Category: Bloomington Group

Dear Kevin,

I took the time to listen to your March 15, 2006 lecture “A 9-11 Whistleblower Examines the Official Conspiracy Theory“ to gain an appreciation of your point of view. Let me say at the outset that your lecture of that date is not debatable at any level. I would be interested in viewing an updated version to see if your vision has matured, especially now that the files of the 9-11 Commission are becoming available. Absent an update, let me address a few points.

Your Response

Here I will address some of the topics you mention and, for convenience, in the order you introduce them.

First, I did not work on the New York issue except as it concerned FAA and NEADS.  However, I  have read enough of the NIST report to know that it is not “dismally weak, highly inconsistent, and complete false,” as you have it.  Further, I know of no verification of the “independent discovery of explosive residues in the WTC dust.”  I find that supposition tenuous, misleading, and scientifically ungrounded.

Second, let me clarify a point. You site my “stated appreciation for Joel Hirschhorn.”  I mentioned Joel Hirschhorn for one reason and one reason only. He is trying, within your movement, to point out some essential issues and to move you out of a “do loop.”   I hope you see that and understand what he is telling you. I don’t subscribe to his basic point of view any more than I do yours.

Third, you mention that you have met with your own Congressman.   Ironically, it was such a Congressman, Representative Burton, who directed the DoD IG to investigate the Cuban shoot down of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.  Either your Congressman–perhaps it is Burton–or Lee Hamilton could compel a similar inquiry for you were your issue sufficient.  As you are also aware Hamilton has a new public platform for action, the National Security Preparedness Group.   You might consider approaching that group.

Fourth, since you have not read Dean John Farmer’s new book I suggest you do so and verify in your own mind that Ekonomou’s characterization of “flat-out misrepresentation” is valid.  I am confident you will find differently.

Fifth, I gather from your site logo and your statement “we know it was a terrorist attack” that you accept the fact that four planes were hijacked and used to attack New York City and Washington D.C., and that you distance yourself from any suggestion to the contrary.  Your hypothetical statement/question “What we don’t know is: Who were the terrorists?” does in fact beg a question.  If not Atta and company, then who?

Sixth, you speak to FOIA, a lack of transparency and the extreme redaction that is involved.  I share your concern and do what I can to pry more out into the public domain.  I archived my work files so that I could get at them and continue to explore the events of the day.  The lack of some information is frustrating.  What we do know is that NARA has second and third levels of effort in the offing, but that will take time.  By their own accounting they have released about 35% of the holdings.  Still to come are the master paper files, the audio files of recorded interviews, and the electronic files on the two servers, one classified and one unclassified.  NARA does have a mechanism for requesting release of redacted information if a case can be made; you might want to selectively pursue that.  I understand that approach was successful in obtaining the redacted phone number concerning the Olson call, for example.

Finally, let me speak briefly to a non-issue, “we have some planes.”  The convergence of evidence, a term with which I am sure you are familiar, is that the term from air traffic control primary sources correlates to American Air 11 and Mohammed Atta.  There is no credible evidence to suggest otherwise.   I am puzzled that a simple analytical problem such as this causes you any degree of consternation.

Additional Comments

Independent of the construct of your letter and considering your 2006 presentation, let me address a few other things that caught my eye.

First, there is no such thing as an ‘Official Conspiracy Theory.”  As I said in my initial letter the facts of the day are straight forward and tell a consistent story.   If it is your purpose to tell a different story then you are obligated to establish what that story is and provide a body of evidence—pre-event, event, and post-event—that supports your story. You have not done that.

Second, your presentation is wrong on so many levels that it defies analysis.   For example, the facts are compelling, conclusive, and definitive that American Airlines flight 77 impacted the Pentagon.  To argue otherwise does a disservice to the men, women and children who died there that day.  Visit the Pentagon Memorial and sit on the bench of the youngest victim.  Look around and ask yourself why the Memorial is constructed as it is and reflect on the story the Memorial tells you.

Third, ask yourself one simple question.  Why is it that you have not been successful in the media, the courts, and the Congress?  If your postulation has any credibility at all it would gain some traction, somewhere.  You can endlessly speak about the need for a new investigation as a mantra but without Congressional will, jointly or individually, that won’t happen.  It will be helpful if you can gain a Senate sponsor, but the work of Dan Burton shows that you can also work at the Representative level.

