At its April 7th meeting, the Truth Action Project (TAP) held its annual election of board members and officers.  New board member Chuck Fall of Portland, OR was elected President, and Dan Hennen of Minneapolis was named Chairman of the Board while retaining his position as Treasurer.  John O'Malley of Maryland was elected Secretary.     

Other returning board members are JB Hockersmith of Atlanta; Matt Van Slyke of Chicago; and Bill Jacoby of Claverack, NY.  In addition to Chuck Fall, one other new board member was added:  Michael Zarzano of Sarasota, Florida.

Surveying the composition of the new board, Hennen remarked “Our Board of Directors is a diverse group of leaders within the 9/11 Truth Community.  Not only will they be mentors to our volunteers, but also ambassadors of the Truth Movement." 

Hennen used the word "ambassador" advisedly; In the past year, TAP differentiated itself from other 9/11 Truth organizations, while maintaining its emphasis on the historical importance of 9/11.  Some board members who favored continued emphasis on the events that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 stepped down, leaving a board committed to a more contemporary focus on the consequences of those events in shaping the major institutions of our nation and world:  the media, governments, intelligence agencies operating on and beyond the margins of public awareness, universities and research institutions, and popular culture. 

Incoming President Chuck Fall commented, "I am looking forward to working with the TAP Board and members of the media/marketing team to help TAP grow as an organization. I am not sure what it will take to do this, but we are going to be doing basic stuff, putting out original media and highlighting that of others to make our point that “truth demands action” and that “we the people” need to do the heavy lifting of getting a truth message our into the public eye."

While some in the 9/11 Truth Movement do not see connections between 9/11 and aspects of the current Covid phenomenon and election allegations previously championed by Democrats, TAP is now the first 9/11 "origin" organization to focus on commonalities among these "paradigm-shifting events."  Bill Jacoby and Matt Van Slyke became "9/11 aware" as volunteers for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.  J. B. Hockersmith likewise volunteered for AE911Truth, and Mike Zarzano saw early on the implausibility of the official narrative.  Each has expressed his activism in unique ways, and most have reached out to other movements where the hand of domestic psychological warfare and media infiltration by government is discernable.

A glance at the current Board members makes clear their "Truth Movement" pedigree.  John O'Malley and Dan Hennen were active in local 9/11 Truth organizations that remain active 15 to 20 years later. Van Slyke has developed detailed blueprints and exhibits for a "Truth Booth" that is being marketed to local groups at cost.  Hockersmith has used his video production background to produce content for the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, a group of which Jacoby was a founding board member.

However, the current board is united in seeking to spread awareness of how the true story of 9/11 has been obscured, and accountability avoided, by methods similar to those being used today to silence and discredit people who question the Official Narrative of Covid-19.  These include doctors who successfully used repositioned drugs to treat Covid 19; researchers looking into the possibility--or likelihood-- that Covid-19 was a byproduct of gain-of-function bioweapons research; and dissidents who believe that such research, funded by the Defense Department and NIH, was partly carried out in such unlikely places as Wuhan and Ukraine, for both weapons development and biodefense.  

As Hennen indicated, the board's diversity, almost equally divided between people who grew up identifying with the Left and the Right, rather than being an obstacle, is very helpful as the organization seeks to help America see beyond the divide-and-conquer strategy that defines American politics and media.  In 2022, with the Left outraged by efforts to prove electoral fraud in the November 2020 elections, TAP Board members recall the videos of Democratic Congressional testimony criticizing previous elections and especially electronic voting machines in earlier elections, and find remarkable similarities to today’s allegations.  

Do our intelligence agencies interfere in domestic politics, even tipping the scales, sometimes to the Left, sometimes to the Right?  If so, what determines whether they oppose a Gore or Kerry one year, or a Trump a few years later?  How should we think about the investments of DoD's In-Q-Tel venture capital firm in many of Silicon Valley's most successful and culture-pervasive companies?  Or the decades of investments by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in mind control?  Do such questions help explain how America could be drawn into endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, often using Al Qaida veterans as surrogates?  Into developing and possibly deploying bioweapons against nations not at war with us?  Do they help us understand how public support for such policies is maintained even as they remain secret?

The new TAP Board is determined to build a grassroots constituency for public scrutiny of the underpinnings of secret warfare, domestic surveillance and mind control, and related phenomena as first showcased in 9/11; and, thanks to a successful cover-up, quite possibly at work today to destroy the American freedom and civil liberties.

{gallery}Poll results{/gallery}

Article by Julia Piccici

In early September of 2021, a poll of adults in the United States revealed that 48% of people were still unaware that a third World Trade Center tower, WTC7, collapsed in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. 

