Russert administered the coup de grace himself before an audience of millions:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/10/31/kucinich-i-saw-a-ufo/

With Mitchell the new Commission is DOA.

“On the altar of God, I swear eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man."--Thomas Jefferson

And it was like clockwork last year when the effort to get this initiative on the ballot was receiving a bit of local press in NYC. Right in the midst of that came a high profile piece on Mitchell (tied in with the X-Files sequel, if I remember correctly), announcing unequivocally that aliens are among us.

What is this guy doing on the list of commissioners in the first place? I don't recall him ever being involved with the 9/11 issue. What are his qualifications? He was an astronaut 40 years ago and currently speaks out about the alien presence on Earth whenever he gets a chance?

Something isn't right here and this letter does nothing to reassure me.

The Eleventh Day of Every Month

http://greyfalcon.us/pictures/Flying%20Saucers.htm

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The CONSTITUTION is NOT going to "collapse" into pulverized dust no matter how much thermate/explosives or planes they throw at it

christ4sale, I have annotated your "Background" post. Annotations blockquoted, in italic (I apologize for the length, but this is no doubt the proper place for this post);

"For a background on UFOs, please read Vallee's Messengers of Deception, Vesco's Man-Made UFOs, 1944-1994: Fifty Years of Suppression and a transcript of John Judge's 1989 radio interview on them from his book Judge for Yourself. Also, Dave Emory's Lecture: The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the “ET” Myth is a great resource that can be found here: http://spitfirelist.com/?p=520 "

On John Judge:

John Judge is one the one hand a useful activist, but Judge also makes mistakes. His stance on exclusion of the controlled demolition debate from 9/11 inquiries has turned out to be harmful, IMO, just as Michael Ruppert's very public and conscious decisions to marginalize physical evidence investigations and even the possibility of remote control aircraft on 9/11 has been a detriment, creating artificial divisions of inquiry within the 9/11 Truth movement that don't need to be there. I'm willing to bet that Judge will not be moved by the now multiple peer-reviewed papers on controlled-demolition, and will continue to take up the argument from the debunker's array of sources, exluding even new solid evidence from Jones & Co. I have personally heard him vehemently arguing the case for the fire-induced collapse of WTC7, and the fire/damage induced collapse of the Twin Towers. But more directly, in this article, Judge transmits factually incorrect information to his readers;

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/P56A.html

"And finally, the Pentagon sits inside the P-56-A restricted air space section that extends 17 miles in all directions from the Washington Monument, and that activated air defenses from a joint FAA/Secret Service radar and air traffic control at Langley, VA for many years prior to 9/11. Interceptor fighter jets in that area, which is separate from and more restricted than FAA commercial air space, as well as much better defended, were regularly scrambled when small or commercial planes went off course or were not on scheduled routes within a larger Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that extends 50 miles out to give time for the response. Andrews Air Force base, within 10 miles of the city as well as the 113th Air Wing of the National Guard at Anacostia NAS have provided consistent scramble-ready defenses for the P-56 sector, which protects the most important government buildings. Having grown up and lived in the area for most of my life, I saw such defensive responses many times, guiding planes away from the restricted area. Commercial pilots have also long complained about the difficult curving maneuvers necessary to land or take off at Washington National Airport (now Reagan) to avoid entering P-56-B, the three-mile inner restricted zone above the White House, Capitol and Pentagon."

The Pentagon does not sit inside P-56A or B, and to my knowledge it never has: http://www.faa.gov/ats/dca/dcaweb/p56.htm

If someone has an older map of P-56 to disprove this, I'd like to see it. Also, the DC ADIZ did not come into effect until after 9/11;
http://www.iflyamerica.org/faa_fact_sheet.asp
http://web.archive.org/web/20060128114626/http://www.faa.gov/news/news_s...

I have written to Judge and Ratical.org directly to have this information corrected, with no response.

In 2002, Judge gave this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZb2vWvXjpY

In which he says at the 19:32 mark;

"...and then in July of last year (2001) Colin Powell the Secretary of State made a special trip, it was reported on in the Times of India, to Pakistan, India and Uzbekistan, and surrounding countries around Afghanistan, and he told the leaders of those countries that the United States would militarily intervene in mid-October in Afghanistan. This was in July."

I can find no citation for this. Can anyone else?

Since Judge is wrong about his divisive exclusion of the controlled demolition debate from 9/11 research (arguably, the most fruitful avenue of research we have seen), wrong about Washington's air defense apparatus, and apparently wrong about Colin Powell's activities in 2001, should we tar and feather him, too? Or, is Judge an earnest researcher who has made a few mistakes? If Judge is an earnest researcher who has made a few mistakes, why can we not extend this courtesy to William Pepper, who is surely human? To my knowledge, Judge has no issues with William Pepper that prevent him from associating with Pepper. Does Judge display a "poor ability to identify disinformation"?

