Friday, February 26, 2010

TERROR !! - we’ve been hammered

Let's face it, folks: we've been hammered.

Eight and one-half years after September 11, 2001–that day of atrocious shocks whose serial and collective trauma we, the public of the United States, early came to know through Corporations' mass-media by its date's convenient shorthand for emergency, " '9/11′ "–the U. S. public's understanding of the most consequential crimes of September 11, 2001 and these crimes' cover-up is most crucially an issue of and for our mental health, as well as it is an issue of and for our moral well-being and our descendants' futures.

To free ourselves from trauma and lies, we need to step up and say aloud what we know to be true.

We need to confirm to each other what we know to be true about the crimes of 9/11/01, crimes whose fraudulent attribution to " 'al Qaeda' " continue to most direct the 21st-century " 'War on Terror' ", no matter how horrific or challenging the conclusions to which these truths lead us.

Kevin Ryan's book-length, four-part, extensively footnoted study, 'Demolition Access to the World Trade Center Towers' (READ BELOW!), is a great blessing. It throws light onto figures and relationships that have been previously obscured. It provides for us a cavernous mountain of illumination from which we can gain clarity and courage.

Let's first look back at our 21st century from September 11, 2001 onward.

Eight and one-half years ago we, the TV-viewing public, had to gape and grieve as Networks' TV repeatedly showed us one Boeing 767, American Airlines Flight 11, fly into the World Trade Center's North Tower and United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767, fly into the other 110-story Twin Tower. Oh my God, it's not an accident! Then we saw the Pentagon itself gaping from another reported airliner's crash. My God, the Pentagon! Then the second Tower that was hit, the South Tower, World Trade Center 2, for God's sake, burst into unprecedented disintegration–killing how many thousands, we thought. And then the first Tower that was hit, WTC 1, also burst into disintegration like a volcanic elevator smashing into Lower Manhattan–killing how many more thousands, we, the shocked and sympathetic masses, thought.

What had happened? A review of that day in New York City, including the fall of a third skyscraper, World Trade Center Building 7, at 5:20 in the afternoon, can be seen through more than 10 minutes of survivors' and Network commentators' spontaneous reports in a youtube video that has had more than 14 million viewings. These scores of eyewitnesses remark on "explosions" and "demolition." [1]

But a contrary analysis, one of strange exactness, was introduced on the day. The seeming "demolitions" were actually the result of airliners' impact and jet fuels' fire, Jerry Hauer (then a Managing Director of Kroll, Inc., one of the 'Security' firms examined by Kevin Ryan in Part Two of his "Demolition Access …' study, as well as a Senior Adviser to the United States' Department of Human Services) immediately told Dan Rather of CBS. Further, the attack bore "the fingerprints of Osama bin Laden," Jerry Hauer, standing for his interview in dust-shrouded Lower Manhattan, somehow said with uncanny prescience over CBS on the day of " '9/11′ ". Readers can hear Jerry Hauer between 2:33 and 6:48 of another widely viewed online video, '9/11 Solution'. [2]

Jerry Hauer had been Director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management between 1996-2000 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a span in which the City's 'Command Center' was installed on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center Building 7, and Jerry Hauer had afterward been 'Associate Director of Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis' for another contractor with the U. S. Government that figures repeatedly and integrally in Kevin Ryan's study, the Sciencee Applications International Corporation (SAIC). [3]

Late in the September 11, 2001 afternoon, as George W. Bush stayed in his Nebraska refuge of Offutt Air Force Base (somehow the scene of a 'charity event' hosted by financier Warren Buffett for at least one South Tower-based Chief Executive Officer earlier in the day [4], [5], [6]), World Trade Center Building 7 also fell, its 47 floors imploding into its own footprint at nearly free-fall speed [7], the "collapse" of this skyscraper somehow predicted by CNN [8] and reported by the BBC [9] 65 and 26 minutes respectively before WTC 7's actual destruction.

And within the next three days we found that 18 and then 19 Arab hijackers (Hani Hanjour, the supposed, incompetent pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, came last) were there for billions to blame, materialized into a TIME cover-sized row of 'al Qaeda' targets through marvelously rapid efforts of the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation [10], the Official Story seeming as ready made as the PATRIOT Act that swiftly accompanied it. [11]

And the echo-chamber of Governments and Corporations' mass-media, forming one organ of unity that may be seen to serve an indivisible Corporate Government, chorused us into war in Afghanistan for the 'Attack on America'.

And we had a new Homeland and another, new and more insidious War. That war, the borderless and expanding, domestic and international     " 'War on Terror' ", has only grown more into the "new normalcy" [12] [13] that Dick Cheney announced in October 2001. Invasions of privacy and curtailments of civil and Constitutional liberties [14] have only increased with the " 'Change' " from the George W. Bush into the Barack Obama Administrations. In little more than one year the Barack Obama Ad.'s salesmanship has advanced preventive detentions [15], Fusion Centers [16], troop-surges [17], and body-scanners to thwart explosive underwear that (1) are manufactured by clients of the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertof [18] and that (2) emit more radiation than medical X-rays do [19], et cetera, et cetera.

In June 2009 President Obama repeated in Cairo, Egypt the lie that has explained the need for U.S. troops in Afghanistan for eight and one-half years: 'I'm aware that there's still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.' [20]

Thus we still live under a Big Lie, a blanketing deceit that degrades us daily.

Evidence that disproves the Official Story for " '9/11′ " has built steadily since October 2001, we'll see below. Signs point one way. A whole picture grows clearer. Further repression follows more false-flag acts of terror. The United States' and all Western societies suffer from needless debt. The global public's well-being is more and more divided from the agenda of a supranational Corporate Government that's run by the biggest of Banks. In the near future we may see that the half-Black agent of " 'Hope' " is to become more the patsy for a de facto Rule of Terror, his arc and that of White woman Sarah Palin coupled in the aim of them [21] toward incapacitating civil war in the United States, the kind of war that financiers most favor for profits and control, as Abraham Lincoln learned and the New York Times noted more than 140 years ago. [22]

As counter to the shocks and lies we've received from Governments and media that serve a ruling few (the Ruling Few, let's say), we, the working masses (We Masses, let's say) have produced and absorbed a tremendous amount of compelling, alternative information over the past eight and one-half years.

Through courageous and compassionate researchers such as Kevin Ryan we've gathered plenty of facts to counter the Rule of Terror by, for and of supranational Corporations.

In particular we've learned a lot about events of September 11, 2001 and about indubitable facts that point to true crimes of that day and to the cover-up of those crimes by likely perpetrators and orchestrators.

The most revealing and threatening fact widely known now is that the Twin Towers and World Trade Building 7 must have been 'demolished by explosives set off within their structures.' [23]

Early on, October 2001, J. McMichael of Australia noted the Twin Towers' strength of columns and beams and the limits of jet fuels' fire, disproving the Official Story's then fantasy of 'melted' steel and floors, in his funny and trenchant 'Muslims Suspend the Laws of Physics'. [24] In 2002 and 2003    " '9/11′ " / Facing Our Fascist State stated primary phenomena, proving Twin Towers' demolition, over Berkeley, California's KPFA and Los Angeles, California's KPFK. By 2004 Jim Hoffman's 911research.wtc7.net had tens of pages of text and photographs and videos that depicted the Towers' destruction [25] and that analyzed the North Tower's dust-cloud [26] and that refuted the U. S. Federal Emergency Management Agency's 'World Trade Center Building Performance Study'. [27] In May 2004, to the amazement of one caller, demolition of the Twin Towers was discussed on Canadian network TV. [28] In November 2004 chemist Kevin Ryan of Underwriter Laboratories exposed online that the 'summary' by the U. S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology completely misrepresented findings by U L about the capacities of Twin Towers' steel to withstand the effects of fire. [29] Less than two weeks later, Kevin Ryan was fired by U L. [30]

In 2005 the 2004 911 Commission Report by the United States' National Commission on Terrorist Attacks was rebutted by Dr. David Ray Griffin as a 567-page or 571-page 'lie.' [31] Dr. Griffin remarked that the best-selling Report completely omitted mention of WTC 7's destruction. From 2005 to 2008 many more pages of Reports from the U. S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology were found to be a 'Mirage' by Jim Hoffman [32], regarding the Twin Towers, and to rely on be unverifiable 'computer models' by a 16-member team of professionals, regarding WTC 7. [33] [34].

In 2006 architect Richard Gage began the outreach that has led to 1025 architects and engineers joining him in the call for 'a truly independent investigation' into the crimes of September 11, 2008 on the website of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (ae911truth.org)., as of February 1, 2010. [36]

Videos about NIST's reliance on 'computer models' alone [37] and on the presence of molten metal as not an al Qaeda concoction [38] can be seen on youtube, as can be seen the more than 10 minutes of survivors' and Network commentators' spontaneous exclamations about "explosions" and "demolition". [39]

In April 2009 a team of nine authors published their most conclusive findings about nano-thermites in the WTC wreckage–'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe' [40]. One author, chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen, discusses the paper in an interview on mainstream Danish TV. [41]The public has been mindful. The United States' and the world's peoples have taken in the credible evidence mounted over the past eight and one-half years. Hundreds of millions unto billions now doubt Governments' and billions-dollar media's stories about the leading pretext for the " 'War on Terror' ".

In November 2004 89% of 10,641 respondents in a CNN poll answered 'Yes' to the question 'Do you believe there is a U.S. Government cover-up surrounding 9/11?' [42] A poll begun by the Washington Post on September 7, 2006 asked: 'Do you believe of any the conspiracy theories suggesting the U.S. Government was somehow involved in 9/11?' 67% of of 96,937 respondents have voted: 'Yes. The government has left many questions unanswered about that day.' [43] In October 2006 a New York Times/CBS telephone poll pf 983 adults found that 81% believed that the Bush Administration was 'Hiding something' or 'Mostly lying' about foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. [44] In October of the next year, 2007, a Zogby Poll of 1000 adults found that 67% were informed enough to want an official investigation into the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. [45]

In short, we in the U. S. who doubt official explanations for " '9/11′ " are a steadily more informed majority.

Our majorities are very like the majorities who still doubt the Official Stories for the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. 'Pancake collapses' and 'truss failures' work no better against clear-eyed reason than a "pristine bullet" (Senator Russell Long) that somehow produces seven exit-wounds and an indigent, globe-hopping '"lone gunman" do.

Strong skepticism regarding official explanations for " '9/11′ " exists in many nations outside the U. S. [46], along with wide interest in alternative findings.

