of the launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq by way of whoring the tragedy of Sept. 11 for his cronies' appalling gain, what you might not know, what gets so easily forgotten in the mists of time and via the endless repetition of the orthodox Sept. 11 tale, is the sheer volume, the staggering array of unanswered questions about just about every single aspect of Sept. 11 -- the planes, the WTC towers, the Pentagon, the fires, the passengers and the cell phone calls and the firefighters and, well, just about everything. It is, when you look closely, all merely a matter of how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go.
Verily, Jacobson, in his New York mag piece, encounters crackpots and fringe nutballs and those who think Sept. 11 was connected to aliens and electromagnetic fields and the Illuminati. It can, unfortunately, get a little crazy. But there is also a very smart, grounded, intelligent and surprisingly large faction -- which includes eyewitnesses, Sept. 11 widows, former generals, pilots, professors, engineers, WTC maintenance workers and many, many more -- who point to a rather shocking pile of evidence that says there is simply no way 19 fanatics with box cutters sent by some bearded lunatic in a cave could have pulled off the most perfectly orchestrated air attack of the century. Not without serious help, anyway.
Whose help? This, of course, is the biggest question of all, one which many of the more well-researched theories go a surprisingly long way toward answering.
You have to sift and sort. There are disturbing questions about collapse speeds and controlled demolitions and why the towers fell when the all-steel infrastructure was designed to easily withstand the temperatures of any sort of fire, even burning jet fuel. There are questions of the mysterious, media-documented blasts deep in the WTC towers that took place after the planes hit. There are questions of why there was such a short-selling spree on shares of American Airlines and United Air Lines the day before the attack, huge doubts about the failures of NORAD and the FAA, the bizarre case of the missing plane in the Pentagon crash, and also the downing of Flight 93 where, according to the coroner, no blood or major plane wreckage was actually found. There is, ultimately, the stunning failure of the entire multi-trillion-dollar American air-defense system. Just for starters.
There is also the very big question of what happened to 7 WTC, the only building not hit by anything at all, but which collapsed anyway, in a perfect controlled-demolition sort of way, for no reason anyone can sufficiently explain. But which just so happened to contain vital offices for the IRS, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission and more.
But perhaps Jacobson's article is insufficient for you. Perhaps you have heard much of it before, or you're more of the visceral type and need to actually see the proofs in order to delve deeper, have them laid out like gruesome body parts in a mesmerizing autopsy. Fair enough.
For you, we have the surprisingly compelling indie documentary "9/11 Loose Change" (Google it), freely available on the Internet and produced by three very astute and very young and very strong-willed dudes who managed to cobble together a truly astounding array of proofs and interviews and evidence, a full 1 hour and 20 minutes' worth of mesmerizing footage you will not be able to easily forget.
Or maybe you should peruse one of the countless Sept. 11 conspiracy sites, many of which link to relevant video and one of which -- scholarsfor911truth.org -- claims to be "a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11." Start there.
Now, it's very true that some of the more specious conspiracy claims have been largely discredited and proved false. Some of the more radical "evidence" gathered by theorists is quite suspect and easily placed in the category of no-way-in-hell. This is valid. This is as it should be. You have to chew through a lot of skin and gristle to get to the real meat.
But oh the meat. The overwhelming quantity, the bloody, deadly stench of it. Fact is, it is quite impossible to watch the entire "Loose Change" documentary and not come away just a little shaken, a little awed by the sheer number of perversely interrelated facts and aberrant coincidences-that-aren't-coincidences, shaking your head at how it all seems to irrefutably prove there is far, far more to the Sept. 11 tragedy than just crazy Osama and his band of zealots, as you begin to sink into a sighing morass of rage and frustration and suspicion and mistrust. You almost can't help it.
Of course, there is another option. There is another way out. You may, as is the standard cultural default, simply ignore it all, scoff and roll your eyes and shrug it all off because it's just too bleak and distasteful to entertain the idea that the dark Sept. 11 thread winds all the way through the NSA and the FBI and the White House and the Project for the New American Century and Dick Cheney's mangled soul and God only knows where else.
But then again, no. You have to look. You have to try. Knowledge is power, and while the truth may be spurious and slippery and messy and deep, the pursuit of it is just about the only thing we have left. Give that up, and all that's left is spiritual numbness, emotional stasis and death. So what are you waiting for?

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/03/29/notes032906.DTL
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If the above article isn't enough to make you bellow HUH?

WAIT UNTIL YOU READ AND VIEW THE BELOW INFORMATION FROM DEMOCRACY NOW thinkingblue

PS: The next time I want to take out a loan... will I be able to sign a SIGNING STATEMENT claiming, "I DO NOT HAVE TO ADHERE TO THE STIPULATIONS IN THIS LOAN AGREEMENT, I CAN CHOOSE TO NOT PAY IT OFF WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES"? I think NOT!

Monday, March 27th, 2006
Bush Signs Statements to Bypass Torture Ban, Oversight Rules in Patriot Act

When President Bush signed a law banning torture he quietly signed a statement saying he could bypass it. Earlier this month, Bush signed the USA Patriot Act but signed a statement that said he did not consider oversight rules binding. We speak with the Boston Globe reporter who broke the story.

The USA Patriot Act was re-authorized this month after a lengthy bi-partisan effort to include new provisions safeguarding Congressional oversight. The new provisions mandated President Bush to brief Congress about how the FBI was using expanded authorities to search and monitor suspects. But shortly after he signed the bill into effect, Bush quietly issued what is known as a signing statement in which he lays out his interpretation of the law. In this document Bush declared he did not consider himself bound by the oversight provisions. Bush wrote he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosing it would harm foreign relations, national security or his duties as President.

This was not the first such statement to come from the White House. When Congress passed a bill outlawing torture of detainees last year, President Bush quietly released a signing statement in which he affirmed his right to bypass the law if he felt it jeopardized national security. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said the President's latest effort represents "nothing short of a radical effort to manipulate the constitutional separation of powers and evade accountability and responsibility for following the law."

Charlie Savage, reporter with the Washington bureau of Boston Globe
who has written several articles exposing Bush's signing statements. Related Links:

"Bush Shuns Patriot Act Requirement" (Boston Globe)

"Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban" (Boston Globe)
Related Democracy Now! Coverage:
An Imperial President?
Bush Claims Right To Ignore New Law Banning Torture (DN!,

ALSO VIEW THE FANTASTIC MOVIE by Chris Hume:

"MARCH TO NEW ORLEANS"