Graeme MacQueen

Propaganda in Focus

Many of us are convinced that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. But the question at once arises: if this is what happened, would somebody not have noticed?

The answer is that many people did notice. There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2. This paper will give a brief overview of this evidence.

[…]

The oral histories were collected by the World Trade Center Task Force of the FDNY after New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided it would be important to have a record of what the members of the department experienced on that day. The Task Force interviews comprise 10-12,000 pages of statements by approximately 500 “FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002” (258).

Professor David Ray Griffin, with the help of able researchers, was the first scholar to ferret out fascinating descriptions of explosions from this material (259). The author of the present paper published a subsequent article after reading the oral histories, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers” (260).

The presentation and analysis below build on this earlier work. As the evidence is presented, three important points will emerge. First, the conviction that the Towers came down because of explosions was common on 9/11. Second, there is substantial eyewitness evidence supporting this conviction. Third, this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.

The explosion hypothesis was common on 9/11

[…]

1. In a video clip preserved from 9/11, ABC television reporter N. J. Burkett is seen standing close to the Twin Towers. He draws our attention to the firefighters at the scene and to the burning buildings themselves. Suddenly, the South Tower begins to come apart behind him. As the pulverized debris shoots into the air, Burkett says: “A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!” Mr. Burkett’s statement shows no evidence of over-thinking the situation or of a conspiratorial mindset. He certainly did not come along after 9/11: he expressed his judgment before the debris of the building had even reached the ground. Then he ran for his life. Half an hour later he would run for his life again as the North Tower came down (261).
2. In CNN’s same-day coverage of the events of 9/11, Mayor Giuliani was asked questions about explosions in the Twin Towers on two separate occasions. The second occasion is a press conference at about 2:39 p.m. A female reporter (off screen) asks the Mayor: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought the two buildings down? Was it caused by the planes or by something else?” (262). Notice that she does not ask if there were explosions: she assumes there were. She does not ask if these explosions brought down the Towers: she assumes they did. She merely wants to know what caused the explosions – the planes or “something else.”
3. In footage known as the “Matthew Shapoff video,” acquired from NIST through a Freedom of Information Act request, there are several people (off screen) chatting while they watch the events at the World Trade Center unfold at a distance and film them with their video camera. Suddenly, through their camera we see the North Tower begin to throw pulverized debris in all directions in huge plumes as it disintegrates. After a horrified, “oh, my God!” we hear a male voice, presumably that of Shapoff, exclaim as follows: “That was a bomb that did that! That was a fuckin’ bomb that did that! There’s no goddamn way that could have happened!” (263). Again, this is a spontaneous reaction to what Shapoff was observing.
4. New York firefighter Christopher Fenyo, in a passage from the World Trade Center Task Force interviews, speaks of a debate that began among firefighters who were on the scene. The debate started after the destruction of the South Tower but before the destruction of the North Tower – in other words, between about 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. “…At that point a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.” As with Shapoff, the statement concerns not just explosions generally but the intentional destruction of the building with explosives. That is, people were already debating a subcategory of the explosion hypothesis, the controlled demolition hypothesis, before 10:30 on the morning of 9/11.
5. The FBI’s name for its investigation of the 9/11 incidents is PENTTBOM, which stands for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” Is it possible that when this name was assigned someone in the FBI thought a bombing had taken place? (Recall that according to the current official narrative there was no bombing at any of the affected locations.) On the day of 9/11, USA Today’s foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was seen telling his TV audience that the FBI’s “working theory” at that time was that “at the same time two planes hit the building…there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building, which exploded at the same time and brought both of them down” (264). Given that Kelley was later shown to have routinely fabricated stories for USA Today, his allegations about the FBI would have to be corroborated. However, the general hypothesis ascribed here to the FBI – the buildings were brought down through the use of explosives – was common on 9/11. For example, Albert Turi, FDNY Chief of Safety, told NBC’s Pat Dawson not long after the destruction of the Towers that, in Dawson’s words, “according to his [Turi’s] theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building” (265).

[…]

There is strong eyewitness evidence supporting the explosion hypothesis.

[…]

Zoda says, as he moves his hand: “Floor by floor, it started poppin’ out.” Tardio concurs and uses the same hand gesture: “It was as if they had detonated, detonated (Zoda: “Yeah, detonated, yeah”), you know, as if they were planted to take down a building: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Zoda adds: “All the way down. I was watching and running.”