Google 'architects engineers' and see what comes up first (ae911truth.org as of February 1, 2010). Google the more specific '911 investigations', '911research', or '911 guilt', and see which websites or other media lead the lists as most visited.

Now, as we move through the second month of 2010, many hours' worth of detailed, peer-reviewed analyses and proofs are available at the sites journalof911studies.com and stj911truth.org (Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice) as well as at ae911truth.org (Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth) and at 911research.wtc7.net and its companion 911review.com.

For readers who want a quick review for themselves or others, the homepage of ae911truth.org admirably condenses 'characteristics' of 'demolition' of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7. [47] A 10-page 'Brief Guide to Proofs …' in my 2009 The World Is Turning examines these areas of phenomena in the Twin Towers' destruction: Explosiveness, Pulverization, Speed, Symmetry, and Molten Metal. [48]

Any child, or anyone with an open mind, can see obvious realities upon looking at footage of the falling Twin Towers and WTC 7.

Buildings do not explode into dust of themselves. Nor does a 47-story skyscraper (WTC 7) implode into its own footprint of itself. 110-story skyscrapers of 485,000 tons each do not plummet through their central structures and paths of greatest resistance at nearly free-fall speed due to their potential gravitational energy. Nor do they instantly pulverize tens of thousands tons of concrete of themselves–100,000 tons of concrete slabs in each Twin Tower were blown to 100-micron-or-less bits in less than 15 seconds. Nor do truss-failures fling 60-foot-long steel beams 400 lateral feet. 200,000 tons of structural steel in each Tower, including 47 central columns that were as much as 52 inches wide at their bases, along with 236 perimeter columns, were all brought to ground in less than 15 seconds on September 11, 2001. [49]

The fact of demolition is difficult to absorb. This fact carries with it the deeply disturbing recognition that more than 2600 people–479 of them public-service personnel and 343 of these personnel New York City firefighters–thus were the victims of premeditated mass-murder. [50]

Who could have committed so awful a crime? So calculated and cold-blooded a crime? Why? And what more might they do? What more might they do to everyday people such as ourselves? Now that we know, what can we do?

Contemplation of what the fact of the three World Trade Buildings' demolition means may be as unsettling to one's gut as were the shocks that we suffered in the first hours of " '9/11′ ". Fear of what the fact means may be as premeditated and vital a part of the the Rule of Terror as any other part of this vast, complex and ongoing psychological-operation.

The fact and its implications are nonetheless as inescapable as the Earth's rotation around the Sun was through Galileo's telescope.

Kevin Ryan helps us to face facts. His 'Demolition Access to the World Trade Center Towers', heroic in the breadth and depth and detail of connections it presents, confronts squarely the investigation that needs to follow from eight and one-half years of probing holes in the Official Story.

His four installments repeatedly ask for us: 'Who could have placed explosives in the World Trade Center towers?'

The question produces a corollary that was also asked by ex-U.S. Military officer "Mr. X" as he assisted District Attorney Jim Garrison's understanding about the assassination of JFK: "Who has the power to cover it up? Who?"

Answering these questions of placement and cover-up and acting on our answers can free us from the Rule of Terror.

Our answers can turn from Dick Cheney's "new normalcy" and Barack Obama's selling of more war, debt and repression into our futures. We can turn to a 21st-century that's instead of marvelous, multi-national self-empowerment, cooperation, and renaissance. Now we indeed do have the tools for all to be free.



Part One of Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' presents 'Tenants' of the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7.

 His Part One especially investigates those tenants of WTC Buildings 1 and 2 that occupied airliners' impact-zones on 9/11/01. It also examines these tenants' means, motives, and opportunities for profiting from the " 'War on Terror.' "

Tenants



Twin Towers' tenants could of course provide access to the confidential planting of explosives in their spaces. Among the tenants with the most crucial occupancy for demolition in both of the Towers were the world's largest insurance broker as of 9/11/01, Marsh & McClennan, the world's then-largest Bank, Mizuho Holdings, and the multi-armed Primark Corporation.

A previous article by Kevin Ryan, 'Another Amazing Coincidence Related to the WTC', published in January 2008, tracked the exact or nearly exact parallels between floors of the Towers that were upgraded before 9/11/01 and the floors that were then subjected to airliner-impact and explosive failure on 9/11/01. [51]

For the North Tower, WTC 1, struck by American Airlines 11 at 8:46 a.m. and destroyed at 10:28 a.m., the parallels are inclusive. The North Towers' floors 93-99 were areas of impact, fire and failure on 9/11/01. Coincidentally, floors 93 to 100 of WTC 1 received 'upgrades' between 1995 and 2000 by Marsh & McClennan, Marsh & McClennan then occupying more than 361,000 square feet on these floors. [52]

Marsh & McClennan was headed on " '9/11′ " by CEO Jeffrey Greenberg. Among other principals in Marsh companies during 2001 were former Goldman Sachs partner Stephen Friedman (a Board member of the Central Intelligence Agency's investment-arm In-Q-Tel) and Craig Stapleton (a partner with George W. Bush in the Texas Rangers), and Mathis Caviallavetta (former President of the Union Bank of Switzerland, this UBS the nominally Swiss Bank that in 2008-2009 garnered $5 billion from the United States' Federal Reserve System through the Federal Reserve System's bail-out of gigantic insurer and speculator the American International Group). [53]

Perhaps most interesting among Marsh & McClennan executives on 9/11/01 is L. Paul Bremer (Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999-2000 at the same time as he was Managing Director of Kissinger Associates), for Kevin Ryan relates that L. Paul Bremer also served on the international advisory board for Komatsu, a Japanese mining and machinery company which shared with its Texas-based partner Dresser Industries in the 1996 patenting of  'a thermite demolition device that could 'demolish a concrete structure at a high efficiency, while preventing a secondary problem due to noise, flying dust and chips, and the like.' [54]

In 1998 Dresser Industries merged with the Halliburton Corporation that was then headed by CEO Dick Cheney.

On April 14, 2007 L. Paul Bremer was indicted by the San Diego Citizens' Grand Jury on the Crimes of September 11, 2001 in New York City for the 'Charge' of 'Conspiracy to Defraud Private Individuals and the Public Interest through Acts of Terror that Furthered Illegal and Legal Profits.' [55]

L. Paul Bremer was also one of 16 executives wanted for questioning by the San Diego Citizens' Grand Jury … for the 'Charge' of 'Conspiracy to Commit Mass Murder.' Among others so wanted were George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Maurice Greenberg, Jerome Hauer, Peter G. Peterson, and David Rockefeller. [56]

L. Paul Bremer was interviewed by NBC on September 11, 2001. You can watch him online. His composure is extraordinary for someone whose firm suffered 295 deaths earlier in the day. [57]

Arms of the Primark Corporation also occupied both Towers, having offices on floor 78 of the South Tower (Baseline) and floor 11 (Primark Decision Economics) of the North Tower. Coincidentally, the South Tower's impact-zone on 9/11/01 was floors 77 through 85; its major fires on the " '9/11′ " morning were on floors 79-83; and its floors of primary, explosive failure were 77-83. Supposed fire-proofing upgrades of floors 77 and 78 in the South Tower occurred in 1998. Primark's subsidiary Baseline is recorded as specifically upgrading the southeast corner of floor 78–the exact place that United Airlines Flight 175 hit WTC 2.

On 9/11/01 Primark's CEO was Joseph Kasputys, an honorary U. S. Navy Commander who had at least 20 years of close relations with the U. S. Department of Energy (the DOE funder and receiver for much research into nano-thermites).

Coincidentally, another Primark subsidiary, Triad International Maintenance Company, modified Boeing 757s and 767s, we learn from Kevin Ryan.

Floors 79-82 of the South Tower's impact-zone were occupied by a Corporation large among the assets of Mizuho Holdings: the Fuji Bank.

Coincidentally, the Fuji Bank 'modified' all four of its WTC 2 floors between 1997-2000, according to Kevin Ryan's reference to a report by the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, 'NIST NCSTAR1-1H, table 13-2, in footnote 33 of his 'examination of Twin Towers' Tenants'.

In 2000 the Fuji Bank merged with the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank and the International Bank of Japan to form the then largest Bank in the world, Mizuho Holdings. Coincidentally, the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank occupied floors 48 to 50 of the North Tower, WTC 1, for Mizuho Holdings.

Prior to its merger in 2000, Fuji Bank's largest investors were Union Carbide, Mobil Oil, and Raytheon. Fuji Bank Chairman Toru Hashimoto now sits on the Board of Deutsche Bank with Lockheed Martin Chairman Norman Augustine. During the 1990s, we learn from Kevin Ryan, all three Mizuho Holdings Banks were implicated in fraudulent loans, some of these transactions involving executive-level members of the yakuza.

As a sidelight, all but 10 of World Trade Building 7's obviously imploded 47 floors had the financial-services firm Salomon Smith Barney as their major tenant. SSB's immediate ancestor, Salomon Brothers, had in the 1980s invented 'mortgage-backed securities' and in 1991 had received the largest fine ever levied against an investment-bank at that time, $290 million. [58} Salomon Smith Barney was on " '9/11' " wholly owned by Citigroup, we know from Kevin Ryan.

In November 2008 Citigroup's award of $306 billion in guarantees from the U.S. Treasury Department made it the largest single recipient of U.S. Government bail-out funds to Banks so far. [59]

Security

Part Two of Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access' study examines companies and individuals that provided presumable 'Security' for the two Towers and other property in the WTC complex.

At least 29 individuals are named in this part as executives in Corporations' or Governments' offices (whether Federal, New York State, or New York City) that were nominally responsible for protecting the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan between 1973 and 2001.

Among the firms most responsible for security at New York City's WTC before " '9/11′ " were Kroll, Inc. (since 1993 23% owned by the American International Group), Stratasec or Securacom (whose executives or Board members included George W. Bush's brother Marvin and their evident, mysterious cousin Wirt Walker), the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) that somehow envisioned the 1993 bombing of the Twin Towers and that provided the most non-U.S. Government investigators to the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology after the 2001 demolition of the Towers, and the BDM-related Ensec International of Brasil.

The reach of even this short list of Corporations that profit from 'Security' travels from yakuza-partnered businesses in Japan to the training of Militaries across the Middle East to the opium-into-heroin laboratories of Afghanistan and Pakistan and thence back to the money-laundering and credit-creating Banks of New York City, Washington, DC and the City of London (Bank of AmericaBarclay's, Chase, Citigroup, …) [60]

We meet many of them again and again in the third and fourth installments of Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' study.

