oh, and, a few more

[winterbadger]

One robbysmom pointed me to while we were examining Intelwire; interesting news snippets, but the commentators seem unpleasntly jingoistic and racist in the extreme

http://www.rantburg.com/

and two more related to terrorism

http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/roots/index.htm
http://www.ict.org.il/

Comments

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

rantburg is generally a bunch of (yup, racists) conspiracy theorists who have pretty interesting RSS feeds, many of which come from Debka

http://www.debka.com/

which is well compared to Drudge (as rumor mongering, hawkish (Israeli in this case) and sometimes--- of ocurse not always-- onto something)

http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47325,00.html

Debka's currently headlining the apparent eye witness account that Mubarak was on Egyptian TV havign to deny rumors of his untimely demise, e.g. . .

which e.g. cnn and bbc aren't running, but which is interesting.

bbc is running this disturbing development, btw:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3811539.stm

[winterbadger]

Debkafile... (shudder)....

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

right, well, that's why I think rantburg is also suspect. But I read lots of suspect things-- as supect.

Today's debkafile "analysis" (which is the most suspect) has these assertions abotu yesterday's 9/11 report:

"1. A senior expert gave this comment to DEBKAfile: “We see here the outcome of a cynical attempt to link Sharon, Israel and the Jews to the September 11 atrocities. Sharon is suddenly being blamed not only for the Palestinian uprising - which was planned years before he visited Temple Mount - but is also being dragged into focus in relation to al Qaeda’s attacks on America."

"2. One answer which has not been considered seriously enough is that the terrorists or their ground support commanded the electronic capabilities for jamming US tracking devices that ought to have picked up – but didn’t - the captured airliners as they cut through American air space from airport to target."

[winterbadger]

Exactly the sort of nonsense that makes me avoid reading Debkafile. For me, at least, it's just too much time and trouble finding the few grains of useful information in the desert of lies, misinformation, and paranoid schizophrenia.

[winterbadger]

[on the terrorists' mythical jammers] Apparently if they had some, they were real crap jammers, since the FAA and NORAD picked up the planes every time they actually looked for them. The biggest problems seem to have been the time that they weren't even looking... The jammers probably wouldn't have done much good at preventing visual sightings, of which there were dozens.

The most chilling part of the testimony I heard yesterday (about 1.5 of the report of the 9/11 commission being read) concerned the C130H crew who got diverted from a flight from ?Norfolk?Hampton? to get visual contact with, track, and possibly attempt to divert the flight that hit the Pentagon (American 77). They saw it hit the building, which must have been damn freaky.

Then they went back to their scheduled flight to ?Michigan?, and en route reported a plume of black smoke, which was from the crash of the plane in Pensylvania (United 93)

Being at two of the three locations of the attacks in one day is not unbelievable, just eeire.

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

yup. The Debka stuff is just spinnign a weird theory, as that content so often does. To the extent there may be some shred of "truth" on which they built their house of cards, it may be the 30 or so minutes described in sum here:

"But by 9:21, aviation officials had realized that a third plane - American Airlines Flight 77, which had left Dulles International Airport outside Washington at 8:20 - was missing. Controllers lost sight of it near Indianapolis and did not realize it had turned back toward Washington. [. . . ] The plane traveled undetected toward Washington for 36 minutes, the report found."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18minutes.html?pagewanted=2&hp

But to jump from undetected to "jamming" is nonsense, especially when the report states the problem was confusion (about the plane beign headed toward New York or DC), and th eonly "undetected" plane was 1 of 4. No reason to beleive folks jammed one plane taking off from Dulles, but not the two from Logan or the one from Newark-- esp. since the two latter flights were both headed toward DC. (That is, if one were goignt o try to jam, it seems to me it woudl be based on destination, perhaps with the idea that the latter palnes also took off after the planes from Logan likely woudl have (and did) hit the Towers before the others did or would have.)

[winterbadger]

Also, based on what I heard yesterday, they actually had AA77 on radar the whole time, it just wasn't on the decisionmakers' scopes because of a software glitch. They didn't recognize it as AA77 immediately because they thought that AA77 had crashed or was going in the opposite direction and had not asked air controllers in the direction it actually went to look for it.

Whoever that is whose voice is being played over and over on the airwaves saying "Oh, jeez, I don't know" to the question of "should we scramble aircraft to find/intercept this flight"... They're going to be pilloried. Not just for the indecision in the face of a damn obvious answer, but for his tone. And, frankly, he should be. It was 15 minutes before UA93 crashed, an hour *after* the first plane had hit the WTC. There's no possible excuse for that person's response not to have been, "We haven't yet? Oh my god, yes, right away!" If the passengers hadn't done what they did, failure to react on his part could easily have meant that today there would be a ruin where the White House or the Capitol building stands.

[robbysmom.livejournal.com]

yup, and weirdly, the UA 93 passengers had more info-- and from cell phones-- than the folks in charge of air defense seem to have. Very bad.

oh, and the Pres. could only get thru to the VP and the staff in DC also by cell phone? and that can not eb a secure line, as far as I know.

Of course, I can tell you that cell phones all over the NY metro area after 8:50 that day. Having heard a report on a NY AM newsradio in the car, I grabbed he phone to call C. who who was her way to the dentist, the sign to me that soemthign was drastically wrtong was in fact that the phoens didn't work, which made me more crazed to contact C. based on my belief that she'd need to get to the parish. She did eventually, but it was hours before I reached her by landline.



as you may recall, our T1's worked the whole time, however.