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Dare to care
30 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review a 2017 paper by Amy Baker Benjamin - "9/11 as False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare to Care"
Note: the audio on this episode is a little off for the first third of the recording due to technical errors on M's part.
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Transcript
Zoom Call Confusion and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
And we're back to the Zoom calls. But we all knew this was coming though. So, Em, how are things in China? Ni hao ma? I'm not in China. I'm in the same city as you, just like I was last time. Ah, that's relief. I just used up all the Mandarin I know, apart from the numbers 1 to 10. But if we're still in Auckland, why are we Zooming? Why? You were the one who wanted a Zoom call? I'm pretty sure that's not true. I have the text messages. Do I need to start reading them out loud?
00:00:27
Speaker
Well, no, because obviously those are fake messages that were hacked onto my phone by the Russians, I guess, for an unknown but completely plausible reason. Some things are. You're being held at home again against your will, aren't you? Don't be ridiculous. Who would want to imprison me in my own home, let alone have the nefarious deep state connections to do such
Conspiracy and New Technology
00:00:53
Speaker
a thing?
00:00:53
Speaker
Well, any of the numerous conspirators our investigations have uncovered, literally any one of them. But I'm starting to understand now. This sounds more like the hazing ritual for the latest acolyte, JJ.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh, come on, what's more likely that I have other things to get done this evening and I didn't want to lose time commuting to your place and back, or that this JJ, if they even exist, use their Masonic Templar Illuminati connections to confine me to my own residence as a show of power and intimidation? I think you know the answer to that question.
00:01:30
Speaker
all right but you don't understand they have two J's in their name and I only have one they're literally twice as powerful as me. Doesn't that even work? I don't have a choice now act natural because I think they're coming back to check on me. Ah fine uh this is the last time I'm bailing you out though. Ah so Joshua ready to start another perfectly normal episode where
00:01:56
Speaker
Everything is exactly as it always is. I sure am. Let's play the theme music like we always do, because everything is perfectly normal. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcasters guide to the conspiracy it's a, it's a special technology episode as we showcase the various new items we've been purchasing with the money generously given to us by our patrons, the best and most sweet smelling people in all the world. If you're watching this on video.
00:02:47
Speaker
You'll see the images of our new webcam, so you'll really get to appreciate the greasy sheen of sweat on my forehead as I sit here in a sultry Auckland evening. And if you're listening to the podcast, then you get to hear the magical new tool that Emma's using to record it. I haven't seen it with my own two eyes, but I gather it's quite the thing.
00:03:09
Speaker
It's true, it's got buttons, it's got dials, it has things that make me able to censor you. So Josh, say something exciting.
New Patrons and Upcoming Column
00:03:22
Speaker
I long for the sweet embrace of death, which cannot come too soon. And say something about your mother. My mother is quite a lovely person actually.
00:03:37
Speaker
No one will ever know. No one will ever know. No one will ever know. Yes, actually, in all my excitement, I probably should do the actual intro and say that I, of course, am Josh Addison, and they, of course, are Dr. Imdientoth, both of us in Auckland, New Zealand for the time being. And so we have.
00:03:57
Speaker
So now we have new things, we have new technology, we have new patrons, new patrons plural, I understand. Yes, so we actually had two people go to the level of pledging where they get mentioned in the intro to the show. So this week it was JJ, but Susan, Susan your time is coming Susan, don't think we've forgotten about you Susan, we know about you, we're going to
00:04:23
Speaker
That's not what I was going to expose you. We're going to exploit and expose you. That's not a lot better, but yes. It might need to be worse. And now another little bit of interesting admin before we actually get into the episode. You are in the Herald currently or are going to be in the Herald?
00:04:43
Speaker
So I'm going to have an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald. I was told it would go up this afternoon, but actually looking at the opinion pieces on the Herald website, all of them appear at 5am in the morning. So I suspect I'm actually going to appear in the digital version tomorrow morning.
00:05:00
Speaker
And I may or may not be in print because with our weird digital world, sometimes you're in print and sometimes you're not. But I'm going to now be a Herald columnist, although that's kind of a one-off thing. I don't think it's a recurring gig. But the interesting thing about it, guess who asked me to write a column for the New Zealand Herald? Veteran Character Actor Steve Buscemi.
00:05:27
Speaker
I think it's Buscemi and no, it was Matthew Hooton. Hoots himself. Indeed. I was shocked at the time. I would say I was dismayed, but I was surprised. But no, Matthew reached out saying that I'd be the right person to talk about conspiracy theories in the Herald, particularly
00:05:48
Speaker
that Malaki, as Joe Biden would say, that's been going on around January 6th.
Analysis of False Flags in History
00:05:53
Speaker
And so I wrote an 800-word piece and it was off to the editor. The editor went, this is good, but I think you need to say more. And I was able to say more, I need more words. So I've submitted a 1200-word piece, which will be out in the next day or so.
00:06:08
Speaker
Hmm, very interesting. We'll have to keep an eye on it. Will you be behind the paywall? The opinion pieces usually are, aren't they? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I assume I'm behind the paywall, although I actually don't think I'm being paid for the paywall. So if it's behind the paywall, I'll be very annoyed if they don't actually pay me for it.
00:06:29
Speaker
As I've always assumed, you're an exclusive sort of a person. Your words aren't just to be thrown around willy-nilly to wee unwashed messes. So I'd kind of assumed there'd be some sort of gating to prove that only the worthy should be able to hear your words. But we'll see. Insert some jokes about Watergate right here, but I can't think of it right now.
