The Fabians Society January 2008

A group of We Are Change UK activists and journalists attended the Fabians Society annual conference on the 19th of January 2008 in London. The title of the conference (and the slogan wrapped around our wrists on the compulsory red rubber bracelets) was ‘Change the World’ – but unless a grand finale of mass suicide in the closing seminar was on the cards – there was little chance of that happening… Imagine my disappointment.

 

These people were the deluded, the brain dead and the deceptive, pressed so close together in the tight spaced folding seats that it was hard to tell who was who. In an ideal world these people would be the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the political world – pressed suits and steam ironed faces, the focus of their glazed eyes stuck permanently in the mid-distance and with smiles which they contrived to sell as “warm” in the same way a commission starved travel agent might try to sell a winter break in Helsinki as “balmy”. If fate had morals these clones would be stopping door to door, asking people if they had ever considered the inner joy they could attain by accepting that globalisation and a move of power from the people to the corporation was inevitable, and could they be tempted to accept a leaflet about the EU? Hopeless fanatics with PowerPoint prayer-graphs and a hymn book of late 80s corporate power pop. Ignored and occasionally humoured, most would commit suicide by 40, or realise what a mistake they had made with their life and get a hobby. But no; these are our criminal leaders, these are their campaigners, these are the young being formed in their image – this is New Labour laying the red carpet for the New World Order. The worst of them was David Miliband, the fresh-faced foreign secretary who mistook smarm for charm at some vital point in his development. He has inherited the criminal record which comes attached to a military engaged in grave and gory war crimes.

 

Does he care? Belinda McKenzie of Make War History asks him a question – is he aware that New Labour have broken both British Common Law and International war law 5 times; that anyone who is part of a government committing war crimes is a war criminal? Miliband dismisses the whole issue with “I don’t agree”. What a state our nation would be in if all criminals could chose whether or not they recognised their crimes. When a rapist and murderer is caught with his trousers down and a bloody knife in his hand does he have the right to say “actually I don’t agree that what I’m doing here is a crime so please be on your way officer”? The law is the law and anyone who wants to read the recognised national and international war laws that everyone in this country should be accountable to can see that our leaders are war criminals. If there was a single police officer, a single judge in this country who was willing to uphold the law every one of them would be in the dock. But there isn’t and instead the death of over a million innocent Iraqi men, women and children cause the guilty no more inconvenience than the Belindas of this world, tirelessly trying to make the cheerleaders of these butchers aware of what manner of beast they are jiggling their pom-poms at in a stuffy London conference hall.

 

After his speech We Are Change UK had a few questions for Miliband regarding the EU (see the We Are Change UK Fabian Society video on YouTube), again he appealed to his right as a politician to disagree with reality and made his hasty exit. The sentiment of his squirming on the EU was the theme of the day. Over and over again people repeated, when questioned, the deceptive line that the EU constitution and the EU treaty are completely different things. Deceptive line rather than lie as they do have completely different names, but this form of weasel wording is worse than a lie in that it abuses the truth; makes it wear a lie’s dirty knickers and parade around humiliating itself while it sobs horrible tears. Both the Milibandit Brothers and Hilary Benn would sully and abuse the truth in this fashion during the course of the day. If I weren’t a pacifist I would like to take them all snorkelling and promise them that there were no man eating fish in the spot I chose, and then explain to them in detail as they thrashed around becoming gradually smaller, that a shark is not actually a fish as it has a cartilage skeleton rather than one made of bone.