Four Leading Players

Part Three of Kevin Ryan's study is a relative encapsulation, titled 'Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence',  focusing on four of the more well-known Corporations or individuals integral to New York City's former World Trade Center and the" 'War on Terror' ".

The Carlyle Group is a holding company of various global investments that was headed on 9/11/01 by former Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director (1978-81) and former U.S. Secretary of Defense (1987-89) Frank Carlucci. Frank Carlucci's decades-long service to the supranational Corporate Government also had an evident role in the overthrow of national Governments in the Congo and Brasil during 1960 and 1964 respectively and a role in the devastation of Black inner-city neighborhoods through the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare between 1972-74 [61]

On September 11, 2001 the Carlyle Group was 'the eleventh largest' recipient of U. S. Department of Defense contracts, according to GlobalSecurity.org. [62]  Among the Carlyle's Board of Directors on 9/11/01 were former U. S. President George H.W. Bush, former U.S. Secretary of State and former U. S. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker, and Osama bin Laden's brother Shafiq of the billionaire bin Laden family, all of whom were coincidentally present for a Carlyle Group meeting at the Washington, DC Ritz-Carlton on September 10-11, 2001. The Carlyle Group's holdings benefited multiply from the mass-murder on 9/11/01. Dan Briody of Red Herring magazine wrote on January 8, 2002: 'As the Carlyle investors watched the World Trade towers go down, the group's prospects went up.' [63]

Henry Kissinger is the former U.S. Secretary of State (1973-77), the orchestrator of massacres in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor and elsewhere between 1969-1976 [64], and a recipient of  the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Through his lead role in Kissinger Associates, founded in 1982 'with $350,000 lent to him by Goldman, Sachs and a consortium of three other banks', [65] Sir Henry (the German immigrant and long-time Rockefeller beneficiary was named a Knight Commander by the British Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1995) was part-owner of several Corporations that profited directly from destruction of the three WTC Buildings on 9/11/01. [66] These Kissinger-partnered Corporations on 9/11/01 included the Blackstone Group (headed on 9/11/01 by Peter G. Peterson, who was then the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York [67], the American International Group (headed on 9/11/01 by Council on Foreign Relations' and Federal Reserve Bank of New York eminence Maurice Greenberg [68]), and Kroll, Inc.. (headed on 9/11/01 by Michael Cherkasky, the former Manhattan District Attorney who was Chief of Investigations into the 1993 bombing of the WTC Twin Towers [69], a bombing that became lethal due to the insistence of FBI Special Agent John Anticev to FBI informant Emad Salem, as revealed in a tape-recorded conversation that was published by the New York Times and Washington Post and Atlantic Monthly and then covered up. [70]

Michael Cherkasky was another person wanted for further questioning by the San Diego Citizens' Grand Jury … on the 'Charge' of 'Conspiracy to Commit Mass Murder' as well as the 'Charges' of 'Destruction of Evidence' and 'Obstruction of Justice.'

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) is the San Diego-based 'intelligence contractor' that Kevin Ryan ranks as having received 'more individual government contracts than any other private company in America' and a firm responsible for advising New York City's World Trade Center on measures for security before and after the 1993, FBI-assisted bombing of the Twin Towers as well as a firm with expertise in nano-thermites. Among employees of SAIC or members of its Board of Directors before 9/11/01 are the Bush/Obama Administrations' Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former CIA Deputy Director and U. S. Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management Jerrome Hauer (1996-2000), a Managing Director of Kroll, Inc. on 9/11/01, and Jerome Hauer's close associate Steven Hatfill, a supporter of South Africa's apartheid in the 1980s and a prime suspect in the September/October 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S [71], and Duane Andrews, Assistant Secretary of the U.S.  Department of Defense under Dick Cheney during the 1991-92 Gulf War.

The Halliburton Corporation and its subsidiaries on 9/11/01 of Dresser Industries and Kellogg, Brown, Root share a history of branching out from the supply of oil-field drilling services to the supply of logistical support and surveillance to overseas U.S. Military Forces.

The latter expansion of Halliburton's business especially increased when Dick Cheney was Chief Executive Officer of this Corporation between 1995-2001, Cheney appointing to Halliburton's Board of Directors Kissinger Associates' Lawrence Eagleburger (U.S. Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush) and Charles DiBona, a former Special Assistant to U.S. President Richard Nixon, DiBona also President of the American Petroleum Institute for 19 years and a close associate of the head of companies that had offices in the airliners' impact-zones of both WTC Towers,  Joseph Kasputys. Like Joseph Kasputys, Charles DiBona was and is also a Commander in the U.S. Navy.

Clean-up and Cover-up

Kevin Ryan's fourth installment concerns companies and individuals responsible for 'Clean-up' at the " 'Ground Zero' " site in Lower Manhattan.

We meet individuals and Corporations new and old to the 'Demolition Access' study in its concluding part.

Control of clean-up of a crime-scene is of course vital to cover-up of the crime or crimes in question. Three municipal officials are reported through different media to be principal in the clean-up/cover-up, according to footnotes 70, 71 and 72 in Kevin Ryan's 'Clean-up' installment. These official are: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the city's Office of Emergency Management Director Richard Sheirer, and Executive Deputy Commissioner Mike Burton of the city's Department of Design and Construction.

Overseeing the most immediate possible removal of mounded, tangled and molten steel and other WTC evidence for the City was  LZA/Thornton Tomasetti, headed by engineers Charles Thornton and Richard Tomasetti. Charles Thornton later joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Board of Advisors regarding the 9/11/01 destruction at the World Trade Center. Richard Tomasetti took responsibility for the removal and/or recycling of  hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and other evidence taken from " 'Ground Zero' ". According to Kevin Ryan, Richard Tomasetti has claimed to not know "the direction that investigations … would take."

Under LZA/Thornton Tomasetti for the WTC clean-up were five major contractors: AMEC Construction Management, Bevis Lend Lease, Tishman Construction, Tully Construction, and Turner Construction. The parent Corporations of AMEC Construction Management and Bevis Lend Lease are based in London, England.

These five major contractors employed numerous local sub-contractors for hands-on waste-removal. Kevin Ryan finds that some of the latter are connected to Italian Mafia felons. Bevis Lend Lease received $277.2 million from the U.S. Government for its efforts, AMEC Construction Management received $65.8 million, Tully Construction $76 million, and Turner Construction $39 million.

These private contractors' earnings loom large when compared to the $600,000 allocated by the U. S. Government for FEMA's 2002 'Building Performance Study' and the $20 million allocated for NIST's three-year 2005 draft of a 'Final Report'.

Turner Construction was a tenant on the North Tower's 38th floor.

Coincidentally, Turner Construction was also the contractor responsible for supposed fire-proofing upgrades on floors of the Twin Towers that were most hit by Boeing 767 impacts and/or that were most affected by fires and faults on 9/11/01, a statistically implausible pair of coupling coincidences at which Kevin Ryan also marveled in his 'Another amazing …' piece of January 2008. [72]

Turner Construction was also the contractor responsible for demolition of Seattle's Kingdome on March 26, 2000, in partnership with another Corporation that cleaned up at both " 'Ground Zero' " and at the 1995 demolition-site of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Controlled Demolition, Inc.

Coincidentally, Turner Construction is also intimately connected to nano-explosives through its building of the 1997-completed headquarters for the Naval Sea Systems Command, said command's Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare center being the 'only reliable source for aluminum nano-powers in the U. S', according to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2001[73].

Turner Construction is also a champion of  'Green' building in U. S. Public Schools, praised by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Clinton Global Initiative, and a proponent of reducing 'greenhouse gases'. [74]

Turner Construction is also since 1999 a subsidiary of Hochtief of Germany, a firm whose website recounts its 'increasing use of forced labor' from 1939-40 onward while Hochtief served the Nazi Government [75]. Coincidentally, in 1999 Tom Leppert, later Mayor of Dallas, Texas and now a close neighbor of George W. Bush's, became CEO of Turner under Hochtief. [76]

The 'Clean-up' installment of Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition …' study reports new accounts of criminality by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation.

FBI agents Richard Marx, Pasquale ("Pat") D'Amuro, Kevin Donovan, Edwin Cogswell and Barry Mawn are found by admissions within their own ranks to have stolen significant pieces of steel and other evidence from the Fresh Kills landfill to which WTC wreckage was hauled (footnotes 105, 106). Pat D'Amuro was the lead FBI Agent into investigation of the 1993 FBI-assisted bombing of the Twin Towers and–according to FBI Director Robert Mueller's commendation in promoting D'Amuro to be the Bureau's Assistant Director of Counter-Terrorism on January 31, 2002–also headed 'the PENTTBOM investigation' that somehow identified all 18 and then 19 supposed Arab hijackers (Hani Hanjour, the incompetent, supposed pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, was a latecomer to the FBI's list) within 72 hours of the 9/11/01 morning.

PENTTBOM, it should be noted, is the FBI's own acronym for its self-described investigation. The little-known FBI designation of PENTTBOM stands for: 'Pentagon Twin Towers Bombing' [77]

The FBI-designated 'Bombing' of the Twin Towers also brought the Science Applications International Corporation back into New York City's World Trade Center crimes. As related by Kevin Ryan, SAIC 'supplied the largest contingent of non-governmental investigators to the WTC investigation conducted by NIST.'

Coincidentally, the story of Special Forces expert John Blitch and " 'Ground Zero' " began on the first day of his employment with SAIC: September 11, 2001. According to Wired magazine, on 9/11/01 John Blitch happened to be leaving his position as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army's Special Forces to direct the Center for Intelligent Robotics and Unmanned Systems at the Science Applications International Corporation facility in Colorado [78]. John Blitch had been charged by the U.S. Army's Special Forces with heading the Defense Department's Tactical Mobile Robots Program within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, over the preceding three years.

