In the just-published issue of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes:
"Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in 'tinfoil hats,' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as 'conspiracy theories,'(1) and The New York Times declared that 'there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.'(2)"
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
In the rest of his long, detailed article Kennedy exhaustively demonstrates that thist time, as so many times throughout history (1), the "conspiracy theorists" got it right. To illustrate this, I give a few examples from the article before returning to the questions that I promised to address:
"But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004."
"A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13)"
"According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. 'As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,' he says, 'it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)"
"The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered '27,' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)"
I recommend that you read this very important article. Now, this has several points of contact with 9/11, the central one being that the mainstream media have not demanded, or participated in through investigative journalism, a real and impartial examination of the evidence indicating that, minimally, important parts of the official story cannot be true.
In my diary "A Finnish perspective on 9/11" I pointed out that the 9/11 Commission lied or kept silent about important information, such as Minister of Transportation Norman Mineta's detailed testimony and the fact that several of the alleged hijackers turned out demonstrably alive after the hijackers' name list had been published.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Not surprisingly, few of the comments I received addressed these issues. One commentator wrote "I have no real interest in the Cheney thing, so there's not much for me to say about it". I found a reply like this deeply upsetting. All evidence points to the Commission having been caught lying, but this does not interest the commentator? In my response, which has since been deleted, I asked how far he would allow the Commission to go along this road.
In another deleted reply I asked why, after the current administration has been caught lying on almost a daily basis, the results of the investigations controlled by the same administration should be regarded as truth and nothing but the truth, although anyone with even a partially open and critical mind can see important problems in the official story, as argued by David Ray Griffin in the following excellent article:
http://www.911truth.org/...
Griffin writes "the 9/11 truth movement is in one respect the most important movement in our country and even in our world today. This movement has accomplished its first task--providing evidence strong enough to convince anyone with an even slightly open mind that the official story is a lie."
In some responses I was challenged to show a structural engineer who supports the controlled demolition hypothesis. Here is a link to several structural engineers' responses to Steven E. Jones, who challenges the NIST investigation:
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/...
And here is an article by a Finnish Doctor of Engineering on WTC-7 (his research on the Twin Towers has not been Englished):
http://www.saunalahti.fi/...
Someone wrote that 9/11 skepticism has not found an audience in Finland. That is quite incorrect. The truth movement in Finland is strong and growing. I'll be glad to provide more information if requested.
Considering that over 80 percent of the responders to my poll agreed with me that the issues I exemplified have not been convincingly explained by the authorities, the "official position" of DailyKos on 9/11 ("Do not dare express doubt about the official story") is totally untenable. This also implies that a vocal minority of "Koshers" keeps labelling the majority "tinfoil hats" for their skepticism toward the official explanations. Such attempts at thought and expression control are just likely to alienate "free-thinkers" from the forum.
If there is a fear that discussing controversial topics could disrupt the community, why doesn't DailyKos set up, say, a special forum for the majority of its readers to freely discuss 9/11?
Finally, thanks to all who wrote constructive comments as well as to all who voted. As you can see, I have set up a new poll. I trust that no poll fraud will take place on DailyKos. ;-)
(1) For a historical perspective, see operation Gladio, another disclosed conspiracy:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/...
"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."
This was the essence of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of terrorism and deceit directed by the intelligence services of the West -- against their own populations. Hundreds of innocent people were killed or maimed in terrorist attacks -- on train stations, supermarkets, cafes and offices -- which were then blamed on 'leftist subversives' or other political opponents. The purpose, as stated above in sworn testimony by Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra, was to demonize designated enemies and frighten the public into supporting ever-increasing powers for government leaders -- and their elitist cronies.
First revealed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1991, Gladio (from the Latin for 'sword') is still protected to this day by its founding patrons, the CIA and MI6. Yet parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have shaken out a few fragments of the truth over the years. These have been gathered in a new book, 'NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe,' by Daniele Ganser, as Lila Rajiva reports on CommonDreams.org."