Oil Empire Dictionary

9/11 Truth Movement: a social justice movement dedicated to seeking the full truth about the 9/11 attacks. While there are many views on what constitutes "9/11 truth" among those who disbelieve the official conspiracy theory offered by the Bush administration, and the full story may never be precisely established, the common denominator for the entire "9/11 truth movement" is that 9/11 was not a surprise attack.
However, there are two 9/11 truth movements: those trying to document serious evidence, and a speculation movement often echoing claims on websites or movies that lack they read on line or in books without making effort to verify the claims. Most people promoting the "no plane at Pentagon" hoax(es) are sincere, but that sincerity does not make their arguments correct.
Due to the successes of the 9/11 Truth Movement in shifting public understanding, the volume of parallel efforts that pretend to be part of the "Truth Movement" yet promote red herrings increased substantially during the 2004 election season (see "COINTELPRO").
The 9/11 truth movement "peaked" in March 2004 at the International Inquiry into 9/11, held in San Francisco, California. Shortly after that, the flood of nonsense claims masquerading as investigations accelerated (most dramatically with release of the hoax film "911 In Plane Site") and the "movement" split into two factions -- those that think the hoaxes are worth including for their propaganda effects (some of them are psychologically effective) and those who are interested in fact checkingclaims. Perhaps the best way to determine whether a "9/11 truth" website, book, or movie is being careful or sloppy (or deceitful) is to see whether they understand that the "no plane hit Pentagon" claim was just a hoax to distract and discredit the skeptics. In a few cases, some authors who previously gave some credibility to those claims have since retracted their support for them. If there is any hope for the "9/11 truth" movement, it will involve refocusing on the evidence that has the strongest proof, and excluding the hoaxes and those who push the hoaxes.
Perhaps the best advice for bystanders is to ignore the conspiracy gatekeepers promoting "no planes" and focus instead on the best evidence.

Able Danger: a military intelligence operation that tracked Mohammed Atta and several other 9/11 conspirators in the years before the attack, revealed by (now muzzled) whistleblowers in late 2005.

al-Qaeda: literally "the Base" in Arabic, al-Qaeda is purported to be a global terror organization controlled by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden. al-Qaeda evolved out of the terror networks set up during the Soviet - Afghan war in the 1980s, with Pakistani assistance and Saudi and US money. Now, it is a way of describing the various Islamic extremist organizations, especially in the parts of the world that hold most of the remaining petroleum reserves.

biometrics: a form of identification that uses biologically unique information for each individual. Biometrics includes the use of fingerprints, DNA samples, retinal scans, and / or facial recognition systems. Biometric identification cards, passports, drivers licenses and other tracking systems are a core part of the global surveillance system that has been accelerated since 9/11.

binary thinking:

black boxes: the nickname used for the Flight Data Recorder and voice recorder that archive key information about flights, useful for reconstructing the last moments before a crash. The black boxes from all four planes on 9/11 were recovered (World Trade Center, Pentagon, Pennsylvania), but the data on these recorders has not been made public. The black box data would refute or confirm the suspicions that the four planes were electronically hijacked (with the hijackers playing the role of patsies).

blowback: an intelligence term for attacks by assets who were former allies but are now enemies. The "blowback" paradigm of 9/11 assumes that the attacks were revenge by Islamic fundamentalists previously supported by the CIA during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. While there is some truth to these claims, since there is an enormous amount of resentment in the Islamic world about US foreign policies (especially the Iraq wars and support of Israeli genocide of Palestinians), blowback is an inadequate explanation of the events of 9/11. The Bush administration allowed the attacks to happen (willfully disregarding warnings from numerous allied governments, among other evidence) and gave them technical support to ensure they would happen as desired. Al-Qaeda did not run the 9/11 war games, and is not a logical candidate for steering Flight 77 into the nearly empty part of the Pentagon.

Bojinka: the code name for the original 9/11 plot, which was uncovered and thwarted in 1995 when terrorists were caught in the Philippines planning to attack the Pope (he was about to visit that country). Bojinka included plans to attack numerous civilian airliners over the Pacific, and also considered attacking US government buildings (such as the CIA headquarters) with planes. Bojinka is one of many pieces of evidence that shows that the official claims after 9/11 that a plane-into-building attack had not been anticipated were lies.

Building 7: World Trade Center Building 7 was a 47 story steel skyscraper that fell straight down on 9/11 even though it was not hit by a plane. However, it was hit by the collapsing towers and several sources (such as the New York Fire Department) claim it was leaning before it fell down around 5:25 pm that day. It was essentially a military building, containing New York City's emergency command center (on the 23rd floor), the CIA's New York office and an office of the Securities and Exchange Commission that had numerous files of corporate scandals. Video footage of the WTC 7 collapse resembles a controlled demolition, although some of the facts of the case suggest it the collapse may have been caused by the impact of the towers falling upon it plus fires more significant than usually claimed by the 9/11 truth movement.

Bush Knew: a slogan widely adopted shortly after 9/11 to suggest that the Bush administration knew the attacks were coming and deliberately allowed them to occur. "Bush Knew" is a shorthand for the administration behind him, whether George W. Bush personally had foreknowledge or not is a distraction from the voluminous evidence that senior political and military officials knew that 9/11 was about to happen.

Carlyle Group: a private investment firm that had both the Bush and Bin Laden families as participants. Carlyle held a business meeting in downtown Washington on 9/11 that included representatives of the Bush and bin Laden clans. After the attacks, immense public scrutiny was focused on this very exclusive organization, and the bin Laden family quietly withdrew their investments. Carlyle is one of the nation's top military contractors, and they have profited from the "war on terror."

chain of custody: a term used to describe whether a piece of evidence can be sourced back to the scene of the crime. Blurry pictures posted on websites years after 9/11 that proclaim to have "new evidence" of various 9/11 theories lack any "chain of custody" that can verify their authenticity - a big problem in the era of digital photography.

chaff: efforts to distract from finding a target. Defenses against missiles use different forms of "chaff" to confuse targeting systems (flares to confuse heat seeking missiles, metal bits to provide false radar signatures, etc). Similarly, propaganda campaigns are often used to confuse social movements about scandals by misdirecting public awareness toward disinformation, distractions or other misrepresentations of key issues.

chatter: a term used by the Homeland Security Department to justify its terror alert scare system. "Chatter" refers to the intercepts of supposed terrorists planning the next attack. However, since any real terrorist would have long since figured out that their phones were monitored by US intelligence, it is difficult to understand how any increased "chatter" between these terrorists could translate into real evidence of an imminent attack. One example: in May 2004 (during the 9/11 Inquiry in Toronto, Canada), the US government claimed that preparations for the next 9/11 were 90% completed. If this is true, that would mean that the US government had informants in the group supposedly planning this crime -- why would they not immediately intercept the plotters and arrest them before they can complete the remaining 10% of the preparation? How would they know that the plans were exactly 90% complete without having an informant or very close monitoring of the group? This hyperbolic scaremongering is a primary reason why many commentators suspect the whole story is mostly, if not entirely, fabricated to keep the fear level as high as the "terror alert" level. While it is true that there are groups around the world that would like to wreak violence and havoc in the United States, it is also true that there are a lot of lies and exaggerations used to keep the public living in fear.