Among the 52% of American adults who do know about the collapse of Building 7, a steel-framed skyscraper that stood 47-stories tall at the World Trade Center complex since 1987, 51% are not convinced of the official explanation of its collapse, i.e. that normal office fires caused its structure to fail. The official explanation, produced in a 2008 report by NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, has been contested by a study conducted at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which concludes that WTC7 could only have been brought down by controlled demolition. The final UAF report was released in March 2020.Additionally, the poll reveals that 37% percent of American adults either disbelieve or have doubts about the destruction of the Twin Towers being due to fires caused by the impact of airliners and jet fuel. Controlled demolition, while ignored by NIST - which self-admittedly "did not look for explosives" - has been widely offered as the probable cause of the buildings' collapses by scientists worldwide. It is critical to note that independently processed samples of Ground Zero dust were found to contain unreacted incendiary residues, as published in 2009 in the Open Chemical Physics Journal by Niels Harrit, PhD and colleagues, further supporting the theory of controlled demolition. The theory is also publicly endorsed by more than 3,400 professionals from the organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who unanimously call for a new investigation into the possible use of explosives as the actual cause of the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings.

More than one-third (35%) of Americans believe the U.S. government either knew the 9/11 attacks were coming and let them happen (22%), or that components of the U.S. government helped plan the attack (13%). These margins have increased since a 2007 Zogby poll which found that 31% of people aligned with one of these two theories.Despite 70% of respondents reporting that they were unaware of current legal initiatives to reinvestigate the events of 9/11, 58% expressed support for a new investigation into 9/11, such as a Grand Jury.Poll results represent a +3% margin of error at the 95% confidence level. Over the weekend of September 4-6th, 2021, Pulse Opinion Research, LLC, conducted an automated telephone survey of 1,156 randomly selected adults living in the United States of America. The 9/11 Truth Action Project, a non-profit organization, commissioned the poll for research and marketing purposes.

In April 2018, 50-plus civilians died in an alleged chemical weapon attack in Douma, Syria—a city located six miles northeast of Damascus. The US, UK, and France (the West) bombed in retaliation seven days later, alleging the Syrian government had carried out the attack. The West alleged that the Syrian air force had dropped two gas cylinders and, at the time, alleged that they likely contained Sarin nerve agent.

A group called the White Helmets—ostensibly a volunteer organization that provides medical evacuation and urban search & rescue in response to bombings-- was a deceptive operation that became a key propaganda weapon in the dirty war on Damascus.   Max Blumenthal reported in 2018 that,

“since the White Helmets were founded in Turkey by a former British MI5 officer named James Le Mesurier, the group has received at least $55 million from the British Foreign Office, $23 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives — the State Department’s de facto regime change arm — and untold millions from the Kingdom of Qatar, which has also backed an assortment of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda. 

“White Helmets are routinely relied upon by the governments that fund them as a primary source on alleged chemical attacks, including the most recent incident in Douma. When Defense Secretary James Mattis cited ‘social media’ in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, he was referring to video shot by members of the White Helmets.”

Since the Douma incident, a crude smear campaign against researchers, journalists, academics, and even OPCW (Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) scientists has sought to discredit anyone asking questions as "conspiracy theorists," "war-crime deniers," or "Russian/Syrian agents."

Despite these campaigns to bury the truth about Douma, whistleblowers, facts, and detailed documentation continue to enter the public domain. Many now state that there are "major" concerns regarding the official narrative.

To bolster the official position, as recently as early June 2021, OPCW chief, Director-General H. E. Mr. Fernando Arias, went before the United Nations in an attempt to squash the criticism. He claimed the Scientific Advisory Board for his organization did not have the authority to examine the official Douma findings.  He even made the dubious claim that even he, himself, lacked the power to question the Fact-Finding Mission's official findings.

Aaron Mate, in an article [1] examines the founding documents of the OPCW, and shows that both the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and the Director-General very definitely do have the authority to question fact-finding missions.[1] Dr. Piers Robinson, the convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, suggests Arias's interpretation in this instance means he has no confidence the official findings can stand up to the scrutiny of the SAB.

Sanctions for Punishing Syria's Public

The US imposed draconian sanctions against Syria in June 2020, the “Caesar Civilian Protection Act,” named after the alleged whistleblower discussed in Part One of this article—with the hidden purpose to prevent Syria's reconstruction works. After ten years of the conflict, many buildings, including social infrastructure, like hospitals, or schools, or housing, are completely destroyed, and people have no place in which to live. Many people in Syria live in poverty. These sanctions are preventing Syria’s financial system from resuming normal functioning, causing the population to become very dependent on humanitarian aid delivery.  Alena Douhan, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures, stated to the Grayzone that organizations that deliver humanitarian aid to Syria must undergo a costly, complicated process to obtain a license from the sanctioning country.  Douhan explained in a 2020 report some of the ways these sanctions restricted Syrian medical professionals’ ability to provide care during the COVID-19 pandemic.  For example, they could not import technology needed for CT scanners and ventilators; they could not use Zoom and other online platforms for telemedicine, research, etc.; and they had difficulties buying various needed medicines and medical devices.

