W. Niederhut

Gee, Jeff, we haven't heard anything from you about Trump since you were busy denying Trump's January 6th coup attempt earlier this year-- before the J6 hearings revealed all of the damning evidence. I'm going to respond to your latest bizarre comments in red, below. Jeff wrote: It’s almost two years since the last U.S. federal election and Trump remains the number one topic of conversation and public hysterics. How could this be? Well, it could have to do with all of the current investigations into Trump's criminal activities, by Congress, the Fulton County DA, NY DA, and DOF/FBI/NARA records case. Just a thought. I would wager that no American public figure has ever faced such vast cascades of flung mud: major accusations of malign foreign influence, major accusations of election chicanery, major accusations of financial impropriety, two impeachments, continual federal and state level investigation… all amplified to level 10 by an endless parade of hostile political, bureaucratic, and especially media mouthpieces. I'll accept your wager and double it, on the grounds that no American public figure has ever engaged in such widespread fraudulence and criminality-- collusion with a hostile foreign power to gain public office in 2016, massive election chicanery in 2020, the staging of a violent coup attempt on January 6th, long-term tax fraud, emoluments violations, and illegal handling of classified government documents. It looks from the outside that a pertinent motivating issue is that Trump, unbelievably, remains a potent political force and all the flung mud only makes his supporters dig in deeper rather than abandon the cause. How could this be? Why do Trump’s political opponents continue to fling mud when it has been an ineffective if not counter-productive strategy? It isn't "mud," it's truth, and justice. Trump is a criminal who needs to be held accountable for his crimes against American democracy and society. The fact that he still controls the Republican Party makes this all the more imperative. His sociopathic conduct has only been worsened by the fact that he hasn't been held accountable previously. In effect, the Republican Party has enabled his criminal conduct. The first inklings of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane file, directed at the Trump campaign beginning August 2016, began to creep into the light in late 2017, notably in several prescient articles by the late Robert Parry. Although the direct mechanics of this program are not yet publicly known, it has been established that the Clinton campaign, and possibly the Obama White House, worked with partisan assets in the FBI and DOJ to disrupt the Trump campaign, including planting stories alleging untoward influence by an adversary government. The brief Sussmann hearing a few months ago effectively confirmed that program. Trump filed a lawsuit last March directed at persons affiliated with Crossfire Hurricane (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157/gov.uscourts.flsd.610157.1.0.pdf). Trump's Russia-gate scandal came to light in 2017 after the FBI began questioning Michael Flynn about his illegal December 2016 phone calls with Kisylak, to undermine U.S. sanctions for Russian meddling in our 2016 election. Robert Mueller was appointed as a Special Prosecutor only after Trump tried to shut down the FBI investigation of Flynn by firing James Comey and Andrew McCabe in 2017. It had nothing to do with Crossfire Hurricane, Steele, or Sussman. What Trump’s supporters are saying is that the documents stashed at Mar-A-Lago were all relevant to the Crossfire Hurricane file, and were declassified by Trump via legal executive decisions - which is why the affidavit had to rely on the Espionage Act. What Trump supporters are you referring to? And what executive decisions? On the contrary, 18 former Trump officials have already debunked Trump's claim about de-classifying the documents at Mar-a-Lago. The concerns about espionage, apparently, have to do with Trump holding Top Secret documents about clandestine informants. They are saying that the FBI office responsible for the document raid is the same office that ran the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. If this becomes confirmed, it seems the massive partisan divide will be ever more entrenched and the political warfare ever more intensified. The "massive partisan divide" is a Trump media chimera, used to deflect attention away from Trump's felonious mishandling of classified documents. He was given multiple opportunities to obey the law. When word started in late 2017 that the Trump campaign had been placed under FISA surveillance via a sketchy predicate during the 2016 campaign, it appeared as potentially one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. It may yet achieve such status. It appears to have occurred in a milieu whereby Clinton was assured the presidency and so these machinations would never come to light. The decision to publish, in early 2017, the Intelligence Community assessment of malign foreign influence appears to have been part of an effort to upend Trump early in his term - as publicly acknowledged by John McCain - also confident of success. It was not successful, and served to ultimately reveal Crossfire Hurricane and the massive mess caused by all of this continues to paralyze U.S. politics present and future. Disclaimer: I do not admire Trump, support his policies, or even really care or fixate on him. One has to follow the facts, wherever they lead. Trump should have been easily handled politically, not through skullduggery. It’s really late Roman Empire stuff going on. What pettifoggery! Any alleged "skullduggery" about Trump's crimes is, basically, telling the truth about his conduct. It's entirely warranted. And the FISA "Obama-gate"/Crossfire Hurricane Trumpaganda has been repeatedly debunked. Meanwhile, we are just learning more details about how Bill Barr lied about the Mueller Report, and blocked Trump's prosecution for multiple counts of obstruction of justice, as detailed in the Mueller Report.

