Ron Paul and the 'kook squad' [Ron Paul's 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Albatross]

[snip] If Mr. Paul intends to stay in the race or even maintain his credibility, he needs to dissociate himself quickly from irresponsible accusations that the government is guilty of 3,000 counts of mass murder. Not only are such ideas offensive, but they are being used around the world to bash America and organize terrorist cells against us. American lives are endangered by such irresponsible propaganda.

For those who have not gone slumming on the Internet, the September 11 conspiracy theorists say no airplanes hit the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, even though hundreds of thousands of eyes watched the planes hit live, in person. They refuse to accept Osama bin Laden's proud claims of responsibility for September 11, instead "outing" bin Laden as a paid CIA agent. They claim that 30 tons of burning jet fuel could not melt steel, even though steel's strength is reduced at 1,000 degrees Celsius and melting is irrelevant. More than a dozen steel buildings have failed from fire alone. Last month, a burning fuel truck caused the steel in a San Francisco highway overpass to melt and fail. These people are not interested in answers or truth, but only in bashing America with falsehoods.

It's the same old story. When liberals thought "maverick" John McCain was useful for undermining President Bush and Republicans, he was the darling of the news media and liberals pretending to be Republican voters. Now that Mr. McCain is supporting Mr. Bush's position on the dominant issue of the day, the mainstream news media has shunned Mr. McCain like an old mistress once the affair is over.

The Ron Paul bashers know that...but they don't care...they seek to destroy by making baseless accusations and hoping that, every time they say it, a few more people will believe it. They should be ashamed and embarassed...but I doubt they are

ACTUALLY I do care. I say that for Ron Paul to avoid drowning politically he has to make a clean break. Whatever point he was trying to make (and I do understand it), he came dangerously close to agreeing with the 9/11 "Truth" (read FALSEHOOD) crowd. Meanwhile, Ron Paul is riding around on their shoulders. The 9/11 conspiracy nuts ARE Ron Paul's foot soldiers -- together with anti-American, anti-Bush opponents of the war in Iraq.

My point is that for Ron Paul to avoid being sucked under the waves, he needs to clarify his remarks so as to leave no doubt that he has nothing in common with those who wear tin foil hats and claim that tens of thousands of people have all kept silent about a scheme to (allegedly) murder 3,000 of their former citizens -- NYC firefighters, NYC police, Arlington/Fairfax firefighters, airline personnel, civilian radar operators, etc., etc. all have kept silent for no apparent reason after seeing their fellow countrymen murdered. Yeah, right!

THE POINT IS that Ron Paul HAS fought for limited government and a strict construction of the Constition (if perhaps absurdly strict, but at least principled).

THE POINT IS that all that Ron Paul has fought for is in danger of going up in smoke if he allows himself to be tarred by the kooks.

But this is very hard, because the people who are aggressively promoting Ron Paul on talk shows, C-SPAN, swamping internet polls, etc. ARE THE ANTI-WAR AND 9/11 KOOKS. If Ron Paul cuts the ropes to this crowd, he has no special status or energy to his campaign. If he does NOT cut the ropes to this crowd, he may be permanently ruined politically.

If you mean to say by your post that there are conspiracies of incompetence involved in the government's failures surrounding 9/11, you are correct. Opinion polls consistently show that most Americans believe the government is NOT "telling us everything it knows about 9/11." Count me in that group! Why isn't that 100%?

Of course the bureaucracy is covering up its own incompetence! Would you expect anything else? The government is covering up its failures before, during, and after 9/11. Furthermore, there are many things that the government SHOULD NOT tell us about intelligence it had -- which might help our enemies. REMEMBER that we were listening to Osama Bin Laden's satellite telephone calls until the news media blew that secret and reported that publicly. Bin Laden stopped using the telephone, and we lost the ability to listen in on his conversations. (Hear that 9/11 kooks? We were actually LISTENING to Bin Laden talk about planning terrorism against the United States. There is no doubt that Al Qaeda was behind 9/11.) SO WE DO NOT WANT TO ALERT AL QAEDA ONCE AGAIN to how we are tracking them and monitoring them.

So of course there are many things that the government SHOULD NOT tell us about 9/11, lest they give aid and comfort to our enemies.

But the 9/11 kooks abuse these opinion surveys and try to fool the gullible into thinking this proves that Americans believe that the U.S. government or the Jews were behind 9/11. Opinions that the government "is not telling us everything it knows" DO NOT SUGGEST THAT ANYONE OTHER THAN AL QAEDA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR 9/11. Those surveys merely tell us exactly what they say: "the government is not telling us everything it knows." I would think that the response to that opinion survey would be 100% having that opinion!