Fighting Forces Shrouded in Trickery

Congress has not authorized fighting forces from the U.S.  Nor have Western counterparts. Yet, warriors are very much on the scene.  

Defectors from the Syrian military formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an armed opposition organization, in 2011.  The FSA is an umbrella group comprising small, uncoordinated militias operating at local levels.  The FSA’s headquarters was originally based in Turkey but moved to Idlib province in northern Syria in 2012.  Fighters from various countries have reportedly been active fighting with the FSA.[2]

In August 2011, Obama called for Bashar al-Assad to resign.[3]  Then, in August 2012, Obama stated, “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people. We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”[4]   This statement incentivized the insurgents—who wanted assistance in the form of U.S. military intervention against Assad—to carry out such an attack. As stated by a former US ambassador to the Middle East, “‘The 'red line' was an open invitation to a false-flag operation.’”[5] 

A CIA-run classified weapons supply and training program, code named Timber Sycamore, began funding, arming and training rebels fighting against President al-Assad in 2013.  Researcher Max Blumenthal stated that weapons were flowing to Syria from Libya even before the official start of Timber Sycamore but believes the September 2012 Benghazi consulate attack likely ended that.[6]  Obama insisted publicly in May 2012 that the U.S. was neither supplying nor funding weapons for the FSA. 

In May 2013, Senator John McCain traveled to Syria in an effort to generate American support for the “moderate rebels”. He met and posed for a photograph with members the Northern Storm Brigade, a faction of the FSA responsible for kidnapping and murdering several Shi’ite pilgrims in 2012.  In 2013 this group sold American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff to ISIS, who beheaded him in 2014 at age 31.[7]  Sotloff had been a talented reporter who covered the post-Gaddafi unraveling of Libya, lived in Benghazi and reported on the 2012 consulate attack for Time magazine, CNN and others.[8]  Scott Horton, author of two books about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, provides evidence in this video that none of the factions of the FSA are “moderate.” 

On 13 June 2013, the United States government announced its conclusion that the Assad government had used limited amounts of chemical weapons on multiple occasions against rebel forces, killing 100 to 150 people.[9]  Then on August 21, 2013, two alleged chemical weapons attacks occurred 10 miles apart Damascus suburb of Ghouta.  An Obama Administration press release stated, “We assess with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack against opposition elements in the Damascus suburbs on August 21.”[10]  Obama stated, “This attack is an assault on human dignity.  It also presents a serious danger to our national security.”[11]  British lawmakers rejected PM David Cameron’s proposal to participate in U.S.-led military strikes against Syria on August 29, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also told Obama her country would not participate. Obama’s attempt to secure Congressional approval for the strikes was unsuccessful.  But in classified parts of defense appropriations legislation, Congress secretly approved funding for U.S. weapons deliveries to the Syrian rebels for fiscal year 2014.[12]

In October 2014 Congress authorized the $500 million plan, first announced by Obama in June, to train and arm Syrian rebels to confront Islamic State militants—5400 rebels per year for the next three years, according to the Pentagon.[13]  But Obama told the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman in August 2014 that the notion that arming the secular rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy.  This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”[14]  And one year after Congress authorized its funding, the Obama administration acknowledged —amidst revelations that the program had only produced four or five graduates fighting in Syria-- the training program’s failure and announced its plan to instead use the funds to provide weapons and ammunition to existing groups.[15]

Fast forward to 2021:  An open-source study published in June concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the August 2013 Ghouta sarin chemical attack -- not the Syrian government, as the White House, U.S. intelligence, and other Western sources publicly alleged.  Read a summary of the study here.

The makeup of forces changed throughout the ten years of war against Assad's government forces, involving the Nusra Front-- al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. Funding for military equipment to FSA came from the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar—but frequently came into the possession of the al-Qaeda branch in Syria. It was CIA funding making its way to these fighters that led Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to introduce the "Stop Funding Terrorists" bill to Congress in 2017, after her 7-day fact-finding trip to the region with former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. 

On April 7, 2017, the United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Mediterranean into Syria in response to an alleged April 4 chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on Khan Shaykhun, a town in Idlib province.  But in July 2017, Trump reportedly decided to halt the CIA’s support program for Syrian moderate opposition—a move viewed by many as a concession to Russia.

In April of 2018, with John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, Trump launched strikes on Syria in conjunction with France and the United Kingdom.  These strikes occurred in response to another alleged chemical attack—the aforementioned April 7 Douma event.  Many analysts and diplomats questioned the veracity of the U.S.’s claims about this incident.  The U.S. and its allies attacked Syria before international observers from the OPCW had even arrived in Syria to investigate.  One of the targets their strikes destroyed was the Barzeh Scientific Research Center in Damascus, which had passed OPCW inspection several times.  The Damascus site in fact contained a space allocated for the OPCW to collect and package samples taken from sites they were inspecting.