COINTELPRO: The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counter Intelligence Program, a 1960s era effort to disrupt social justice organizations, including the Civil Rights, American Indian, and Peace movements. COINTELPRO used surveillance, infiltrators, burglaries, false flag groups (that pretended to be activists), fake press releases used to discredit groups, snitch jacketing (falsely accusing activists of being agents provacateurs), threats, violence and worse (the assassination of Martin Luther King is perhaps the most famous example). The COINTELPRO operation was officially shut down after citizens burglarized an FBI office in Pennsylvania in 1971, liberating secret papers detailing the program. Nevertheless, COINTELPRO tactics continued against the anti-nuclear power groups in the 1970s, the anti-nuclear weapons and central america peace campaigns in the 1980s, the anti-globalization efforts in the 1990s and in the 21st century, continue at an accelerated effort against virtually every effort dedicated toward peace and a more sustainable paradigm.
It is difficult to imagine that similar efforts are not being used to disrupt the 9/11 truth movement, and that the increasingly loud claims of "no planes," "pod planes," "holograms instead of planes" and other flimsy, evidence-less so-called theories echoed in a growing flotilla of websites, self-published booklets and the "In Plane Site" film are all independent of government sponsorship.
Some of the bogus claims of Cheney's complicity are echoed by well-meaning people who merely have been convinced that extreme speculation (which lacks corroborating provable evidence or even logic) is worthy of promotion. This is probably part of the long standing goal of covert operatives to have outside people working for the "op" who are unaware that they are participating in the "op."
The FBI has been very effective over the decades of disrupting social change efforts, although they're not as skilled at solving actual crimes, especially those committed by elite interests.

compartmentalization:an organizational strategy analogous to the old parable of the blind men and an elephant -- each of the men is asked to describe what the elephant is, and all accurately describe their perception (trunk, tusk, legs, ears, tail, body), but none of them understand what the entire elephant is. Covert operations succeed by keeping most of the participants focused on their particular task, unaware of the full situation. Compartmentalization means that only key people in key places need to know what their role in a covert operation is -- others nearby might not be aware of those ensuring the success of the operation. This practice refutes the claim that too many people would have had to know about 9/11 for a conspiracy to allow it to have been possible.

"One of the most important characteristics of a covert operation, in addition to the fact that it must be secret, is that it be very small. There is no such thing as a successful big clandestine operation. The bigger the operation, the less chance there is that it can be secret."
- Col. Fletcher Prouty, "The Secret Team" www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html

Complete 9/11 Timeline: a database compiled by Paul Thompson and the Center for Cooperative Research that contains over 1,000 mass media articles that show how 9/11 was not a surprise attack. The Timeline was turned into a book that is the best reference guide for researching 9/11 - "The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute."

concentration camps: This term is most infamously associated with Nazi Germany, yet concentration camp is not necessarily synonymous with mass murder of enemies of the state -- it refers to any systematic form of detention without trial. The most famous US concentration camp is the Guantanamo Bay facility in the US occupied sector of Cuba, but other concentration camps are reported to be operating in several parts of the world (Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean, in Afghanistan, Iraq and probably other locations).
During the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, information was revealed by Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Texas), the Miami Herald and other sources that a network of domestic concentration camps had been envisioned by Col. Oliver North, FEMA and others in the event of widespread protest of an unpopular invasion, specifically if the US had invaded Nicaragua (then under the Sandinista government which overthrew the US backed Somoza dynasty dictatorship). Senator Inouye (D-Hawaii) interrupted Rep. Brooks with a warning that this was information that could not be discussed in public.

conspiracy theory: a term commonly used to stop discussion about the evidence for official crimes, whether engaged in by corporate leaders, government officials, or a combination of the two. The official story of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory -- it assumes that 19 men conspired to conduct a terrorist attack that somehow managed to outwit the largest military intelligence system in world history. This story is only a theory, since it has never been proved. There is a conspiracy to discredit the idea that conspiracies happen, and there is also a conspiracy to exaggerate the level of complicity in the event to discredit those investigating the conspiracy (the truth gets attacked from both sides).

continuity of government: clandestine, compartmentalized programs designed to maintain federal government operations during and after national level emergencies, especially a nuclear war. These COG programs are largely administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which runs a network of underground bunkers intended to shelter high level government officials during Apocalypse..

Crossing the Rubicon:a 2004 book from journalist Michael Ruppert that contains the best original evidence about how 9/11 was allowed and assisted.

Deception Dollars: an international artistic outreach campaign started in 2002 that spoofs the US dollar bill with links to websites about 9/11. Over six million are in circulation, with eight printings. Despite massive distribution from coast to coast at countless peace rallies and other dissident events since the fall of 2002, no national liberal "alternative" media publication dared to mention the Deception Dollar campaign, not even to attack them, even though they were distributed at the large peace / anti-war protest rallies where reporters and editors for "alternative" media presumably were in attendance.
The Deception Dollar campaign originally promoted most of the best 9/11 websites, but efforts with lower standards have always been included on Deception Dollar printings, and over the years, the ratio of good websites to sloppy websites worsened considerably. The Deception Dollars removed links to From the Wilderness after Michael Ruppert pointed out that some claims are good and some are not, and oilempire.us was removed after documenting how the "no plane" claim is disinformation first promoted by Donald Rumsfeld. While it is difficult to know how many of the efforts promoting debunked claims are sincere and how many are deliberately lying, it's more straight forward to document that a couple of the websites promote ultra conservative, anti environmental and even white supremacist perspectives that are not "truth."

deep politics: a term created by author Peter Dale Scott to describe the intersection of systemic, continuous set of illegal relationships of covert operations and governmental policies. Deep politics refers to structures within what President Eisenhower called "the military industrial complex" that guide actual behavior of the government beyond the control of the ostensible three branches of the US system - executive (President), legislative (Congress) and judicial (the courts). Few members of the overt parts of the US government have made serious, sustained efforts to gain control over the deep politics, the covert structures beneath the surface that run the most important policies.

"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society."
- Jim Garrison, 1967 (New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison led the first independent investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators of the JFK assassination - his book "On the Trail of the Assassins" was the basis for the Oliver Stone film "JFK.")

disinformation: erroneous material intentionally promoted to confuse, distract and otherwise make it more difficult to determine the truth. Some disinformation is amplified by well-meaning persons who unwittingly adopt the material without understanding that it is not genuine. Deliberate disinformation about 9/11 includes fake evidence to claim that it was genuinely a surprise attack (which has fooled a large segment of the population and nearly all of the media), and fake evidence supposedly proving official complicity but is based on illogical theories that lack any credible evidence (which is being used to discredit the 9/11 truth movement and to distract from the proven-beyond-reasonable-doubt evidence that 9/11 was not a surprise attack). The best disinformation is mostly correct - it establishes "bona fides" in the target audience before offering a slick lie.