Well, I'm astonished by David Lifton's ignorance of Newtonian physics, and also by his surprisingly scurrilous ad hominem nonsense here, so I'll respond to both. First of all, I was recruited by Professor Phillip Bray at Brown University to tutor undergraduate students at Brown in physics in the mid-70s, after achieving a perfect score on Bray's Physics 101 final exam. I also had a perfect Physics score on MCATs before graduating from Harvard Medical School. So there are those minor details about my knowledge of basic physics. And, incidentally, a knowledge of basic physics, and a capacity for basic empiricism, is sufficient to properly recognize the WTC demolitions on 9/11, which is why I originally asked Michael Griffith if he had studied physics. But, let's skip over Lifton's ad hominem nonsense and look at the physics of the WTC demolitions. These are questions that I would like Lifton, Griffith, and other 9/11 Truth deniers to answer, without changing the subject or resorting to ad hominem deflections. 1) What was the structural resistance to the observed virtual free fall collapses of WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7-- i.e., to the free fall acceleration of gravity? 2) What rapidly destroyed the entire steel substructures of those massive steel skyscrapers on 9/11, resulting in the observed near free fall collapses into their own footprints-- without gradual, step-wise, assymetrical, gravitational pancaking of floors? 3) What liquefied the steel that was flowing "like a foundry" at Ground Zero? 4) What explosively pulverized hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete into high pressure pyroclastic flows over lower Manhattan? 5) What caused the serial explosions that brought WTC1 and WTC2 down-- clearly visible and audible on extant film--and also reported by multiple witnesses inside of the buildings?

Ben is right about one thing. Trump has been living rent free in my head lately. He does it by incessantly evading consequences for his misconduct. The only time Trump told the truth all year was when he was pleading the 5th.

Yes, John Ratcliffe is another one of those flying monkeys Trump eventually appointed to positions of responsibility in his administration, after the semi-reputable people abandoned the Trumptanic. Ratcliffe belongs in Trump's flying monkey menagerie with Mike Pompeo, Chris Miller, Kash Patel, Chad Wolf, Tony Ornato, Peter Navarro, et.al. They were all selected mainly for their loyalty, sycophancy, spinelessness, and willingness to lie on Donald's behalf.

This is a total non sequitur, folks, but it's too good to ignore. Django Unchained does an uncanny Donald Trump impression... 🤥

Ben, I think this one's for you. 🤥

Speaking of cudgels, why was Trump hoarding and refusing to return classified documents about clandestine human intelligence sources?!

Ron, The causes of the widespread public ignorance about what happened on 9/11 are multi-faceted-- not unlike the history of public ignorance about JFK's assassination. On the one hand, the government and mainstream media have aggressively suppressed the facts, while promoting the false, official narrative for the past 21 years. And, on the other, the accurate historical, scientific, and forensic research about 9/11 has been marginalized and attacked (on the internet and in the M$M) with ahistorical, pseudo-scientific disinformation. It has been Posnered, Bugliosied, and Luis-Alvarezed. The most significant recent example was Spike Lee being aggressively pressured by the NYT and M$M to edit and delete his interviews of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth from his September 11, 2021 documentary for the 20th Anniversary. I could post a thousand facts and salient questions as examples for people who haven't studied the data but, typically, 9/11 Truth deniers simply respond to the data debunking the official narrative by posting links to all of the ubiquitous 9/11 disinformation on the internet. At one point, David Ray Griffith responded to the M$M anti-9/11 Truth bunk by "debunking the debunkers." But, unfortunately, it's a "firehose of falsehoods." Here are a few sample questions for 9/11 Truth deniers to contemplate. 1) Who planted the serial explosives, clearly visible and audible on film, that abruptly demolished WTC1 and WTC2 on 9/11? And why? Cui bono? 2) What liquefied the steel girders of the WTC1 and WTC2 towers? (Certainly not jet fuel or smoldering office materials!) 3) What explosively pulverized all of the bodies and hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete into the atmosphere of lower Manhattan, in high pressure pyroclastic flows? 4) Why has the M$M aggressively suppressed any news coverage of the obvious, expert demolition of WTC7 on 9/11? 5) Why has the M$M aggressively suppressed any news coverage of the arrest (and secret 70 day FBI incarcerations) of the "Five Dancing Israeli" Mossad agents who were arrested near Giants Stadium on 9/11, after witnesses saw them filming and celebrating the demolitions of the WTC towers from Liberty State Park? They later told Israeli television that they were "documenting the event," but how did they know there would be an event, and why were they celebrating? 6) Why has there been no M$M news coverage of the fact that the U.S military had successfully tested Raytheon's GPS-guided remote-piloting technology in Boeing jetliners in August of 2001? They could fly, land, and maneuver Boeings without pilots. 7) Why is there no photographic or CCTV evidence, or flight manifest evidence, of Muslim hijackers boarding the "hijacked" planes on 9/11? 8. Why did the FBI immediately seize all of the surveillance cameras around the Pentagon on 9/11? 9. Why did the first CNN television reporter at the Pentagon on 9/11 say, and show, that there was "no evidence of a plane crash" at the Pentagon? 10. Why did FBI experts at the Moussaoui trial testify that no phone calls had been made from AA77 to Ted Olson on 9/11-- contradicting the Barbara Olson 9/11 narrative about hijackers with box cutters? 11. Why did the 9/11 Commission (and the M$M) suppress the shocking evidence about major shorting of United Airlines and American Airlines stock prior to 9/11 by a bank linked to CIA comptroller Buzz Krongard?