 

As Angela Merkel has reported, EU treaty is 90% the same as the EU constitution. This is an issue of who rules us and this is a question of what we the people chose to do with our power. Tony Benn puts it best when he says that the people loan the government they elect their power, and if they don’t like the job they’ve done with it, they can take it back. If New Labour gives our power to Europe without a referendum they are stealing that power; giving away what was not theirs to give. As We Are Change UK asked Miliband, receiving no answer, is this treason? The second party line was the instant conflation of people criticising the EU with nationalists or bigots. Whenever a point would be raised the instant response was  “UKIP would love people to think that, but….” We heard this over and over again from a “Young Fabian” who We Are Change UK interviewed after the event. If anything was more depressing than the state of the modern Labour party if was this sad example of things to come. Still unable to shave, this young man already had the fixed stare, the false smile and the politician’s answers. It’s easy to imagine how a young idealist might sell off their ideals step by step as they climbed the rungs of power; it is common knowledge that most of the New Labour politicians were left wing activists in their youth. But it’s a bitter pill to swallow when they come pre-formed and boil in the bag straight off the production line. I couldn’t help imagining he was the product of some perverted gene splicing project; formed fresh from the spittle of Blair, cultured in a tube in some neon underground lab below Westminster. His Blair impression down pat, he stood there and again and again dismissed legitimate concerns by insinuating the only people who had any argument against the EU were UKIP, as thought o state “if you resist our handing your power to the EU permanently it’s only because you’re a nationalist, and quite possibly a xenophobe” why does that sound familiar? Oh yes, the childish and offensive linking of questioning the government line on 9/11 to anti Semitism.

 

In a seminar on how democracy can fight terrorism We Are Change UK asked the panel that since 9/11 had been referenced so many times by them as the genesis of the war on terror, what they thought about Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (www.ae911truth.org) – a coalition of 244 qualified experts who state that the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC7 could not have been achieved without controlled demolition, and therefore the whole prospectus of the war on terror and the level of threat we face is false? Immediately on cue a woman in the audience mockingly asks “did Mossad do it?” to laughter from the rest of the audience. Where did this come from? When presented with the fact that many respected professionals are going public to say that they know from their education and professional experience that these building collapses are impossible, the response is to insinuate that the person bringing this news to them is trying to “pin it on the Jews”. In his response Tony McNulty MP (government cheerleader for ID Cards, CCTV and the DNA database) said that he didn’t believe in “conspiracy theories”, to which We Are Change UK asked “are you an architect or an engineer?” and McNulty snapped back I’m neither, but I know enough about hat really did happen to reject conspiracy heories” – demonstrating that he in fact knew next to nothing about what really did happen, or was a liar, the audience then erupted in rapturous applause demonstrating they knew even less, or were fools.

 

This is the centre left; so terrified of being called a “conspiracy theorist” that they flatly refuse to look further into any matter than the Guardian or New Statesman will allow. The policy is to judge things at all times not by whether or not it is truthful or moral, but by how it will make them look. Chami Chakrabarti (the head of Liberty and supposed “lefty liberal” who spent the entire seminar making sure everyone knew how much she agreed with everything the rest of the panel, who should be her natural enemies, were saying) stated that Liberty did not oppose ID Cards because they were “conspiracy theorists” (i.e. for any silly reason like protecting our civil liberties or the opposition to a totalitarian state) but simply because it wasn’t safe to have all our data in one place because some bad people might get their hands on it – look at what happened to the Inland Revenue records after all. I fought the urge to vomit. This woman threw away the entire basis of her organisation, belittled the struggle against the very real attack on our civil liberties which is a key facet of the war on terror in exchange for jumping on the band wagon of an over-blown news story about some encrypted data a contract courier firm misplaced. Why? Because We Are Change UK were in the room, and she didn’t want anyone to think she was a “conspiracy theorist” as well.

 

What exactly is a conspiracy theory? I like the definition of US Political Economist Chris Sanders best – which is that the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is nothing less than the most successfully developed propaganda term of the 20th century; that it is a get-out of-jail-freecard which can be played at any point to silence articulate dissent. It has been so well twinned with an image of the laughable nut that once applied to a topic the image-conscious will automatically drop it, and who is more image conscious than the modern political caste? So if someone says that 240 experts on building design and structure say that the Twin Towers could not fall without explosives it is ridiculed, because someone else has said “if you believe that, you’re a conspiracy theorist”. It doesn’t matter what the scientific evidence says, what the historical precedent suggests, what simple empirical observation or simpler common sense tells you – don’t listen, or everyone will think you’re a nut!

