Thompson work is very useful, but it is hardly a serious analysis. What he does very well is select news reports that appeared in the main stream media, organize them in catagories, and present them as a timeline. In essence, a timeline of what passed through the editorial process in various outlets at a given time.

Remember, Journalism is the first cut of history, and the first cut is not necessarily correct simply because the journalist, focused on a small slice of the story, does not have the time or the instinct to actually do history, openly evaluate sources, cross-check claims, search out past history, compare and contrast — the culture of the newsroom reporting the new information of the day prevents this type of interrogation of information. Journalists and their publishers/owners have no idea when following the threads of a story whether it leads to new comprehension of an event in time, or if it is just a dead end, interesting, but in the end not relevant to the major story.

It is very valuable to have essentially a clip file available — what was published when? But a clip file is not history.

To take a specific example from Farmer’s work — the timing and the orders to launch fighter planes on 9/11. Farmer, and the 9/11 Commission finally got the dispositive evidence, the tapes from NEADS that amid all the confusion that morning, recorded all aspects of the timing, sequence, origin of orders, information shared, origin of information — tapes that had not been acknowledged in prior investigations, were not offered by DOD or even indexed as existing, and that contradicted the sworn testimony of a number of military and civil witnesses from relevant departments and agencies — By matching those tapes up with other contemporary documentation, the Farmer team was able to show that after September 17-18 most of the “official” claims were wrongheaded — lies. The anaylitic question is not satisfied by just showing someone lied, (or misspoke as they softly call it), but that the lies were a cover-up, and that from the evidence you can determine what they were covering up.

Farmer also includes a long segment summarizing the process by which military operations to protect US skies were first organized early in the Cold War, and then gradually defunded, first as the US and the Soviets shifted to Ballistic Missiles from manned bombers in the 70′s, and then as the Cold War ended. Air cap over the US and Canada went from 750 fighters on alert 24/7 to 14 on 9/11. At the same time, the command proceedures for any launch were made far more complex, impossible in an emergency. You will never get that sort of analysis in a news report, even though it is absolutely critical in assessing what happened on 9/11. You had much rewriting of mission statements largely to protect organizations the end of the Cold War made redundant — but you had no re-thinking of what those new missions might require in terms of personnel, training, equipment. As Farmer puts it, the building where NEADS operated that day looked a little like a garage for the Jettsons with a few antenna wagging in the wind, and it was on an otherwise mothballed bomber base in Rome New York. None of their equipment was compatable with FAA, much of the equipment had not been updated since the 60′s. Their training was still about Soviet Bombers coming over the North Pole — but their mission statement was all about terrorism. Why was this the case? For that you have to look at the whole sequence of decisions a number of Government agencies who were supposed to coordinate missions with each other, made over a number of years. This is System’s criticism. We can do it now largely because we have had to take apart what went wrong on 9/11. Have they fixed the problems? Apparently not, because when the Delta/Northwest flight did not respond to controllers for over an hour, and overshot the Twin Cities an a California/Minnesota flight, by a hundred miles or so a few weeks back, FAA did not contact the military in a timely fashion. No, the plane wasn’t hijacked, and there were no mechanical issues, it was pilot errors and inattention. The underlying issue however is whether FAA and the military are still not on the same wavelength. In otherwords, System still not fixed.

Google Zim American Israeli Shipping Co, Urban Moving Systems, dancing Israelis, and Jerome Hauer anthrax.

When you finish the scavenger hunt, check back in and tell us how warm and fuzzy you feel!

Regarding your objection, if there’s chaff in the wheat or bath water with the baby, I don’t think the remedy is throwing it all away.

To quote from TocqueDeVille’s GBCW:

Let me say up front that I was wrong. In my diary, “The Conspiracy Theory Label”, I argued that the greatest threat to our national security was the secrecy of the national security state. In fact, I am now forced to reconsider: the greatest threat to our national security is, as Al Gore put it, the assault on reason.

I hate to go down this road… Try this for starters: BillWalker wrote,

Why do you think employees of an Israeli company in the WTC received an anonymous instant message 2 hours before the attack warning them about it, and instructing them to leave the building?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744

Unfortunately for BillWalker his link doesn’t support his claim. There is no indication either in his linked article or in the Wikipedia entry for the incident that the “warnings” went to WTC. Rather, they went to a business in Israel, made no mention of WTC and contrary to the spirit of BillWalker’s innuendo, contained anti-semitic slurs.

Also I’m surprised not to see a comment in this thread from plunger, is he banned on EW?

Plunger had left a comment in an earlier EW diary that intrigued me, something about the four 9/11 planes not having flown in the year prior, and I tried to find what he was referring to. Googling led me to info that 911blogger Aidan Monaghan had FOIA’d and received a response with govt Excel spreadsheets from the Dept of Transportation that seemed to show that the last BTS info on the flights was as of the end of December 2000, nothing at all for 2001 and nothing at all on Flight 77. Googling again now, an update shows that the FOIA’d records don’t match the BTS online database and that Monaghan suspects the FBI has seized all the missing 2001 info. See http://www.911blogger.com/node/20456 for scans of the FOIA response and discussion. This was back in June. What does it all mean? I read through it and it seems that the interesting thing is not only that the records don’t match, but that in neither place is there any info on Flight 77, the plane that went into the Pentagon. The commenters are serious and informative. They even hide one on the bottom of page 2, for reasons I can’t fathom unless perhaps that the commenter is holding onto his previously expressed unpopular opinion and isn’t budging, though unlike hiding elsewhere (DailyKos) you can click and see the hidden comment. You guys here at EW are so good, I wish you were following that data, or perhaps that Aidan Monaghan would guest here like Andy Worthington has when the story calls for it. Everyone has their area of expertise. It all goes back to Cheney, why aren’t you all over this?

Another thing, you and I tangled a bit the last time I commented, on appropriate public involvement in workings of govt — “citizen mobs” vs. just plain citizenship. I just came across another story, totally by chance — why have I never heard of this? — New York City citizens tried to get a call for a new 9/11 investigation on the November ballot. They got the needed signatures but were turned down by a judge, hence nothing 9/11 on the ballot despite their efforts. 30,000 sigs needed, 80,000 so far per the header: http://nyccan.org/The_Turning_Point.php . Do you have an opinion on that? Could this have a bearing on the 9/11 federal trial in NYC Holder announced?

With all due respect to you and the fine people here at EWs, you should cast your net a bit wider.

I hope you guys realize I’m only after the truth, but there’s no real way to prove that.

I guess we’ll all just have to stick to the conspiracy theory as handed down by the Bush administration, which holds that strip club and alcohol loving Muslim extremists made PNAC’s biggest fantasy come true, despite PNAC members occupying the highest posts in government and the military, and their 100% efforts to stop it from happening.

There is often a grain of truth in the claims of paranoid people, indeed there usually is. Unfortunately, serious breaches of trust by elements in the intelligence community (usually in the service of economic elites) have occurred in the past, and revelations of that sort are bound to inflame–and provoke poor judgement in–a certain minority. At risk of being labeled one of the paranoid myself, I’d offer CIA involvement in JFK’s murder as perhaps the most egregious example. But imo, a close reading of “Not In Your Lifetime” (Anthony Summers) and “The Last Investigation” (Gaeton Fonzi) leads inexorably to that unhappy conclusion.