On Dave Emory:

Dave Emory may have contributed one or two useful nuggets in his day, but since 9/11, his insistence on the perpetuation of the term "Islamofascist" is counter to an objective reading of the facts of 9/11. Also, his perpetuation of Paul Manning's misinformation on Martin Bormann, which was officially laid to rest in 2000, is inexplicable. Finally, Emory is infamous for his on-air attacks on other researchers; including John Judge, Carol Brouillet and most recently, Steven Jones. Emory is an ad hominem attack artiste, who doesn't let facts get in his way when he is on a roll. Emory refers to 9/11 Truth as the "9/11 B.S. Movement" and the "9/11 Lie Movement" because generally, Truthers don't spend much time fretting about the Muslim Brotherhood. Like Judge and Ruppert, Emory eschews any scientific examination of the claims of controlled demolition, and prefers to attack Jones' religious beliefs, engaging in character assassination, rather than an evenly-administered debate.

Emory is wrong about Bormann (and probably wrong about the Super Secret Crypto-Fascist Government too), wrong in his slathering attacks on controlled-demo research, wrong about his characterizations of key members of the 9/11 Truth phenomenon, and lets his mouth run on.

Emory does indeed display a "poor ability to identify disinformation", and is a frothing slander-monkey, yet you are using him as a reference to shore up your post which intends to cast doubt on Pepper's abilities to separate the wheat from the chafe.

Perhaps his UFO information is actually quite good, and all of the above are merely mistakes on the part of an earnest researcher. If Emory is an earnest researcher who has made a few mistakes, why can we not extend this courtesy to William Pepper, who is surely human?

For a background on William Pepper's sometimes poor ability to identify disinformation, see:

From Peter Dale Scott's Road to 9/11, Introduction end notes:

"Most of what Pepper writes about army surveillance of King is documented and corroborated (cf. Steve Tompkins, "Army Feared King, Secretly Watched Him. Spying On Blacks Started 75 Years Ago," Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 21, 1993 ( http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/1993/mar/21/army-feared-king-secret... ). Unfortunately, Pepper also transmitted the claim made to him that the 20th Special Forces Group had a sniper team in Memphis on April 4, 1968, to ensure that King was murdered. I believe from my own research that the sniper team story was disinformation from high sources in order to discredit Pepper. In particular, an alleged authorizing cable, citing Operation Garden Plot, is to a trained reader a self-revealing forgery."

On Peter Dale Scott:

When Scott wrote this footnote, he was unaware of a key aspect of Pepper's situation. Pepper's cable (which indeed appears to be a forgery) was at the time considered genuine by his sources. It took a third corroborating source to convince Pepper to use the cable in his first book on the King case, "Orders to Kill". This third source was a man by the name of Jack Terrell. Peter Dale Scott was hustled by Jack Terrell, too. He writes about the hustle in his poem, "A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11", in which he laments the fact that he trusted Terrell at all, and also reveals that he may have misplaced trust in the secretary to whom he gave a secret memo for delivery (bolding added);

"...One is never sure whom to trust
as I learnt years ago at a Washington Center
researching for Senator Kerry's investigation
into Contra support operations and drugs

I think of the secret memo in two copies
I had my secretary a student intern
hand-deliver from the Center
to Brian Barger and a Bob Parry

who phoned back to say he was furious
(There are things you don't write down in Washington)
and somehow Secord's lawyer got hold of it
to file as a Court Exhibit in the Christic case

and what about Jack Terrell at the Center
a man intimate with the mercenary "community"
who had fought for the whites in Rhodesia
who had earned the confidence of the Miskitos

by shooting thirteen of their prisoners
with their hands tied behind their backs
and who knew about the military coup in Fiji
that night before anyone in the press

Jack was shown to have told the truth
about the Contra cocaine operation
disguised by imports of frozen fish
in the memo he prepared for Senator Kerry

which was stolen for the Reagan Justice Department
after which Oliver North
classified Terrell as a "Terrorist Threat"
and our Center was put under FBI surveillance

So later when Jack said he wanted
to bring his wife to the United States
I (knowing his childhood story
of how he had once stolen a car

and on the instruction of his father
was sentenced to 18 years in adult federal prison)
gave him the money he needed
for return airfare to Manila

after which I got a call from the Center:
Why did you finance Terrell's scheme
to destroy Manglapus (who had been expected
to succeed Cory in the Philippines?)

In this way naïve good will
implicated me in the defeat
of the one candidate committed to removing
the U.S. military bases.