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, in that case, then I guess we should actually go on with this episode. So this is, does this count as an episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre? No, because it's not a masterpiece. No, so we're reviewing a paper today, but it's not one in the series of sort of the corpus of philosophical conspiracy theory material. This is a completely different paper altogether. And I think we should leave you in suspense as to what it is until after the chime.
00:07:21
Speaker
Indeed, which I'm going to press the button to play right about now.
00:07:33
Speaker
Now see what you don't know is that normally this is all being edited together manually afterwards. We have to stick the sound effects in, but now as I understand it, all EM has to do is just like push a button and then suddenly the noises just appear automatically. I refuse to believe that it isn't magic.
00:07:52
Speaker
I mean, it is going to, so this is, this is our first, what we might call live episode where we're trying to do it all entirely on a podcasting deck without any editing afterwards.
00:08:04
Speaker
I mean, there will be some editing afterwards. I'll be cutting out some silence at the beginning and some silence at the end. But technically, this is live. This is like live theater with all of the excitement that comes with it. So before what you've heard is a podcast's guide to the conspiracy where it's carefully edited together to get rid of the points in time where Josh says terrible things. Terrible, salacious, libelous things. Well now, now we're just going straight. Just gonna have to leave the libel in. It's true.
00:08:34
Speaker
Let's see what kind of libel we commit when we talk today about a paper by a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, Amy Baker Benjamin, which is salient even though it was published back in 2017 because of something she said recently about outgoing president Donald J. Trump. But let's talk about the paper and then we can talk about the author.
00:09:00
Speaker
Right, so the paper is called 9-11 is false flag why international law must dare to care. It saw print in the African Journal of International and Comparative Law in 2017. So yeah, why are we talking about this today?
00:09:20
Speaker
So Amy Baker Benjamin as I said is a lecturer in the law faculty at AUT. She deals largely I believe in international law and she was interviewed before the election and after the election in the US.
00:09:35
Speaker
And let's just say, it would be fair to say that she doesn't have explicit Trump sympathies, but also doesn't seem to be saying that Trump has done, say, some bad things with the whole election wrangling that's gone on since November.
00:09:53
Speaker
affect when she was interviewed earlier this week she claimed that the january sixth event now that's what the storming of capital building in washington d.c. looked quite peaceful and said that his son was at the process and he has no calls for violence at all
00:10:11
Speaker
So it does seem as if she has some skewer ideas about the Trump presidency. And so I thought, because she's made the news here talking about Trump, it would be quite useful to look at her 2017 piece, which is one of the few pieces in the academic literature
00:10:31
Speaker
which I think can be charitably called a contribution to the 911 truth community and search for a re-investigation of the event to September 11th, 2001. And yes, it does seem to be a bit, it almost seems to be gaming the system a little bit in that as we'll see the paper is in four parts, three of those parts, well,
00:10:59
Speaker
One of those parts is the conclusion. Two of them are basically 9-11 truth material and then only one out of the four is actually talking about international law and legal implications.
00:11:15
Speaker
So maybe you should just pile straight into it and we'll see as we go. So the African Journal of International Comparative Law is not a journal I know, but at the same time I also don't publish in international law.
9/11 as a Potential False Flag
00:11:31
Speaker
It is part of the Edinburgh University Press imprint, so it does actually belong to a university press. It's also not particularly highly ranked. Now, university press imprint is a good thing. University presses tend to have certain standards when it comes to its journals.
00:11:50
Speaker
although sometimes those standards do slip and there are a whole bunch of kind of boutique or niche journals out there which do have a history of bad publication. As far as I'm aware, the African Journal of International Comparative Law is not one of those. At the same time, it's not a particularly highly ranked journal in that the papers which are cited in it, sorry, the papers which appear in it do not tend to be cited elsewhere.
00:12:19
Speaker
And so I have a suspicion, and I'm going to mark this out as a suspicion, that this is a lower ranked journal that the paper was eventually accepted into. And the reason why I have that suspicion is that, as will become clear in the discussion about this paper, I do not think the paper is particularly good.
00:12:42
Speaker
And in fact, I think the paper commits some egregious errors in reasoning, which is the kind of thing which may have got it moved on from journals higher up the academic rankings. And yes, as we'll see, it's something of a 9-11 Truth Greatest Hits compilation album. We'll be revisiting a lot of topics that we've talked about before.
00:13:11
Speaker
But to start at the start, section one, introduction, which is quite a long, a long section actually, begins by saying, no matter what one may think about the nature of the attacks that took place in the United States on September 11, 2001, one thing is beyond dispute. Those attacks have provided the legal, political and moral justification for 16, or I suppose now 20, years of international war.
00:13:37
Speaker
continues a bit later each one of these military campaigns and or thrusts is based on the legal authorization and moral dispensation granted by domestic and international authorities in the days following 911 to respond to the attacks of that day.
00:13:49
Speaker
and the middle lower, we would do well to remind ourselves, however, that this shouldering is only as strong and effective as the claim of self-defense on which it is based. The war on terror is, after all, a war that is claimed to be fought in self-defense. Were this claim ever to be proved false, were it ever to be shown that the United States was not, in fact, attacked by others on 9-11,
00:14:08
Speaker
rather attack itself or let itself be attacked. For the purpose of blaming others and justifying international war, then its war would not be one of self-defense but of premeditated and carefully camouflaged aggression. So we've got both Mihop and Lihop in that last paragraph, attack itself or let itself be attacked. Interesting. And that paragraph has a footnote at the end of it.