"Espionage is simply the organised theft of information"
European Parliament - Final Report on Echelon, 11 July 2001
http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm

Fahrenheit 9/11: the movie by Michael Moore which was the first time that the actual footage of George W. Bush reading "My Pet Goat" to second graders while the towers burned was shown to a large audience, more than two years after it aired in "The Great Deception" by Vision TV of Toronto, Canada. F/911 was sold out from coast to coast because millions are hungry for alternative information about the crises of fascism, oil wars and the fear paradigm that seeks to smother democracy and liberty. Moore's movie implied the Saudis were at fault, and that Bush was blind to their treachery due to a divided loyalty caused by oil wealth given to his family. Unfortunately, F/911 did not discuss the primary questions of 9/11 -- who had the power to turn off the Air Force protection of New York and Washington (especially the latter), and who had the power to simultaneously schedule military and intelligence war games that day which confused the official response to the off-course jets?

false flag: an "intelligence" term for a covert operation where agents provocateurs stage acts that are falsely blamed on their enemies. False flag operations can include fake radicals acting violent at a peaceful protest to discredit the organizers, a terror attack staged by an intelligence agency to blame on the nation's perceived or actual enemies, or fake dissidents who discredit government opponents by making illogical or easily disproved claims for their assertions of conspiracy and corruption. The "Boston Tea Party" in 1775 was a form of "false flag operation" (the American revolutionaries had disguised themselves as "Indians" before dumping King George's tea into the harbor). False flag technically does not completely describe the conspiracy to allow and assist 9/11, since al-Qaeda operatives did play a critical role in the operation and were probably not impersonated by others. However, the fact that enormous amounts of warnings were available to the Bush administration, that FBI agents were blocked from stopping the attacks, and the overlapping war game exercises during 9/11 suggests that "covert operation" may be a better description than "false flag."

false sponsors: "fictitious suspects routinely created by the intelligence community's disinformation machinery following some covert action to lead the unwary down the wrong path away from government intelligence." -- Jim Garrison, "On the Trail of the Assassins," p. 259

fascism:

Federal Aviation Administration: the FAA is the civilian agency that is in charge of air traffic control for all commercial flights in the United States. The official 9/11 Commission report blames incompetence at the FAA for the failure of the military to properly respond to the hijacked airplanes (the FAA is a much less powerful bureaucracy than the Air Force). In short, the official story is that the FAA was too incompetent to properly alert the Air Force that four planes were off course, yet was competent enough to safely land more than four thousand four hundred planes at airports that were not expecting them and on timetables that had to be immediately improvised during the crisis. The order to get all commercial planes to immediately land at the nearest airports (in order to better find all hijacked jets) was perhaps the most complex and amazing feat of air traffic control in the history of aviation -- the FAA was not incompetent on 9/11.

From the Wilderness: an independent media organization that published original investigations on CIA involvement in drug running and 9/11 complicity. FTW ran from 1998 through late 2006. The reports, videos and book produced by From the Wilderness are among the most important documentations of 9/11 "truth."

geoslavery: the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to keep track of everyone, all the time. GPS, RFID chip enabled national IDs, and other electronic surveillance systems (finances, communication, internet, etc) combined together could create a global totalitarian state more intrusive than any previous dictatorships.

gray propaganda: disinformation that is a mix of truth and lies (the true parts are used to gain credibility for the lies)

The Great Deception: This film, aired in January and February 2002, was the first televised documentary challenging the official story of 9/11. It was produced by Vision TV of Toronto, Canada, a non-profit, multicultural network. The Great Deception was the first film to show the notorious footage of George W. Bush reading to second graders while the twin towers burned, footage later shown in Fahrenheit 9/11. A sequel film "The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw" was released in late 2004.

Homeland Security, Department of:A behemoth federal conglomeration of nearly two dozen agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs, Border patrol, and the Secret Service. The term "Homeland Security" dates to the latter part of the Clinton administration. The primary pretext used to enable creation of the DHS is the false claim that the various federal police and intelligence services were unable to properly communicate with each other before 9/11, and therefore consolidating many of these functions into a new, super surveillance agency will be able to prevent a repeat of the attacks. However, whistleblowers at the FBI have alleged that their investigations of the hijackers suffered from suppression by their bosses, not any alleged communication failures with their colleagues in other federal departments.

John O'Neill: the primary FBI official in charge of investigating al-Qaeda during the latter part of the Clinton administration, he was pressured to resign from the agency in 2001 (after Bush stole the election but before 9/11). He was given the new job of director of security for the World Trade Center immediately before 9/11, and was killed on the job when the towers collapsed. If he had lived, it is likely that his dissident voice would have been extremely prominent in the days after the attacks. The book "The Forbidden Truth," published about two months after 9/11, was essentially his last testiment, containing many of his allegations of Saudi complicity in the funding of al-Qaeda and the Bush administration's interference with his investigations. Forbidden Truth also conclusively showed that the US government had threatened to invade Afghanistan before 9/11, discussing the July 2001 meeting between US government and Taliban representatives, where the latter were offered a choice between "a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" depending on their attitude toward the proposed trans-Afghan gas and oil pipelines from central Asia.

hijack the hijackers: the theory that the hijackers were allowed to board the doomed planes but remote control technology was used to fly the planes to the targets once the hijacking was underway. This theory is speculative, but it fits the known evidence better than other paradigms. Remote control technology for pilotless control of jet planes is commercially available. After 9/11, remote control planes received lots of media attention for their use in the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, although discussion of the probable use of this technology to ensure that the planes hit the top of the towers before they were full (and not the nearby Indian Point nuclear power station) and the nearly empty part of the Pentagon has received virtually no discussion in the media. The "no plane hit the Pentagon" hoax has been a successful distraction from the best evidence for remote control -- how the plane made a spiral dive into the nearly empty sector (which minimized casualties).

Holocaust denial: an effort by white supremacists to provoke doubt in the public consciousness about the largest genocide of the 20th century, which they hope will help rehabilitate their political perspectives. The internet has made Holocaust denial much easier for the public to access, since websearches on these issues often bring up white supremacist websites in search results (the supremacists all link to each other, which improves their "page rank" in search engines). While most of the source material documenting the enormous crimes of the Holocaust predates the internet (for obvious reasons), there are a number of excellent efforts to refute neo-Nazi propaganda on the internet. Some of the hoaxes inserted into the 9/11 truth movement originated with these supremacist organizations, which raises the possibility that an active campaign from fascist groups is deliberately disrupting the 9/11 truth efforts.

honey pot: "A honey pot, in intelligence jargon, is a tempting source of information or 'dangle' that is set out to lure intended victims into a trap. Ultimately the honey pot is violently and maliciously discredited so as to destroy the credibility of anything stuck to it by association."
-- Michael Ruppert, "Crossing the Rubicon," p. 184
Perhaps the most popular "honey pot" of 9/11 is the "no plane at the Pentagon" hoax.

impeachment: a procedure in the Constitution for removing Presidents (and other officials) from elected office. Impeachment of a President requires that they be found guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors" by the Congress, and that the Congress then votes to remove the President from office. No President has been removed from office via impeachment. Andrew Jackson was nearly impeached in 1866, but survived by a single vote. President Nixon resigned in 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee recommended that the Congress impeach him for the Watergate scandals, and it was clear that the full Congress would vote to impeach him and remove him from office (although they did not vote for an Impeachment resolution regarding the illegal bombing of Cambodia, a much worse crime than burglary and obstruction of justice). President Clinton was impeached for his lying about Monica Lewinsky, but the Senate declined to remove him from office. In 1987, Representative Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas) introduced a resolution of impeachment against President Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal, but no other Representative or Senator co-sponsored it. In 1991, Rep. Gonzalez introduced another impeachment resolution against President Bush (the First) for deploying a half million troops to Saudi Arabia without a Congressional declaration of war (as required by the Constitution), but again, no member of Congress co-sponsored that effort. While there has been a lot of discussion about the numerous violations of the Constitution by President Bush (the Second), no one in Congress has dared to introduce an Impeachment resolution.