These are firefighters and they are used to encountering the standard sorts of explosions that occur in building fires. But they do not talk about smoke explosions, or “boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor” (BLEVE) explosions, or any of the other expected forms of explosion. Instead, they are talking about, and acting out with dramatic gestures, something altogether different. They say that what they saw resembled a controlled demolition.

[…]

[…]

Ross Milanytch, an employee at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank, says of the South Tower: “It started exploding…It was about the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.”

John Bussey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said this of the South Tower:

“Off the phone, and collecting my thoughts for the next report, I heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” (268)

Kenneth Rogers of the New York Fire Department said this about his experience with the South Tower:

“…we were standing there with about five companies and we were just waiting for our assignment and then there was an explosion in the south tower… A lot of guys left at that point. I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized

[…]

The handwritten PAPD report of this brave and obviously traumatized individual, which corroborates the above account in several crucial respects, is directly available in the PAPD documents released in 2003 (272). One page of that report is reproduced as follows.

Quantity

It is difficult to formulate a complete account of eyewitnesses who describe, expressly or implicitly, explosions near the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Neither the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission, nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology have published a count. I have compiled the most complete known list of witnesses to explosions at the Twin Towers. There are 156 such witness statements. The two graphs presented below summarize certain aspects of the list.

FIGURE 8-1: WITNESSES BY PROFESSION/AGENCY

[,,,]

The “explosion” category is by far the largest, with 112 eyewitnesses. However, the “bomb” category, with 32 eyewitnesses, is extremely important as well. Most of the people on this list speaking of bombs are firefighters, and it is clear from their use of the word “bomb” that they are not talking about the sort of explosion they expect to encounter in a high-rise fire.

[…]

FIGURE 8-2: WITNESSES BY TERM USED

The types of explosions that typically accompany a fire are described in detail in various publications, probably most authoritatively in the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. There the NFPA describes four types of explosion that would have been expected to accompany the fires in the Twin Towers.

1. BLEVE (“boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosion,” as with an exploding boiler)
2. Electrical explosion
3. Smoke explosion (i.e. backdraft)
4. Combustion explosion (e.g., natural gas, jet fuel vapor)

There are three characteristics of the eyewitness statements that rule out all four types of explosion. That is, these four sorts of explosions may well have occurred, but they do not account for the main explosions witnesses say they perceived. Here are the three characteristics that must be explained.

[…]

Via https://propagandainfocus.substack.com/p/eyewitness-evidence-of-explosions-in-the-twin-towers

Episode 16 Indian Parsis, Jews and Christians

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

The historic Parsi (Zoroastrian), Jewish and Christian district, mainly located India’s west coast, began as diaspora trading communities during the first millennium AD.

Indian Parsi (Zoroastrians)

Many Zoroastrians immigrated to India’s southwest coast following the Muslim conquest of Persia. According to Fisher, Persia had a well-established trade network with west Indian ports prior to the Muslim conquest. The Parsis were some of the earliest Indian shipbuilders, producing European-style ships with Indian teak wood. India’s vast Tata Group conglomerate was started in 1868 by a Parsi philanthropist.

Thanks largely due to their strong Parsi trade networks, Surat and Bombay were the most successful Indian cities under British colonization. Parsi merchants were early brokers for arriving European settlers, as well as working with native artisans who produced products for the European market.

At present India has a population of 60,000 Parsi.

Indian Jews

Jewish traders first arrived in India around in the 8th city BC in the cities of Cochin, Surat and Bombay on India’s southwest coast. By the 8th century AD, it was typical for Jews to have relatives living in all major trading ports of the known world. This enabled the formation of an extensive trust network in an industry (overseas shipping) that could take over a year to produce profits.

Jewish immigration to India reached its peak following the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate (where Jews paid a special tax to be treated as special subjects).* After the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 AD, the prosperity of the Cochin Jews declined. Now many Jewish immigrants from Persia to Bengal on India’s east coast. There they established extensive trade in and out of the Bay of Bengal.

Jewish settlers subsequently set up a third major settlement known as Bene Israel, on India’s northwest coast.

Following Indian independence in 1947 and Israeli independence in 1948, there was a major exodus of Indian Jews to Israel. At parent, only about 5,000 Jews reide in India.