00:14:33
Speaker
And the footnote contains the definition of what a false flag attack is that she's going to be using. I'll read that bit out. A false flag attack occurs when a country organises an attack on its own citizens and or officials and makes the attack appear to be by enemy nations, political opponents or terrorists, thereby giving the country a pretext for domestic repression and or foreign military aggression.
00:15:00
Speaker
I will use here a broadened definition of the term that also includes foreign attacks that a government knew were coming and could have stopped but allowed to succeed so that a nation would be primed for war. Now Josh, what do you think of that definition?
00:15:16
Speaker
But despite being broadened, it does actually sound very specific. I mean, it's quite clearly about 9-11. It's quite clearly about 9-11, yeah. Especially the bit about when a country organizes an attack on its own citizens and or officials doesn't like normally that's not something we'd necessarily say about false flag attacks. And when we get to later on, when she actually starts going through historical examples of false flag attacks, some of them at least are
00:15:43
Speaker
not a country taking its own citizens, they're a country are taking another country but making it look like someone else did it and so on. So it's
00:15:53
Speaker
it's not hard to read between the lines of that definition and see 9-11 truth arguments front and centre. And I mean I would just resist the idea that we should include in false flag attacks things that other powers are going to do to you which you allow to occur. I mean that's a bad thing don't get me wrong but it's not a false flag, a false flag
00:16:16
Speaker
is pretending that someone else did something you're doing in its most looser sense. The idea that you allow someone else to do something actually seems like, well, that's not a false flag, that's simply negligent. Negligence is bad politically, but it's not a false flag. But so right away we see what kind of is the tenor of the whole argument, which is this, if it's turned out that 9-11
00:16:45
Speaker
was a false flag attack, then that would be a really big deal and would have massive ramifications and would totally undermine the US's justification for a lot of stuff it's been doing over the last 20 years. And that's true. If 9-11 turned out to be false, then that would be true. But when I first read it, and we'll see this going right the way through, the thing it reminded me most of was Pascal's Wager.
00:17:09
Speaker
Now, if you listen to this podcast, you probably know what Pascal's Wager is, but just give a quick refresher in case anyone isn't sure. What's Pascal's Wager? So Pascal was a philosopher. Was he a 16th or 17th century mind? Something like that. Don't know the dates precisely.
00:17:29
Speaker
And he basically had an argument about the existence of God and whether or not you should believe in God as a rationalist. And Pascal's wager is the idea that, look, you might be inclined as a rationalist to think, well, there's no good evidence for God's existence. But if God does exist and God hates atheists,
00:17:54
Speaker
then choosing not to believe in God, even if God hasn't provided you with enough evidence for its existence, is going to be a bad thing. You're going to go to hell. In fact, it's much better to believe in God, even if it turns out that as a rationalist you don't have any inclination to.
00:18:11
Speaker
because the benefit of belief in God if God does exist means eternal life, and the benefit if God doesn't exist is basically nothing. I mean, you may have wasted some time on this whole God malaki, but when you're dead, you're dead, and it makes no real difference. So Pascal goes, look, according to the terms of the wagia, it is better to believe in God
00:18:34
Speaker
than it is to not believe in God because the benefit of believing in God is going to be dramatically higher if it turns out God exists. And one of the main objections people have to that line of argument is that while Pascal was interested in justifying belief in the Christian God, the argument could be used to justify belief in basically anything
00:18:59
Speaker
any god who has the capacity to judge you in the afterlife from any religion or indeed you could make stuff up. The flying spaghetti monster, you know, you could say well if the flying spaghetti monster is going to subject you to eternal torture if you don't believe in it then you better believe in that and it sort of it turns it kind of undermines the whole thing and that is what reminded me about this one, made me think of this one because
Debating the Need for Investigation into 9/11
00:19:25
Speaker
with the same argumentation you could basically say we need to investigate anything because if it turned out that the world was actually flat that would be massive that would that would invalidate just about all of science it would be a huge deal but the fact that it would be a big deal if it were true isn't enough by itself to mean we're actually obligated to investigate it and yet that seems to be a lot not the whole of her argument but that seems to be a large part of it
00:19:56
Speaker
Yes, and as we'll see later on, there are similar issues that can be leveled against this with the way that she characterizes the situation between the official theory of what happened in 9-11 and her urging for a re-investigation. So the introduction goes on to talk about, but basically say that nobody's interested in revisiting the 9-11 investigation, or at least no one official. The US isn't and the UN isn't.