In Plane Site: a film released in the summer of 2004, just before the peak of the election campaign, that summarizes most of the hoaxes about 9/11 complicity (missiles fired at the WTC and Pentagon, giant explosions at the base of the towers, etc) into a slick multimedia production with annoying music, fancy graphics, and altered footage. In Plane Site did include a couple of real pieces of evidence, such as the Building 7 collapse video, but nearly everything in it is fake). The group that ostensibly made the film - the "Power Hour" internet radio show (based in central Missouri) - reportedly made nearly a million dollars marketing this film to gullible conspiracy theorists. PlaneSite was used by "debunkers" of conspiracy theories to support the official story -- but the truth of 9/11 lies in-between the hoaxers and those who think it was a surprise attack.
It is likely that Plane Site was made in response to the 9/11 Truth Movement becoming better organized in the wake of the March 2004 "International Inquiry into 9/11" in San Francisco. About five weeks after that event, a participant in the 9/11 Truth Alliance email list posted a photo showing how the claim that a "pod" was hanging off the plane that flew into the South Tower was just the normal "fairing" (the bulge between the wing and the fuselage), pointing out that this photo was one of countless photos like it that are posted on the internet. The DVD cover image for In Plane Site included the EXACT SAME photo posted to this email list, as well as an image from the cover of Alex Jones's "911: the road to tyranny" (a film that the "Plane Site" producer copied, without attribution, several minutes of real footage from the early television coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, which suggested that multiple bombs were found in the building). This film is a bad joke "hidden in plain sight."

intelligence failure: the claim that agencies charged with preventing attacks like 9/11 were unable to protect the public, even though the truth is that there was adequate cooperation between the agencies (according to 2001 RAND corporation report) and FBI whistleblowers complained that their investigations of the flight school terrorists were obstructed by management (an accusation that is not a charge of "failure" or incompetence). See "limited hang out."

Interstate 395 (Virginia):a large highway that passes by the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. On 9/11, countless motorists on I-395, Washington Boulevard and other roads had a good view of the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Most of the people who still promote the "no plane" claims are not personally familiar with this geography.

Koran in the van: the practice of intelligence services of finding smoking guns allegedly pointing to Islamic extremist involvement in terrorist crimes, such as the "Koran in a van" supposedly found near the train station in Madrid, Spain (March 2004) or the Koran (and Arabic language Boeing instruction manual) supposedly found in a rental car at Logan Airport in Boston that was allegedly used by the 9/11 hijackers. (The Arabic language flight manual suggests that the hijackers were hoping to finish their flight lessons on the way to the airport, or perhaps while onboard the plane, which is not believable.) This unverifiable evidence is reminiscent of similar planted material used to claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was the "lone gunman" in Dallas on November 22, 1963, even though it was physically impossible for him to have shot Kennedy.

left gatekeepers: a term used to describe many in the liberal "alternative" media who accurately describe the many crimes of the Bush administration but refuse to touch even the mildest evidence for official foreknowledge of 9/11. No national alternative media publication has dared to publish a systematic analysis of how 9/11 was not a surprise attack, any information about the 9/11 war games, or other evidence that points toward official complicity. These publications have also ignored the looming crisis of Peak Oil, a primary reason for 9/11 and the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are not advocating any non-violent, permaculture type solutions to the problems of oil depletion. (Hybrid cars and other modest efficiency efforts are woefully inadequate as solutions.)

legend: a false story spread by intelligence agencies to frame patsies for responsibility for a crime
"Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age."
-- H.L. Mencken

let's roll!: the rallying cry attributed to the passengers on Flight 93 (the fourth and final plane) who supposedly attacked the hijackers, and sacrificed their lives to prevent a worse tragedy in Washington DC. However, there is evidence that Flight 93 was shot down, including the eight mile long debris field and eyewitness reports from people on the ground.
There are several theories on why this plane was shot down:

  1. the military took that long to get their fighter planes ready, and Flight 93 was the first plane they were able to stop. This theory does not adequately explain why the military was not able to prevent Flight 77 from hitting the Pentagon, since 77 was at the Ohio / West Virginia border at 9:03 am, when the second tower was hit (and the entire air defense system knew that an attack was underway).
  2. the passengers were about to regain control of the plane, and one passenger was a pilot who might have been able to safely land the plane, something the official conspirators could not allow, since this would have resulted in live hijackers who would have been interrogated. This theory suggests that the shootdown was the equivalent of Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  3. the story of the heroic passengers was always an intentional part of the psychological manipulation of the 9/11 plot. Once the Pentagon had been hit, there was no need for Flight 93, since the goals of the attack had already been met. The "let's roll" story was a "Wag the Dog" propaganda that was a part of the overall psychological operation (psyop).
  4. The hijackers were planning to crash into Three Mile Island nuclear power station (this has been floated in a few places, although it is not be backed by actual evidence), which would have been an unmanageable disaster.
  5. Flight 93 was late taking off, and missed the window of opportunity to reach Washington before the air defense system was mobilized. After the Pentagon was hit about 9:38 am, the military defense of the national capital area went into full force. It is theoretically possible that the original 9/11 plan was to have all four (or more?) planes hit their targets nearly simultaneously, but the delays (especially Flight 93) made it impossible to allow the last plane to reach DC, and therefore it had to be shot down, since the longer the lack of response of the Air Force, the more suspicious the event would become.

    Which of these theories, or combinations, are true would require a full scale investigation to determine.

LIHOP: Let it happen on purpose, the paradigm that 9/11 was known in advance and deliberately allowed to happen (but not actually organized by the Bush administration).

limited hang out: a tactic to fess up to a small crime so that the full crime can remain safely hidden. The most effective limited hang outs persuade political opponents of the perpetrators that the full truth has been exposed, and that the remedies required to cope with the scandal are actually the plans of the perpetrators. The 9/11 limited hang outs - that it was a surprise attack caused by massive intelligence failures, including the supposed inability of different agencies to properly communicate with each other - have resulted in the spectacle of Bush administration opponents endorsing proposals to increase the budgets for the "Homeland Security" police state.