Nestorian Christians

After splitting off from the Catholic Church in the 5th and 6th century, large groups of Nestorian (Syrian) Christians immigrated to India (Kerala). They honor the legacy of the apostle Thomas, who traveled to India in 52 AD. He was martyred on the Tamil Coast and is buried near Madras.

The Nestorian Christians, who recognized the authority of the Syrian patriarchs, also established an extensive trade diaspora network.

There would be major conflict between the Catholic Portuguese who settled India’s west coast in the 16th century and established Nestorians, who the former regarded as heretics.

*The Abbasid Caliphate (750 – 1517 AD) was the third to succeed the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Prior to Muslim conquest, Baghdad was long a major center for Jewish learning

*https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366203

Jonathon Cook

thefreeonline

There’s only one plausible explanation for continuing silence on excess deaths: governments, media and regulators are frightened of what the research may uncover

During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”.

Fear of living under Big Brother or of dying from plague drove many people not only into the arms of one of these two oppositional camps but fuelled a pandemic mania in which reason and compassion were replaced with either extreme cynicism or extreme compliance.

We are still living with the consequences.

There has been a spate of “excess deaths” over the past two years across the West – well above what would normally be expected – and yet this sustained trend is being universally ignored by governments, establishment media and medical bodies.

No one is protesting. The cult of compliance is still in the ascendant.

More on that in a moment.

But it is worth first revisiting briefly the climate of intolerance and willed ignorance that predominated at the height of the pandemic, as I documented in real time in a series of essays that upset more of my readers than any I had written before.

It was always unwarranted to press for vaccine mandates, if only because they violated the critically important principle of bodily autonomy.

But the demand became completely unhinged once it was clear – as it was much earlier than publicly let on by Big Pharma, the World Health Organisation and national regulators – that the vaccines were doing little to halt virus transmission.

Similarly, it was always unethical to insist that children should be routinely given the vaccine and boosters when it was evident that the virus posed no threat to the overwhelming majority of them – and all the more so given that the mRNA vaccines were based on a new technology whose development had been rushed through on an emergency licence.

By definition, no one could know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccines on humans because there had been no long-term studies.

The science was built on a wing and a prayer, which is part of the reason the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations, demurred for so long, and despite huge political pressure, on recommending vaccination for children.

And it was always deeply irresponsible to refuse to consider, or even study, other treatments that might have had an impact on the virus.

Medical authorities ignored or warned the public off potential prophylactics and immunity-boosting treatments and behaviours – even when those interventions could have complemented the role of the vaccines, rather than serving as an alternative to them.

Nothing could be allowed to dilute the public’s exclusive reliance on vaccinations.

One prize example was Vitamin D, the sunshine hormone that, uniquely, every cell in the human body has a receptor for.

Most people in the West are deficient in Vitamin D, many of them severely so, and doctors still have little understanding of what the consequences of that deficiency – beyond osteoporosis – might be.

Even before Covid, there were many studies suggesting that Vitamin D was critical to improving the health of our immune systems, including by warding off and aiding recovery from coronaviruses.

That evidence has only grown stronger subsequently.

But definitive proof has been lacking because full-scale controlled studies are extraordinarily expensive and only Big Pharma has deep enough pockets to fund such studies (given that our captured governments refuse to dig deep themselves).

But Big Pharma has no interest in proving a cheap hormone like Vitamin D – one it cannot patent or profit from – which might offer the public health benefits not only in relation to Covid but for a wide range of chronic health conditions.

The fact that most medical regulators and media commentators continue to prefer to shut down debate about the potential benefits of Vitamin D rather than demand that governments fund research to confirm or refute the growing body of evidence for such benefits should be a scandal. But, predictably, it isn’t.

Blanket silence

I set this out as a preface to this latest scandal on excess deaths, one that – like so much else related to the pandemic and its aftermath – continues to elicit a blanket silence from the establishment media, politicians and, of course, our medical authorities.

The consistent and markedly elevated death rates each month across most of the Western world are not due to Covid and are far above the seasonal five-year average before the pandemic.

Such deaths have been significantly raised since late 2020 or mid-2021.

That is all the more surprising because, after early waves of Covid killed off those who were already sick and vulnerable, the expectation was that excess deaths would fall, not rise. That anomaly needs explaining – scientifically.

The video below sets out the latest figures for excess deaths, using Office for National Statistics and European Statistical data. (Links to the graphs presented by Dr John Campbell are in the notes immediately below the video.)