00:20:25
Speaker
But then claims that lots of people though are talking about the 9-11 investigation and want to look further into it. So she says, over the course of the last 16 years, neither the UN nor NATO has revisited the issue of responsibility for the attacks. And this despite the fact that one, an impressive body of literature has emerged that challenges virtually every significant aspect of the official account,
00:20:53
Speaker
Two, key members of the United States Congress have insisted that the domestic investigations into 9-11 were not credible and indeed were set up to fail by the Bush administration. And three, two candidates for the office of US President in 2016, Donald Trump Republican Party and Jill Stein Green Party,
00:21:10
Speaker
publicly questioned the accuracy of the official account with Stein going so far as to call for a new investigation. There's quite a lot going on there. Now one thing which this kind of brings to mind to me and this is not a perfect analogy but I think it actually does play a fairly significant role in how we kind of talk about the way these things work is that
00:21:31
Speaker
What we're seeing here is something which is quite similar to the debates in the whole Shakespeare authorship controversy, in that Amy Baker Benjamin is going, look, there is a debate going on. Some people doubt that 9-11 happened the way that it actually did, in the same respect that people who believe that Edward Devere, the Earl of Oxford, was really Shakespeare, go, look, there's a debate going on. There are some people out there who don't think it's settled,
00:22:00
Speaker
who Shakespeare really was and because there are people talking about this we need to investigate this and get to the truth because if people are talking about it it's an issue that needs resolution and it's obviously a matter which is up for debate. Now as far as that impressive body of literature that has emerged the main one she samples
00:22:29
Speaker
the main one she refers to rather, is the paper 15 years later on the physics of high-rise building collapses published in Europhysics News in 2016. Now that's a paper we looked at ourselves all the way back in episode 116 and we found it wanting. I think it's
00:22:49
Speaker
fair to say. Yes, it was not the best piece of work we've reviewed. There was a lot of the sort of cherry picking, a lot of claiming that people who support the official theory were sort of picking data to support their preconceived ideas when that's basically what the author of the paper was doing.
00:23:14
Speaker
themselves. Go back and listen to it, episode 116 if you want the full deal, but we didn't find it convincing. Interesting to see Donald Trump's name show up there. So this is 2016 prior to the election and both Trump and Jill Stein had voiced doubts about 9-11 Trump also had to get that point started talking about UFOs as well and wanting to
00:23:40
Speaker
the official story about them because he did that too didn't he? Yeah there was some mention about UFOs at the time was I can't actually recall whether it was a big issue I mean I remember him talking about the fact that he was asked about 9-11 and did that usual thing that Trump is quite prone to do which is to go oh well you know I think we probably should have some kind of discussion about that
00:24:02
Speaker
which is what Trump does when he's basically not paying attention to things, but wants to appear that he's really taken on board exactly what the person said. Is that sort of non-committal rambling? I mean, Trump does like a bit of the old non-committal rambling. Oh, he does. So the introduction chat, introductory chapter continues
00:24:26
Speaker
recent developments suggest that the public at large is beginning to back away from this assumption, the assumption being that the official account is accurate, and that it may be time for scholars to do so as well. And at this point, she brings up the missing 28 pages, which is something else we've talked about. We talked about it in episode 94, back when the 28 pages, this is the 28 pages that were redacted from the official report. They were being talked about
00:24:52
Speaker
way back when we recorded episode 94, where it was sort of assumed the reason why these pages have been redacted was because they relate to Saudi Arabia's role in the September 11 attacks, which America kind of wanted to sweep under the carpet a little bit, I think. Because it would be a diplomatic issue if it came out that the US was supporting a regime which itself had supported the 9-11 attacks.
00:25:19
Speaker
And then the 28 pages were eventually released, and we talked about that in episode 107, where basically they said what everyone thought they were going to say. So it wasn't a massive revelation, but nevertheless, Amy Baker Benjamin thinks that
Conclusion on 9/11's Impact and Global Reconciliation
00:25:36
Speaker
this is a problem for the official theory, the fact that Saudi Arabia had more of a role. I think what she was saying there, and correct me if you had a different impression, was that
00:25:48
Speaker
If Saudi Arabia had a role in the attacks and Saudi Arabia is an ally of America, that sort of, that draws things into question there. She does say, at the very least, a Saudi role in the attacks would invalidate the core plank of the official account, namely the claim that a decentralized group of non-state actors, bent on the most indiscriminate kind of asymmetric warfare, perpetrated the attacks on their own and unaided by the resources of any nation state.
00:26:15
Speaker
Now I do recall the 28 papers, there was that one particular line wasn't there, which it said, I should have it in front of me, I don't have it now, but basically it was a really sort of very specific hedged thing that sort of said, no one from the government, the Saudi Arabia government
00:26:35
Speaker
hated the attackers in an official capacity or something. It sort of it went to pains to say that the actual Saudi Arabian government didn't have anything to do with it while leaving it possible, leaving it open for the idea that
00:26:50
Speaker
actual members of it acting independently could have had something to do. Yes, she reminds me quite a lot of the whole John Key hat routine. So our former Prime Minister John Key was very keen on metaphorical hats, as far as the way he actually doesn't wear hats at all. But he would claim that when he made a statement in the House, he was making that statement as say the Minister for Tourism,
00:27:17
Speaker
and not the Prime Minister, because it turns out that actually the rules for disclosure differ between, say, a Prime Minister and a Minister. And so John Key would keep on changing hats, metaphorically, whenever he was asked questions to then be able to go, well, actually, no, I didn't say that as Prime Minister, I didn't say that as Minister of Tourism, so you can't request information in that way, you have to request it in another.
00:27:44
Speaker
And you can kind of imagine the situation of, you know, I'm a minister in the Saudi Arabian government, but I've taken my metaphorical hat off and I'm meeting Mr. X, the mysterious funder of operation Y, without my hat on, simply as a private citizen who in my day job, how it runs a country, but at night, my life is my own. So further down,
00:28:14
Speaker
the introductory chapter, we find this belated and still fledgling American movement toward transparency regarding 9-11 is unquestionably laudable. It is also, however, insufficient. The main contention of this article is that international law and international political institutions have a vital role to play in ensuring that the case of 9-11 is fully and objectively investigated. Not sure about the word fledgling in that paragraph.