Russia is a natural ally of Syria, because of the warm-water naval base Tartus, along Syria's Mediterranean coast. The Soviets have operated the port, then Russia, for 40 years when military threats against Syria escalated in 2011 and sent Russia’s only aircraft carrier in 2016 to fly sorties against the enemies of Assad.

Reports suggest that at the height of the conflict in 2017, some 40% of the overall number of outsiders joining the war were militants from former Soviet areas.

Israel, on the other hand, is a natural adversary. As it is, the Israeli-Syrian interface along the Golan Border has been a source of irritation. An increase in the number of flareups built each year, 2012, 2013, and continuing to this day. Israelis also provided medical treatment to insurgents close to the Golan Heights-Syrian border in Israeli hospitals and then sent them back into battle against government-controlled areas. Additionally, there is an Israeli-backed opposition faction in rebel-held southern Syria.

It is an open secret that the Israelis have been providing armed air support to the FSA.

Conclusion

The Defense Secretary’s memo, which General Wesley Clark heard about from a Pentagon official on or about September 20, 2001, revealed plans to “take out” seven countries in the next five years.  Clark stated that according to the memo, Syria would be second--next after Iraq--and Libya would be fourth, right after Lebanon.  If there had been any truth to this prediction when Clark made it, the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi on October 20, 2011, changed the planned sequence of regime change projects.  Many theories as to why the U.S. prioritized removing Gaddafi proliferate.  One alleged link between the two countries seems worth remembering.

The September 11-12, 2012, Benghazi, Libya consulate attack killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens and two former Navy SEALs.  Beginning at 10:30pm the night of the attack Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the attack on a spontaneous uprising in response to “inflammatory material on the internet”.  Then, after the White House spent $70,000 on videos to apologize for the inflammatory film, admitted 10 days after the attack what emails prove she had known for over a week:  that this was a coordinated terrorist attack.

In a now obscure August 1, 2013, blog post, CNN reported,

“Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.

CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings.

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career….

‘Agency employees typically are polygraphed every three to four years. Never more than that,’ said former CIA operative and CNN analyst Robert Baer….

Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.

A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.

While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency….

Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.[16]

Perhaps we should view the Syria killing of journalist Steven Sotloff –who spent months in Benghazi after the 2012 attack--in a new light, given these alleged unprecedented efforts by the CIA to suppress information about the Benghazi attack.  Sotloff’s family blamed the Obama administration for his death and accused it of making inaccurate statements—such as the claim that the administration had consistently and regularly informed the family as to Steven’s whereabouts after his abduction.  Sotloff was kidnapped August 4, 2013, and brutally murdered the following year.

[1] https://thegrayzone.com/2021/07/02/pressed-for-answers-on-syria-cover-up-opcw-chief-offers-new-lies-and-excuses/

[2] https://www.start.umd.edu/baad/narratives/free-syrian-army

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/assad-must-go-obama-says/2011/08/18/gIQAelheOJ_story.html

[4] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/08/20/remarks-president-white-house-press-corps

[5] Quoted in:  Glass, Charles.  “Tell Me How This Ends,” Harper's Magazine, New York: Vol. 338, Iss. 2025, (Feb 2019): pp. 51-61.

[6] https://moderaterebels.com/transcript-cia-syria-al-qaeda/

[7] https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-administration-and-sotloff-family-battle-over-blame-for-journalists-kidnapping

[8] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/steven-sotloff-isis-war-journalist-syria-libia/

[9] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324049504578545772906542466

[10] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/30/government-assessment-syrian-government-s-use-chemical-weapons-august-21

[11] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/31/statement-president-syria

[12] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-syria-rebels-idUSBREA0Q1S320140127

[13] Hennigan, W. J., & McDonnell, P. J. (2015, May 04). “Friction grows over Syria force; $500-million program to train fighters to battle Islamic State appears stalled.” Los Angeles Times.

[14] Quoted in:  Friedman, Thomas L. "Obama on the World." New York Times (1923-Current file), Aug 09 2014, p. 1. ProQuest. Web. 2 Aug. 2021.

[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/world/middleeast/pentagon-program-islamic-state-syria.html

[16] https://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/01/exclusive-dozens-of-cia-operatives-on-the-ground-during-benghazi-attack/

If 9/11 Truth is still alive today it is due, in part, to the dedication and commitment of long-time advocates who feel compelled to reach out, educate, volunteer, raise awareness and fight for 9/11 Truth at the grassroots level. They are scattered across the country, but connected in spirit, determination and their quest for justice and accountability. Some of them will be marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in their own cities, while others will be meeting up in New York in the days leading up to the 11th. Meet some of the advocates in this 911TAP clip.

Catherine Watters is a New York City-based activist on 9/11 truth and other issues.  Her background is in psychology.  She has also been a personal trainer and a yoga instructor.