Lone Gunmen: a TV show aired on Fox TV in March 2001 that contained numerous likely elements of the 9/11 conspiracy. The Lone Gunmen was a sequel to the X-Files conspiracy themed drama show, and centered on a group of computer hackers who expose government and corporate crimes. The climax of the show involved the heroes stopping a small government faction using the cover of a war game to hijack a commercial jet via remote control technology to crash it into the World Trade Center in order to boost military spending. Much of the show had abyssmally bad acting -- but the key part of the show so close to the actual events that it is likely that the truth of 9/11 was deliberately planted in the middle of this terrible TV show in order to discredit the concept (wargames, remote control, small faction of government perpetrating 9/11 to boost military spending) as bad science fiction.

Loose Change: a 2005 film promoting the no plane claims that has been the most successful disinformation effort to confuse public consciousness of the "alternative" view on 9/11. In 2006, nearly every major corporate and alternative media focused on 9/11 "truth," highlighing Loose Change as the representative of this movement. None of these media dared to mention more credible efforts from the Center for Cooperative Research or From the Wilderness that documented the suppressed warnings and the military wargames on 9/11 that simulated actual events. Loose Change resembles a Karl Rove style propaganda effort to use false evidence to discredit a real scandal.

magic passport:Shortly after 9/11, the government announced that they had found one of the passports of a hijacker on the streets of lower Manhattan. This paper passport had supposedly passed unscathed through the giant fireballs, although the plane's nearly indestructable "black box" was not officially found. Many commentators have called this the "magic passport," in honor of the "magic bullet theory" promoted by the Warren Commission in 1964 (the claim that a single bullet hit both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly, making multiple wounds that would have been physically impossible to have been one bullet, yet this theory was used to justify the false claim that a lone gunman had been the shooter in Dallas, since acknowledging additional bullets would have required admitting that multiple shooters were firing simultaneously). This sort of planted evidence (the magic passport) is reminiscent of similar material used to create a fake trail of evidence that falsely implicated Lee Harvey Oswald as a crazed loner motivated by Communism.

MIHOP: made it happen on purpose, the paradigm that 9/11 was an "inside job" organized by the Bush administration. Some 9/11 truth activists have created an illusion that there is an incompatible gap between LIHOP and MIHOP, or worse, that LIHOP is a "limited hang out" (when in reality merely allowing 9/11 to happen without providing direct technical assistance would still be the largest scandal in American history). If there was a decision to let it happen, it is virtually certain there would have been technical assistance (perhaps via war games to confuse the air defenses and remote control hijacking to ensure the planes went were they were supposed to go). See "hijacking the hijackers."

misinformation:erroneous material, not necessarily intentional. Peer review fact checking and editors are usually effective at correcting misinformation. The internet makes it easy to spread untrue material faster than it can be fact checked.

missing trillions: the largest current financial scandal is the fact that several trillion dollars are "unaccounted for." On September 10, 2001, War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted that $2.3 trillion was missing, the day before the staff of Resource Services Washington, a division of Army accountants, were among the victims of the attack on the Pentagon.

National Commision on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States: the "9/11 Commission" chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean. The 9/11 Commission was fought by the Bush administration, and only was created due to public pressure by the self-named "Jersey Girls," four 9/11 widows who refused to take "no" for an answer. Unfortunately, almost all of their serious questions were ignored by the Commissioners and the staff. The staff director was a former colleague of National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice, and refused to step down when the 9/11 families cried foul. Every member of the Commission had compromising ties to aviation, finance, military, intelligence and/or petroleum interests. It would have been much more honest to keep Henry Kissinger as the Commission chair, since his conflicts of interest would have been blatantly obvious (whereas Kean's board membership of Amerada Hess petroleum, which was invested in a Saudi consortium planning the trans-Afghan pipeline, escapes public scrutiny). As predicted by many observers, the 9/11 Commission's final report (July 2004) stated that it was all a giant intelligence failure and completely ignored the copious evidence of foreknowledge. The Commission's recommendations included recommendations to give Big Brother a bigger budget to prevent a repeat of 9/11, which ignores the reality that 9/11 was not a surprise attack and that multiple investigations by FBI agents into the flight schools were suppressed (a deliberate action, not incompetence).

National Energy Policy Development Group: the "Cheney Energy Task Force" that met in early 2001, immediately upon the seizure of the White House by the Cheney / Bush administration. While the full details of the discussions remain secret, some of the information from the task force has been disclosed -- and it includes lists of oil fields and corporations active in the Persian Gulf region. Journalist Michael Ruppert hypothesized in his book "Crossing the Rubicon" that the deepest secrets of 9/11 lie in this group's records, since it seems obvious that they were discussing the imminence of Peak Oil, who had the oil, who needed to be bought or invaded in order to control the oil. (9/11 was allowed to happen in order to create the pretext to grab that oil.) One of the task force's participants was investment banker Matthew Simmons, who has become a prominent voice urging Corporate America to pay attention to the implications of Peak Oil.

National Reconnaissance Office: the NRO is a military intelligence agency that runs America's spy satellite systems. On 9/11, the NRO was conducting an emergency operations exercise simulating a plane crashing into its headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia (four miles from Dulles Airport). This exercise resulted in the evacuation of most employees just as the actual events of 9/11 began to unfold, which meant that fewer analysts were available to track the hijacked planes.

NORAD: North American Defense Command, the joint US / Canada military agency in charge of defending air space over New York and Washington on 9/11. NORAD's standard operating procedures state that fighter planes must be intercepted whenever commerical planes wander off course and lose radio contact (especially over the northeastern US, the most congested air space on the planet). These policies were not followed on 9/11, not even after the second tower was hit (9:03 am) and with a hijacked plane hurtling toward Washington.

NORTHCOM: the Northern Command is the domestic "homeland security" division of the military established in October 2002. NORTHCOM's first commander was General Ralph Eberhart, who commanded NORAD on 9/11 and was ultimately responsible for the Air Force's failed defense of New York and Washington. This command also seeks control over Mexico and Canada, although those countries have not granted permission to NORTHCOM to control their territories (and their natural resources). With the establishment of NORTHCOM, the US military has now assigned a "unified command" (fusing the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) to every place on the planet. If the Homeland Security alert system goes to "Code Red," NORTHCOM would essentially be in charge of carrying out the road blocks, detentions without trial, media censorship and other aspects of full scale martial law.