And Trump's sleazy propaganda strategy of riling up the "working class" about student loan forgiveness appears to be part of a broader GOP propaganda strategy-- playing upon the resentment of working people who didn't have an opportunity to go to college, (while pushing and preserving GOP tax cuts for billionaires.)

No wonder Enrich is so well-informed about this subject.

Ben, I trust that you're not naive enough to believe that these paltry Jones Day political donations are a meaningful metric of their right wing political agenda--especially in light of this week's remarkable NYT analysis of Jones Day's role in stacking the U.S. courts with reactionary Republican plutocrats. Perhaps you should lay off the red kool aid for awhile and re-read that article. As for your Cicero Institute article praising the merits of the disastrous 2017 Trump/GOP tax cuts for corporations and billionaires as "sound policy," please study the data about who actually benefited most significantly from that trickle down Trump/GOP boondoggle-- not based on rates, per se, but on actual dollars. It was another massive GOP tax policy scam chiefly benefiting billionaires, foreign and domestic, while contributing to Trump's $8 trillion dollar budget deficit from 2017-2021.

Remarkable investigative journalism. This guy should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Ben, Not sure what planet Taibbi is living on lately. The biggest news story of the past 48 hours on my planet has been the 300 classified documents in Trump's confiscated trove from Mar-a-Lago.

I'd describe the speech as a kind of rhetorical Russian pretzel. Putin makes some valid points about U.S./NATO imperialism, but he glosses over his own heinous, "imperialist" crimes in Ukraine by framing them as a righteous struggle against "neoliberal totalitarianism." WTF? Talk about Orwellian Double Speak! Neoliberal totalitarianism? 🤥 This is the same fascist dictator who has been claiming in recent years that liberal democracy is defunct, while murdering his own journalists and imprisoning opposition politicians. I've been telling people for the past 15 years that the Russian Federation has devolved into a fascist police state under Putin's thumb, and nothing in 2022 has changed my mind. If anything, the RF is regressing back to Stalinism.

It's truly discouraging to observe the ignorance of even some respected JFK researchers about 9/11, especially since there are so many striking parallels between the 9/11 op and the JFK assassination-- as Laurent Guyenot and others have documented. JFKA researchers should understand 9/11 Truth better than anyone. If they don't, they simply haven't studied the bona fide research, like the accurate work of the scientifically accredited Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Those guys aren't "kooky conspiracy theorists." They're scientists and engineers who know precisely whereof they speak. Both ops were misrepresented by fraudulent government commissions-- that altered and suppressed the forensic evidence-- and pervasive, persistent, false narratives in the U.S. and world mainstream media, which began promptly after the ops and persisted for decades. Both ops involved aggressive sequestration, destruction, and misrepresentation of the evidence. Both ops framed patsies. Both ops resulted in major, protracted U.S. wars. Both ops have been gradually exposed by quality research, and misrepresented by bogus "research."