ACTUALLY I do care. I say that for Ron Paul to avoid drowning politically he has to make a clean break. Whatever point he was trying to make (and I do understand it), he came dangerously close to agreeing with the 9/11 "Truth" (read FALSEHOOD) crowd. Meanwhile, Ron Paul is riding around on their shoulders. The 9/11 conspiracy nuts ARE Ron Paul's foot soldiers -- together with anti-American, anti-Bush opponents of the war in Iraq.

He has not come close to agreeing with the 9/11 Truth movement...he has said (on more than one occasion), unequivocally, that there is no evidence of a 9/11 conspiracy and he does not believe it to be true.

I know many Ron Paul supporters and don't know a single one who believes that 9/11 was an inside job or that I would call anti-American...every one (including myself) loves this country as much as you do...is committed to having a federal government that acts in accord with its Constitutional limits...and does not want the US government to continue pursuing a foreign policy built on some bureaucrats' arrogrant grandiose ideas of remaking the middle east...policies that are counterproductive to the efforts to win a war on terror. US intelligence has stated that the worldwide jihadist movement is feeding off, and growing because of, the war in Iraq...so, yes...I'm anti-Iraq war, pro-America, pro-US Constitution and not a 9/11 "Truther and I support Ron Paul (although, like most regular people I'm sure...I'm way too busy to be a "foot soldier" for any candidate :))

My opinion is that this attempt to try to link Ron Paul to 9/11 Truthers is a cynical smear campaign...I see that Michele Malkin essentially accused Ron Paul of being a Truther on Fox News...then issued a weak apology on her blog...you'd think she'd have the decency to go back to the place where she made the charge to make her apology but I don't think fairness is really the goal among some of these smear artists

Here is an excerpt from an interview Ron Paul have Reason magazine last week:

Reason: What did you mean when you told the Scholars that "the [9/11] investigation is an investigation in which there were government cover-ups"?

Paul: I do think there were cover-ups, and I think it was mainly to cover up who was blamed, who's inept. See, they had the information. The FBI had an agent who was very much aware of the terrorists getting flight lessons but obviously not training to be pilots. He reported it 70 times or whatever and it was totally ignored. We were spending $40 billion a year on intelligence. It wasn't a lack of money or a lack of intelligence, it was a lack of the ability to put the intelligence together. Even the administration had been forewarned that something was coming, the CIA had been forewarned. So it was a cover up of who to blame. I see it more that way.

Reason: The position of the Student Scholars is that 9/11 was executed by the U.S. government. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Paul: I'd say there's no evidence of that.

Reason: So what did you mean when you told Student Scholars you'd be open to a new 9/11 investigation?

Paul: Well, I think the more we know about what we went on is good. But I don't think there's any evidence of [an inside job] and I don't believe that. The blame goes to bad policy. And a lot of times bad policy is well-motivated. The people who believe in a one world government are well motivated, but they disagree with me.

The unmentioned elephant in the room is our dependence on oil. This region is the world’s last and final reserve of the thing that permits our way of life - relatively cheap energy.

We need to maintain order and access to this region to survive. It is necessary for any future leader of this country to find ways to do this difficult task. Ron Paul has denied the obvious, and neglects the future of this country.
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There is no “final reserve” but a series of “final reserves” economically available at ever higher prices. At sustained prices above $50 per barrel, there are very large deposits of economically recoverable oil in the US and Canada. Some of these are already in production, and more could be developed when needed. However, it would be better to drain the inexpensive reserves in the rest of the world first, as transition to other energy storage and generation technologies is made.

Unless whoever rules in ME just leaves it in the ground, the oil will be accessible to us. Commodities are fungible, and if the sellers in ME won’t sell to us, then those who buy from them will... at the right price, and in the meantime domestic development is encouraged if prices remain high. Our way of life will adjust to price changes as it always has and, if we don’t smother ourselves in unproductive state barriers to development and allow the state to spend us into insolvency, technological developments will lead to satisfactory substitutes.

In the end, our most serious challenges are domestic, e.g., unwillingness to modernize and expand domestic refining capacity (NIMBY constraints having become a major contributor to the recent price volatility) and open borders in an era of debilitating entitlement programs well on their way to consuming the national wealth. The immigration flow will not end as long as the large incentives to relocate are maintained.

