Daniel Hopsicker: Truth, Lies and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Not since nearly 50 years ago when the CIA tried to pass off a man shown in two black and white photographs taken outside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City as Lee Harvey Oswald, has the truth been so openly and casually violated as during the ferocious campaign to roll back some of what was already known and on the public record about Mohamed Atta in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
At one point a man even came forward to insist he, not Mohamed Atta, lived with Amanda Keller at the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice.
Well over six feet tall (Atta was 5'10) he looked far more like a young Jean Paul Belmondo than the dark glowering visage of Atta’s described by eyewitnesses.
In fact, the man, who avers Amanda Keller mistook him for Mohamed Atta, looks as if he might be hard-pressed to glower his way out of a paper bag.
No matter. The idea was a trial balloon, one of many sent up. The idea seemed to be that if you throw enough mud on the wall some of it will stick.
In more innocent times, this may have even been true.
But the after-image burned behind a billion eyeballs of bodies hurtling out of 100th story windows to escape encroaching flames insured the effort was not just unsuccessful, but was never even taken seriously.
The Persistence of Memory
The revelation last week that a key eyewitness to the activities in Florida of the 9/11 hijackers never changed his story about Mohamed Atta being drunk and belligerent in his bar four days before the 9/11 attack raised new questions about major news media coverage after the attack.
Continued at: http://www.madcowprod.com/05242011.htm
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"Real Americans won’t be silenced."
But how many real Americans are still left?
"Don't mourn -- organize!" -- Joe Hill
If the term "real Americans" is meant to refer to courageous, moral, hard working citizens residing in the land mass known as the United States of America, then I would venture that there are considerably more of these creatures than is generally realized. The problem is that they are all isolated from one another. Social atomization is one of the most significant, if overlooked, consequences of modern capitalism.
What we have here is not so much a failure to communicate as a failure to organize. The 911 Truth Movement is a perfect example. Cosmos aka YT of Truth Action and Luke Rudowski of We are Change have made valiant efforts, but not enough leaders/intellectuals have given them proper support and exposure.
Perhaps the forthcoming Toronto effort involving Kevin Ryan et. al will allow an opportunity to address this problem.
organizing
Again, I preface my comment with the following explanation for how facts actually backfire and work against us when presenting the truth about something when a listener simply doesn't want to accept it..
http://articles.boston.com/2010-07-11/bostonglobe/29324096_1_facts-misinformation-beliefs
... and my comment;
I think we need to focus a discussion on this issue of our lack of cohesion and our need to have better organization.
I hope the Toronto meetings do solve this serious strategy problem of ours.
I hate to think about this problem the way a southern baptist preacher thinks of a way to increase church attendance, but perhaps without strategy we aren't going anywhere with this. Part of the problem is the throngs of people, particularly high-profile people, who have been provided very thorough explanations of the lesser known details of 911 in such a way that WE KNOW they know something is wrong with the official story and still they hold back.
There are others who have received the evidence and they are not convinced, and this is a separate group from the previous.
In a sense these two groups make up a single group but what does it take to set them apart?
Yeah, poor organization is a key to explaining the limited
success of 911 Truth activists. I see that amongst activists, in general. One factor is the co-option/sabotage efforts. In the case of progressive political groups in the US, which theoretically were ideological, not partisan, the co-option of these groups by Democratic forces has been discussed at firedoglake.com. Search for "veal pen" at that site.
As I have written previously, one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, failures of the 911 truth movement is it's failure to conduct investigation where no state power was required. It did not require state power to either disprove or corroborate Hopsicker's expose of the real Mohammed Atta. Yet, to this day, there has been no effort by 911 Truthers to organize to fund even a single investigator of Atta, How sick is that?
In this vein, I highly recommend Denis Rancourt's essay Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia Rancourt at least asks the right questions about what activism actually threatens power.
IMO, the best thing to come out of the 911 Truth movement is We Are Change. And that's because they manage to propagate political messages outside the usual channels. Good for them! However, even they haven't bothered organizing to confirm or debunk Hopsicker's work. They also haven't done anything to move American's to a credible replacement media. (In fairness, relatively few activists work on this obvious, glaring problem.)