According to Kevin Ryan, John Blitch had also been in his U.S. Army career chief of unmanned systems at the U.S. Special Operations Command (US SOCOM), a Command which conducts ' "covert and clandestine missions" ', and John Blitch had also won an award for his 'ground-breaking research in robot assisted search and rescue conducted during the Oklahoma City Bombing response.'  According the Association for Computing Machinery, John Blitch used his Oklahoma City research to 'develop many of the robot platforms that were eventually used at the WTC.'  [79]

The demolition of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995 by internal explosives–causing 168 strictly civilian deaths–and the subsequent cover-up of that demolition and mass murder and sensational, terrorist pretext is in many aspects a precursor for the true crimes of " '9/11′ ". [80] [81]

Wired magazine wrote in its May 2002 issue that on 9/11/01 the 43-year-old John Blitch scrapped his 1500-mile drive from Washinton, DC to SAIC's Center for Intelligent Robotics and Unmanned Systems in Littleton, Colorado and instead 'donned his fatgiues, dug out his military ID, and worked his cell phone, summoning colleagues to Florida to Boston to pack up their finest robots and rendezvous at Ground Zero.' [82]

Honoring John Blitch in March 2002 with the $5000 Eugene Lawler Award for Humanitarian Computer Science, the CEO of the Association for Computing Machinery, John White, said: "John Blitch helped the New York community apply robot-assisted search and rescue technology at a critical time in our history." The press-release for the Association for Computing Machinery notes: 'Eighteen hours after the attacks, robots were on the rubble pile.' [83]

What might be an alternative explanation for John Blitch's and the robots' swift " '9/11/ " work? Kevin Ryan quotes James T. Thurman's Practical Bomb Scene Investigation: 'Regardless of how efficent the initiator is, all the explosives are never entirely used or destroyed.' [84] Kevin Ryan then offers this interpretation of  John Blitch's background and amazing coordination of activities amid the Twin Towers' molten wreckage: 'Therefore, Lieutenant Colonel Blitch of SOCOM and SAIC had the means and opportunity to neutralize any unwanted explosives that might have been buried in the pile at Ground Zero.'

Another immediate arrival to the demolitions' crime-scene was David Griffin of North Carolina.

A laudatory article in the Asheboro. North Carolina News and Courier reports that the 34-year-old Griffin, son of the founder of D.H. Griffin Companies, was like James Blitch in driving promptly to New York City after the " '9/11′ " attacks. Ostensibly without credentials, the younger Griffin is reported to have somehow walked through check-points at the clean-up site on Friday, September 14, 2001 and given crucial advice about dismantling a steel overhang remaining from Building 7.

The next day, the younger Griffin from Asheboro was reportedly asked by 'New York City authorities' to 'become overall head of the demolition teams at the disaster area.' He later came to be called "Carolina" by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the newspaper's story relates. [85]

The D. H. Griffin Companies had 'worked closely' with the United States' Department of Energy and Department of Defense as early as 1994, according to Kevin Ryan.

Global Gangsters, Partnered Plutocrasies, Captains of Technology for Totalitarian Financiers, and What We Can Do

'Investment guru Warren Buffet offered a bleak prediction for the nation's national security, saying a terrorist attack on American soil is "virtually a certainty." ' CNN, May 6, 2002

"Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives as the result of a single attack, or a set of coordinated attacks." Then United States Vice-President Dick Cheney, speaking to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on January 14, 2004, the day before then Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, met with the News Department heads of the ABC, CBS, CNN, and FOX Networks in Steven Brill's Manhattan apartment 'to discuss how they'll cover the next terrorist attack' (the New York Post)

'Another attempted terrorist attack on the United States in coming months is "certain," the heads of major U.S intelligence agencies told a Senate committee Tuesday.' CNN, February 3, 2010

'I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in taking this stand– either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice.' Muhammad Ali in his statement on refusing induction into the U.S. Armed Forces, April 26, 1967, quoted in The Soul of a Butterfly (written with his daughter Hana Yasmeen Ali), 2004

The stories of John Blitch and ' "Carolina" ' Griffin are small though instructive pieces among the intercontinental cast of characters, Corporations and Governments that Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' presents.

Within this Introduction alone we've met more officers and executives of the supranational Corporate Government than one mind can easily trace.

Within my brief overview of Kevin Ryan's far-reaching 'Security' installment, we've met SAIC and Kroll, Inc, Stratasec or Securacom, BDM, TRW, Ensec, Komatsu, Lockheed Martin, and more.

Within the 'Clean-up' installment, we've met Turner Construction and its parent Hochtief, AMEC Construction Management and Bevis Lend Lease of London, England, the FBI, FEMA and NIST, the new Mayor of Dallas, and many more.

Among 'Tenants' with exclusive or dominant occupation of floors in the North and South Towers that were subject to 'upgrades', then Boeing 767-impact, and then disintegrative failure that can be explained only by internal explosives, we've met Marsh & McClennan, the Primark Corporation, and Mizuho Holdings. Through these mere three Corporations and their executives and interlocking subsidiaries and Board memberships we've encountered connections that are literally unending.

Thus, the range and powers of the networks and capacities that Kevin Ryan has traced for us in his 'Demolition Access …' may seem overwhelming.

What these intrinsically conspiratorial Board members (for what is a Corporation but a conspiracy of like-minded individuals to achieve secret advantages?) have evidently done may give pause to even the intrepid.

We must face and ask again: If these relative few are capable of the ruthless mass murder of more than 2900 civilians in one epoch-making day, the day we know by its synonym for emergency, " '9/11′ ", what more might they do?

What more might these Ruling Few and the technologies that they control do to us, We Masses, we who are bound to these few through the systems of credit and debt that they also control, we who live under seemingly all-seeing eyes?

Now that we know, what can we do? How can we fight back? How can we get free?

Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' offers us keys through the very enormity of detail that he's presented about the intercontinental integration of the supranational Corporate Government.

First, we can see that though their interlocking partnerships are endless and often secret, the Ruling Few are really few. They are also really limited in their visions of the present and future. The very lack of compassion that allows them to carry out acts of terror such as " '9/11′ " and " '7/7′ " [86], as well as to carry out practices of deceit, theft, bigotry, impoverishment and worse every day, also blinds the Ruling Few them to imminently possible solutions through cooperation. They're bound to systems of exploitation and speculation that are failing as fast as the largest Banks and Stock Markets were in 2008-2009 before our national Governments fed these obviously illogical, inhumane and malignant Corporations and institutions more trillions of currency.

The only real question about the Ruling Few's trajectory is whether We Masses on Earth–in particular We Masses in the United States–let them further feed from us and thereby take us down.

Our courage must answer now whether we'll choose to stay bound to the Ruling Few's systems of credit and debt, their centuries-old game of creating money from nothing and empires for free, a game that inevitably brings We Masses to suffer and die in acts of terror and war.

Let's look further into specific pieces of our collective history and present so that we may better see ways to break free.

"Who owns General Dynamics?" the U.S. Military and "black operations" expert Mr. X asks New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in "JFK". Mr. X is prodding District Attorney Garrison in their Washington, DC meeting to more deeply probe "who" had the means, motive and opportunity to assassinate a U.S. President and cover up their crimes. Mr. X is referring to one weapons-maker, General Dynamics, builder of the F-111, whose profits soared due to the Vietnam War that escalated after the murder of John F. Kennedy.

In 1963 General Dynamics–a weapons-maker whose dollars-amount in contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense nearly doubled between2001 and 2003, post " '9/11′ ", like such gains in contracts for Lockheed MartinRaytheon, Northrop Grumman, et cetera [87]–was controlled by the Chicago-based 'industrialist and philanthropist' (wikipedia) Henry Crown. [88]

Regarding the General Dynamics F-111 as opposed to Boeing's model, according to the business-resource FundingUniverse: 'An investigation of impropriety in the selection process was interrupted when President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 and was not concluded until 1972.' [89}

29 years after JFK's murder, in July 1992, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company became General Dynamics' largest share-holder with its purchase of $4.35 million shares--or 14.1%--of G.D. [90] Warren Buffett was in 1992 credited with recently "saving" Salomon Brothers, the speculator Corporation whose descendant Salomon Smith Barney was the tenant on 36 of World Trade Center Building 7's 47 neatly imploded floors. [90] We know from Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' that too-big-to-fail bailout-recipient Citigroup wholly owned Salomon Smith Barney on 9/11/01.

Readers may also remember that Warren Buffett was also the host to a 'charity event' that somehow took place at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska on the morning of 9/11/01. Said 'charity event' included Anne Tatlock, the Chief Executive Officer of Fiduciary Trust, a Corporation that lost 87 employees to death in the demolition of the South Tower. [91]

In 1992, according to Chairman Warren Buffett's letter to more than 20,000 share-holders, Berkshire Hathaway owned 18.2 % of the ABC TV-network, 14.6% of the Washington Post publishing company, and 11.5% of the Wells Fargo Bank, as well as large holdings in Coca Cola and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, as well as its 14.1% of General Dynamics [92]

In 2009 Chairman Buffett's letter to Berkshire Hathaway share-holders reported on 18.4% ownership of the Washington Post and billions of dollars of new investment in General Electric (NBC) and Goldman Sachs. [93]

At present General Dynamics remains a favorite of 'guru' fund-managers and other multi-billions-dollar speculators. [94]

Gains to weapons-makers from wars in the Middle East and Central Asia continue. In 2008 Lester Crown, Henry's son, a former President of General Dynamics, wrote to 'a large number of Jewish voters' about his support of then Senator Barack Obama for U.S. President due to the Senator's 'stellar record on Israel'. [95] The increase in U.S. Defense Department spending in the first year of the 'Change' from the Bush to the Obama Administrations has been 12.7%–up from $515.4 billion in the 2009 Federal budget to $663.7 billion in the 2010 Federal budget. [96]

At the same time, debt, the most powerful means of profit and control over peoples and nations, has grown. Over the same span of less than two years, the total projected debt of the United States has risen much more than 100%–from $5.6 trillion to $14.078 trillion–largely due to the expenditure of trillions of dollars on the biggest of supranational Banks and other speculator Corporations. [97]

Proofs pile up. Signs point to increasing divisions and manipulated breakdown. The whole picture grows clearer. We Masses are meant to suffer more for the Ruling Few.

We can look into true horrors and see the same faces and grotesqueries illuminated in their shadows. The further windows that Kevin Ryan has opened for us and the lights that he's shone show the same Corporations and executives as integral to the crimes of " '9/11′ " and the ongoing theft of working-class and middle-class freedoms and wealth in the United States and around the world.

Proofs are as multiple and uniform as the headlines in U.S. newspaperson September 12, 2001 ('TERROR', 'TERROR', .., 'ATTACKED', ATTACKED', …, 'FREEDOM UNDER SEIGE', 'AMERICA VOWS REVENGE AS TERROR CLAIMS THOUSANDS', …), as assembled by Jim Hoffman in Waking Up from Our Nightmare [98], and in multi-national media after the summit of G-20 nations on September 25, 2009 ('G-20 to police new world economic order', 'Obama to Usher in New World Order at G-20', 'New World Order: Obama to Widen G-20's Role', 'G-20 to Become Premier Coordinating Body in Global Economic Order') from the London Telegraph to Fox News to NBC Miami to Russia's Pravda [99] [100] [101] [102].