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this was published in 2017, so we're looking at, what, 16 years after the event? Now, admittedly, as we've discussed on this podcast, 9, 11 Truth Movement itself doesn't really appear until about three or four years after the event. So maybe 9, 11 Truth has been around for only about 12 years at this point.
00:29:04
Speaker
But a theory which is 12 years old, and apparently is vital to be reinvestigated, doesn't appear to be fledgling in 2017.
00:29:17
Speaker
But anyway, that sort of rounds out the introduction section. And she finishes by basically as a good lawyer, her next step is to establish precedent. She says, I'll suggest that the first step in trying to break the 9-11 paralysis is to recognize that international law and political institutions have long been concerned with the danger of nation states committing false flags in order to both gain domestic political advantage and or to justify
00:29:44
Speaker
or prepare for international war to portions of this unsavory history I now turn. You dig into section two, why it is rational to care. And basically the entirety of section two can be summed up as false flags happen. Also, and I know this is actually probably not the point of this, but it's a very lawyerly thing to say, why is it rational to care? If this was a philosophy, say, why is it ethical to care?
00:30:14
Speaker
but no, fair enough. So section two is in three subsections. The first section is about false flags in Africa. It's entitled Africa's false flag education. And I want to point out this is not in the pre print of the article that she initially hosted on the AUT repository. So this was obviously a section that was added in probably by request of a reviewer at the journal.
00:30:43
Speaker
But nevertheless, this section is quite interesting because Africa is quite a big gap in my knowledge in general, but particularly when it comes to conspiracy theories. And so this section talks about various false flag events that have occurred in South Africa and apartheid South Africa. Apparently there are numerous incidents of police or other national forces
00:31:10
Speaker
performing false flag attacks to discredit the ANC.
00:31:16
Speaker
And apparently in other countries in Africa where things are a little more less stable, I suppose, there are numerous instances of African governments performing false flag attacks. And it's actually quite an interesting read, really. It's always nice to see something, to get a bit more education on something I don't know anything about.
00:31:42
Speaker
But then section B, section B is a bunch of familiar faces, isn't it? Actually, it's two familiar faces and another new one, to me at least. Yeah, so the first example that she puts forward is a false flag event in Manchuria. So back in 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria after the explosive sabotage of a railway line, which was blamed at the time on Chinese dissidents.
00:32:08
Speaker
it now looks through the lint of history as if the Japanese enacted the event to then justify the invasion. The next false flag she looks at is the Gleiwitz incident, which is one we have looked at before. In fact, that was actually part of our false flag series that we did a while ago. So this one was episode 149 of our podcast. Nearly 50 episodes ago.
00:32:36
Speaker
Oh yeah, a long, long time ago. So the short version of the Gleiwitz incident, if you don't remember back that far, is that in 1939 Nazi Germany staged an attack on a German radio station near what was at the time the border with Poland and blamed it on Polish saboteurs as a pretext for invading Poland and they, you know, they went as far as I recall they
00:32:58
Speaker
they took a Polish sort of partisan who they had prisoner killed him and then sort of shot his body with bullets and left him outside. So it would look here as though he'd been killed in the attack and so on and so forth. But it was 100% false flag. And then the last one, that's what she talks about is the Reichstag fire. Now we've talked about this several times,
00:33:24
Speaker
My understanding the last I heard was that it was still a little bit up in the air. There's definitely no question that the Nazi party capitalized on the Reichstag fire to a great extent. But last I heard it was kind of uncertain as to whether they had actually started the fire or communists had and they took advantage of it. Whereas she claims quite definitively that the Nazis definitely started the Reichstag fire.
00:33:52
Speaker
Now for those of you who don't know about the Reichstag fire, that was the fire that occurred in Germany prior to World War II, which was blamed on the Communists and was used by the Nazi Party to basically expel the Communists, the opposition, from the, about say, the Bundaberg, because I'm thinking about ginger beer, from the German parliament at the time.
00:34:18
Speaker
Now, just afterwards, people said, oh, that was definitely a false flag event. The Nazis basically started the fire and used that as a pretext for getting rid of the Communists. Most historians now think that actually the fire was probably an accident.
00:34:37
Speaker
and then the Nazis used the communists as convenient patsies because by blaming the communists it allowed them to achieve the thing they really wanted which was control of parliament. So I mean it's certainly false flag-esque no matter which way it went. It's false flag adjacent.
00:34:56
Speaker
And then finally, subsection C of chapter two is Operation Northwoods in the larger historical context. And so again, Operation Northwoods, we mentioned it briefly in episode 113. This was the positive plan to invade Cuba, whilst also setting up justifications for Americans to think that Cuba had actually started the hostilities.
00:35:24
Speaker
And so we went into it in more detail in episode 244 which is looking basically we looked at Cuba and we looked at a couple of different operations that had been proposed and in some cases partially enacted around Cuba. Operation Northwoods was basically 100% false flags. There's no doubt about that. It was plans for all sorts of
00:35:45
Speaker
acts of sabotage, what have you, in Cuba I think mostly. But there's a notable problem with using Operation Northwoods as an example, because whilst these were planned false flags, they were false flags that were never executed. No, so President Kennedy
00:36:06
Speaker
Once the plans were suggested to him basically next to the whole affair said not not going to happen and none of them actually occur, but the plans were for false flags to
00:36:18
Speaker
be blamed to sort of try and stoke a revolution in Cuba, to suggest that Cuba was a threat to drum up sort of international support for some sort of intervention in Cuba and what have you. And I mean, I think it does suit her purposes fairly well because she wants to say in this chapter that basically A, false flags occur, which they definitely do, we've talked about a whole bunch of them in this podcast, and B,
00:36:46
Speaker
false flags are something that the American government has thought about before. Maybe not, you know, she doesn't claim right then and there that it's a thing they've definitely done, but it is a thing they've definitely thought about doing.