October Surprise: a term that dates to the 1980 Presidential Election between President Carter and the Reagan-Bush campaign. The October Surprise was the suggestion that Carter might be able to free the 52 hostages being held in the US embassy in Iran immediately before the election, which would have given his re-election campaign a giant boost. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein (with the blessing of the US government) initiated a pre-emptive attack on Iran, which forced the Iranian government to seek spare parts for the military equipment that the ousted Shah had purchased from the United States (these parts are not generally available on the open market). At this time, the Republicans made a deal with the Iranian government, offering a better deal than the Carter administration (more weapons) if they delayed the release of the hostages until Reagan and Bush took office. The hostages were released within minutes of the change of Presidential leadership on January 20, 1981. Several writers and whistleblowers have charged that George Herbert Walker Bush flew to Paris to cement the deal with representatives of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime -- this claim can be summarized as a short slogan: "On October 19, 1980, Bush was dealing with Khomeini!" The "October Surprise" was the start of the "Iran-Contra" scandal.
Many people speculated that an "October Surprise" would be used to disrupt or delay the 2004 election, or less severely, to stampede public opinion in favor of Bush-Cheney just before the vote. These hypotheses include a 9/11 repeat (an attack on this scale), unveiling of a captured Osama bin Laden, a "red alert" (martial law clampdown) just before or during the election, to name a few of the most popular ideas. But what actually happened was subtle tampering with phony computerized ballot machines, fake election polls, efforts to keep the full truths of Peak Oil out of the mainstream of media discussion until after the election, various dirty tricks against the Kerry campaign (Swift Boats, the faked papers about Bush's AWOL in the National Guard that nevertheless told the truth about his lack of service), and last but not least, the selection of an unpopular elite candidate by the Democrats as the "opponent" to George Bush.
If Kerry had been allowed to win, it is possible that the October Surprise would have been a December Surprise, a nasty "housewarming" gift from the outgoing Cheney-Bush administration to the incoming Kerry-Edwards team, similar to the Somalia debacle given by outgoing President Bush in 1992 to the Clinton-Gore administration. A 9/11 sequel under a Democratic White House would also deflect criticism that the attack was staged by the "neo-conservatives" to boost their extreme ideological agenda -- a new terror attack after Kerry's inauguration would seem to be legitimately directed by an outside enemy, not an "inside job." Perhaps the Kerry - Bush campaign is just a "good cop, bad cop" effort.
If the United States ever installs a Presidential administration to replace the Bush regime who is not planning to cover up their crimes, the possibility of some sort of "December Surprise" housewarming from the outgoing administration will need to be taken very seriously by these replacements.

Operation Northwoods: a 1962 proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the Pentagon's highest military leadership) to stage fake terror attacks in the United States to create the pretext to invade Cuba and topple the regime of Fidel Castro. Northwoods was vetoed by President Kennedy, and was never implemented. The documents describing this plan were declassified in May 2001 in James Bamford's book "Body of Secrets," his second book about the ultrasecret National Security Agency (NSA).

Pakistan: a close ally of the United States, Pakistan was one of the primary sponsors of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (the other was Saudi Arabia). On 9/11, General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's "Inter-Services Intelligence" (ISI - their equivalent to the CIA) was meeting with Representative Porter Goss (R-Florida) and Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, at the exact moment that the 9/11 planes hit the buildings. General Ahmad was widely accused of wiring $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, alleged to have been the primary plotter among the 9/11 hijackers, and resigned his post shortly after 9/11. Pakistan is a military dictatorship that has nuclear weapons, has fought several wars with India (which is also now a nuclear power), is fighting a low-level guerrilla proxy war with India in the disputed Kashmir region, and has a substantial domestic Islamic extremist population that would like their country to become a nuclear-armed theocracy. Pakistan is probably the leading candidate for nuclear proliferation among any of the admitted nuclear powers.

pantopticon:

 

patsy:some of the last words of Lee Harvey Oswald, framed for the assassination of President Kennedy, were that he was "just a patsy." see "false flag"

Peak Oil: the all time maximum rate of extraction of petroleum, as charted on a curve. All oil fields have a roughly bell curve shaped rate of production -- the initial extraction is of oil that is under pressure and is easiest to extract, but once half of the oil is removed, retrieving the remaining supplies becomes much more difficult. The only debate among petroleum geologists about the precise timing of the global peak of petroleum production is exactly when it will occur, and how fast extract rates will decline -- the reality of Peak Oil is not seriously disputed by experts in the field. Most of the debate is between geologists who think we are currently near, or at, the global peak, and those who think it is later in this decade or slightly into the next decade (the official US Geological Survey position is that the global peak is still about three decades away, still in most of our lifetimes but close enough to be an immediate crisis). The peak of oil discoveries worldwide was four decades ago, around 1962. The peak of oil discoveries in the United States was in the 1930s, about four decades before the peak of production in 1970. Much of the theoretical basis for analyzing Peak Oil was performed by the geologist M. King Hubbert in the mid-1950s, who accurately predicted the US would peak around 1970 and that the global peak would come around 2000. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are privately very aware of Peak Oil, and it is likely that 9/11 was allowed to happen (and given assistance) to provide the pretext to invade the Middle East oil fields as the world reaches peak production. Control of the world's remaining supplies will determine who will control the global economy in the coming decades.

Pearl Harbor: the Hawaiian harbor attacked by the Japanese Navy's air force on December 7, 1941. Declassified documents prove beyond any doubt that President Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were about to attack, yet deliberately kept the information from the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii (the latter were kept out of the loop of the information generated by military decryption of the Japanese "purple code"). FDR allowed the Pearl Harbor attack in order to galvanize a divided nation to support world war, but he didn't give technical assistance to the Japanese (they were able to find Hawaii without any help).

Pentagon Strike: a short video released on the internet in the summer of 2004, a few weeks after In Plane Site received a mixed review. Plane Site included too many hoaxes for most of the 9/11 truth movement (and their allies) to accept, and its tone was too obnoxious to persuade many (although it did have an audience that wanted to believe that it was true). Pentagon Strike was more low key and spread like a virus around the internet through email lists, chat forums and websites. It was only a few minutes long and stayed away from the more bizarre, less popular hoaxes - focusing strictly on the "no plane hit Pentagon" disinformation. Pentagon strike quoted eyewitness statements out of context (people who said they saw the plane were quoted selectively to imply that they did not see the plane). Pentagon Strike also used photos of the damaged building where the full extent of the impact was hidden by smoke and firefighting foam, and also superimposed a black stripe (with misleading selective quotes) over the first floor impact that the plane made.
It was used by the Washington Post in October 2004 to color its coverage of 9/11 complicity investigations - pointing out the ludicrous claims that the film was made by people who claim to talk to alien beings in other dimensions from their European palace. This lousy coverage for the 9/11 truth movement helped dismiss the issue as a legitimate one before the election, which helped Bush / Cheney get "re-elected" (in reality, they stole the election again, but if the Democrats had won by more than a few points, the vote rigging would not have been enough to tip the balance).