Last, on the subject of your position and your perspective, I take your letter to be a singular voice and not necessarily the consensus voice of the Bloomington Group.  I would be very much interested in hearing other voices; surely there is diversity of view, exposition and discussion.  I cannot believe that all members take, for example, your 2006 presentation as gospel.  Having said that let me shift gears back to my own perspective.

My Perspective

First, read my Welcome and my page on Becoming a Commission Member.  It was my pleasure to associate with two hard working and dedicated staffs during my tenure with the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the 9-11 Commission.   Both endeavors and their final reports were fact-based, verifiable, and definitive.   Both staffs wrote the reports, by the way.

Can more be learned?  Certainly.  Will finer-grained and more complete analysis be done?  Inevitably.  One example is the Creed/Newman work on Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11. I paraphrase the authors here, but one key point they made was once AA 77 touched the Pentagon the laws of physics and chemistry took over.  We can extend that statement to the World Trade Center complex.  Once AA 11 and UA 175, separately, touched the Towers, the laws of physics and chemistry took over.  And those laws explain everything that happened subsequently, including the collapse of buildings one, two, and seven.

Second, as I said before, I am beyond debate and Q&A in my own continuing work.  I have expanded on specific subjects such as Delta 1989 and the Bobcats as the occasion warranted and, based on my work files, will place other things in perspective on request, such as the Otis Scramble.   Further, it remains my intention to set the Scott Trilogy in context.  That Trilogy is a primary source for the public record concerning events of the day as the Commission Staff understood it when we began work. I am two-thirds done and am now looking at the rules of engagement issue which is the subject of Scott’s third article.

Third, and most important to me, I am continuing to look at events of 9-11 through the lens of Chaos Theory and that is where I try to devote the most time.  That focus has led me, for now, squarely back to the final episode in the Scott Trilogy.

Finally, the facts of the day and events leading up to that day have been credibly established by the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the 9-11 Commission.  Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and flew them to a grim fate.  n the process the World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon damaged, and a final target saved by the only people that day, ultimately, who could make a difference, the passengers and crew aboard UA 93.

Amicably,

Miles Kara

Dear Mr. Kara,

Thank you for your “Open Letter to the 9-11 Working Group of Bloomington.”  As a member of that group, I’m glad to see you express interest in our work and I appreciate your invitation to further discuss the 9/11 Commission report in a public forum.  It’s unfortunate that you’re not willing to engage in Q&A, however, as the questions are many and, to this day, the answers are very few.  It is also unfortunate that you are not willing to debate the facts, because we would be happy to have you come to Bloomington for a public debate.  But a dialogue of any sort is a welcome start.

For six years now, I’ve been focused on the work of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the ongoing independent investigation into what happened at the World Trade Center (WTC).   The WTC reports finally generated by NIST have been shown to be dismally weak, highly inconsistent, and completely false.  Frankly the NIST reports are a shameful excuse for science.  Add to this the independent discovery of explosive residues in the WTC dust, which NIST did not test for or even consider, and we must suspect that a cover-up has been intended with regard the events of 9/11.

Although I have not had as much time to evaluate the 9/11 Commission report, my understanding is that it too is mostly, if not entirely, false.  This is evident from the very start, where the report states its primary aim to “provide the fullest possible accounting of the events surrounding 9/11.”   It is now widely known that many of the most important events of 9/11 were never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report at all, let alone presented in the fullest possible accounting.  These complete omissions include the destruction of WTC building 7, the testimony of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony concerning the Vice President and the approach of Flight 77, the connections between al Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI, and many other examples.  A number of the omissions and distortions in your report have been detailed by Dr. David Ray Griffin in an easy to reference book.

Considering these facts, our group’s excitement about your offer to collaborate with us is tempered by the suspicion that you might continue to engage in the same “exacting investigative work” that the Commission report attributes to you.  For my own part, this suspicion is aggravated by your stated appreciation for Joel Hirschhorn, who you claim is “value added.”  My experience with Hirschhorn, someone I’ve met and presented with, is that he does not strive for a “paradigm shift” by any means.  In fact, he appears to promote a futile pandering to the status quo that would result in the 9/11 Truth movement becoming as useless as a concrete parachute.  Worse yet, Hirschhorn was involved with misrepresenting an honest group of investigators and promoting a poorly considered draft bill for Congress that called for investigation of WTC theories that literally no one supports.