Terror is to shape us. Crises are to bend and break us. We Masses are to be hammered more to fit the Ruling Few's uses.

We Masses are to lose national sovereignty as the Ruling Few destroy our economies. Our capacities for nativist resistance are to sapped and shattered as our Armed Forces are entangled here and there and our arms are taken away. Our capacities to imagine alternatives are to be as reduced as the minds of monkeys exposed to the same inputs, the same screens and sensory deprivation, 24 hours a day, every Time Zone around Earth.

We're to be hammered further into robots and serfs. We're to be taxed for driving and riding and smoking and breathing. We're to feel lucky to board airliners. We're to be strip-searched and irradiated by technology controlled by totalitarian financiers through their former Secretarys and eternal debtors….

Yes, those few, the Ruling Few, totalitarian money-lenders and office-holding henchmen, partnered in plutocracy, gangsters linked in skyscrapers and occult haunts around the world, mixed in their races and supposed religions and doomed due to their arrogance, elitism, and pathological lack of compassion.

The Ruling Few have yet to see that they need We Masses' genius to sustain any life worth living on this planet.

Kevin Ryan concluded his third installment, "Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton: A 9/11 Convergence', with a paragraph that stated the core of his immense findings. He suggested that those who seek truth and justice for the crimes of 9/11/01 must turn away from 'al Qaeda' as the culprit for phenomena that 'al Qaeda' could not have caused.

Alternatively, we who seek truth and justice must look at 'a far more powerful and highly connected system of intelligence and financial networks, represented by organizations like Carlyle, Kissinger, SAIC and Halliburton, that converged upon the events of 9/11.'

Kevin Ryan suggested finally: 'Understanding and destroying terrorism might simply be a matter of understanding and destroying the organizations that continue to profit from 9/11.'

The ultimate profiteers from " '9/11′ " and the " 'War on Terror' " are the Banks that ultimately control national economies as well as they control the four-legged monster which I identified as G.O.D.D. (Guns, Oil, Drug, Debt) in first writing about the 'Financiers behind 9/11′, May of 2004. [103]

Who owns Exxon Mobil/ Who owns Chevron Texaco? Who owns the Corporations that sell " 'swine-flu vaccines' "? Who owns the Banks that most profit from laundering money from narcotics such as opium/heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan and coca/cocaine/Crack from Latin America?

These Banks, the world's largest commercial Banks (Bank of America, Barclay's, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, …) are owned by the same families who control the private and for-profit Central Banks (the Federal Reserve System, Bank of England, Bank of France, Bank of Germany, Bank of Japan, …) that set national interest-rates and issue national money-supplies. [104] [105] [106]

We Masses need to be rid of these Central Banks first of all.

The step of withdrawing funds from the largest commercial Banks, as in the 'Move Your Money' campaign', is one good though partial turn. [107] [108] The step of moving sources of Government funding to publicly controlled Banks that can invest without usury in the public's well-being, such as the Bank of North Dakota with its singular $1.3-billion surplus now does, also makes sense, per the advice of Ellen Brown and Conan O'Brien. [109] [110] The step of a mass public withdrawal of funds from the largest commercial, supranational Banks in a 'National Strike' is a further, dramatic and radical step. [111]

More basic than any of these sensible rebellions and practical alternatives is recognition of the whole picture that Kevin Ryan has helped us to see.

The whole picture asks us throw off the deeper psychological holds that the Ruling Few have imposed on us. Act on what what we know to be true. Reject the very basis for the crippling nonsense of the " 'War on Terror' ". Encourage brave District Attorneys to investigate L. Paul Bremer, Dick Cheney, Jerome Hauer, George W. Bush and his father and brothers, … or independently begin a grand Jury and prosecution, as was done in San Diego in April 2007. Reject the transparently false pretext for the Ruling Few's wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen and …

Say aloud to each other obvious truths. "9/11 was an inside-job." "9/11 is a big lie." Say these obvious truths simply, calmly, forthrightly, and build from them to take our freedom and prosperity with tools of the 21st century.

Creatively join the social movements!!

Proceed forward. Turn to each other, combine resources and forces, and proceed forward. In the United States, check out possibilities at the Organic Consumers Association website. [112] Likewise that of the American Monetary Institute. [113]. Likewise the 'Solutions Revolution' at Bill Jablonski's puppetgov.com. [114 ]Separate from the Corporate Government as naturally as peoples move away from ruins and deserts and the tyrants and systems that would debase, dumb-down, and annihilate them.

Eight and one-half years is much too long to live under the thrall of murderous lies.

We can thank Kevin Ryan for much heavy-lifting of lies. We can thank him for removing Corporate Government blocks against our understanding and possibilities. We can appreciate his courage, clarity, compassion, humor, and then we can appreciate his courage again. We can thank his family's steadfastness too. Over six years ago Kevin Ryan lost his job at Underwriter Laboratories for publicly insisting that executives in that Corporation and in the United States Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) not lie about tests' findings as to the resistance against fire of Twin Towers' structural steel. He continued on his truth-telling course. He joined with Steven Jones in proving thermitic reactions in the steel and dust of debris from the Twin Towers' explosions. He listed 'The Top 10 Connections between NIST and Nano-thermites' in another far-reaching and ground-breaking paper. [115] He counseled Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf and others whose 'Confabulations' deny realities that most threaten them. [116] He thanked the National Geographic Channel (67% owned by financiers' loyal debtor Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation [117]) for an apology and honesty that of course nevcr came. [118]

Now Kevin Ryan has provided for us one more great resource.

His 'Demolition Access …' forms in its breadth and depths and strata something like a cavernous mountain of light. This cavernous mountain and its illuminated recesses may be seen to face the skyscrapers that were entirely taken down on September 11, 2001. Peer into the shadows that Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' exposes. Follow its labyrinthian connections. Trace the links between the Boards and conspirators among the millionaires and billionaires it names. See what happened when more than 2600 died–never forget–and see what is further happening to your nation, your integrity and sanity, your children's future, and your world. Feel that a good soul has bravely brought you news that may save your family. Courage, clarity, compassion, humor, and courage again. Answers are as simple as they are noble.


Good Riddance to the Big Lie: Kevin Ryan's 'Demolition Access …' Lights the Shadows

Posted by PUPPETGOV on Feb 22nd, 2010



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posted by u2r2h at 4:40 PM 1 comments

Monday, February 22, 2010

Iraq corporate media whore article in student paper

A new perspective on the Iraq question

by James Naish  WEBLINKwww.student-direct.co.uk/2010/02/a-new-perspective-on-the-iraq-question/comment-page-1/#comment-587

NEW?  Hahaha.  James will make it far in the halls of power. The capitalists need apologists that can write well. He needs to learn a bit about propaganda, though.
Defending the indefensible is not easy in the 21st century.  Keep reading Chomsky. 

The 1991 Gulf War was motivated entirely by realpolitik. Iraqi forces in Kuwait presented a significant threat to the West’s trading partner – Saudi Arabia – and so had to be repelled. However, it was essential not to remove the Ba’athist regime from power as Saddam Hussein presented a useful counterweight to the growing power of the Islamic Republic – Iran. A policy of containment was consequently established to ensure that Saddam Hussein could remain in office while being prevented from gaining or exercising such military power that he could threaten Western allies or interests.

By 2002 the containment policy was in tatters. After more than a decade of sanctions and attempted diplomacy, the West was still in the position of having to enforce and monitor sanctions, and for this cost, what gain? There was little evidence that the Iraqi regime had been reformed or was ready to co-operate with the crucial weapons inspections. Furthermore, brutal sanctions had crippled the Iraqi economy, leaving Iraq a somewhat second-rate business partner and causing a great degree of suffering to ordinary Iraqi people.

Many on the left had argued for simply terminating sanctions in the hope that this would empower Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. This line of reasoning ignored the near-impossibility of organising any kind of an opposition movement under the Ba’athist regime. Furthermore, the complexity of this task would have brought Saddam time, at the very moment of the reinvigoration of the Iraqi economy, to consolidate his own position in Iraq and to rebuild his crippled arsenal. In reality, then, the most humane and prudent solution was to depose Saddam Hussein.

This was a point which the left did their best to refute; it was claimed that the Ba’athist’s numerous war crimes could not justify the intervention due to Western backing at the time. Should, then, no government ever attempt to make amends for the crimes of its predecessors? Similarly, Noam Chomsky claimed that Saddam “wasn’t going to threaten anyone” if sanctions were terminated. One wonders if the “thousands of people” who faced “arbitrary […and…] systematic repression” (Amnesty International, 1999) would have agreed. In actuality, it was a fundamentalist commitment to oppose Western imperialism that led the left to betray those most deeply cherished principles: humanism and internationalism.

The position of those who supported intervention in Iraq was no less problematic; on what legal grounds could the intervention be justified? A war crimes tribunal could have been established to prosecute the relevant Ba’athist officials for the acts of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, and the genocidal al-Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds. This approach had significant advantages: strong evidence was already available to bring the case to justice; a precedent had been set (Yugoslavia); such an approach was supported by a strong humanitarian argument which, although dismissed, was not directly disputed.

Despite its strength, however, this approach was rejected in favour of a more pragmatic solution. Containment had dominated the debate over Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. (Saddam’s use of chemical weapons was viewed only as evidence to support containment). By 2002, the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) argument for removing Saddam was well established. By contrast, the process for dealing with the Ba’athists through a war crimes tribunal was less familiar and significantly more complex. It was, therefore, more attractive to pitch the intervention in Iraq as an extension of, rather than a break from, the existing policy.

Underpinning this miscalculation is the cause of the degradation of Iraq into chaos: after a decade of debate over Iraq policy, there was a general failure to recognise a change in the basic proposition: by 2002, it was not realpolitik, but rather the collapse of realpolitik that motivated intervention – a position entirely consistent with humanist objectives. This failure inhibited the provision of an objective critique of policy. The left, locked in their view of intervention as essentially imperialist, dismissed the policy, rather than critique the strategy. Those who favoured the war attempted to tie fresh policy to the existing debate over WMDs, regardless of relevance; a meaningful critique would have pointed out sensible alternatives.

Ultimately, it was this entrenchment of positions, and the consequent failure to analyse the new situation objectively, that created the conditions in which the intervention could decline. Our leaders made catastrophic mistakes over Iraq (their strategy was negligent; their arguments, fraudulent; for this they must be held to account) but for their failure to understand the actual motives for intervention, and thus to propose serious alternatives, the anti-war camp must partially shoulder the blame for the chaos in Iraq.