Ron Paul does not appear to be electable, but whoever manages to grab the brass ring will have to deal with the above, and fairly soon. Arranging one’s affairs to reflect the likelihood that those who get to “deal with it” are no more competent than those who have steered us to where we are now appears to be the most prudent course.

FlyoverPress.com”

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May 25 (2 days ago)
The problem with these big “L” Libertarians is that they are not radical enough. For example, Hornberger says, “...there is an obvious solution to the problem: End the U.S. government’s role as international policeman, invader, intervener, interloper, provider, and sanctioner.”

If one of us little “l” libertarians had written that sentence, we would have said, “...there is an obvious solution to the problem. End the uS government.”

However, he did get it right when he said, “...the federal government and the country are composed of two separate and distinct groups of people.”

thegunny, 419
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Why Ron Paul’s Answer Terrifies Them

by Jacob G. Hornberger

In one short answer to a moderator’s question in the South Carolina debate in which Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul suggested that U.S. foreign policy motivated the 9/11 terrorists, Paul produced an earthquake that is shaking the Republican establishment.

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party proposed banning Paul from future debates. Besieged by adverse public reaction, however, he quickly backed down.

FoxNews commentator John Gibson and columnist Michelle Malkin somehow reached the warped conclusion that Paul was suggesting that U.S. officials had committed the 9/11 attacks. After bloggers pointed out the inherent contradiction between that claim and Paul’s point that foreign terrorists motivated by U.S. foreign policy had committed the attacks, Malkin quickly issued a retraction.

Other members of the Republican establishment suggested that Paul was “blaming America” for the 9/11 attacks. That’s because they think that the federal government is America. In actuality, as our American ancestors understood, the federal government and the country are composed of two separate and distinct groups of people – those within the federal government and those within the private sector, a point reflected in the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the country from the federal government.

What’s going on here? Why the enormous, almost panicky, overreaction to what is a rather simple point about U.S. foreign policy? Why the attempts to suppress, distort, and misrepresent? What are they so scared of?

The answer is very simple: The Republican establishment knows that if the American people conclude that Ron Paul is right, the jig is up with respect to the big-government, pro-empire, interventionist foreign policy that Republicans (and many Democrats) have supported for many years.

Paul’s point is a straightforward one: U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East generated the anger that motivated the 9/11 terrorists. If he had had more time, Paul undoubtedly would have pointed out the U.S. policies in the Middle East that made people so angry: (1) the U.S. government’s ardent support of Saddam Hussein and the furnishing of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction to him; (2) the more than 10 years of brutal sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children; (3) UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement to Sixty Minutes that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from the sanctions had been “worth it”; (4) the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands, knowing the adverse impact such action would have on Muslims; (5) the “no-fly zones,” which were never authorized by either the UN or the U.S. Congress and which killed still more Iraqis, including 13-year-old Omran Harbi Jawair, whose head was shot off by a U.S. missile while he was tending his sheep in 2000; (6) and the long-time, unconditional financial and military aid provided the Israeli government.

Thus, by invading Iraq the U.S. government was simply engaging in the same course of interventionist conduct that had produced prior acts of terrorism against the United States (not only the 9/11 attacks but the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole). As Paul stated in the debate and as U.S. intelligence agencies now confirm, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which has killed and maimed countless more Iraqis, has been a dream-come-true for Osama bin Laden’s recruiters.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks also generated the “war on terror,” which in turn has given us ever-increasing budgets for the military-industrial complex, out-of-control federal spending that debauches the currency, omnipotent power to the CIA, an endless stream of color-coded fear-mongering, warrantless monitoring of telephone calls and emails, torture, kidnapping and rendition, secret overseas prison camps, indefinite detention, cancellation of habeas corpus, military tribunals, “enemy combatants,” and ever-increasing infringements on civil liberty.

If the U.S. government’s foreign policy of interventionism is, in fact, the root cause of terrorism against the United States, as Congressman Paul contends, there is an obvious solution to the problem: End the U.S. government’s role as international policeman, invader, intervener, interloper, provider, and sanctioner. Foreign terrorism against Americans would disappear along with the need for a “war on terror.” Civil liberties that were suspended could be restored. A sense of balance and harmony could return to our lives.

Ending interventionism, terrorism, and the “war on terror” would also mean that the era of big government in foreign affairs could be brought to an end. No wonder the Republican establishment is so terrified of Ron Paul’s foreign-policy message.

May 24, 2007

Jacob Hornberger [send him mail] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He will be among the 22 speakers at FFF’s upcoming conference on June 1–4 in Reston, Virginia: “Restoring the Constitution: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.”

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