Therefore I’m not encouraged by your suggestion that we subscribe to a new three-part plan of action, which in fact is not new.  There have been countless attempts at engaging corporate media sources in reporting the basic facts about 9/11, and most of those attempts have failed.  There have also been a number of 9/11 lawsuits filed, and to date, all of those have been rejected before the evidence could be discovered or presented.  Finally, there have been many attempts to reach Congress with the facts.  The 9/11 Working Group has met with the staff of our own congressman, and also with our former congressman, 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton.  Unlike you, Mr. Hamilton was not opposed to a new investigation, and he gave us a long list of excuses for why your 9/11 Commission investigation report was not sufficient.

We can no longer afford to ask our politicians and media to cure our corrupt system.  It is the corporate media itself, and the corporate-funded politicians that maintain the corrupt system, and that are the problem.  We must rebuild our media and our government, and the truth about 9/11 has the power to do just that.  In doing so we will need to be aware, as you wrote, of “the frauds, opportunists, and paper millers who serve primarily as a major distraction.”

This brings me to John Farmer and his new book, which I agree does not intend to state that the 9/11 Commission report is completely false.  To the contrary, although I have not read the book I understand from others that its approach is much the same as that of the Commission’s report.  I learned this through attorney John Ekonomou, who wrote to Farmer a few weeks ago and later copied me on his message.  Ekonomou purchased the Farmer book and was appalled at how quickly he realized that it was a “flat-out misrepresentation” of the facts.

But getting back to the struggle for truth, and your offer to help, we should see if there is common ground as you mentioned.  You say that an event occurred on 9/11, and you call it a terrorist attack.  Having met many of the Americans around the country who are alarmed by the lack of truth about 9/11, I can tell you that this appraisal is shared by almost all of them.  We know it was a terrorist attack.  What we don’t know is:  Who were the terrorists?

You can help us continue building an honest answer to that question.  As you’re no doubt aware from our website, our group has received a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses from government agencies.  Some of those responses are enlightening, while others are not particularly useful due to the ongoing lack of transparency surrounding the events of 9/11, and the extreme redaction that is involved.  But among the documents we received, we have noticed many facts that do not support your Commission’s report, and we’ve noticed a number of surprising things that should have been in your report but were not.

Starting out in a small way, let’s talk about “We have some planes.”  Can you tell us where this phrase originated from, in terms of records made by air traffic controllers or others involved in the events of 9/11, and how you attributed it to the alleged hijackers?   It is the title of one of the chapters of the 9/11 Commission report, and I believe you have taken credit for that analysis to some degree.

With a small step such as this, I think we might be able to begin working together for the benefit of all.

Sincerely,

Kevin R. Ryan

September 29, 2009

An Open Letter to The 9-11 Working Group of Bloomington

I am Miles Kara, former professional staff member of both the 9-11 Commission and the Congressional Joint inquiry that preceded it.  Recently, I started my own website, www.oredigger61.org, as perhaps you have discovered.  If there are specific subjects you would like me to address I will consider doing that, with two caveats.  First, I have found the Q and A approach to be counter-productive and that is one of the reasons I started my own website.  Second, I am not interested in a debate over the facts of the day.

The primary reason I started my own site was that I knew when the Commission’s files were released that a great deal of my work would be made public.  I also knew that I had the opportunity to do additional research and work using my own files.  So, by starting my own site I am able to dictate the pace of my work and the subject matter.  I prefer to focus on the theoretical and for me that is Chaos Theory as is evident from the categories on my website.

However, the opportunity to delve further into specific issues is both useful and interesting.  Examples of such issues are my articles on Delta 1989, the Bobcats, and the so-called mystery plane.  I have requests from correspondents to write about the Otis Scramble and about UA 175.  I may or may not do that as I grapple with completing my re-look at the Scott Trilogy (https://www.oredigger61.org/?cat=20) which is fundamental to understanding why the public story was as it was when the Commission began its work.