Comments

One Response to “A new perspective on the Iraq question”

  1. Comment:

    Haha, what a brilliant article in the service of power. But it’s not even remotely credible. Never once mentioned the real motives of the powerful, Oil (pipelines) and military bases, instead it tries the age-old “we are only trying to help” nonsense that history of anglo-american financial-takeover and military intervention is full of. White man’s burden, deja-vu all over again.
    Just a few points. The 1991 “tanks at the border to Saudi Arabia” satellite photos were faked, and worse, it deceived an ally, Saudi Arabia. Relations have never improved after that. (There were bombs at Marine barracks instead). Saddam was successfully fighting the financial-oppression, he had the oil-money he was allowed to retain put into Euro-accounts, and double his money. Oil being sold in Euro? US goes to war!

    “the most humane and prudent solution was to depose Saddam Hussein”

    let me rephrase that. The west is helping people by killing and maming untold numbers of them.
    “deposing” a foreign country’s leader is a dangerous precendent. Will China have the right to do too?

    “the anti-war camp must partially shoulder the blame for the chaos in Iraq”

    Yeah right. Grow up!

  2. Comment

    Have a look at some of the best cartoons on the Iraq Oil-War subject:

    http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2009/01/bush-is-gone-good-riddance-cartoons.html

    and tell me if you were able to suppress your smiles… Then, to get you blood boiling over “lefties” again, read these:

    http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2008/06/barak-obama-clinton-israel-operation.html

    http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2007/08/hiroshima-nagasaki-end-war-myth.html

    http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2008/05/learned-helplessness-cia-mind-control.html


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posted by u2r2h at 12:56 PM 0 comments

Friday, February 19, 2010

VeteransToday : GAZA ISRAEL - MUST READ

Interesting commentary. This guy seems to be an enlightened humanist. We need more Micheal Leon's.


Anti-Militarists Cohn, Hilberg, Finkelstein

February 19, 2010 by Michael Leon · 2 Comments 

Reposting this to rebuke those who would call the slaughter of Gazans a people’s simply getting the raw end of the deal. Kill, starve and imprison Palestinians with your eyes wide-open if you believe in what our government supports in the Middle-East. But do not say you do not know.

If anyone wishes to acquaint himself with a recent massacre in Gaza, I suggest the rigorous analyses of a man, Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were concentration camp survivors. Finkelstein’s latest is This Time We Went Too Far on the willful destruction of Gaza and its alltogether human beings living there, 1.5-million of them. After reading the book, you can call Finkelstein a “Jew Baiter,” an “anti-Semite,” or a “self-hating Jew,” if you must. He’s heard the slander before. But again, do not say you do not know.

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn (January 12, 1915 – July 31, 2007) and Raul Hilberg (June 2, 1926 – August 4, 2007) died within a week of each other this summer.

I intend no meaning in noting the proximity of their deaths, other than to state that these men shared a common disdain for the power of the state aligned with the indifference of its citizens to inflict genocidal catastrophes upon humanity.

And their lives and work ought to live on as a furious reproach to contemporary Americans who passively watch the destruction of over one million Iraqis [Gazans, Palestinians, people] as demagogic figures in American popular culture vilify anyone (achieving a certain level of celebrity) daring to point out the crimes against humanity that war inflicts.

Cohn’s most influential works are The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957) and Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1970).

Hilberg wrote The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), regarded as the seminal study of the Holocaust killing of millions of Jews and millions of other victims.

Both men were historians believing in precision free of ideology in depicting the facts of past occurrence without apology to contemporary political motivations.

Cohn and Hilberg’s eloquence and precision inspired generations of humanists.

Reading Noam Chomsky’s The Culture of Terrorism (1988), Cohn’s words ring out.

All the NAZIs required of the population is a “mood of passive compliance” as Hitler’s Holocaust coursed through Europe as he promised a return to “traditional values” and security for good German families, cites Chomsky.

Passive compliance; that phrase should become an imprecation, a curse reserved for the most despicable of acts.

Norman Finkelstein, a child of concentration camp survivors and a furious critic of violence, writes of Hilberg after his death:

Hilberg famously used the triad Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders to catalogue the main protagonists in the Nazi holocaust. It is notable that he didn’t include a category for givers of succor, presumably because they were so few in number. Judging by the life he lived, my guess is that, had the tables been turned, Hilberg would have been among those few.

I can’t help but think that Hilberg and Cohn went to their deaths disappointed and saddened as the idiocies of the Bushes, Cheneys, Powells, and Rices go unchallenged by far too many Americans.

However, millions of Americans have come to the conclusion that halting and reversing the obscenity that we as a country inflict upon the people of Iraq ought to become the deciding factor in whom we elect as the next president.

And that conclusion owes nothing to Hilberg and Cohn, but rather is the result of independent, free thinking.

Hilberg and Cohn, as great intellects, would have smiled and saluted that.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/02/19/anti-militarists-cohn-hilberg-finkelstein/


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Thursday, February 18, 2010

200ys ago - 1811 1812 1813 Luddite attacks against oligarch ownership of means of production

200ys ago - 1811 1812 1813 Luddite attacks
against oligarch ownership of means of production

Luddites and Luddism  -- History

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This historical overview is an extract from Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).  No part of this page may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of Kevin Binfield -- [except fair use, according to the law]

Few groups have been more misunderstood and have had their image and name more frequently misappropriated and distorted than the Luddites. The Luddites were not, as not only popularizers of theories of technology but also capitalist apologists for unregulated innovation claim, universally technophobes. The Luddites were artisans -- primarily skilled workers in the textile industries in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Flintshire in the years between March 1811 and April 1817 -- who when faced with the use of machines (operated by less-skilled labor, typically apprentices, unapprenticed workers, and women) to drive down their wages and to produce inferior goods (thereby damaging their trades' reputations), turned to wrecking the offensive machines and terrorizing the offending owners in order to preserve their wages, their jobs, and their trades. Machines were not the only, or even the major, threat to the textile workers of the Midlands and North. The Prince Regent's Orders in Council, barring trade with Napoleonic France and nations friendly to France, cut off foreign markets for the British textile industry. Even more importantly, famine and high food prices required more of each laborer's shrinking wages. Machines and the use of machines to drive down wages were simply the most accessible targets for expressions of anger and direct action.

The Luddites were not the first or only machine wreckers. Because organized, large-scale strikes were impractical due to the scattering of manufactories throughout different regions, machine wrecking, which E. J. Hobsbawm calls "collective bargaining by riot," had occurred in Britain since the Restoration. For example, in 1675 Spitalfields narrow weavers destroyed "engines," power machines that could each do the work of several people, and in 1710 a London hosier employing too many apprentices in violation of the Framework Knitters Charter had his machines broken by angry stockingers. Even parliamentary action in 1727, making the destruction of machines a capital felony, did little to stop the activity. In 1768 London sawyers attacked a mechanized sawmill. Following the failure in 1778 of the stockingers' petitions to Parliament to enact a law regulating "the Art and Mystery of Framework Knitting," Nottingham workers rioted, flinging machines into the streets. In 1792 Manchester weavers destroyed two dozen Cartwright steam looms owned by George Grimshaw. Sporadic attacks on machines (wide knitting frames, gig mills, shearing frames, and steam-powered looms and spinning jennies) continued, especially from 1799 to 1802 and through the period of economic distress after 1808.

The first incident during the years of the most intense Luddite activity, 1811-13, was the 11 March 1811 attack upon wide knitting frames in a shop in the Nottinghamshire village of Arnold, following a peaceful gathering of framework knitters near the Exchange Hall at Nottingham. In the preceding month, framework knitters, also called stockingers, had broken into shops and removed jack wires from wide knitting frames, rendering them useless without inflicting great violence upon the owners or incurring risk to the stockingers themselves; the 11 March attack was the first in which frames were actually smashed and the name "Ludd" was used. The grievances consisted, first, of the use of wide stocking frames to produce large amounts of cheap, shoddy stocking material that was cut and sewn into stockings rather than completely fashioned (knit in one piece without seams) and, second, of the employment of "colts," workers who had not completed the seven-year apprenticeship required by law. (For those laws, see the page on "Interpretations.")

Frames continued to be broken in many of the villages surrounding Nottingham. The 23 March 1811 and 20 April 1811 Nottingham Journal reports several weeks of almost nightly attacks in the villages, all successful and carried out without one attacker's being arrested. The summer of 1811 was quiet, but a bad harvest helped to renew disturbances in November, when, as the story goes, stockingers assembled in the wooded lands near Bulwell and were led in attacks on a number of shops by a commander calling himself Ned Ludd.

Letters from Midlands correspondents to the Home Office report a number of riotous disturbances, including the burning of haystacks and "an anonymous letter received by a Magistrate threatening still greater acts of violence by fire." Letters dated 13 and 14 November 1811 request that the government dispatch military aid because "2000 men, many of them armed, were riotously traversing the County of Nottingham." In December 1811 public negotiations between the framework knitters and their employers, the hosiers, some of which were carried out in the two Nottingham newspapers, failed to result in the return of wages, piece rates, and frame rents to earlier levels or in any satisfactory amelioration of the framework knitters' economic circumstances. Frame breaking continued in the Midlands counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire through the winter and early spring of 1812. It resurfaced in 1814 and again in Leicestershire in the autumn of 1816.

The first signs of the spread of Luddism to the cotton-manufacturing center of Manchester and its environs in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Flintshire materialized in December 1811 and January 1812. Manchester Luddism has traditionally been understood as having centered on the cotton-weaving trade, which had failed in an attempt to organize in 1808, and which was suffering from the use of steam-powered looms to decrease the wages of skilled weavers at a time of rising food prices and depressed trade; however, documents that I have discovered in the McConnell, Kennedy and Company papers and Home Office documents that have been entirely overlooked by previous scholars indicate that Luddites were active in defense of the spinning trade, too. (For those documents, see Chapter 3 of Writings of the Luddites.) In Manchester, unlike Nottingham, the offensive machinery was housed in large factories. Luddite raids in and around Manchester tended to be carried out by large numbers of attackers and also often coincided with food riots, which provided crowds that were large enough to carry out the factory attacks and that came from a broadly distressed population ready to take action. Luddite activity continued in Lancashire and Cheshire into the summer of 1812 and blended into efforts to establish larger trade combinations and into political reform, but the force of Luddism dissipated following the acquittal of dozens of accused Luddites in Lancaster later that year and the administration of loyalty oaths coupled with royal pardons conditioned upon the taking of those oaths.