00:37:00
Speaker
Yes, it is very much a case of, look, there's a history of false flags and there's also a history of people wanting to commit false flags. So, by extension, why not consider that 9-11, an extraordinary event, might be one of those false flags in the kind of loose definition that she uses in Fortnite 9.
00:37:24
Speaker
So she says, Manchuria, the Reichstag fire and the Gleiwitz incident were all undisputed, fully executed false flags, but none of them resulted in mass or even many casualties. Northwoods, on the other hand, gets us far closer to 9-11 in terms of a historical precedent, as it would have involved multiple theatres of operation and hundreds, perhaps even thousands of innocent victims. Moreover, when set within the context of two larger and closely related categories of state malfeasance, namely false flags used for domestic purposes,
00:37:52
Speaker
and false pretenses for interstate war not involving the use of false flags, the 9 million false flag scenario becomes scarily thinkable and, if you will, speakable. And she goes on to talk about Operation Gladio, which is not a name I recall, but it sounds like something we should have mentioned before. Was that familiar to you? So it has come up
00:38:14
Speaker
tangentially in previous episodes. So, GLADIO is an operation that occurred both during World War II, where the Allies were setting up resistant cells across Europe.
00:38:29
Speaker
And then after World War II, with the fear that the Soviets were going to engage in a massive land grab in Western Europe, the Allies basically set up a whole bunch of resistance cells all over Europe to ensure that there would be small cells that could operate independently.
00:38:48
Speaker
to push back against communism if it reared its ugly heads in their lovely Western democracies. And Gladio basically ran up until the 90s, at which point it officially ceased, although there are certain conspiracy theories that certain terrorist activities going on within the EU to this day, including separatist movements throughout Europe, are actually all part of ongoing Operation Gladio movements.
00:39:19
Speaker
So here a count of it reads, we have strong evidence that during the Cold War the US government acting through NATO orchestrated mass casualty false flag terrorism against the civilian populations of Western Europe for the purpose of discrediting the West European left. The history of this disgraceful episode is not widely known in the West, yet it is indeed very real.
00:39:40
Speaker
In the early stages of the Cold War, NATO and the governments of various West European countries arranged for the formation of a clandestine network of resistance fighters that were intended to be activated to fight against the Soviets in the event they invaded and occupied Western Europe. This project was codenamed Operation Gladio.
00:39:56
Speaker
The backbone of the GLADIO network were far-right and neo-Nazi groups working in coordination with carefully compartmentalised sections of the Western security and intelligence services. Although the Soviets never invaded Western Europe, NATO nonetheless activated this network beginning in the late 1960s to commit political assassinations and mass atrocity terror attacks that were blamed on West European Communists.
00:40:17
Speaker
In 1990, following a series of public revelations by various high-level European officials, the European Parliament alarmingly passed a resolution condemning GLADIO in the strongest possible language for its evasion of all democratic controls, its illegal interference in the internal political affairs of EU member states, and its involvement in serious cases of terrorism and crime. US military personnel in NATO were explicitly singled out and condemned for their involvement in the GLADIO network.
00:40:41
Speaker
Now it's important to note that she is claiming that Operation Gladia was largely made up of neo-Nazis and the far right. That is a very contentious claim to say at least, and this is in part because of her reliance on particular sources.
00:40:58
Speaker
in particular Gensler, which is one of her primary sources for this claim, many people dispute this claim. This is taken to be a very contentious characterisation of what the Gladio network was made up of. Most historians take it that Gladio was made up of local resistance cells, and so in some situations where the resistance cells were far right and opposed to communism,
00:41:23
Speaker
There were in fact Nazis and Neo-Nazis involved, but it certainly wasn't the backbone of the Gladio network. It was simply some cells, they were using existing resistance towards Communists, and sometimes having to make devils bargains at the same time.
00:41:44
Speaker
And then she goes on to mention the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which you've talked about before, which provided a pretext for the Vietnam War. And the US's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which of course was used as a pretext for the Second Iraq War.
00:42:02
Speaker
She finishes out, putting all these pieces together, what emerges is a disquieting mosaic showing the very real possibility of a mass casualty false flag attack being executed to justify international war. To dismiss this policy out of, sorry, to dismiss this possibility out of hand and to concomitantly belittle the need for the international community to investigate it not only reflects a profound lack of imagination, it reflects a rather profound degree of irrationality.
00:42:31
Speaker
Through an appeal to history regarding the reality of past false flag attacks and mass casualty state terror, I have tried to pry open the mental space needed for scholars and statesmen to begin to engage the reality of false flag attacks used for egregious purposes. Once we become so engaged, the options for action going forward are clear as set forth below.
00:42:50
Speaker
That a profound degree of irrationality. Them's fighting words. They are, especially for this podcast because, you know, we deal in warrant here at the podcast as guide to the conspiracy. We need more than just mere possibility. So yes, you certainly can't deny the possibility.
