9/11 and The New Pearl Harbor: Response to Bill Weinberg
by Michael Caine / FTW Energy Affairs Editor
ALMOST no one who opposes the idea of U.S. government involvement in 9/11 has seriously confronted Crossing The Rubicon by Mike Ruppert. And sadly, many in the 9/11 truth movement who do embrace the notion of U.S. government involvement will not deal with Rubicon. This 9/11 report points to one notable exception to the latter, Bill Weinberg, and since Weinberg’s opinion was first published at Guerilla News Network, FTW is posting this story for free on our site because it will also be posted on the GNN site. While Weinberg did at least deal with the contents of Rubicon, his arguments are extremely fallacious as Michael Kane explains in this report.
Rubicon remains the most impeccably-documented and thoroughly-researched analysis of 9/11 but also the most ignored and least confronted. Unlike the physical evidence of 9/11, i.e. “Were there explosives in the buildings? Did a plane hit the Pentagon?”—evidence which has been destroyed and cannot be proven in a court of law, Rubicon reveals the military, legal, and energy-resource evidence behind 9/11 that cannot be tampered with because it is historical fact and could easily be proven in a court of law—IF there were any courts in the United States where such evidence could receive a fair and impartial hearing without sabotage or assassination. —CB]
October 9th 2006, 3:56PM [PST] – New York – Recently Bill Weinberg has trashed everyone who believes 9/11 was perpetrated by the U.S. Government in a report published at GNN.tv.
He makes some valid points regarding bad analysis and sloppy documentation put forth by some who claim to be 9/11 “skeptics” searching for “truth.” But where Weinberg falls flat on his face is in his evasive analysis of the most important area of research surrounding 9/11: The multiple 9/11 war games.
In his analysis of the war games, Weinberger never once mentions FromTheWilderness.com, Mike Ruppert or Crossing the Rubicon.
FTW is used to getting attacked, in many ways. David Corn and Alexander
Cockburn spent a good amount of time attacking Ruppert from 2002 to 2004. Cockburn denies that global warming exists or is a serious threat to humanity.
Unlike Cockburn, I respect Weinberg, and find him to be an intelligent and valid analyst of current events and history. There are even two tactics Weinberg uses in his report against official complicity in the 9/11 attacks that I respect.
First, he begins his argument in a way I have not seen used by our detractors in the past. He admits that official governmental conspiracies exist, and it would be “irresponsible not to consider the possibility that elements of the CIA and/or Bush administration had a hand in the events of September 11, 2001.”
Secondly, he does something no one else will do any longer when attacking those who say 9/11 was an inside job: He mentions Mike Ruppert.
Since Crossing the Rubicon was published, all of FTW’s favorite detractors (Corn, Cockburn et al.) have shut their mouths, no longer mentioning our work especially as it pertains to the crimes of 9/11. They can’t dispute our case so they have no other choice.
Weinberg was brave enough to invoke the name that others now steer clear of, but he did not seriously challenge our case at all. Instead he focuses on minor disputes that he had with FTW’s Oh Lucy! timeline four years ago. These points are not in anyway central to the case against Dick Cheney as laid out in Crossing the Rubicon. The main point Weinberg drives home is over the interpretation of a French report published in Le Figaro. The report claims bin Laden met with CIA officials during his stay in a Dubai hospital shortly before 9/11. Le Figaro has never retracted the story. Weinberg says Ruppert translated
a French word in the report incorrectly. Ruppert responded at length to
Weinberg regarding this issue at the time, and his response was partially in French. Weinberg did not reprint Mike Ruppert’s response in full in his recent report; he selectively quoted from it.
Regardless of who is right in terms of such minutiae (I cannot truly say since I don’t speak French), this debate is meaningless and has no impact on FTW’s central case naming Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the crimes of 9/11. To prove such a case in a court of law you must show MEANS, MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY. When Weinberg finally does try to take a swing at our case in his report, he doesn’t even mention us!
