17 responses so far ↓

• 1 Deran // Aug 14, 2008 at 11:47 pm

  I’m confused, a bit (no surprise there!); is Cynthia McKinney on this show, or one of her campaign people? I know Ms. McKinney has expressed some questions re: Sept 11, but is she an actual “Truther”? And if so, is she campaigning on this?

• 2 Mike Gillis // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:45 am

  McKinney has on multiple occasions courted the Truther vote, but never explicitly taken any “inside job conspiracy” position.

  During her acceptance speech she said “911 Truth” and in her Newsweek interview she straight out said the phrase “9/11 Truth Movement”. She also links to a couple Truther websites on one of her (three?) campaign sites.

  Her relationship to those people is much to close for my comfort, regardless of whether she endorses their nonsense or not. Either way, she’s clearly comfortable openly associating herself with them.

• 3 Eric Prindle // Aug 15, 2008 at 9:02 am

  Bruno Bruhwiler is the registered owner of votetruth08.com, which displays similar but not identical content to mckinney911.com, which is in turn owned by “PTTP Committee.”

  Both include links to sites maintained by the far-right-winger Alex Jones, and on both, when you click on Truth: 9/11, there are articles that oddly appear and then quickly disappear.

  Unlike Mike Gillis, I have historically supported the McKinney campaign, but this stuff has me very concerned as well.

• 4 sunshinebatman // Aug 15, 2008 at 11:05 am

  McKinney was the most active Congresscritter on 9/11 cover-up stuff. She grilled rumsfeld & Meyers about the wargames during a hearing; and put on a “Congressional briefing” on 9/11 cover up issues. One of her top campaign (former congressoinal) staff is John Judge, who had a watchdog group dogging the Kean/Hamilton/Zelikow cover-up commission. She also has appeared in at least one of alex Jones’ films.

  Yet she keeps calling 9/11 “nine one one” which is bizarre.

• 5 Mike Gillis // Aug 15, 2008 at 11:20 am

  Eric,

  Can you clear up why she appears to have multiple campaign websites?

• 6 G.E. // Aug 15, 2008 at 12:27 pm

  Interesting that everything good about McKinney, this Prindle guy doesn’t like. I guess he wants her to be an Establishment shill, pro-Fed, anti-Truth.

• 7 Mike Gillis // Aug 15, 2008 at 12:57 pm

  Don’t seriously tell me that you believe the ludicrous 9/11 Truth “inside job” garbage and its labyrinth of contradictory sub-conspiracies, all of which had to have gone off without a hitch or the whole thing would collapse.

  Rejecting it isn’t anti-Truth, it’s pro-Sanity.

• 8 Eric Prindle // Aug 15, 2008 at 12:59 pm

  I wish I could clear up the multiple sites, but the campaign won’t answer my inquiries on the topic. Certainly the impression that’s created is that the sites are meant to appeal to separate constituencies: runcynthiarun.org to Greens and the other two sites to the Alex Jones crowd.

  And it’s not that surprising that I disagree with McKinney on the topics on which G.E. agrees with her, since G.E. is a right-wing pro-capitalist and I am not.

  I don’t want McKinney to be pro-establishment. I want her to be a true radical. The 9/11 Truth movement — at least the direction it has taken — and Federal Reserve conspiracies are both about “radical-sounding” empirical claims followed by unconvincing solutions. I am interested in radical solutions.

• 9 G.E. // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:03 pm

  Mike – I do not believe in a “labyrinth of contradictory sub-conspiracies.” But I don’t believe the government is telling the truth, either. If you want to blindly accept the government’s non-story and unanswered questions, then go ahead.

  Eric – The Federal Reserve redistributes wealth from poor to rich. There’s no “conspiracy” or at least, there’s no debate on the issue. It is an objective fact. Of course, the Fed is in keeping with the Communist Manifesto, so I guess that’s why it gets a pass.

• 10 G.E. // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:05 pm

  Again, here’s what Prindle wants McKinney to say:

  “The government story about 9/11 is true. Oh, and the Federal Reserve System, run for private profit by bankers, is also good. I will not talk about these issues that might challenge the Establishment in my campaign. Rather, I will agitate for greater socialism, which is in no way a threat to the Ruling Elite who want more of it.”

• 11 Eric Prindle // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:29 pm

  For the record, I do not believe the question has been adequately answered: How was the al Qaeda organization able to successfully hijack four commercial airplanes, fly two of them into the Twin Towers — causing the destruction of both towers and Towers 3 and 7 — and fly another into the Pentagon?

  The 9/11 Truth movement, as currently constituted, is not making a contribution to answering those questions, because the majority of 9/11 Truthers believe that some/all of the above events did not actually happen.