 

If all a conspiracy theorist means is a nut, then it is not a conspiracy theory to say that ID Cards, CCTV and the DNA Database are a threat to our civil liberties, or the building blocks of a police state. It is not a conspiracy theory to report that qualified independent experts say that a plane hitting a sky scraper should not cause it to crumble to dust and bent steel in 10- 12 seconds from top to bottom. The real conspiracy theory and the dangerous one is that reinforced by Hollywood through a thousand films, through the history books we are indoctrinated with – the conspiracy theory that the population of Nazi Germany were monsters and not normal human beings who were led from manufactured fear to submission and from submission to irrational hate just like we could be. It is a conspiracy theory that, as Zappa mockingly said “it couldn’t happen here”; that it could not happen again and isn’t happening now, as our civil liberties scale down in an identical pattern, as our rhetoric against Muslims eases towards theirs about communists, about the Romany, about the Jews, and that it didn’t all start with a cynically crafted false flag attack; a catastrophic and catalysing event that allowed the seed of evil within their government to whisk its people into hysteria and lead them to place their trust, their democracy and their freedom in their rulers hands and result in a mark being left on history so black and so foul that it would be remembered forever. They liked to applaud the criminals in their midst as well.

Should we be Afraid of Terrorism? (Or – the Luckiest Terrorists That Ever Lived)

There are almost certainly terrorists who want to kill us; there are almost certainly people in the world who would murder us to take our wallets; everyday cars whiz by us that could lose control and end our lives on the spot; we could choke on a peanut and die. We could, and eventually will, die in any number of unusual (or far more likely – mundane) ways.

 

But the knowledge that any one of these fates could befall us has never caused us to willingly accept that the rules of how society conducts itself has changed radically forever. The fact that something bad could conceivably happen to us has never led us to accept a way of doing things which, as a people, take us back hundreds of years in terms of personal freedom and human rights, all in order to keep us safe.

 

Never before 9/11…

 

Many have been convinced that the spectre of 9/11 is always over us; that it’s not over yet and any second of any day this could happen again. These people happily trade their freedom for security and accept that the government must do anything they can to protect us and we should leave our rights and our dignity at the door and place our blind faith in our leaders pockets for safe keeping.

 

We knew about terrorists before; they’d blown up some embassies, attacked a boat – they didn’t prey heavily on our minds – but that was before we knew what they could do – hellfire, Hollywood explosions, bodies falling from a quarter of a mile to their fate, steel buildings crumbling spontaneously; Armageddon. But it is essential that we are sure – could 9/11 happen again? Because key to this society wide acceptance is a notion of capability; the idea they are protecting us from another 9/11 is at the heart of too many people’s willing surrender of their rights. I will argue that through sober eyes it is clear that the atrocities of 9/11 happening in the first place relied on a lot of luck, so much so that these 19 men should be remembered as the Luckiest Terrorists That Ever Lived.

 

The first stroke of luck is that since two of these terrorists Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been known to be associated with al-Qaida from early 1999 by the National Security Agency it’s a wonder they ever even got into the country in the first place [1]. In addition, Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the attacks, had been under CIA surveillance since 2000, while he was in Germany, and along with three other hijackers his name was known as a terrorist within the USA by the Able Danger programme [2]. But none of these men were put on a no fly list– this was especially lucky when you consider the pre-warnings the government had been receiving. George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that “The system was blinking red” [3] there had been no less than 26 intelligence warnings of the attack, 10 of them specifically mentioning the use of aircraft and warnings from Russia, Germany and the UK specifically stating that aircraft would be used as weapons to crash into targets [4].

 

So with the “system blinking red” several known terrorists got visas to enter the US; lucky them. Luckier still is that with multiple warnings of a huge terrorist attack involving flying planes into targets the authorities chose not to hike up security in US airports, not even just a little. According to the US government the pre-intelligence could not have helped them stop the attack because it did not give a time or date, or specific targets. OK, but maybe some guideline on stopping 19 Arabs armed box cutters or Stanley knives through airport security

might be an idea? A simple “you’ll have to put any sharp items in your stowing luggage sir” and a friendly smile would have prevented the 9/11 attacks completely, lucky for them that no one thought of that one. So they boarded their planes with just their blades, of course this isn’t really being well prepared to hijack a major airliner, but as we said, they had super human luck that day, and each team of terrorists successfully entered the cabins of and commandeered the aircraft.