Pet Goat: the story that George Walker Bush was reading to the second grade classroom at Booker Elementary in Sarasota, Florida on the morning of 9/11 while planes were crashing into the World Trade Center. Bush continued to read this book even after being told the nation was under attack. Even more damning is the fact that the Secret Service did not remove the President from a location that had been widely publicized on television. If the claim that 9/11 was a surprise attack was really true, then the Secret Service completely failed to follow normal protocols to protect the President. However, if the White House knew the specifics of the attack before it happened, then the Secret Service's apparent failure to remove Bush from the school was actually justified, since they would have known the President was not in any danger. Journalist Michael Ruppert claims in his book "Crossing the Rubicon" that Cheney wanted Bush to stay in the school so that he could not interfere with Cheney's management of the 9/11 wargames that ensured the success of the attacks.

physical evidence: a mantra of some in the 9/11 truth movement who promote some of the wilder "theories" about 9/11. The only "physical evidence" that no one anywhere disputes is the Pentagon was hit in the nearly empty, recently reconstructed and strengthened sector (which minimized casualties and damage to the compound, strongly suggesting remote control type technology used to guide the plane to the target). Some of the "physical evidence" claims are extremely speculative, based on blurry photos or are slick disinformation(the "no plane hit the Pentagon" claim is the most important). All of the physical evidence from the four 9/11 crashes, the collapse of the three buildings in New York, and the Pentagon attack have been destroyed, and independent analysis of the debris is not possible.
Most of the people promoting the term "physical evidence" for 9/11 investigation ignore the best evidence that no one anywhere disputes - the fact that the Pentagon was hit in the nearly empty part of the building. They also ignore the fact that the width of the damage on the outside of the building was the width of a Boeing 757, among other pieces of "physical evidence" that shows the "no plane at Pentagon" stories are hoaxes.
The only physical evidence that even the mainstream media admits is true - where Flight 77 hit - is the most important "physical evidence" to focus on. All of the other claims are subject to the "dueling PhD" phenomenon (for every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.), and therefore unlikely to accomplish the desired outcome. The "black boxes" would be the most revealing (since they would refute or confirm the remote control hypothesis), but it is unlikely there will ever be an independent examination of this data.

"the nature of the assessment of physical evidence ... rests largely upon the judgement of experts who themselves often come to such contentious cases with biases and agendas. So, as with JFK and the obsession over ballistics, physical evidence becomes a battlefield of expert opinion that never resolves itself into legal fact, while less readily contested evidence goes ignored."
-- Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/09/secret-agent-man.html

pipelines and poppies: the primary motivations for the invasion of Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. Western oil companies such as UNOCAL seek to build pipelines across Afghanistan to markets in Pakistan, India and to terminals on the Indian Ocean for the oil and natural gas in former Soviet Central Asia republics such as Kazakhstan. The Taliban dictatorship also declared growing opium poppies un-Islamic shortly before 9//11, and the suppression of the opium production had removed huge amounts of drug profits from the global financial system (perhaps a few hundred billion dollars). Now that the Taliban have been deposed, the pipeline projects are underway, and opium production is at record levels.

pod: a few fringe 9/11 websites claim that the second plane to strike the World Trade Center had an anomalous "pod" underneath the wing that proves that it was not Flight 175, and therefore the planes were switched in mid-air, and therefore 9/11 was completely an "inside job." These "pod people" websites offer a variety of theories to explain what this "pod" supposedly was: a structure that fired a missile at the towers a split second before impact (even though the alleged video of this missile does not resemble in any way actual missiles fired from fighter planes), a container of napalm (as if the large fuel load in the plane's tanks were not enough to make a fireball), or the remote control transmitter system (which, if used, would have been on the inside of the plane, wired into the plane's electronic control systems).
In reality, the "pod" is just a photo of the underside of the plane that shows the oval shaped connector (called the "fairing") between the wing and the fuselage. Promotion of the "pod" disinformation intensified as the 9/11 truth movement has become more politically successful at persuading a growing percentage of the population that 9/11 was not a surprise attack. The "pod" was the first claim debunked by the March 2005 Popular Mechanics story on "9/11 Lies."

Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group (P2OG):

 

Project for a New American Century (PNAC): a "neo-conservative" think tank that includes many of the senior members of the Bush regime. The PNAC's September 2000 report "Rebuilding America's Defenses" suggested that "The process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

put options: a stock trade that bets that the value of a company's shares will decrease. The week before 9/11, insiders on Wall Street made anomalous bets that the values of United and American Airlines would drop precipitously in the coming days, and also bet against the values of companies that had a large presence in the towers. The "put options" story was covered by the world's financial press in the weeks after 9/11, with many speculations that Osama had made the sickest stock trade in history. After Michael Ruppert's "From the Wilderness" tied some of the stock trades to a firm formerly headed by the Executive Director of the CIA (the number three position), there was virtualy no more coverage of the stock trade issue in the media. The 9/11 Commission report dismissed discussion of the put options by noting that the firms that made the bets had no conceivable links to al-Qaeda, and therefore could not have had foreknowledge of 9/11.

psyop (psychological operation): a military term for propaganda intended to shift public consciousness. 9/11 was essentially a "shock and awe" psyop against the American public (and the global audience).

red alert: the highest level of alert under the new "Homeland Security" advisory system. Since being introduced, the color coded alert system has always been on either Yellow or Orange, oscilating back and forth in almost complete alignment with political requirements of the Bush administration (the color code has shifted from Yellow to the more severe Orange at times when Bush's poll numbers have been dropping). Several senior governmental spokespeople have stated that "red alert" would essentially shut down normal operation of the country, it would be a form of martial law administered by the two most important government entities created by the Bush regime: the Department of Homeland Security and the US military's Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

Reichstag Fire: the burning of the Reichstag, the German Parliament building, on February 27, 1933. The Reichstag Fire was blamed by the Nazis on a lone arsonist, who was a Dutch Communist, who was supposedly the vanguard of an effort to foment a Communist revolution in Germany. Hitler used the excuse of the Reichstag Fire as the pretext to pass the "Enabling Act," which temporarily suspended civil liberties in Germany to deal with the terrorist threat. This temporary abrogation of freedom, which is how Hitler became absolute dictator, lasted 12 years until Germany lay in ruins.
Perhaps the best parallel to 9/11 is the 1933 "Reichstag Fire" - the Dutch communist accused of trying to burn down the German Parliament (Reichstag) really was captured at the scene of the crime, yet he had been overheard boasting of his intention to commit arson, was probably lured to the Reichstag by Nazi agents, and while he was attempting to burn down the building the Gestapo was in the basement with barrels of flammable liquids. Similarly, the Islamists had been observed planning similar atrocities since the mid-1990s, yet as the warnings poured into the White House before 9/11 no apparent efforts were made to prevent the attacks. While the exact amount of technical assistance to ensure that the attacks happened will probably never be known, the fact that the intelligence agencies were conducting a "plane into building" exercise during 9/11 in northern Virginia suggests a deliberate effort to sow confusion that allowed the attacks to succeed.

remote control: technology for guiding planes without a pilot on board. While it is not proven that this was used to guide the planes into the top of the towers and the nearly empty sector of the Pentagon, the technology is not theoretical. One developer of this technology is System Planning Corporation, which had PNAC member Dov Zakheim as a senior official before the 2000 "election." Mr. Zakheim was comptroller of the Pentagon (in charge of the budget) from 2001 until early 2004, a very powerful, behind-the-scenes position.

reverse psychology:

RFID chip: radio-frequency identification, a new technique for massive tracking of nearly everything on Earth. An RFID chip is about the size of a grain of rice, and contains a small transmitter that emits an 18 digit identification number when a particular wavelength of radio energy is aimed at it (it is a totally passive system, no battery or other internal power source is needed). RFID chips are sought by large grocery stores to replace bar codes, which would enable tracking of individual objects to a much greater degree of precision (RFID chips would keep track of each individual bottle of shampoo, bar codes merely identify that shampoo bottle as a particular brand). RFID chips are planned for credit cards, paper currency, drivers licenses, car tires, grocery store products, and are even being implanted under the skin of people in experimental trial runs. A global surveillance society based on RFID chips would be far more intrusive than any previous dictatorships, far outstripping the police states of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Apartheid South Africa.