  I also don’t believe the Federal Reserve is “good.” It simply is not at the center of my economic analysis, nor do I believe that transferring formal ownership of its assets from banks to the government is likely to help matters.

  G.E. and many of the other people who post here have a distorted idea of “socialism.” They think any time a constraint is placed on free markets, socialism has been implemented. This does not resemble any version of socialism as it is understood by actual socialists.

• 12 G.E. // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:38 pm

  nor do I believe that transferring formal ownership of its assets from banks to the government is likely to help matters.

  You are correct here. But you are wrong in not making the Fed “the center of your economic analysis.” The Fed controls the money supply. Making it anything other than central to economic analysis is sheer folly. Of course, its “assets,” to the extent they exist, belong to “the people” (to steal a socialist phrase) and should be returned. There is no need for a central bank, period.

  Also: McKinney is not a “socialist” but hardcore socialist definition. She just wants more of what we have. As such, she is in no way a threat to the Establishment, except where she calls into question the sacred institutions of the Regime, such as the Fed, or calls into question the unspeakable, such as what really happened on 9/11.

  Oh, and by the way, I’m only “right wing” if you equate “right” with freedom. I consider myself to be a radical leftist in the original sense of the word.

• 13 Trent Hill // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:38 pm

  Eric,

  A restraint placed on the free-market is moving AWAY from free-markets and TOWARDS regulation and nationalization, even if that movement is only in some small way.

  Think of it as a scale. On the left we have Socialism. On the right, Freedom. Every regulation imposed, everytime the government intervenes in the economy, our government slides Leftward along that scale–towards Socialism.

• 14 Trent Hill // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:40 pm

  GE,

  I alternatively think of you as a Classical-leftist and a Libertarian Old-Rightist.
  Either way, GE fits close to Freedom.

• 15 Galileo Galilei // Aug 15, 2008 at 1:53 pm

  If you’re running in a third party, you’d be stupid not to court the 9/11 Truth vote. Over 120 million Amercians think 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

• 16 Mike Gillis // Aug 15, 2008 at 2:51 pm

  Just as many people think the world is fewer than 10,000 years old. That doesn’t mean you should encourage them.

  And do I believe that the government has lied about 9/11? Sure, but only about the things that government officials normally lie about: their own incompetance, greed or negligence.

  I DON’T believe that the same government that completely fucked up Katrina, Iraq and everything else it touches could have pulled off a massive X-Files level conspiracy with a cast of thousands and kept it under wraps.

  They couldn’t even pull off Watergate without getting caught, and that didn’t require nearly as many participants.

  And why kill 3,000 people? Since when did we ever need an atrocity on that scale to trick the general public into a bullshit war? All they need is a propaganda campaign, which they did. Which they’ve always done.

  There are real conspiracies in our government, mostly just public officials being bought and sold by big campaign donors, corporations, their PACs and their lobbyists… forcing pork into every bill, exploiting disasters with fake “relief bills” crammed full of a laundry list of the stuff they wanted all along.

  Even the atrocities that they do commit, from war crimes to attacks on civil liberties…. they do it in the open. They don’t even pretend otherwise.

  …but unlike the fictional cloak and dagger bullshit of 9/11 “Truth”, they aren’t even secret. They’re right out in the open and use only the general public’s apathy as their cover.

  I think there are alot of unanswered questions about 9/11, but the identity of the people behind the attack is not one of those questions. The responsibilty for the failures to prevent, stop and properly respond to it and care for its victims, are.

  And the 9/11 “Truthers” investigate in the exact opposite way that they should. They cling like a pitbull to a preconceived end result and then toss aside any data that invalidates it, accuse the person raining on their parade of being yet another conspirator — or worse yet, create yet another complicated sub-conspiracy to rationalize the leap of logic.

  We have real problems and crawling in a fantasy world is the last way to solve them.

• 17 G.E. // Aug 15, 2008 at 3:06 pm

  The government has engaged in false flag operations before.

  The sillier thing is that you want the same government that “fucked up” Katrina to handle healthcare and a vast assortment of other tasks.

  But regardless, I’m convinced (as are many scholars) that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen. Wilson essentially killed Americans to gain entry into WWI. The Gulf of Tonkin was a pretext for escalating in Vietnam. There’s the “why” to your question.

  As for the incompetence argument: People within government are incompetent (hence the stupidity of Nader’s platform) but not necessarily totally so, and not all of them. The CIA engages in coups all of the time. Not that many people have to be involved, and not everything has to be perfect when people REFUSE to acknowledge the truth. A large percentage of people STILL think Iraq was behind 9/11.

  The 9/11 “Truth” movement is plagued by nutcases just like the anti-Fed “movement” is plagued by anticapitalists, conspiracy mongers, and anti-Semites. That has nothing to do with the underlying truth of either proposition.

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