Women's panties, eh? No wonder Trump promoted Haspel. 🤥

Chris, WTC7 did, in fact, collapse to the ground at free fall acceleration. That is a scientific fact, not a theory. Even NIST admitted it. You can readily confirm that fact with a stop watch and the film footage and floor dimensions. It's Physics 101 stuff. * * https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/free-fall-acceleration What amazes me are the pervasive mass delusions about 9/11 created and maintained by the false government narrative in the mainstream media (and on the internet) denying the basic physics of the explosive WTC demolitions. And this false, pre-planned 9/11 narrative was launched in the M$M immediately after the first plane hit L. Paul Bremer's WTC office on 9/11. It was a skillfully prepared Shock & Awe psy op-- the Great American Psy-Opera. It was the New Pearl Harbor op that launched PNAC's multi-trillion dollar wars in the Middle East. Jerome Hauer was the guy who originally birthed the "jet fuel melted the steel girders" narrative about the anomalous WTC tower collapses in the M$M, immediately after the first tower collapsed. Anomalous because massive steel skyscrapers don't rapidly collapse from fires. When Rudy Giuliani told the NYFD on 9/11 that the WTC towers were going to collapse, the NYFD experts, accurately, thought he was nuts. (Giuliani was forewarned about the impending collapse by someone at OEM, and later changed his story.) Burning jet fuel cannot liquefy steel and, even it could, it would not have rapidly obliterated the entire steel substructures of those massive steel WTC towers, nor would it have explosively pulverized all of that WTC concrete into virtual pyroclastic (high pressure/high heat) flows over Manhattan. In the cases of WTC1 and WTC2, the serial explosions that brought down the buildings-- pulverizing thousands of tons of concrete into the atmosphere of lower Manhattan and, literally, liquefying massive steel girders-- are readily visible and audible on film. But, amazingly, most people can't perceive the empirical evidence with their eyes and ears. They process it through a kind of a priori filter-- based on the false mainstream media narrative.

Trump approved Gina Haspel as CIA Director after promoting his large flying monkey Mike Pompeo from CIA Director to Secretary of State (to replace Rex Tillerson, after Tillerson called Trump a "moron.") There was an interesting article at WaPo this week about Trump's flying monkey, Kash Patel. Trump tried to install Patel as Deputy Director of the CIA, but withdrew the nomination after Haspel threatened to quit. Ultimately, Trump installed Patel as Assistant Sec Def, to support his flying monkey Chris Miller at the Pentagon (after Esper quit.) Now Patel is working for Trump at NARA, trying to convince people that Trump de-classified the documents, etc. Trump only hires the best flying monkeys.

Michael, You've posted a long list of the ubiquitous media disinformation on the subject of the WTC demolitions. This pseudo-scientific bunk about 9/11 is everywhere on the internet, and in the U.S. mainstream media, and has been for the past 20 years-- a firehose of falsehoods propaganda technique. The problem is that people need to understand Newtonian physics and chemistry to really understand why it's pseudo-scientific bunk, and they also need to put aside their a priori assumption-- created by our mainstream media propaganda -- that the official Bush/Cheney/Zelikow narrative about 9/11 is true. That's not easy to do, because the false 9/11 narrative has been aggressively repeated in the mainstream media for 20 years-- beginning almost immediately after the first WTC Tower was hit by a plane on 9/11, when Kissinger & Associates CEO L. Paul Bremer immediately appeared on CNN to tell America that "Osama Bin Laden" and "Al Qaeda" were responsible for the attack on the WTC. (Ehud Barak repeated the same talking point that day on BBC television, and Henry Kissinger repeated it on Sky Television.) The most prominent example of the original pseudo-scientific 9/11 narrative (along with the original Bezant paper) was the NIST Report. It's pure pseudo-scientific bunk-- an alleged computer "simulation" of the WTC demolitions, for which the U.S. government-affiliated authors refused to even publish the parameters used for their computer "simulation." Nor did they even comment on the obvious explosions-- visible and audible on film. Imagine spending taxpayer millions on an alleged computer "simulation" while refusing to publish the parameters used in the "simulation!" It's absurd. Nor did the NIST guys even pretend to explain the observed, total, free fall collapse of WTC7 on 9/11. Their "model" only described an office fire scenario in which an upper floor theoretically collapsed onto a lower floor-- not what happened. Study the film. The distance between WTC7 floors remained constant as the entire 47 floor structure collapsed abruptly in a free fall. * It was an expert demolition, as Danny Jowenko observed. Have you studied physics in high school, college, or on a post-graduate level? Let's keep it simple. If something-- a rock, or a building-- falls to earth at the acceleration of gravity (32 ft/s2) what is the resistance to acceleration? Zero. By definition. Ergo, the steel substructures of the WTC towers had to be rapidly, explosive demolished-- all the way down to the ground level. And all of the actual data supports that fact-- including the film and suppressed witness testimony about the serial explosions and visible molten steel. (Jet fuel doesn't burn at a high enough temperature to liquify steel, which was flowing "like a foundry" at Ground Zero.) * Below: The abrupt, free fall collapse of WTC7 on 9/11-- no "pancaking" of floors