Instead he uses Alex Jones’ extremely flawed and inaccurate analysis of the 9/11 war games as a straw man, easily knocked down. It is simple to win a debate on fact checking against Alex Jones, (Prison Planet) who has continually co-opted FTW’s investigation into these matters without ever mentioning our work or representing it accurately. Weinberg writes:
(Alex Jones says) “The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.”
But this last claim is not verified. In fact, PP’s own embedded link on the drills goes to its page delineating several Pentagon (not CIA) exercises scheduled for the morning of 9-11, including one (“Vigilant Guardian”) that concerned a multiple hijacking scenario—but none concerning “drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon.” The only one which came close to “drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon” actually concerned such a scenario at the Chantilly, Va., offices of the DoD’s National Reconnaissance Office.
The apparent fact of the Vigilant Guardian exercise is used by numerous
conspiracy websites (such as the modestly named WhatReallyHappened.com)
as evidence of an Air Force “stand-down” on 9-11. It is well-established (and not actually contested by PP or What Really Happened) that fighter jets were, in fact, scrambled from Langely (sic) Air Force Base in Virginia and Falmouth AFB in Massachusetts on the morning of 9-11. Why they failed to find the hijacked planes is a legitimate question, and it may have to do with confusion arising from Vigilant Guardian. But this is not the same as a “stand-down,” which the American Heritage dictionary defines as “a relaxation from a state of readiness or alert.” Yet “Truth” activists continue to espouse the “stand-down” as dogma.
For anyone who has read Crossing the Rubicon, Weinberg’s analysis is terrible. Let me first correct the straw man lie from Alex Jones that Weinberg so easily knocked down. The CIA drill on 9/11 was headed by the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO) which simulated an emergency response to an aircraft crashing into its headquarters at 8:30 am (precisely the time an almost identical scenario “turned real” at the World Trade Center and later at the Pentagon). This drill was coordinated with local law enforcement and emergency response organizations. So the NRO – the hi-tech headquarters for the CIA – was very well prepared to respond just in case a plane happened to crash into it on 9/11. Mike Ruppert wrote the following opinion regarding
this drill on page 382 of Crossing the Rubicon:
The NRO is probably one of the top ten high-value targets in the country. Nobody (in the US Government or military) wanted it hit, but if the (9/11) plans went awry it just might be hit. Everyone knows that there are no guarantees when you start something this big. Things get out of hand; someone fails to follow the plan; loyalties change; people screw up their mission, the fog of war. It would be prudent to have the NRO drill underway, with police, fire, paramedics, and everything else there just in case. Good thinking!
All Weinberg has ‘proven’ is that Alex Jones is not a reliable source. That’s no newsflash to FTW readers. But what he doesn’t do is take on the documentation laid out in Crossing the Rubicon that shows not only were there multiple, conflicting Air Force war games running on 9/11, but that Dick Cheney was in charge of managing them.1 The 9/11 war games created the opportunity for the crimes of that day to unfold as planned.
By Michael Riley
Denver Post Staff Writer / 
As Conover points out, the dread list of "conspiracy nuts" includes not only such usual suspects as Mike Ruppert of CopVCia website notoriety, but also the newest "arch conspiracist," Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney, who had the temerity to call for an investigation into what the Bush administration knew before the attacks and the connection of Bush and the Carlyle Group, one of the largest corporations which is profiting handsomely from the "war on terrorism."
Ms. Conover ends her thoughtful essay with a salient question:
"So how do we explain this behavior of the lily-livered left? If the Ivory Tower gentlemen are leaving it to us in the trenches to get to the truth, because they won't dirty their hands to help us collect the bits and pieces to connect the dots, why then are they so ferociously attacking our efforts? Are they currying favor with someone? Is it time for us to start following the money?"
Yes, indeed it's time we started following the money to explain the gutlessness of the establishment "liberals" and also to follow the money in the entire 9/11 phenomenon to see who profits from this catastrophe and how.