Saudi Arabia: the country with the world's largest oil reserves (about one-fourth of known recoverable petroleum). The official story of 9/11 claims that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nations (along with Osama bin Laden), but this claim has never been independently verified, and several news accounts (including the BBC) claim that several of these people were really victims of identity theft. The full truth of the hijacker identifications remains unproven. Regardless of whether these hijackers really were Saudi citizens or not, the core issue of why the Air Force chose not to defend the Pentagon against attack has nothing to do with Saudi complicity with al-Qaeda or suicidal terrorists seeking to attack America. Some of the neo-conservatives who aggressively promoted the invasion of Iraq advocate the partition of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to separate the oil rich areas along the Persian Gulf from the bulk of the Saudi population. If Saudi Arabia was split, this would allow the US to control the oil fields in a way that would not require US military troops occupying the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (on the western side of the country, far from the oil).

Skull and Bones: a secret society that is an occult organization at Yale University that "taps" 15 people a year to become part of what is possibly the most exclusive organization in the country. Since 1832, about 800 people have been inducted, including many political leaders, business elites, intelligence operatives, and others at very senior positions in the nation's establishment. Some of these members include George Walker Bush (president 2001-2005), John Forbes Kerry (Senator and probable president), George Herbert Walker Bush (president 1989 - 1993), Prescott Bush (senator, grandfather of George W. Bush), and John Heinz, Senior (father of Teresa Heinz Kerry's first husband).

snitch jacketing: the practice of agent provocateurs falsely accusing genuine activists of being government stooges (see COINTELPRO)

snuff film:a movie that shows graphic violence (not simulated), even murder, often for the sadistic enjoyment of the viewer. Lots of people thought that 9/11 resembled a movie when they first saw it happening on their televisions. 9/11 was a "snuff film" with a global television audience.

stand down: a military term referring to a deliberate scaling back of military forces. Many skeptics of the official story of 9/11 assume that "stand down" orders were issued to ensure that the Air Force protection of New York and Washington was turned off. However, it is more likely that the confusion of the "war games" at the military and intelligence services was the real reason that the hijacked planes were not intercepted before striking the towers and the Pentagon (especially the latter).

Total Information Awareness: a Pentagon agency set up after 9/11 to consolidate countless databases and intelligence information systems. TIA was a division of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military department that created the internet (long before it became a popular tool for public use). TIA was chaired by Admiral John Poindexter, one of the primary perpetrators of the Iran-Contra scandal (he was President Reagan's National Security Advisor). TIA was disbanded after it received extremely harsh criticism from civil liberties groups, but the functions of TIA have merely been dispersed to other departments, private contractors and several State agencies. TIA's logo was of the Masonic "all seeing eye" on the top of a pyramid looking at the planet, focused especially on the Middle East. It is likely that this logo was calculated to infuriate conspiracy minded people upset at the creation of this "Totalitarian Information Awareness" office.

touch screen voting machine:

 

treason:betraying one's country, whether in peacetime or during a war. Allowing (or hiring?) a group of terrorists to attack the largest buildings in the nation's largest city and the military's headquarters is an act of treason.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission: the effort in post-Apartheid South Africa that exposed many of the truths about horrible crimes committed during the Apartheid era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered perpetrators of politically motivated atrocities the opportunity for immunity from prosecution if they went public with the full details of their crimes (whether committed in defense of the Apartheid state or by the "liberation" forces). Some of the victim relatives were very upset about this deal, but the Commission's work resulted in the bulk of the population, especially the white minority, becoming aware of many of the evil acts done to prop up the Apartheid regime -- and probably helped avert civil war and retribution violence after the establishment of democracy. The South African example was very different than the amnesties offered perpetrators in other dictatorships (such as Argentina), where human rights abusers in the government were merely rendered immune from justice without any requirement for disclosing of their crimes. Representative Dennis Kucinich stated during his 2004 Presidential campaign that we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to get at the full truth of September 11, not necessarily to prosecute all of the officials involved (which would not bring justice for the victims or undo the psychological shock that everyone had), but to expose it to prevent it from happening again and to encourage social and psychological evolution beyond the destructive fear paradigm.

Truth, Ministry of: in George Orwell's novel 1984, the government department in charge of propaganda

truthiness: a word coined by comedian Stephen Colbert that refers to wanting to believe that things are true even when they are not


Stephen Colbert invented the word truthiness

USA PATRIOT Act: the legislation passed by a panicked Congress about a month after 9/11 that radically changed basic civil liberties protections under the pretext that we need to be defended from terrorists. During the very short debate on the Patriot Act, the Democratic leadership began to question some of the provisions -- and that is when anthrax letters were mailed to the Senate, disrupting its operations. Nothing in the Patriot Act addresses the real problems with preventing 9/11 -- the suppression of FBI investigations of the hijackers, the failures of the Air Force to properly respond to the attacks, the multiple military and intelligence war games on 9/11 that confused the response or the ignoring of warnings from 15 countries that 9/11 was about to happen.

war games: On 9/11, the military and intelligence agencies were practicing exercises that simulated aspects of the 9/11 attacks, which probably were the means used to paralyze the military response to the hijacked planes until it was too late. These war games have been mentioned in mass media articles, but virtually no media institution has examined evidence that suggests the war games were coordinated to ensure the success of the attacks. The most comprehensive examination of the wargames is the book "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert. In 1990, a wargame simulating the invasion of Iraq by Kuwait was underway at the exact moment that Iraq invaded Kuwait (Richard Cheney was Secretary of Defense at the time).

War on Terror: the slogan adopted by the Bush regime after 9/11 for their global efforts to wage war without end. Dick Cheney claims that this is a war that will not end in our lifetime. It is largely a replacement for the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union which served to keep military budgets excessively large, and is the excuse used to seize Afghanistan and Iraq (second largest oil fields on Earth) and in the future will probably be used to justify invasions of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries with natural resources or strategic locations coveted by the Oil Empire. As with other post-9/11 innovations, the "War on Terror" is based on the pretense that 9/11 was a surprise attack. The resources that are intended to be used to wage the endless "War on Terror" could also be used to relocalize food production and construct renewable energy systems to power a more efficient, more peaceful society -- but there are not sufficient resources to do both.

Washington Boulevard (Virginia Route 27):a six lane highway directly along the Pentagon on the side that was hit by Flight 77. Washington Blvd. was full of commuters when the attack happened and most of them had an excellent view of the crash.

World War IV: a description used by neo-conservatives for their War on Terror. World War III was the Cold War between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Tens of millions, mostly civilians, were killed during World War III from wars, coup d'etats, government repression of domestic populations, land mines left over from wars, depleted uranium pollution, chemical pollution (Agent Orange in Vietnam is the most famous), and economic warfare through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and transnational corporate plunder.