The factory owners and cloth merchants of the woolen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire were the targets of Luddism in that county. Although West Riding Luddites represented a variety of skilled trades, the most active and numerous by far were the cloth dressers, called croppers, whose work was threatened by the introduction of the shearing frame. The croppers' work consisted of using forty- or fifty-pound handheld shears to cut, or crop, the nap from woven woolen cloth in order to make a smooth and salable article. They were threatened by two types of machines. The gig mill, which had been prohibited by law since the rule of Edward VI, was a machine that raised the nap on woolen cloth so that it might be sheared more easily. The shearing frames actually mechanized the process of shearing and reduced the level of skill and experience necessary to finish an article of woolen cloth, even though the machines could not attain the quality of hand-cropped cloth. From January 1812 through midspring, Luddite attacks in Yorkshire concentrated on small cropping shops as well as large mills where frames were used. In April Luddites began to attack mill owners and raided houses and buildings for arms and lead.  Luddism began to fail after the failed attack upon Rawfolds Mill and the murder of mill owner William Horsfall by George Mellor and other Luddites. By the next winter, West Riding Luddism had run its course, even though after the January 1813 executions of Mellor and other Luddites a few more threatening letters were sent to public officials.

In all three regions, Luddites responded to the distressing concurrence of high food prices, depressed trade caused by the wars and by the trade prohibitions imposed under the Orders in Council, and by changes in the use of machinery so as to reduce wages for the amount of work done. That machinery alone was not the primary cause of Luddite anger is evident in the cessation of Luddism. Luddite activities ended as a result of the rescinding of the Orders in Council, the suppression of the riots by the government's use of spies and the military, some wage and usage concessions, and some reduction in food prices. Despite its brief run, Luddism ought to be understood as E. P. Thompson and J. L. and Barbara Hammond have argued, as an important step in the formation of a class consciousness and the development of labor unions in Britain. Both the appropriation of the term Luddism and the use of the term as an epithet are erroneous; to use the term other than in its historical context is to display ignorance of the particularity of historical conditions.

A number of excellent published histories of Luddism are available and are far more reliable and accurate than anything appearing on the internet. J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond gleaned the Home Office Papers for their treatment of Luddism in The Skilled Labourer (1919 -- indispensible). E. P. Thompson's landmark study, The Making of the English Working Class (1963 -- indispensible), considers Luddism in its relationship to cotemporaneous Radical and labor movements. Malcolm Thomis's The Luddites (1970 -- indispensible) was the first major study devoted solely to the Luddites. John Rule surveys the various scholarly treatments of Luddism in a chapter of his book The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England (1986 -- supplemental).  Adrian Randall's Before the Luddites (1991 -- indispensible) explores the philosophy of Luddism in its nascent form and considers the differences between the woollen industry in the West of England and the Yorkshire industry, where Luddism flourished. Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels against the Future (1995 -- cautiously recommended) reinterprets Luddism as a general resistance to technology. The most recent complete history of Luddism is Brian Bailey's The Luddite Rebellion (1998 -- cautiously recommended). The first collection of actual Luddite writings is Kevin Binfield's Writings of the Luddites (forthcoming Spring 2004). Many of these books are available from major booksellers.

http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/kevin.binfield/Luddites/LudditeHistory.htm

HISTORY 135E

Spinning the Web of Ingenuity
An Introduction to the History of Technology

WINTER QUARTER, 2004
Department of History
University of California, Irvine
 Instructor:    Dr. Barbara J. Becker      
 

Lecture 15.


        
Mechanization and Society:  The Luddite Riots (1811-1816)



  It is a fact well known ... that scarcity, to a certain degree, promotes industry, and that the manufacturer who can subsist on three days work will be idle and drunken the remainder of the week....  The poor in the manufacturing counties will never work any more time in general than is necessary just to live and support their weekly debauches....  We can fairly aver that a reduction of wages in the wollen manufacture would be a national blessing and advantage, and no real injury to the poor.  By this means we might keep our trade, uphold our rents, and reform the people into the bargain.
—J. Smith, Memoirs of Wool (1747)


Public discourse in America today is rife with raves and rants on the complex issues raised by terrorism.  In England during the 1810s, it was almost impossible to find a neutral voice on the subject of Luddism.  Depending on who was telling the story, the Luddites were villains or heroes.

What came to be called the Luddite riots began on the heels of two straight years of bad harvests.  The price of wheat had risen by over 50% in London and nearly 90% in northern England.  A fully employed stockinger might earn 7 to 14 shillings 6 pence per week; a handloom weaver, 9-12 shillings per week.  Daily bread could cost up to 1 shilling 8 pence, or (assuming one purchased bread every day) 11 shillings 8 pence per week!

12 pence = 1 shilling = .05 pounds = roughly 25 cents in 19th century

In February 1811 at Arnold—a small town near Nottingham where fabric for "cut-ups" was being knitted on wide stocking frames—stockingers broke into hosiers' workshops and disabled their frames by removing the jack-wires.

luddite map england 

The wide-frame stocking machine produced knitted fabric of uniform width from which patterned pieces could be cut to make stockings and other clothing items.

After a second riot in Arnold, military troops arrived in early April to quell the disturbance, but by then over 200 frames had been destroyed.

In November, in the wake of another disastrous harvest, a new outbreak occurred, this time in the nearby village of Bulwell.  It was here that the name Ned Ludd was first heard.  Perpetrators acted in small bands, striking particular targets and garnering the support of local stockingers and residents.  Those whose financial backing could not be won over by sympathy, were "encouraged" through intimidation:
Gentlemen all.  Ned Ludd's Compliments and hopes you wil give a trifle towards supporting his Army as he well understands the Art of breaking obnoxious Frames.  If you comply with this it will be well, if not I shall call upon you myself.
—Edward Ludd
On one night, frames were broken in villages and towns that were 12-15 miles apart, giving the appearance that the movement was well organized.  In fact, to some observers, the movement seemed too well organized.  Mere stockingers were, in their opinion, incapable of operating at that level of sophistication.  The escalating violence at home worried law-abiding citizens of a nation at war and gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories.  Perhaps outside agitators were to blame:  the Irish? the French? the Americans?

Local authorities summoned more troops and swore in new constables.  In December, a force of 2,000 men was sent.  Meetings were held between representatives of hosiers and stockingers to settle their differences.  And although no formal agreement was reached, some hosiers found it expedient to abandon cut-ups and to pay higher wages.  Nevertheless, cases of frame breaking in the region around Nottingham continued at rate of 200 frames per month through February 1812, when Parliament adopted the Frame-Breaking Bill, which made the destructive action a crime punishable by death.

Just as things seemed to be calming down in the Nottingham area, new disturbances erupted in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire.

The Yorkshire moors were the center of the cropping, or shearing, branch of the woolen industry.



Croppers worked in small collectives to finish newly woven cloth by raising its nap and then shearing it—time-consuming jobs that had always been done by hand.  In fact, croppers reacted positively when clothiers began purchasing labor-saving devices—first the gig-mill for nap raising...

 

The gig-mill automated the tedious process of raising the nap on a fabric.

and then the automated shearing machine.

 

The shearing machine automated the process of cropping the fabric.

But in troubled economic times, as work became scarce, croppers resorted to machine breaking to protect their livelihood.

The area around Huddersfield, a town about 15 miles southwest of Leeds, witnessed the eruption of Luddite-related violence:
  22 February 1812    Two cropping shops (in Marsh and Crosland Moor) attacked by masked Luddites armed with firearms, hatchets and hammers
5-6 March    Two cropping shops attacked in Linthwaite
13 March    Small, well-organized nighttime raids carried out in South Crosland, Honley, and Lockwood
15 March    Bigger, more violent attack at Taylor Hill; more damage:  windows smashed, shots fired indiscriminately, attempts to start a fire; owner was member of the newly-formed committee against the Luddites
5 April    Three workshops in Holme Valley attacked
9 April    Destructive assault on mill at Horbury involving 300 men and causing almost £300 damage
11 April    Major attack on mill in Spen Valley defended by militia; two Luddites killed
18 April    Mill owner, William Cartwright, shot at in Bradley Wood
28 April    Mill owner, William Horsfall, shot and fatally wounded at Crosland Moor
29 April    Arms seized from clothier's home
22 July    Suspected informer—clothier, John Hinchcliffe, of Upperthong—was shot and badly wounded; local criminals suspected of pretending to be Luddites while committing burglaries
2 January 1813    Three young Huddersfield men—George Mellor, William Thorpe and Thomas Smith—charged with the murder of William Horsfall; all found guilty
8 January    Mellor, Thorpe and Smith hanged
9 January    Eight men charged with attack on William Cartwright's mill; three acquitted
16 January    Five men, found guilty, hanged
March 1813    Nine more suspected Luddites hanged for stealing arms or money


By May, the region had quieted down, and most of the soldiers were withdrawn.

There were minor outbursts of machine breaking in the summer and fall of 1814 and 1816, but more and more often, the damage done was found to be the work of mercenary gangs, not cadres of oppressed workers.  Between 1806 and 1817, the number of gig-mills in Yorkshire increased from 5 to 72.  Eventually, the craft of nap raising disappeared.  Stockingers realized the futility of insisting on the abolition of cut-ups.  Realizing that goal would have severely damaged the textile industry at its one growing point and contributed nothing towards raising wages.
  Mechanization and Society:  The Assembly Line


 

Oliver Evans (1755-1819)
The human mind seems incapable of believing anything that it cannot conceive and understand...  I speak from experience, for when it was first asserted that merchant flour mills could be constructed to attend themselves, so far as to take meal from the stones, and the wheat from the wagons and raise them to the upper storeys, spreading the meal to cool and gathering it by the same operations into the bolting hopper, etc. until the flour was ready for packing, the projector was answered:  You cannot make water run up hill, you cannot make wooden millers.
—Oliver Evans
 

Oliver Evans' automated mill, Redclay Creek, Delaware (1785)

  1. Grain goes into RECEIVING HOPPER and drops down a chute to the elevator in the basement.

2. ELEVATOR dumps grain into ROLLING SCREEN to filter out dirt and other foreign objects. 

3. Grain falls into SMUTTER or FANNING MILL to remove any mold or dirt attached to the grain.

4. Grain falls into STORAGE BINS above the millstones.

5. Grain falls into the HOPPER above hole in middle of MILLSTONES.  The SHOE, beneath the hopper, regulates flow of grain onto BED STONE.