She recently had her longstanding channel eliminated by YouTube.  She now creates videos on Odysee and other platforms, including the One Great Work Network.  Catherine interviews other activists--and also creates videos in which she plays excerpts of others’ videos interspersed with her own commentary.   Much of her recent work deals with issues surrounding COVID-19.  I recently talked to Catherine about her work and 9/11.  Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

KB:     You speak candidly about child abuse in your videos, and you talk about how the family is a microcosm for society.  How does your background in psychology inform your work?

CW:    People don't study psych[ology] and health like I have, and so they don't understand it…It just blows my mind how people learn to just fund their own abuse, they literally just fund the abuser. They do it in the family system….  Every video I try to relate it to family. There’s just not enough focus on the family which can be the most harmful, abusive place on earth for millions….

Parenting has been so diluted. Parents have literally failed and not fought for their children.  The corporations are the only things that's been growing over the decades.  I mean the working class, where do people get over the decades? You know, do they ever get to reach any self-actualization?  The workplace and the whole country becomes just larger and larger versions of the f---ing abusive family system….

I worked for EMS with the Fire Department of New York City in the 90’s, from like 93 [or] 94 to 2000.  The reason why I couldn't stay, and the reason why I knew that there was something severely wrong with the system was like you never saw any changes. Like you could work at EMS FDNY; [or] you could be a cop you know, for five decades, and you will never ever see any change in society.  You will never see society improve, you will never see society getting fitter.  You will never see … lives changing.  You will never see people getting lifted up.  And I couldn't bear the thought of having a job and getting paid, you know to basically just keep the system going in a vicious cycle.  You know because I really wanted to be something and I really wanted to help other people actually be something, and I didn't want to just have a job for a paycheck and just keep everything going in a g-ddamn circle…

I had an overwhelming feeling that something big was going to happen, while I was working for FDNY EMS.  It was just a complete like oh my God, I have to get out of this job:  Something big is going to happen… all I know is this was like an overwhelming feeling that just told me to go, so I left.

KB:     Who or what inspired you to become a 9/11 truth activist? How did that start?

CW:    [9/11 activists] were basically just focusing on the math, focusing on physics. You can't be wrong when you focus on those things…like math isn't wrong, physics isn't wrong… And the people that don't want the truth are always trying to bury and hide and spin…. When I learned …that both towers were just completely gone, you know--not even half still standing you know.  Like from maybe where the planes hit, up, the towers [should have been] gone.  So when I heard that both of the towers were just completely gone like down to the ground, the base, the foundation, I was like, why is that?  That doesn’t make any sense.

KB:     Why do you think YouTube took down your channel at this juncture?

CW:    Because they're definitely rolling out a depopulation program with this vaccine … I had a couple of YouTube strikes because I posted really short videos of someone that I know who was down there at the Capitol [on January 6, 2021].  They weren't one of the first people… they didn't break into the Capitol.  They went in like much later and took video being inside the Capitol, and so I posted a few minute-long videos of their footage on my YouTube channel…Why does that give you a strike? I mean again, you're just showing the truth.  You're just showing what happened….

It normally takes them a while to take this stuff down, but this time, when I posted a six-minute video with Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Judy Mikovits, the Attorney Rocco Galati and, primarily, it was Dr. David Martin who was speaking.  The bulk of the video was Dr. David Martin talking about the so-called vaccine and just calling it what it was---and I kind of knew I was going to get a strike again. I thought maybe they would just take the video down; they took my whole channel down... I should have like not put the word ‘vaccine’ in the title, and maybe they wouldn't have taken it down. Like when Ben Swann puts videos up with the word ‘vaccine’ in it, he spells vaccine with the number ‘1’ instead of an ‘i’ and a ‘3’ instead of an ‘e,’ you know. I should have done that.  I just put exactly what Dr. David Martin said, and he called the vaccine ‘a chemical machine device designed to turn yourselves into pathogen creators.’  Those were his exact words, and that's the title that I put in my video.  And literally they immediately took down my channel.  Goodbye 10 years’ worth of work….

COVID is just--it's like a worse 9/11.

DISCLAIMER:

Views of this activist are not necessarily those of

the majority within Truth Action Project.

***

Find Catherine Watters’s work HERE.

AND

https://onegreatworknetwork.com/catherine-watters

Syria was one of the seven countries General Wesley Clark identified in 2001 as being targeted for taking out within the next five years immediately after September 11, 2001. Clark stated that Pentagon insiders told him the targeting would occur in the following order:  Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.  In practice, it became apparent that the UK and France shared this goal, joining the US as an informal partnership known as the West.  Although the timeline has extended beyond the five years Clark predicted, there is evidence of an ongoing regime-change agenda.

The US has a pattern of looking to the few countries with independent governments as regime-change opportunities. In the US government's eyes, the Syrian northeast--the area between Turkey and Iraq, not far from Iran to the East--is ripe for a new US base. It is rich in oil and gas, and the wheat and cotton fields serving the Syrian population make it even more tempting.