00:43:10
Speaker
of any particular false flag event, but that I would say is not a particularly high bar for justifying actually going back and investigating stuff that has already been investigated or indeed believing in it. And of course that's part of the problem with this paper as we're going to see. She is taking it that because there is controversy held by some people about the official theory of 9-11,
00:43:39
Speaker
then it's a controversial topic and it's a factor we need to reinvestigate it. What she isn't talking about is the investigations that already exist and are the reasons why maybe bodies like the UN don't want to go back and look at it because it turns out they think the answer is already there. Yeah I mean earlier in the introductory paragraph she sort of
00:44:07
Speaker
She tries to sort of cast doubt upon the official version, but doesn't really go any further than citing things like that Europhysics paper that casts doubt on it. But so this leads into section three, how we might now care. And so this is where the actual international law comes into things, goes into the legal arguments that the UN has the ability to investigate 9-11.
00:44:38
Speaker
She says the world community acting through the United Nations has the power and the right to investigate the cause of 9-11 and come to a judgment regarding it. Now this is not a law podcast, I am not a lawyer. I'm also not a lawyer. And frankly I'm quite happy to take her word for it. She lays out a bunch of precedent and quotes a bunch of people who've talked about the things that the UN can and can't do.
00:45:00
Speaker
and how the UN, you know, will act in terms of self-defence or not as to whether it thinks the things are justified or whether things to be condemned or what and so on.
00:45:14
Speaker
But again, it all kind of comes down to that big if again, if 9-11 was a false flag and therefore the US war on terror was not justified by self-defense, then yes, according to the argument she sets out here, the UN would be able to reject the self-defense claim and call on the US to cease its hostilities and would have grounds to, actually, I was going to say do another investigation, but this is post the investigation, isn't it? It's assuming the investigation shows it's a false flag.
00:45:44
Speaker
So yes, you sort of want to say that the UN could very definitely have a role in what should happen. But the problem here is that the UN is probably not going to get involved because they consider the case to have already been satisfactorily investigated. So I think it's quite useful here to talk about this notion of controversy, because the entire paper rests upon the idea that because there's a controversy about 9-11,
00:46:11
Speaker
this controversy is non-trivial and thus needs to be resolved. So we should probably talk about the idea that there are trivial differences and non-trivial differences. So a trivial distinction you might say that a 910 year old coin is older than a 900 year old coin and that is a that's a trivial distinction because yes it's true one coin is 10 years older than the other but they're both
00:46:41
Speaker
pretty old so when you kind of when people say oh but this this coin is older in case of well yeah you're right I mean it's a little bit older but it's not particularly important is it now of course this distinction might become non-trivial if it turns out that you're using the coin to say prove when someone came to live at a place or
00:47:04
Speaker
a treasure belonging to a particular person but by itself a 10-year difference for a 900-year-old coin pretty trivial distinction. But a non-trivial distinction would be declaring that look there's been embezzlement of the patron monies the podcast's guide to the conspiracy and either Em embezzled the monies or Josh embezzled the monies and that's a non-trivial distinction because
00:47:30
Speaker
If one of us did embezzle the money, the other didn't, and there are legal repercussions to embezzling things. So it's pretty important to work out whether Josh or myself engage in embezzling the vast sums of money we have stored in giant coffers around the land, which makes up all the monies we've taken from our patrons.
00:47:54
Speaker
And the reason why the stakes were made, that's all I can say. The money was just resting in Josh's account. That's all I'm going to say. And so in the same respect, you have trivial and non-trivial distinctions, you can have non-trivial and trivial controversies. It turns out that it's controversial that I'm a vegan who doesn't like mushrooms.
00:48:15
Speaker
People's kind of, they go, what? As if it's the most important thing I've ever said. But it's actually, it's kind of trivial in the grand scheme of things because most people have foodstuffs they don't like, which people find to be surprising.
00:48:32
Speaker
But you can also have controversies which are non-trivial. So when investigating a murder, it's non-trivial to seriously consider a subset of the range of suspects you have, because it's important to make decisions as to who you're going to spend time on. And of course, it's controversial to spend time on one suspect when you should be investigating another.
00:48:58
Speaker
And so I take it that Amy Baker Benjamin thinks that the 9-11 investigation and the fact there's a controversy is a non-trivial controversy in her eyes. She says, look, there are people having these discussions, these discussions are important, it indicates things up for debate, so we really need to sort this out.
00:49:19
Speaker
except that a lot of other people take the controversies to be a trivial one in the same way the Shakespeare authorship controversy is trivial. Yes, some people think there's something odd about the official theory in the same respect that some people think that William Shakespeare was not Shakespeare of Stratford on
00:49:42
Speaker
Avon, but those people are basically confused as to how serious this controversy actually is. It's a trivial one because actually most people just don't care because most people accept one explanation over the other. And all of this leads us to her chapter four, section four. Like I keep calling it chapter four. You what? You keep calling these sections chapters.
00:50:10
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm just used to chapters and books. But you don't even read books. I have read books. When was the last time you read a book? Well, it's funny you should say that because this is the one time of year when I do actually read books when I'm away on holiday with no PlayStation to keep me occupied. So I've read books as recently as a week ago. How about that? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
00:50:37
Speaker
I will. In fact, if you send me the book, I'll grind it up and turn it into the finest literary tobacco that the world has ever seen. Indeed. Anyway, section slash chapter four conclusion is actually short enough to read the whole thing out in one go, so I will.
00:50:57
Speaker
This article has not attempted to litigate the case of 9-11. Rather, it has sought to show that this very special case merits an objective and independent investigation by the foremost political body of the international community of the United Nations. Consider for one moment what the world would look like were the international community to arrive at a convincing judgment on 9-11. If the official account were confirmed, much of the political toxin injected by the event into the Western body politic would likely drain away.