Concerning your work, let me state at the outset that I appreciate this initiative: “This blog is now strictly private, viewable by members only.”    The ‘wild west’ nature of the web blog world is not conducive to the type work you are about.  Your publication of occasional public comments, however, caught my eye, this one in particular:  “9/11 MIND SWELL by Joel S. Hirschhorn”

Hirschhorn is valued added and I am sure his input has been cause for discussion.  Permit me to add my perspective.  My unsolicited advice to you and to correspondents who have emailed me is that if you seek a paradigm shift, such as Hirshhorn suggests, then you have at least three courses of action available.

First, seek publication in the main stream media; a serious article in something like the Sunday Washington Post magazine.  Michael Bronner had no problem telling the NEADS story in Vanity Fair, for example.  Second, file suit in the court of your choice, but make sure you are on solid legal ground.  I am aware of at least two attempts along this line in which the fundamental language of the baseline documents is flawed.  Third, seek a Congressional sponsor to task one of the statutory Inspectors General to conduct an investigation.

Concerning the latter approach, I personally worked on several cases where individuals and small groups successfully petitioned for a Congressional or Government-directed investigation.  For example, the private American citizen, Jennifer Harbury, caused the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to direct several statutory Inspectors General, acting jointly, to investigate the death of her guerrilla husband, Bamaca, in Guatemala.  Another private citizen, a mother, petitioned Senator Shelby to direct several statutory Inspectors General, acting jointly, to determine why and how her Marine Corps son was killed in the Zona Rosa Massacre in El Salvador.  A private citizen, Jose Basulto, and his organization, Brothers to the Rescue, successfully petitioned Representative Dan Burton to direct the DoD Inspector General to investigate the shoot down of two of his aircraft by the Cuban Air Force.  Finally, the POW/MIA movement ultimately petitioned Senator Bob Smith to form an ad hoc Senate Committee to investigate the POW/MIA issue.  Not happy with the results the movement continued to petition Senator Smith and he directed the DoD and CIA Inspectors General to further investigate the issue.

As I said, I worked on all four investigations and of the four the one most relevant to you is the POW/MIA movement; its successes and failures.  The joint report of the Inspectors General is available through CIA FOIA: “A Review of the 1998 National Intelligence Estimate on POW/MIA Issues and the Charges Levied by ‘A Critical Assessment’ of the Estimate (29 February 2000).

From the beginning of my work on 9-11 (https://www.oredigger61.org/?page_id=598) I have noticed strong parallels between the POW/MIA movement and the 9-11 movements (plural is deliberate).  First, each started as strictly a matter of the families.  Second, the families themselves split into basically two factions; those who wanted to move on with their lives and those who demanded full accounting.  The latter faction further split into those who accepted new evidence and those who were convinced that nothing the government said or did was true.

Third, the movements attracted outsiders.  I over simplify here, but the attracted outsiders came in two flavors; those who had a genuine interest in the issue and a real empathy with the families, and those who sought nothing more than personal gain and fame/notoriety.  The fraud that bedeviled the POW/MIA movement and preyed on families who wanted to believe even beyond hope is well documented and sad.  I’m confident that the Bloomington Group is quite capable of separating those with genuine interest from the frauds, opportunists, and paper millers who serve primarily as a major distraction.

Penultimately let me say that no new investigation is needed.  The more the Commission’s work files are released the more the Commission’s report is validated.  If a new Commission is formed, or even two or more working in parallel, their findings will be no different than the Commission found.  The facts allow no other outcome.  A new Commission may come up with different recommendations and may tell the story differently, focusing on some things more than others.  But a new Commission will not come up with new findings the facts are not there to provide otherwise.

We can start a discussion on common ground.  Everyone agrees there was an event on 9-11.  I have constructed a neutral framework for analysis (https://www.oredigger61.org/?page_id=10) that allows for anyone to call that event what they wish.  I call it a terrorist attack.  If someone wants to call it something different, that’s fine, but that person or group is obligated to provide an evidence-based pre-story to support its story of events on 9-11.  I have seen no articulation of a pre-story to support anything other than a terrorist attack.

Finally let me see that I am disappointed to see the number of shallow articles on the web (I’ve had a Google alert “9-11 Commission” since August 2004) that state that Dean John Farmer’s new book The Ground Truth says that the 9-11 Commission report, itself, is false.  I am confident that The 9-11 Working Group of Bloomington knows that what Farmer said was that the Commission’s report was accurate and what was not accurate was the Government’s reconstruction of events in the aftermath.

Sincerely,

Miles Kara