Syria's leader, Basher al-Assad, came to politics unexpectedly. His elder brother, Basset, who had been heir apparent, died suddenly in a car crash (1994). Thus, Basher, a practicing medical doctor before his brother's death, dropped that profession to become the new heir apparent until his father, Hafez al-Assad, the prior President, died in 2000. 

The Arab Spring had already begun raging in neighboring Middle East countries, when in March 2011, it ignited in Syria as well. It looked like a pattern was established as heads of state either fell or were in danger of falling from power. 

The West conducted a highly deceptive and dirty war. The major components were:

1. Brutal dictator story
2. Douma false-flag attack and coverup
3. Sanctions for punishing Syria's public
4. Fighting forces shrouded in trickery

In March 2021, on the 10th anniversary of Syria's Arab Spring, the CBS 60 Minutes television program trumpeted the Brutal Dictator Assad story.  During the broadcast, the guest, Stephen Rapp—former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the US State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice—displayed gruesome photographs showing tortured corpses.  He attributed the atrocities to Assad's army.  Rapp credited a man named Caesar with recovering the photos. Rapp said, "Assad has gassed the innocent, bombed hospital and schools, and made thousands disappear….We've got better evidence-- against Assad and his clique-- than we had against Milosevic in Yugoslavia, or in any of the war crimes tribunals in which I've involved. To some extent, better than we had against the Nazis at Nuremberg because the Nazis didn't take individual pictures of each of their victims with identifying information on them."

“Caesar” is a codename for a supposed Syrian military whistleblower.  But Max Blumenthal reports that “investigators have determined that at least half of the photographs in the ‘Caesar’ trove depict the bodies of government soldiers killed by the armed opposition. This highly inconvenient fact, which undermines the entire narrative of Caesar’s promoters and exposes them as cynical liars, has been ignored across the board by mainstream US media, Congress, and of course, by the network of operatives that managed “Caesar.” (Grayzone, 6/25/2020)

Anyone aware of the 9/11 travesty and coverup should view Rapp’s claims as another attempt at victory through smoke and mirrors. If Assad's forces were torturing civilians, he would hardly have photographed the victims and displayed them so carelessly that the photos would incriminate the regime. Western-supported forces attacking Syria killed an estimated 100,000. Those attacking Syria likely photographed the mangled corpses in an attempt to pin the slaughter on Assad.  Researchers have proved that a large proportion of the photographs show the opposite of what Rapp and others alleged.   Blumenthal also notes that in 2014, Rapp helped the Holocaust Memorial Museum establish “an exhibition likening the Syrian war to the Jewish genocide of World War Two Europe. The exhibit contained a special section on the Caesar file, presenting it as evidence of industrial mass murder without a scintilla of critical context or evidence.”

In March 2011, a few months before the notoriety struck Syrian President Basher al-Assad, Vogue magazine featured the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad in an article titled "A Rose in the Desert."  The article praised Asma al-Assad as “glamorous, young, and very chic--the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies." Praise of this kind does not go to the wife of a President if he is considered a brute.  Max Fisher notes that the article—which also called Syria the “safest country in the Middle East,”--and all references to it were “removed from Vogue’s website without explanation.”

Concluding Remarks

The devastating succession of calamities in Syria since 2011 are part of the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It is another example of the event's consequences growing far more extensive and destructive than 9/11 itself.

In the forthcoming sequel to this article, we will explore other aspects of this deceptive and dirty war in Syria--including the ongoing effects of brutal U.S. sanctions imposed on the Syrian people in June 2020.

Biography

Dwain Deets is Vice President of the Truth Action Project.  He is also a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel convened by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth.  The purpose of the 9/11 Consensus Panel is “to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11.”  More information about the Consensus Panel is available at:  http://www.consensus911.org

In news from Guantánamo, the US military announced yesterday that it had shut Camp 7, the secretive prison block where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other so-called “high-value detainees” have been held since their arrival at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and had moved the prisoners to Camp 5.

Modeled on a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, Camp 5, which cost $17.5 million, opened in 2004, and its solid-walled, isolated cells were used to hold prisoners regarded as non-compliant. As the prison’s population shrank, however, it was closed — in September 2016 — and its remaining prisoners transferred to Camp 6, which opened in 2006, and includes a communal area.

Camp 7, meanwhile, which cost $17 million, was also built in 2004. Two storeys tall, it was modeled on a maximum-security prison in Bunker Hill, Indiana, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the New York Times yesterday, had “a modest detainee health clinic and a psychiatric ward with a padded cell, but none of the hospice or end-of-life care capacity once envisioned by Pentagon planners.”

Rosenberg added that it was “designed to keep prisoners confined to their cells except when guards move[d] an individual to showers, outdoor cages that serve[d] as recreation yards or another cell where a single captive [could] sit in a recliner, one ankle shackled to a bolt on the floor, and watch television.”

As she also explained, “By segregating the prisoners, under the watch of a special guard unit called Task Force Platinum, the intelligence agencies could strictly monitor and control their communications and prevent them from divulging what had happened to them. Defense lawyers who were eventually granted access to the men were bound by security clearances to keep their conversations classified, including in court filings that accused government agents of state-sponsored torture.”