Related to the lack of organization is the lack of strategic thinking, which should yield you a credible theory of change. IMO, this must involve electoral activism - I don't see how we can fundamentally reform the government while leaving corrupted gatekeepers, in the form of Democratic and Republican Congress critters, in power.
For those of you that lean left, you can consider supporting the New Progressive Alliance. For those that lean right, I'm happy to report that there's real conflict between Tea Party Nation and mainstream GOP career politicians.
Hopefully, a fusion progressive/libertarian political group will arise in the near future, which will lead to mainstream Dem and Rep Congress critters being removed from office. Noises are regularly made about such a group coming into existence at progressiveradionetwork.com (at least by Gary Null), though I'm not aware of any actual organizing to bring this about.
ETA: I changed "Tea Party Patriots" to "Tea Party Nation". I'm pretty sure that there's also a Tea Party Patriots, but I don't know how adversarial they are to mainstream GOP'ers
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Men in Black
The FBI did not receive apartment manager Charley Grapentine’s recollections kindly. Their response, says Grapentine, was positively frosty, especially on the subject of talking to reporters.
“They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut,” stated the ex-marine grimly. “Nobody likes to hear that; that they didn’t see something they know they saw.”
--
It was how she had been harassed and intimidated by agents of the FBI.
"At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification," she stated. "Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone.”
For at least six months after the 9/11 attack, Frederickson says, she received weekly visits from an agent in the FBI’s Sarasota office. "The question they asked was always the same," she says. "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
She shrugs. “Who was I going to tell? Most everyone around here already knew."
--
The FBI is and always has been a criminal organization. Ironically, their alleged purpose is to stop organized crime.
Hopsicker interview on Black Op Radio (Real Player format only)
Interview at:
http://www.blackopradio.com/black529a.ram
More interviews available in their archives, mostly dealing with the Kennedy Assassination, but some 9/11 related stuff as well: http://www.blackopradio.com/archives.html (all in Real Player format only).
Too bad he does interviews there
The problem with Black Op Radio is that it promotes Fetzer uncritically, not just about JFK but about 9/11. They promote a book by him which is likely filled with bogus claims. And he promotes them as well. Never a good sign.
"The internet is the reason why the truth is growing in this country. Sites like Black Op Radio and The Real Deal with Jim Fetzer educate people about real facts and not the disinformation that many in the MSM try to feed you."
[from a Fetzer blog I'm not going to link to]
If you don't already know about Fetzer, just ask anyone.
Hopsicker heaps scorn on the WTC CD theories
In this interview Hopsicker makes it plain that he thinks the controlled demolition theories surrounding the WTC 1, 2 & 7 collapses are totally without merit and could very well be disinfo to lead the truth movement into chasing a false trail. He totally discounts the scientific findings regarding the nano-thermite found in the WTC dust and makes some disparaging comments about the abilities of the scientist involved in this discovery. He apparently attributes the collapse of WTC 7 to the diesel fuel held in the tanks for Rudy's emergency command center. I am baffled how he could see all the dissembling and coverup that has gone on over the Mohammed Atta story and yet swallow the straight down, free fall collapse of WTC 7 and the abnormal, explosive like collapse of WTC 1 & 2 as something that does not warrant further investigation.
Thanks Stew
I vaguely recall Hopsicker disparaging the "remote controlled plane" hypothesis but was not aware of his vociferous rejection of all matters CD.
Mike Ruppert is much more sensible, arguing on the one hand that the guv can line up ten or more "experts" to insist that elephants can indeed hang by the tail via daisies off the edge of a cliff (magic bullet hypothesis), yet at the same time that WTC7 is more than slightly suspicious; Ruppert does not disparage CD but suggests that our focus is better placed elsewhere.
I disagree. I think physical evidence can and should be used in conjunction with evidence regarding the war games etc. But to each his own.
Hopsicker appears to be in denial, despite his excellent investigative work on Atta.
His highlighting of the bizarre antics of the man known as M. Atta (and presumed doubles thereof), Atta's neighbors and girlfriends etc. and the response after 911 by the the FBI are fascinating and certainly damaging to the OFT. I don't really care about Hopsicker's personal beliefs regarding CD and remote control of aircraft.