 

Were they worried at all about their flying skills? The man described by the US authorities as the most skilled pilot among the hijackers was Hanni Hanjour. Hanni, who supposedly had a commercial pilots licence, tried to get some practice in a one engine plane – a Cesnor 172 – a few weeks prior at Freeway Airport in MD. Two separate instructors, Baxter and Conner, took Hanni with them. Both found that Hanni had trouble controlling and landing this easiest to pilot of planes at 65 knots. Bernard, the Chief CFI, refused to rent him the 172.

“I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had” – said Peggy Chevrette, the JetTech manager. Flight Schools tend to keep going till you “get it” if you are a bit rusty, and then rent you the plane – they are in the business of making a profit after all. But the Chief CFI considered Hanni a hopeless case and refused any further lessons. [5]

 

Weren’t they worried? Might they veer off course? Might they lose control of the jet or miss their targets? No; these were the Luckiest Terrorists That Ever Lived, remember, and each of the planes heading for the WTC and the Pentagon arrived at their targets without the aid of air traffic control and did so with pinpoint accuracy and ease. Hanni Hanjour fought off some demons that day. It was no doubt a compulsion to prove his critics wrong as much as his super human luck that led him to perform a 400 knot 330 degree spiralling dive at 2500 fpm, only gaining 30 knots, then 30 knots more descending from 2200 feet at full power, with a very steady hand as to not overshoot or hit the lawn, at 460 knots impact speed, all done in a huge commercial jet [5] (a manoeuvre highly skilled career pilots refer to as incredibly difficult) just a few weeks after his humiliating failure to control a one engine plane.

 

So they are now no longer the Luckiest Terrorists Who Ever Lived. But their luck still grows; now they are the Luckiest Terrorists Who Ever Died, because what happened next represents the kind of luck which in Terrorist terms would mirror picking the winner of the Grand National every year of their adult lives. within an hour of each other both of the twin towers completely collapsed, each one in seconds, and thousands of people died. Now if there is one thing I really do fear it is the Zombie Terrorist as any sane man would, and if reports from the BBC that several of these hijackers are walking around the Middle East today are accurate then perhaps we really should be scared. [6]

 

You see the three reports charged with explaining what happened on 9/11 struggled immensely with why this complete high speed collapse should happen, to the extent that none of the three offers any analysis to explain the event in its entirety at all. The closest to it is the NIST report which, with millions of dollars and a ten thousand page report to explain how to avoid such a collapse happening in the future managed to rustle up little more than: “It was inevitable”, and have since explicitly admitted that they “cannot completely explain the total collapse of the twin towers” [7]. So if this happening was so hard to explain, it cannot be said to be expected by the terrorist master minds. Surely they’d looked into how the buildings were designed to react to plane crashes and heard that the Twin Towers had been specifically designed to withstand high speed impacts of jet liners? A three page White Paper on the design of the towers stated that:

 

“The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.”

 

While a 707 is smaller than a 767 (707- 153 ft long; 767- 159 ft long) it would in fact have had a lower kinetic impact as it was travelling a lot slower than 600 miles per hour and was loaded with less than half its maximum amount of fuel [8]. Some have suggested that the jet fuel was not accounted for and that is why the buildings collapsed. Had the terrorists thought of this perhaps? If they had then just as those who make these claims they clearly hadn’t done their research. John Skilling, the tower’s designer stated quite clearly:

 

“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,” he said. “The building structure would still be there.”[9]

 

This information was publicly available, so their plan couldn’t have involved the collapse of these towers, which ironically is what they will forever be remembered for. Their plan would have been to kill all the passengers and as many in the building as they could, the resulting revolting body count was in fact to their old friend lady luck; an outcome these murderers had never expected but were blessed with.