Despite the backlash inevitably provoked by asking critical questions, I want to examine this development because it highlights something important about the way of our supposedly democratic governments, and the regulatory and adversarial institutions meant to hold them in check, have been hollowed out.

We imagine we live in societies where scientific reason and compassion guide our response to a medical crisis. The reality is different. In our societies, one thing rules: money.

The issue of excess deaths is only one of many problems – though probably the most serious – that have emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Unless you have made an extraordinary effort to do your own research and managed to evade the internet censors and their algorithms, you will most likely not know about these developments.

Neither politicians nor establishment media have publicised them.

Instead troubling data is buried away in obscure, peer-reviewed scientific journals, or has to be squeezed out of government authorities through freedom of information requests – and even then the information is often heavily redacted.

[…]

Dr Campbell, whose Youtube channel became an invaluable internet resource during the pandemic and since (at least for those trying to sift the wheat from the chaff), has done sterling work shedding light on many of those problems.Some notable videos have covered:

• the mishandling and lack of oversight of Pfizer’s research into its vaccine;
• the astounding admission that Pfizer never actually tested whether its vaccine stopped transmission;
• continuing efforts to obscure evidence demonstrating that natural infection confers superior immunity to the vaccine;
• the troubling discovery that mRNA can remain in the blood for at least a month after vaccination, with no understanding of what it might be doing in that time to our immune systems;
• high variation in adverse reactions caused by different batches of mRNA vaccine, with some off the scale;
• the involvement of US researchers and Pfizer in engineering Frankenstein’s monster-type coronaviruses of the very kind that, it increasingly seems, led to the Covid pandemic in the first place;
• new research demonstrating the lack of evidence for reduction in virus transmission from masking;
• the failure of policymakers to weigh the serious financial, social and possibly medical costs of lockdowns;
• and a causal connection, confirmed by the WHO, between vaccination and the development of autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis.

There is doubtless much worse, but we cannot learn of it – at least from qualified sources – because any effort to discuss it publicly will almost certainly result in banning by the corporations that run social media, our modern town squares.

[…]

Via https://thefreeonline.com/2023/07/20/around-the-world-people-are-dying-in-much-greater-numbers-nobody-wants-us-to-learn-why/

Kit Klarenberg

The Grayzone

Newly declassified British Foreign Office files have added disturbing details to the history of Operation Gladio. The covert operation was uncovered in 1990, when the public learned that the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks.

Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio’s aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th.

It is almost impossible to believe that inconvenient truths were not weeded from Britain’s documentary record on Operation Gladio prior to declassification. Nonetheless, the recently released material is highly illuminating. Covering a fraught twelve month period after the first public disclosure of Gladio’s existence, the papers illustrate how London’s foreign intelligence apparatus kept a keen eye on the continent as events unfolded.

The papers not only shed fresh light on the conspiracy, they underline Gladio’s relevance as British intelligence joins its America counterparts in contemporary plots involving secret partisan forces from Syria to Ukraine.

Various passages dotted across the tranche strongly suggest the British knew much more than they publicly admitted about egregious criminal deeds, including the attempted overthrow of an allied Italian government and the kidnap and murder of its leader.

A ‘clandestine resistance network’ goes to work

Gladio consisted of a constellation of “stay behind” anti-communist partisan armies whose ostensible mission was to fend off the Red Army in the event of Soviet invasion. In reality, these forces committed countless violent and criminal acts as part of a “strategy of tension” designed to discredit the left and justify a security state clampdown.

As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio operative jailed for life in 1984 for a car bombing in Italy that killed three police officers and injured two, explained:

“You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. The reason was simple, force the public to turn to the state and ask for greater security…People would willingly trade their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This was the political logic behind the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”

The scandal triggered in Western capitals by the exposure of Gladio dominated mainstream headlines for months. The European parliament responded by passing a resolution condemning the existence of a “clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization [which] escaped all democratic controls, may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of member states [and] have at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources…thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating.”

The resolution called for independent judicial and parliamentary investigations into Gladio in every European state. But aside from inquiries in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, nothing of substance materialized. What’s more, investigators heavily redacted their findings while avoiding having them translated them into English. This may help explain why the historic scandal has been largely forgotten.

In this context, the newly declassified documents may be one of the most valuable primary sources to date offering new insights into the origins and internal workings of NATO’s secret terror militias in Italy.

Take for example an aide-mémoire (see it here) prepared by Francesco Fulci, Italy’s permanent representative to the UN, which was shared at a “super-restricted” November 6th 1990 meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal political decision-making body, then forwarded to senior British officials at home and abroad.