She also explained that “Camp 7 was long one of Guantánamo’s most clandestine sites. The Pentagon refused to disclose its cost, which contractor built it and when. Reporters were not permitted to see it, lawyers were required to obtain a court order to visit and its location was considered classified, although sources pointed to it on a satellite map of the base.”

Conditions at Camp 7 were robustly criticized in a letter in February 2012, to William K. Lietzau, the senior official responsible for detainee policy at the Pentagon, which was written by lawyers for six of the “high-value detainees” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ammar al-Baluchi, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Walid bin Attash (all accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks), and Abu Faraj al-Libi, seized in Pakistan in May 2005, who has not been charged with a crime.

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage noted that the letter contended that “conditions at Camp 7 fall short of the minimum guarantees of humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions”, adding that the lawyers “asked for the letter to be treated as a report of a possible ‘violation of the law of war,’” which would require its allegation to be investigated.

Despite this, Camp 7 continued to be used for the “high-value detainees,” and it was not until Donald Trump’s presidency that a “plan to consolidate the prisoners was devised,’ because of Camp 7’s continuing structural failures. As Rosenberg described it, “Raw sewage sloshed through the tiers, the power sometimes went out and some cell doors would not close at the site. The situation worsened over the summer amid the coronavirus pandemic because it was difficult to bring in contractors and spare parts.”

The military described the move from Camp 7 to Camp 5 as, in Rosenberg’s words, “a consolidation of detention operations that could cut costs and reduce the troop presence” at Guantánamo, and Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, a spokesman for US Southern Command, which oversees the prison, called it a “fiscally responsible decision” whose planning “involved all relevant organizations to include the intelligence community.”

Even James Connell, one of the defense lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, who is normally — and completely understandably — critical of the conditions in which his client is held, said that the move “sounds like a solution to the crumbling Camp 7.”

Rosenberg proceeded to explain that “Camp 7 functioned under a 2006 memorandum of agreement between Donald H. Rumsfeld and Michael V. Hayden, the defense secretary and the CIA director at the time,” although she added that it “was not immediately known on Sunday whether a new agreement was reached or the old one was dissolved.”

What is also not known is what conditions the “high-value detainees” will be held in in Camp 5. The former “black site” prisoners were kept in isolation in their early years in Camp 7. As Rosenberg explained, “Each was allowed to speak with only one other prisoner through a tarp during recreation time, in conversations that were recorded for intelligence purposes.”

She added that their lawyers “described the conditions as mind-numbing until recent years, when the commanders permitted the prisoners to eat and pray together under strict surveillance,” and also allowed them access to “a cell where they could prepare food.”

As Rosenberg also explained, “It is unknown whether the military will emulate that communal lifestyle in the prisoners’ new surroundings,” but it is fundamentally necessary for them to do so, because the men moved to Camp 5 are either caught up in seemingly interminable pre-trial hearings in their military commission trials (because of the CIA’s obsession with trying to keep their torture secret), or are held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners.”

And while it is obviously appropriate for Camp 7 to have been closed, and for the men to have been moved, it does nothing to address the fundamental injustice of either prosecuting them in a broken trial system that is incapable of delivering justice,  as is the case with ten of them (the 9/11 five, mentioned above, plus Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and Hambali and two alleged accomplices), or of continuing to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, as is the case with six others (the stateless Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, for whom the torture program was developed, in the mistaken belief that he was a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abu Faraj al-Libi, mentioned above, as well as a Somalian, a Kenyan and two Afghans).

One other man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is imprisoned alone after he was given a life sentence after a military commission trial in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defence, while another, Majid Khan, agreed to a plea deal in 2012, but is still waiting for confirmation of when, as a result, his imprisonment will come to an end.

The 22 other prisoners, held in Camp 6, are “low-value detainees.” Six of them have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held, while the 16 others are also “forever prisoners,” held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Moving the “high-value detainees” solves the immediate problem of the broken prison block in which they were living, but it does nothing to solve the bigger problem of the broken prison itself. In the review of the prison’s future that Biden administration officials have promised, with the suggestion that the prison’s closure is Biden’s aim, the six men cleared for release need to be freed, and the administration needs to accept that it cannot continue holding indefinitely men it has no intention of putting on trial, and must charge or release the 22 “forever prisoners,” including the six who are also so-called “high-value detainees.”

Originally publshed on 4-5-21 HERE.

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

Higdon suspected that it was the content critical of big tech monopolies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that was the reason why the channel was deleted. “Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos; this seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video,” he said.

“This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users”

The organizers were careful to avoid copyright infringement, with the large majority of their videos in lecture format, essentially a recorded Zoom call. Speakers included some of the best-known names in media studies, with the event sponsored by institutions like Stanford University and UCLA. “This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users: it was an academic conference,” Huff said.