 

But did they even realistically plan for casualties in the buildings? Think about it for a second:

Why did they have targets at all?

We have been told this was a masterminded plan. Surely some small planning session was put aside to studying the publicly available information on NORAD procedure? So they would have known, for example that it is NORAD standard operating procedure (SOP) to scramble jet fighters whenever a jetliner goes off course loses its transponder signal or radio contact with it is lost. This would be a part of the emergency procedure to determine what the cause of the unusual behaviour of the plane was, and in most cases there would be no suspicion that a hijacking was occurring. The average response time was 10 – 15 minutes and between

September 2000 and June 2001, interceptors were scrambled 67 times. In the year 2000 jets were scrambled 129 times [10]. Needless to say in those periods of time there were not 67 or 129 hijackings reported; there were none. All three of the above criteria were established for each of the planes on 9/11, yet no scramble occurred. Had SOP been followed and when it became clear that this was a hijacking, and when it became clear that the hijackers had no demands, but intended to use the planes as missiles, they would most likely be shot down. Maybe the terrorists had hopes that the first plane would hit as their NORAD interceptor might not realise they were planning to hit a building before it was too late. But for three planes to hit their target and for there to be no interception at all of any one of them was an unlikely outcome they would not have imagined in their wildest dreams. Their planning of targets to strike was frankly odd; only a moron or a hopeless optimist would conceive of a plan which involved having planes collectively fly for an hour and forty five minutes off course through US air space and hit the Pentagon, or the WTC towers. Having targets at all made it a plan which was reliant on the complete failure of US air defence, and not their own success. Why plan on such an off chance, did they somehow know how lucky they were going to be, or was it an “in-joke” between them – a “best case scenario” they never realistically considered would happen but amused them to speak of?

 

But enough speculation, lets get back to the fable, because what happened next is simply incredible- even for the Luckiest Terrorists Who Ever Died: A 47 story sky scraper spontaneously collapsed, vertically and at free fall speed onto its own footprint without even being hit by a plane! Now you can say “well no-one was in WTC7 when it collapsed, maybe their luck was petering to an end” but ladies and gentlemen this was the New York Head Quarters of the CIA, The Secret Service and several other American government agencies –

the sworn enemies of the Islamic Terrorist.

 

If only the Luckiest Terrorists Who Ever Died had been lived to see this- not only with the twin towers had they already caused THE most improbable building collapse in history by dumb luck, TWICE, but then the headquarters of their mortal enemies collapses as well! If I suspect a terrorist is living next door to me before I make the appropriate phone calls I’ll be sure to ask him to choose my lottery numbers first.

Now hardly anyone on the street knows that WTC7 collapsed or has even heard of it and the media and government don’t seem to want anyone to know about it. Perhaps in America, a country of people who fervently believe in a God, they feared people would come to the conclusion that it was not luck, but God who wanted these attacks to take place? To the mind o the believer, God seems to have intervened at every point in the way to implausibly clear the way for their nefarious plan to succeed and therefore these hijackers must indeed doing

His work. The US government, no doubt, realised this could lead to a large proportion of the mid-west joining al-Qaeda and embracing the tenets of militant fundamentalist Islam – best to keep them unaware of all this “luck”, or “divine intervention”, then.

 

OK now this fable (the official fable) may all sound a bit unlikely but it’s better than being called conspiracy theorists isn’t it? We all know not accepting an unbelievable account of a serious crime leads people to ridiculing you – let’s just accept that these were the Luckiest Terrorists Who Ever Lived and close the book on this shall we? At least when the story involves such super natural luck, people will realise there is no need

to change our way of life, no need to surrender our civil liberties or our democracy. We should not fear another 9/11 because that such an event happened even once is so unlikely that it cannot be considered to possibly happen again, or, it could be said, so unlikely that it cannot be considered to have happened at all.

The plan of the terrorists in the official conspiracy theory is not a “masterminded plan” as it is entirely reliant on complete US failure, not at all on complete Terrorist success.