6. Grain falls onto MILLSTONES that move at the rate of 125 rpm.

7. Warm, moist flour falls through a chute into basement where ELEVATORS pick it up and carry it to attic.

8. HOPPER BOY cools and drys flour with a revolving rake. 

9. Flour drops into AUGER or CONVEYOR, which moves it, while continuing to dry it, to head of BOLTER.

10. Revolving motion moves flour over BOLTER's screens. 
FLOUR falls through the finest mesh.
MIDDLINGS pass through the medium screen.
BRAN falls out the end.
11. Flour, depending on its fineness, drops into different HOLDING BINS and is loaded into barrels.


Evans' design incorporated three innovative elements to carry the grain automatically from one processing stage to another:  the "endless belt," the "endless screw," and the "chain of buckets."   The result was a continuous line of production.  His automated mill could handle 300 bushels an hour.  Those who said it couldn't be done later came to observe the mill in operation.  Continuous production has been such an integral part of the modern manufacturing landscape for such a long time that it is difficult to conceive of a factory without it.  In Evans' day, no one could imagine a system built on what was a wholly new operational principle.
  Mechanization and Society:  Interchangeable Parts


Achieving truly interchangeable, machine-tooled parts was a long and slow process.  Not only was it a daunting task to create multiple copies of one component that were truly indistinguishable from one another, it was a practical challenge to assemble a set of parts that would work satisfactorily together.  Eli Whitney (1765-1825), found that out the hard way.  The so-called interchangeable parts in the rifles he produced were, in fact, finished by hand and bore the tell-tale marks of their makers. 

Besides, there was (and still is) considerable disagreement over the relative quality and reliability of hand-finished parts compared to those tooled exclusively by machine.  Machinists saw themselves as expert craftsmen.  They took special pride in their creations and resisted being replaced by machines that could mass produce mediochre parts.

 
Isaac Merrit Singer (1811-1875)

For Isaac Singer, one of a number of successful nineteenth-century sewing machine manufacturers, the answer was obvious:  Quality in production depends more on expert hand finishing and fitting than on the large-scale manufacture of uniform parts by special-purpose machines.

In 1862, Singer was confronted with a serious dilemma.  In that year, an overwhelming number of consumers voiced complaints about the sewing machines they had purchased.  Repairing the faulty machines and replacing broken or malfunctioning parts forced Singer to reconsider the wisdom of his preferred method of operation.

Singer's first sewing machine (1851-1858)         Go to: History 135E Home Page  Luddite Documents Shirley (1848), by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) Hard Times (1854), by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1865-1915) Week 8 Riddley Guide



     The Age of George III


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The Luddites 1811-16

After the end of the French Wars, it became increasingly clear that England was suffering from great social, economic and political upheavals. These problems collectively became known as the 'Condition of England Question'. Many of these problems would have occurred eventually but had been speeded up by the effects of the French Wars on the country. Most of the major changes were the direct result of the French Wars. Others came from natural growth and change. The distress and discontent caused by these enormous changes were manifested in a series of events in the period 1811-19. One of these was the upsurge in Luddism.

Luddites were men who took the name of a (perhaps) mythical individual, Ned Ludd who was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites were trying to save their livelihoods by smashing industrial machines developed for use in the textile industries of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. Some Luddites were active in Lancashire also.They smashed stocking-frames and cropping frames among others. There does not seem to have been any political motivation behind the Luddite riots; equally, there was no national organisation. The men merely were attacking what they saw as the reason for the decline in their livelihoods.

However, early outbreaks of Luddism occurred during the French Wars and were seen by the government as clear evidence of disaffection. In 1812 the government probably had reason to be fearful:
a large part of the army was overseas, mainly in the Peninsular with Wellington;
the country was fighting not only the French but also the Americans
England was experiencing the worst trade depression since the 1760s and people were suffering great hardship. as evidenced by the Sheffield riots of 1812

The only person who seems to have appreciated the problems faced by ordinary people was the Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire. He said, 'outrage and conspiracy ... are the offspring of distress and want of employment ... fostered and rendered formidable by nothing but the want of trade'.

This period was not the first time that England had experienced occurrences of machine-breaking. In 1779 the failure of a Bill to regulate the frame-knitting industry had resulted in 300 frames being smashed and thrown into the streets. However, by 1810 the Orders in Council and a change in fashion had led to a deterioration in the standard of craftsmanship required in stocking making and a consequent cheapening of the trade. It was the attempt to intimidate some masters who brought in the new machines that caused Nottingham stocking knitters to smash the machines.

Stocking knitting was predominantly a domestic industry, the stockinger renting his frame from the master and working in his own 'shop' using thread given to him by the master; the finished items were handed back to the master to sell. The frames were therefore scattered round the villages; it was easy for the Luddites to smash a frame and then disappear. Between March 1811 and February 1812 they smashed about a thousand machines at the cost of between £6,000 and £10,000.In April 1812 the Luddites burned the West Houghton mill in Lancashire. Samuel Whitbread, an MP, said of the event

As to the persons who had blackened their faces, and disfigured themselves for the purposes of concealment, and had attended the meeting on Deanmoor, near Manchester, it turned out that ten of them were spies sent out by the magistrates... These spies were the very ringleaders of the mischief, and incited the people to acts which they would not otherwise have thought of. [Parliamentary Debates, lst Series, Vol. 23, Col.1000, (l8l2)]

The authorities were incapable of stopping the attacks so the government felt obliged to put in place special legislation. Machine-breaking had been made a capital offence in 1721; in 1811 a special Act was passed to secure the peace of Nottingham. At the Nottingham Assizes in March 1812, seven Luddites were sentenced to transportation for life; two others were acquitted.

In April 1812, the Luddites attacked William Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds near Huddersfield. The event was described by Charlotte Br�nte in her novel Shirley. Cartwright and a few soldiers held the mill against about 150 attackers, two of whom were killed. The following week an attempt was made on Cartwright's life and on 28 April William Horsfall, another manufacturer, was killed.

In June 1812 Lord Sidmouth became Home Secretary, by which time the outbreaks of Luddism had begun to diminish. However in July, parliament set up Secret Committees for the examination of evidence from the 'disturbed areas'.Information had been given to Major Searle, the commander of the South Devon Militia, which was stationed in Sheffield. The informant was not identified. Part of the Report said

It is the opinion of persons, both in civil and military stations, well acquainted with the state of the country, an opinion grounded upon various information from various quarters now before your committee, but which, for obvious reasons, they do not think proper to detail, that the views of some of the persons engaged in these proceedings have extended to revolutionary measures of the most dangerous description.

Their proceedings manifest a degree of caution and organisation which appears to flow from the direction of some persons under whose influence they act... [Parliamentary Debates, 1st Series, Vol.23, Col.1036. (1812)]

On the strength of the evidence, the Secret Committees in parliament approved a Bill to preserve the public peace of the 'disturbed districts' and to give additional powers to the magistrates. It passed through parliament and remained in force until 25 March 1813. This was the only way that the government could compensate for the inefficient methods of crime prevention at the time.However, despite the government's fears, there is no evidence whatsoever that the activities of the Luddites wer politically motivated.

Another parliamentary committee heard petitions for relief from the cotton workers and reported to parliament in 1812: it is clear from this section of the report that the government would do nothing to move from the economic ideas of laissez faire:

While the Committee fully acknowledge and most deeply lament the great distress of numbers of persons engaged in the cotton manufacture, they are of opinion that no interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty of every individual to dispose of his time and of his labour in the way and on the terms which he may judge most conducive to his own interest, can take place without violating general principles of the first importance to the prosperity and happiness of the community, without establishing the most pernicious precedent, or without aggravating, after a very short time, the pressure of the general distress, and imposing obstacles against that distress ever being removed. [Parliamentary Debates, 1st Series, Vol. 20, (1811) Col.609].

Lord Liverpool, the PM endorsed the view of the committee when he said:

In these cases the Legislature ought not to interfere, but should leave everything to find its own level... I am satisfied that government or parliament never meddle in these matters at all but they do harm, more or less... The evils inseparable from the state of things should not be charged on any government; and, on enquiry, it would be found that by far the greater part of the miseries of which human nature complained were at all times and in all countries beyond the control of human legislation.

In January 1813 three men were charged at York for the murder of Horsfall, were found guilty and were hanged. Fourteen others involved in the attack on Cartwright's mill or related activities were hanged a week later. Sidmouth and Lord Ellenborough expected the executions to have the 'happiest effects in various parts of the kingdom'.

Direct action in the shape of strikes or machine breaking continued despite the special legislation and severe measures. A Bill was introduced to parliament to regulate the stocking knitting trade and especially to prohibit the cheap, nasty 'cut-ups' that were being sold ['Cut-ups' were tubes of stocking fabric that were cut to appropriate lengths and one end was then stitched to form the toe part of the stocking]. The legislation was rejected by the House of Lords. The textile workers then attempted to form a Trade Society to promote their demands but it was deemed to be illegal under the Combination Acts and it collapsed.

In 1816 there was a revival of violence and machine breaking following a bad harvest and a downturn in trade. On 28 June the Luddites attacked Heathcote and Boden's mill in Loughborough, smashing 53 frames at a cost of £6,000. Troops were used to end the riots and for their crimes, six men were executed and another three were transported. William Cobbett's view of events was that

Society ought not to exist, if not for the benefit of the whole. It is and must be against the law of nature, if it exists for the benefit of the few and for the misery of the many. I say, then, distinctly, that a society, in which the common labourer . . . cannot secure a sufficiency of food and raiment, is a society which ought not to exist; a society contrary to the law of nature; a society whose compact is dissolved. [Political Register, 11 September 1819]

After the trials, Luddism subsided in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. Concurrently, 'Swing' riots erupted in the countryside as a protest against low wages, unemployment and the Game Laws.

The Tory periodical, the Quarterly Review, attacked the government's "do-nothing" policies:

Of distresses, such as now pervade the mass of the community, small indeed is the part which parliaments or governments either create or cure... But what little might have been in our power ... has unhappily, perhaps inadvertently, been thrown away. In passing from a state of war to a state of peace, the shock of the revulsion might not improbably have been lessened to all orders of society by somewhat graduating the transition... If stagnant manufactures, and languishing agriculture, and a population suddenly turned loose from the military or naval services of the country, produce a supply of hands for which there is no work, a partial and temporary remedy might perhaps have been found in undertakings of public utility and magnificence - in the improvement of roads, the completion of canals, the erection of our National Monuments for Waterloo and Trafalgar - undertakings which government might have supplied, if the means had been available. [Vol. 16, 1816, pp.276-277]

These links go to primary sources on the Luddites:
"Luddites Smashing a Loom, 1812"
"Luddite Writings
Luddites and Luddism Midlands Documents ContentsMeet the web creator   
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