These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It’s mind numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large…This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism.”

Higdon too, suspected YouTube’s action was politicized: “This is the same year we saw big tech trying to influence Prop 22 here in California, so I am not too surprised that they would be aggressive with folks like us who are critical of media corporations.”

Organizers say they attempted to contact YouTube but did not receive a reply.

MintPress spoke to representatives from Google, YouTube’s parent company, who strenuously denied that they would ever remove content from their platforms purely because it was critical of the company, noting that there is a wealth of videos on the website that challenge or attack them.After looking into the matter, Google said they could find only one video and reinstated it (although the video does not appear on the conference’s channel). As for the hours of other footage, that remains an enigma to them, with no record of its existence. Thus, it appears that there will be no closure or a definitive answer to this mystery.

Algorithms take aim

Media literacy, big tech power, and censorship are hot topics right now. In the wake of the dramatic storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month, a host of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, took actions against Donald Trump, limiting his and his supporters’ ability to communicate online. Perhaps most notably, however, Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services launched a coordinated assault on “free speech app” Parler, a service popular with the far-right for its lax laws on racism. Together, the three effectively took the service offline around the world.

More recently, the Wall Street Bets subreddit, responsible for intentionally sinking a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, has endured retaliation, its communications channels cut by messaging app Discord, amid calls to immediately criminalize their behavior.

While the pros and cons of such decisions can, and have been, debated, the bigger question of should privately-owned companies be allowed to have the power to regulate who can and cannot speak online, has largely been downplayed.

“On the one hand I understand they have the right to deplatform people,” Huff told MintPress. “On a broader level though, I don’t think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment.”

Higdon was equally worried about the power amassed by the tech giants. “By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets,” he said, predicting that,

These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship…the outcome of this is going to be on them.”

If history is any judge, he will be proven correct. In the wake of the 2016 election and the allegations that Russian disinformation swung the result in Trump’s favor, social media companies changed their algorithms to help halt the spread of fake news. The main result, however, was a throttling of traffic to high-quality alternative news sites and the promotion of corporate media like CNN and Fox News. Overnight, Consortium News’ Google traffic fell by 47%, Common Dreams’ by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%. MintPress suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.

Likewise, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the deliberate choking of alternative media, admitting that his company deranked Mother Jones because of its left-wing persuasion (despite Facebook’s assurances that it was doing no such thing). Other, more radical outlets have suffered even greater reductions in traffic.

Anti-social media

Whatever decisions big tech companies make reverberate throughout society. 35, 24, and 17% of Americans get their news from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, respectively, with similar numbers worldwide. This enormous user base makes them by far the greatest and most influential news platforms on the planet, with the ability to highlight stories, bury others, and even swing elections. Huff was extremely worried about the power of these new media monopolies.

“We can’t get away from the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the whole corporate Alphabet soup of this big tech dystopia have gobbled up the public sphere. This is where people can go to congregate and share their information and it is also where invisible forces decide which voices get heard and which do not. Let’s also not forget that all of this tech was initially funded with taxpayer money.”

Worse still, although we now live in an online world, the public is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate its waters, displaying a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of how they can be manipulated.

A 2016 study from Stanford University found that two-thirds of college-aged “digital natives” — people who grew up using the Internet — mistook native advertising for a genuine news story, even with the words “sponsored content” displayed prominently. “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study concluded, leading to calls for more critical media literacy education in schools. “Since we are not teaching people how to use these technologies, or how these technologies use them, they are more susceptible to propaganda and to disinformation. And ironically our conference was designed to combat exactly that problem,” Huff added.

Perhaps most worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

“These companies, we know thanks to Edward Snowden and others, have contracts with the Federal government. There is a revolving door between particularly the Democratic Party and big tech, and there are also various loans and government protections given to this industry. So this is not some independent set of entities making this decision.”

“If 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith were a real character today he’d be a fact checker at Facebook or a content curator at YouTube, relegating to the dustbins of history whatever programmers are told to or whatever keywords our conference triggered,” Huff added.

Big tech has repeatedly acted at the behest of the U.S. government to silence its international opponents, suspending the accounts of foreign leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei or deranking foreign media outlets like RT and TeleSUR.

It is in this light that the deletion of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas can be seen; not as a deliberate decision by an angry Google employee intent on revenge, but as the result of a powerful and Byzantine algorithm designed by Silicon Valley executives who are intimately intertwined with both the government and the corporate world. There is little oversight of their power or recourse to their decisions, given their enormous influence over public life today.

Huff was particularly sardonic about the whole affair:

There are layers of irony here that are certainly not lost on us. But I don’t know if the public at large is realizing the attack that is happening against the very people that are the intellectual bulwark against such institutional censorship. I’m not trying to make us out to be martyrs here, but my point is that I think it has a particular irony when the very public intellectuals who try to educate the public about how these systems work are silenced,” he said.

This article was originally published on 2/1/21 in the Mint Press News.