 

Let’s face it; 9/11 was a rubbish plan by incompetent and unfeasibly lucky terrorists:

 

“Let’s hope they let our known-terrorist selves into the country.

Let’s hope they let several known-terrorists get on planes with knifes on the same day despite endless warnings about an upcoming terrorist attack involving planes.

Let’s hope that these planes aren’t much harder to fly than the one engine planes out best pilot couldn’t handle.

Let’s hope we can fly for miles without the assistance of air traffic control and arrive at our target.

Let’s hope the whole of America’s Air Defence just lets us hit the Twin Towers.

Let’s hope that 35 minutes after this, when the whole world knows that was a terrorist attack NORAD still don’t realise it and we can hit the most protected building in the world – the Pentagon.

While we’re at it, let’s hope the Twin Towers collapse contrary their design, and WTC7 crumbles for no reason as well.”

 

Or, Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s just call a spade a spade – the official account of 9/11 is not just a conspiracy theory, it is one so cheap and badly written that even a man who was the best man at David Icke’s wedding and wore a three piece tin-foil tuxedo and top hat would smirk.

 

Let’s ask for the truth instead.

 

[1]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5485376

[2]

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0100ciaatta

[3]

http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch8.pdf

[4]

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&warning_si

gns:_specific_cases=foreignIntelligence

[5]

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/pentagon.html

[6]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm

[7]

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/AppealLetterToNISTGourleyEtAl.pdf

[8]

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.html#ref2

[9]

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgibin/

texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=1687698&date=19930227

[10]

http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/analysis/norad/

The Consumer Dictatorship

Near the end of last year a new scheme called ContactPoint was rushed through parliament with no fan-fare and not so much as a press release. With the huge mobilisation to reduce state information hoarding and tracking of its citizens through schemes such as the “e-Passports”, the ID card and the National Identity Register at large, the powers that be have staged a massive silent coup here: The new system will store the personal, location and medical details of every child (every citizen under the age of eighteen) in England from next year. And not so much as a whisper preceded it. The papers caught up a month too late; once the legislation had been passed safely the government chose to issue a press release. The fact that the press cannot produce a story in the absence of a press release, even one regarding new laws, would be an article in itself, more fittingly it would be an obituary regarding the death of journalism.

But when the opinion-smiths among the press did decide to comment, the only cost they seem concerned with was the financial one. The Daily Mail, Daily Star and London Metro sung on tune to warn “the taxpayer” that this would cost them £224million to build and have running costs of £41million. The shock head line was that council tax could even be hiked to cover the costs.

Of course they have a point; this is our money being spent on massive scales without any mind for public consultation. In addition to the ContactPoint costs we have heard ravings for months about how the surveillance-chipping of our passports will hike the costs from £51 to £66. The National Identity Register, the media gasps, will set us back £5.4billion. I’m not trying to make light of or dismiss our right to be angry about our money being spent on schemes we neither need nor want; but I do feel the bigger picture is being missed, or more likely ignored, by the media.

What bothers me is that no one actually seems concerned with the cost to our civil liberties in the least bit; it’s as though we’d happily march into an Orwellian Nightmare of a society so long as we could do it on the cheap. As it is, the main grumble seems to be “You can say what you like about the totalitarian dictators of the past, but at least their prices were reasonable”.

At least with most of these aggressions against our liberty there is some sense of shame from the powers that be; sneaking legislation through in the dead of night, paying through the tax kitty, hoping no one will notice. But the brazenness of the ID card scheme is one that takes the breath away. Possession of one of these plastic pocket-cages will be mandatory, yet on top of the scheme costing each and every tax payer £200 from the kitty, we will be asked to hand over £90 from our taxed income for the pleasure. The blind cheek of the consumer-dictatorship is unprecedented. Can you imagine the Nazi Storm Troopers rounding the Romany and the Jewish into their camps and then, just before they close the gate holding out their hand, coughing, and discreetly reminding their prisoners that “service isn’t included”?