Jack himself still later invited me
to think he might have been the "Carson"
who led Bill Pepper to the wild lie
discrediting his book on Martin Luther King.

so that we still do not know for certain
who was behind King's murder
(or for that matter the Kennedys')
any more than who Jack was really working for

though he claimed that he was told by phone
to penetrate North's Contra support effort
by Donald Fortier and the NSC
Oh Jack! Though I knew enough

never completely to trust you
I still thought of you as my friend -
and that like me you were fighting the traffickers
not just your enemy Oliver North.

The American dilemma: to heal this world
we must become intimate with it
but the search for political truth
will lead one deeper and deeper into falsehood..."

(more on Secord and the Christic Institute)

Even though Scott can now say that Terrell was a bad source, and Pepper was unwise to trust him for corroboration, Scott was unable to penetrate Terrell's carefully constructed facade, and trusted Terrell to a degree; even though he knew that Terrell had been jailed for theft early on in his life. And, even though Scott recognizes Terrell for a fraud now, he still maintains that some of the things that Terrell told him were true. I believe that Terrell was an extremely effective con-man, and the effect that Terrell had on Pepper is what lingers, causing him to still hold belief in some of the things that Terrell told to him. Scott does not say, "My work with the International Center for Development Policy is discredited because of my use of Jack Terrell as a source," but a harsh (or desperate) enough critic certainly could.

Scott makes errors as a researcher, just like all of us do. In "The Road to 9/11", and in "Oil, Drugs and War", he says that Pakistani Gen. Haq was allegedly "heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking." However, he has changed his mind on this point; http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090223165146219 - (It appears that some pretty high-level sources played multiple researchers on that point.)

Speaking of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, Scott said, "...which, by the way I didn't totally disapprove of. I personally, although I believe as much in peace as anyone else, I felt that some kind of response was appropriate," when pressed on this support of military action, "...reluctantly accept, would be more like it. I think if, uh... if those buildings had gone down and the Pentagon had gone down, I mean-- in the first place it's inconceivable that America would do nothing. But if it had nothing, it certainly would be an invitation to have more than that. At first, I was not sure-- I thought it was appropriate to go after Al Qaeda, I was not sure it was appropriate to go after the Taliban, because I thought at the time that the Taliban was essentially a nationalist movement that was concerned about Afghanistan, not about Islam in the world. I actually think I was wrong, and the [Bush] administration was closer to the truth than I was..." (February 5, 2002, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center - video currently unavailable, I'll try to load up my copy in the near future)

Yet, now Scott says, "This hypothesis of an underlying continuity and similarity between JFK, 9/11, and intervening deep events suggests that we should look for some continuing and hostile force within our society to help explain them -- and not, as we have been encouraged, to blame them uniquely on external forces -- such as either Castro (in the case of Oswald) or angry Middle Eastern Muslims (in the case of 9/11)."

This fully voids any intellectual support that can be accorded to military action in Afghanistan, because that action is predicated on the basis of 9/11 as an act of Muslim terrorism. Knowing what we know now about 9/11, and the scholarship that authors like Nafeez Ahmed have applied to "Al Qaeda" and the manipulation of the Arab Afghans as proxy armies, Scott's early statement on Afghanistan seems untenable now.

Was Scott a victim of propaganda and disinformation? Is this what led to his tacit support of military action in Afghanistan? Did Scott display a "poor ability to identify disinformation"? I know that I certainly did not support the invasion of Afghanistan. I was waiting for PROOF that "Al Qaeda" even pulled off 9/11. I'm still waiting for that proof. Does that make me better than Scott? No. Does that make Scott a conscious purveyor of disinfo? No. He was simply advancing an argument with the tools available to him at the time, and over time, he has changed his position.

Did Scott display a poor ability to identify (and properly sequester) a disinfo artist in Jack Terrell? Even though he knew that Terrell had a criminal past?

Let's assume the worst of Scott for rhetorical purposes. He can't see a con man when it's right in his face, uses disinfo about Gen. Haq without rooting out the corroborating source material, and backed the wrong horse in the wake of 9/11. Does this negate his good work? Should we dredge it up every time Scott writes a new paper and posts it here?

If we are willing to overlook mistakes that Scott has made, for the greater effect that his overall acheivements as a scholar have produced ("Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" for example) why is this an untenable position for our assessment of William Pepper? Why can we we not say that Pepper is a good man, who is misled at times, like Scott (and anyone else who has fallen prey to a pathological liar)?

Further, although the 9/11 skeptics have been targeted for disinfo, it absolutely pales in comparison to the parade of disinfo that has been churned out against earnest researchers like Scott, Pepper, and others. The mistakes on display by these researchers probably only constitute a percentage of information that has been supplied to them that cannot be verified, will not be verified, is sometimes posted as fact, and later fails to meet the test of time. We're talking about the resources of the most powerful Military-Industrial-Complex on the planet, and its agents, working against those of us who turn over rocks and shed light.