Based on a note provided by Rome’s then-premier Giulio Andreotti to “the Head of the Italian Parliamentary Commission investigating terrorist incidents,” the aide-mémoire begins by noting that following World War II, Western intelligence agencies devised “unconventional means of defence, by creating in their territories a hidden network of resistance aimed at operating, in case of enemy occupation, through information gathering, sabotage, propaganda and guerrilla warfare.”

According to the aide-mémoire, authorities in Rome began laying the foundations of such an organization in 1951. Four years later, Italian Military Intelligence (SIFAR) and “a corresponding allied service” – a reference to the CIA – then formally agreed on the organization and the activities of a “post-occupation clandestine network”:

“[Gladio] was; formed by agents active in the territory who, by virtue of their age, sex and activities, could reasonably avoid eventual deportation and-imprisonment by the foreign occupiers; easy to manage even from a command structure outside the occupied territory; at a top secret level and hence subdivided into ‘cells’ so as to minimize any possible damage caused by defections, accidents or network penetration.”

The “clandestine resistance network” was subdivided into separate branches, covering information operations, sabotage, propaganda, radio communications, cypher, reception and evacuation of people and equipment. Each of these structures was to operate autonomously, “with liaison and coordination ensured by an external base.”

SIFAR established a dedicated, secret section to recruit and train Gladio operatives. Meanwhile, it maintained five “ready deployment guerrilla units in areas of special interest” across Italy which awaited activation on a continuous basis.

“Operational materials”, including a wide variety of explosives, weapons – such as mortars, hand grenades, guns and knives – and ammunition were stashed in 139 secret underground caches across the country. In April 1972, “to improve security,” these arsenals were exhumed, and moved to offices of the Carabinieri, Rome’s military police, near the original sites.

Only 127 of the weapons storehouses were officially recovered. The aide-mémoir states that at least two “were very likely taken away by unknown persons” at the time they were buried, in October 1964. Who these operatives were and what they did with their stolen arms is left to the imagination.

British involvement in the coup effort

Fulci was eventually quizzed by attendees of the North Atlantic Council summit “as to whether Gladio had deviated from its proper objectives.” In other words, beyond operating strictly as a “stay behind” force, to be activated in the event of Soviet invasion. While “he could not add to what was in the aide-mémoire,” Fulci confirmed “weapons used in some terrorist incidents had come from stores established by Gladio.”

This may reflect the fact that political violence was one of Gladio’s “proper objectives.” A June 1959 SIFAR report unearthed by historian Daniele Ganser confirms guerrilla action against “domestic threats” was hardwired into the operation from its inception. In the Italian context, this entailed systematically terrorizing the left.

As the Italian Communist party surged in polls ahead of the country’s 1948 election, the CIA pumped money into the coffers of the Christian Democrats and an attendant anti-communist propaganda campaign. The cloak-and-dagger effort was so successful in preventing the outbreak of a left-wing government in Rome that Langley secretly ed between these parties over what form their administration would take.

[…]

Subsequent investigations showed how Henry Kissinger helped oversee the recruitment of 400 high-ranking Italian and NATO officers as P2 operatives in 1969. The US was so grateful for Gelli’s anti-communist purge that it made him a guest of honor at the inauguration ceremonies of US Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

[…]

It was not until 1993 that the public learned how the US and British gifted munitions to Gladio operatives to foment bloody acts of terror across Italy. As Francesco Fulci told his NATO friends at the “super-restricted” meeting, Washington and London supplied the perpetrators of mass casualty attacks including the 1980 bombing of Bologna Centrale railway station, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200.

Those responsible for these hideous crimes have eluded justice in almost every case. Several of the Bologna massacre’s chief suspects, including committed fascist and confirmed MI6 asset Robert Fiore, escaped to London. Britain refused to extradite him and his co-conspirators despite their convictions in absentia for violent crimes.

The extensive experience British intelligence obtained in Operation Gladio raises questions about the lessons the MI6 has applied to current covert operations in theaters of conflict. As The Grayzone revealed in November 2022, British military and intelligence veterans have trained and sponsored a secret partisan terror army in eastern Ukraine to carry out acts of sabotage in Crimea and other majority-Russian areas. The plan called for the training of cells of ideologically dedicated Ukrainians to “shoot, move, communicate, survive.”