Gerald Posner On Keith Olbermann

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldo...l_b_26530.html

Sheldon Drobny
8/4/2006

I really enjoy Countdown with Keith Olbermann. However, yesterday he had Gerald Posner as a guest to evaluate the recently released NORAD tapes on 9/11. Posner's conclusion was that the audio communications with NORAD proves that this was all about massive incompetence and had nothing to do with any conspiracy. The tapes clearly showed that everyone was confused and tardy in their responses to the 4 hijackings and that Bush did not give the "shoot down" order until all the airplanes had crashed.

This is essentially the same conclusion that the 9/11 Commission came to. The convenience about incompetence as an excuse is that by blaming everyone, no one is responsible.

Below is a review of Posner's book, Case Closed:

"Review of Gerald Posner, Case Closed David R. Wrone This review appeared in the Journal of Southern History 6 (February 1995), pp. 186-188 This electronic version from http://www.assassinationscience.com/wrone.html Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. By Gerald Posner. (New York: Random House, 1993. Pp. xvi, 607. $25.00, ISBN 0-679-41825-3.)

Gerald Posner argues that the Warren Commission properly investigated the assassination of JFK. He claims to have refuted the critics, purports to show what actually occurred, and asserts simple factual answers to explain complex problems that have plagued the subject for years. In the process he condemns all who do not agree with the official conclusions as theories driven by conjectures. At the same time his book is so theory driven, so rife with speculation, and so frequently unable to conform his text with the factual content in his sources that it stands as one of the stellar instances of irresponsible publishing on the subject."

Either Posner is naïve or is a willing supporter of the establishment. Even Congress voted in the late 70s that the assassination of Kennedy was probably a conspiracy and we will probably never know who did it.

I am a forensic accountant who is trained to "connect dots." Forensic work is always part science and part instinct. The ones with the good instincts evaluating empirical data are the best forensic professionals. People who are in forensic work can only be good if they can be objective about the failure of apparent human instincts such as the perception that the earth is flat. Proving the earth was round was counterintuitive to our instincts, but proven by science.

All you have to do is read PNAC, The Project For The New American Century. The writings of the neo-cons in the late 90s conform to the events on 9/11 and the necessity of a second "Pearl Harbor" to rally the American people to support the PNAC plan. Having reviewed the inconsistencies and contradictions of reports on 9/11, I have concluded that the 19 hijackers were really part of what they believed to be an Al-Qaeda funded operation. All 19 sincerely believed in what they were doing and the operation probably was funded by a real terrorist group. However, given the remarkable incompetence of the intelligence agencies and our air defense system, I have concluded that the 19 hijackers had inside help.

When you do forensic work, one of the main questions you ask is who benefits? The day after 9/11, Osama denied that he had anything to do with it. What possible motivation would he have to deny this? After a few days of U.S. accusations, he finally took credit for it. Anyone who believes that Al-Qaeda is a centralized terrorist organization with a network as advanced as the old Soviet Union is smoking something. The so-called Soviet cells of the 50s was a complete myth. Many of the members of the U.S. Communist Party were undercover FBI agents.

I remember Rumsfeld on Meet The Press in 2002 describing sophisticated operations in Tora Bora with state of the art mountain cave operations for Al Qaeda. Tim Russert then produced an artistic rendering of a sophisticated operation inside the mountains of Tora Bora. Rumsfeld then suggested that there are several caves throughout the world as sophisticated is the ones in Tora Bora. When U.S. and British troops inspected the captured areas of Tora Bora, they found nothing.

The portrayal of the people on the hijacked planes making cellular phone calls is also a lie. It is impossible to make a private cell phone call when in flight. Try it some time if you don't believe me. And there is a myriad of evidence that leads a sensible conclusion that the hijackers had help from the inside and the trail of those who helped should be those who would have benefited.

We all know the world is not flat even though our senses tell us it is. It is equally true that our senses cannot accept the idea that people in our own government would run a renegade operation. Ronald Reagan felt the same way when the Iran/Contra operation was run from his own White House. Like Reagan, it takes a detached President like George Bush to let that happen.