From Lisa Pease's Real History Archives:

"Remember what happened to William Pepper? He believed some Ayers-like informants on the MLK case and made a central case against a former military man whom Pepper believed (and wrote) was then dead. So on national TV, what happened? The "dead" guy walked out onto the stage. His living didn't negate all of Pepper's work in reality. But in the popular mind? Pepper was the guy who had 'gotten it wrong' on TV. I fear strongly the same will happen to those who pursue this line of inquiry."
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2006/11/did-cia-kill-bobby-kenne...

Here are Lisa's comments regarding a disagreement between Peter Dale Scott and William Pepper at the Making Sense of the 60's conference in 2008:
http://www.blackopradio.com/black403b.ram
Her comments on Pepper begin at 23:30.

The final chapter on the above "Lazarus" has not been written. I'll be looking into that one. I'm painfully aware that Pepper and Scott are at odds over the Terrell-confirmed forgery. Pease has been, to my knowledge a careful researcher, and very lucky so far.

Here is an excerpt about William Pepper from Joan Mellon's talk from this same conference:
"A digression about sources. From about fifty hours of taped interviews, I could not use any of what a New Orleans figure named Gordon Novel told me. With a soldier of fortune named Gerald Patrick Hemming, the percentage of the truth to fabrication was 50-50. Knowing of my interest in Colombia, Gerry told he he had been imprisoned on Gorgona. (This was an island off the western coast of Colombia, named because of the preponderance of poisonous snakes wandering there. I didn’t believe him. This seemed like bragging. No, it turned out to be true. Smuggling drugs and not paying off the right people in Medellin, Gerry found himself on Gorgona.

Gerry told me that Robert Kennedy had addressed a group of Cuban exiles at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida in the summer of 1963. I needed corroborating witnesses; Gerry promised to name some, but couldn’t, and I broke off all contact with him. I forgot about this matter until a researcher named William Pepper told me the same story. His source, Pepper said, was an aging, very ill documentary filmmaker who had been a close friend of Robert Kennedy’s. He had won eight Emmys! Pepper said. And no, he couldn’t give me this dying man’s name.

As a film historian, I could reach any documentary filmmaker, and I called about ten people. None had ever heard the Homestead story. Then I contacted people close to Bobby Kennedy: Peter Edelman; John Seigenthaler; one of Robert Kennedy’s daughters; Ed. Guthman; Frank Mankiewicz; George Stevens; and Joey Gargan, a Kennedy cousin; the list goes on. None had ever heard of the Homestead story. Seigenthaler suggested I call the Kennedy library and ask to see the appointment book of Bobby’s secretary, Angie Novello. I did. They searched. 1963 was missing!

I went back to Pepper and insisted that he name his source – and it turned out that the source was…Gerald Patrick Hemming! In the course of the same conversation, Pepper told me that Bobby had flown to Dallas on the evening Oswald was arrested, and talked to Oswald in his cell! But I must not use this revelation! So historians must be wary, especially in this field."
http://www.joanmellen.com/oswald.html

So now, Mellen is ok? When I posted an interview with her last October, you made no comments or criticism of the interview, but instead posted a link to a critical review of her book, "A Farewell to Justice". http://www.911blogger.com/node/18136#comment-199145 - but now that you have found a snippet of her writing that works for you, I don't see you criticizing her. So, when her arguments are suitable, you sample her, otherwise you just work to cast doubt on her abilities as a researcher, hinting to the readers of the blog that she should be read very critically... except when you need to use her observations to make a point?

When Dave Emory attacks us, and the controlled demo argument, we should ignore that and just look at his good stuff (the little there is)?

You seek to cast doubt upon, and I guess discredit Pepper as a suitable member of the yet-unfounded Commission. But all of the authors of the sources that you cite have suffered (excluding Pease, AFAIK) indignations/disinformation problems/misinformation problems in varying degrees, not entirely dissimilar to the motes you point out in Pepper's eyes.

No matter who heads up a new Commission, whether it is independent or Federal, the leaders of this Commission will be under an unbelievable barrage of disinfo, misinfo, and outright lies. Any one of the sources you cite, (or you, or me), would be put to the same test if we were in the position of tackling the 9/11 lie. Any one of them could fall, or be tripped up by these distractions. Any one of them. There is no perfect Commissioner.

I don't think the NY Independent Commission will the best one, or the last one, should it pass. I expect to see an International Commission eventually; there is just too much interest now outside of US borders, and Federal disinfo can only be propagated for so long.

Finally, I think Edgar Mitchell should not be a part of the Commission, and I will write to the NYC CAN email address to suggest that he step down on the very day the Ballot Measure passes (should it pass).