Michael, I'm hardly an apologist for Alex Jones, for the reasons investigative journalist Russ Baker mentions in his new article, but the Baker article isn't really about Alex Jones. It's about M$M censorship of inconvenient truths, and the fact that serious scholars of the JFK assassination, 9/11, and other CIA/military ops have often had to seek publicity through non-mainstream media sources. Baker's book about the Bush dynasty, Family of Secrets, is one of the most interesting books I've read during the past decade, an opinion shared by Gore Vidal, himself. As for 9/11, the scientific evidence for explosive demolitions of the WTC is overwhelming, and I say that as a guy who used to tutor physics at an Ivy League college. I don't know if you have a scientific background but, if you want to educate yourself about the widely suppressed scientific data on 9/11, here are some high quality references on the subject. (Be aware that disinformation about 9/11 on-line is ubiquitous and surfaces on Google searches.) Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth | WTC Twin Towers and Building 7 (ae911truth.org) https://911research.wtc7.net/ WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 all collapsed symmetrically into their own footprints at near free fall acceleration on 9/11 -- indicating zero resistance to free fall collapse. The steel substructures had to be explosively demolished, (as opposed to progressive, gravitational "pancaking" of floors.) Additionally, you can readily observe (and hear) the serial explosions that demolished WTC1 and WTC2 on film and audio recordings-- which were also described by numerous witnesses.

Here's Russ Baker's new article in a series at WhoWhatWhy.com about his experiences with Family of Secrets, and mainstream media suppression of political truth-- along the lines of Joseph McBride's work on the subject. Only Lone Nuts Need Apply: The Media’s Antipathy to Deeper Digs - WhoWhatWhy August 22, 2022

Bob, If you haven't read the book, or watched the series, Oliver Stone's chapter on Truman and the Bomb in The Untold History of the United States is worth studying-- and I say that as a guy whose uncle was killed on the U.S.S. Lexington in the Pacific theater in WWII. Before reading The Untold History, I didn't realize that Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, and even Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay all disapproved of Truman's decision to drop the Bomb on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing that was morally wrong and unnecessary from a military standpoint. Here's a discussion of that history with Peter Kuznick.

Some witty person posted this at the Democratic Underground today... "The FBI moved on Trump like a bitch and, when you have probable cause, they let you do it." 🤥

Kirk, My impression of this 1964 conversation between Allen Dulles and RFK is that it was rather bizarre. Certainly awkward. It must have been set up by LBJ. I wonder if LBJ was secretly amused by the prospect of having Bobby ask Dulles for a favor. An abject form of humiliation. The first thing that came to mind for me was the post-assassination Dulles quote about JFK thinking that "he was a little God," and Prescott Bush telling Dulles that he "would never forgive" JFK for canning Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I interpret Dulles's prolonged laughter after RFK saying, "Because I know you," as an expression of veiled hostility and surprise at the absurdity of the "compliment." There's no question that Dulles's darker personality traits were readily concealed by his suave, cultured Princetonian persona. (I'm basing my general impressions of Dulles on my reading of David Talbott's biography, The Devil's Chessboard.) As for Dulles' putative role in the JFK assassination and cover up, we certainly know that he aggressively promoted the "Lone Nut" narrative from the very beginning of the Warren Commission deliberations. And he had, obviously, been involved in global assassination ops prior to 11/22/63. Above all, he was a Cold War hawk, like his brother, who despised JFK.

C'mon, Ben. Are you now trying to argue that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are partisan "Donks?" 🤥 You've twisted yourself into a Russian pretzel for the past year trying to deny the terrible truth about Trump's J6 coup attempt, but this takes the proverbial pirogue. Nor has it been easy to bring Trump's co-conspirators before the investigating committee. Meadows and others have stubbornly refused to comply with their subpoenas. Flynn plead the 5th repeatedly during his appearance. BTW, did you ever finally watch the J6 hearings? They have been outstanding and, certainly, educational-- nothing at all like the Republican Benghazi show trials. Sadly, the people who really need to watch them are hiding their heads in their distal alimentary canals. Here's my question. What is your resistance to facing the truth about Trump's historic misconduct? What impact would it have on your life if you were to finally realize that Trump is a self-serving scoundrel who conspired to overturn an election in order to remain in power?