00:51:24
Speaker
If the official account were falsified in the event a judge had a false flag attack by a transnational criminal cabal, several things would happen. The war on terror would come to an immediate halt, indictments would be issued and criminal trials held until justice was served, forgiveness of the Muslim world would be sought and forgiveness would be extended to any Muslims who struck in terror against the West and backlash against the initial fraudulent terrorism of 9-11.
00:51:47
Speaker
Truth and reconciliation a la South Africa would become not only thinkable but realistically possible and not an ounce of additional police state control of innocent citizens anywhere in the world would be needed in order to achieve these worthwhile goals. Either way on either outcome the world would be a better place, a genuine international investigation of a horrific and hugely important event is within our power, mercifully we have nothing to lose.
00:52:14
Speaker
And again, there's quite a lot going on there. It's a very rosy, a very hopeful view of what would happen if there were to be such a thing. I mean, there's this idea of the UN arriving at a convincing judgment on 9-11. I would argue that there are people
00:52:32
Speaker
if not the majority of people on the 9-11 Truth movement, who would not accept a judgement from the UN if it found in favour of the official version, no matter how convincing it was. I mean, I wouldn't go to say a majority, but yes, there is going to be a certain bunch of people in the 9-11 Truth community who are going to go, but yeah, but you do know the UN is in on it.
00:52:56
Speaker
And of course, an awful lot risks here on what conclusion the UN makes. I'd be quite curious to know what Amy Baker Benjamin's response would be if the UN investigated or reinvestigated 9-11 and said, actually, no, a miracle's right the first time it was Al-Qaeda and a plot to attack the US. The US was in no way involved. Would you think, oh, well, you know, it's still, but there are still people who disagree. We might need a re-re-investigation.
00:53:26
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, the whole thing seems a little bit weird because certainly all the conspiracy minded folk who we look at tend to view the UN as one of the bad guys. They're part of the New World Order. They're the ones with their agenda 21. And what's the new one? Agenda something else?
00:53:45
Speaker
I know there's a bunch of agendas. And it is interesting that the UN is often taken to be a threat to both the left and the right. So the right takes it that the UN comes in and destroys conservatism and thus is a threat to traditional family values and left-wing conspiracy theorists take it that the UN is a globalist organization
00:54:10
Speaker
which is seeking to bring about capitalist control of the world, so it's motivated by entirely the wrong kind of ideology. And so people on both sides of the spectrum tend to look askance at the UN, and in part for good reason, because when you look at the way the UN operates, it's a good system, but it's not a perfect system.
00:54:31
Speaker
and the imperfections in that system sometimes mean some fairly disastrous results occur because of the way it's designed to appease everyone and please no one. And I mean yes also the idea that if the UN were to rule against the US the war on terror would come to an immediate halt. I mean the US
00:54:54
Speaker
Notoriously is very, very, very keen to take UN rulings on everything. Yeah, yeah. But putting aside the fairly rose-tinted view of the consequences of such an investigation, I'm not quite sure what she was getting at with that bit about not an ounce of additional police state control of innocent citizens would be needed.
00:55:18
Speaker
Is that a dig at the Patriot Act? Well, I suppose it's a dig generally at the way in which 9-11 was used as a rationale to curb civil liberties in the same way that the 7-7 attacks in the UK were used as justification for the expansion of the surveillance state in the United Kingdom.
00:55:40
Speaker
9-11 and events like that have been used to bring around, I wouldn't say draconian controls, but certainly quite robust controls on what people can do. In the same respect, we've seen a lot of conspiracy theories about the rationale behind the pandemic based upon the notion that this is precisely what big government wants to do. It wants to shackle its citizens whenever possible.
00:56:05
Speaker
And sometimes that's probably true. Governments do sometimes look to expand their powers using emergencies like this. But that doesn't tell you that they create the emergencies to make the shackles larger. It sometimes just shows that people in positions of power will opportunistically use an event to then go, oh, that power
00:56:29
Speaker
power grab I wanted to do, I finally have a rationale to do it myself. I mean, we saw that with the results of the Christchurch earthquakes here, with National basically grabbing power from a whole bunch of councils in the South Island and going, oh, the earthquake gives us a rationale to seize control of councils that we don't like.
00:56:54
Speaker
But at any rate, as an article as a whole, as an argument as a whole, it still comes back to the same stuff we've already talked about. This really only makes sense if you're already a 9-11 truther. There's only
00:57:14
Speaker
a clear need for a conclusive investigation into this if you think the existing investigations weren't conclusive or if you don't like the conclusions that they came to. And it still comes back to that same sort of Pascal's wager thing, this kind of argument could be used to argue for the re-investigation of basically anything significant ever. And it doesn't seem that 9-11 is special in that regard.
00:57:43
Speaker
No, no, it does seem it does seem this is a argument based upon a preordained conclusion that we must reinvestigate 9-11 rather than argument providing us with a good rationale to engage in that investigation. Hmm.
00:58:00
Speaker
And the thing is, there probably are good arguments to be made for further investigation of the 9-11 event. This is simply not a good example of that kind of argument.
00:58:16
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it does come across, I guess, basically as question begging, I suppose. It's the kind of thing that would not get through a philosophy. And as I said at the top of the show, it's in a low ranked international law, which I think might speak to the caliber of the argument in the paper.
00:58:43
Speaker
All that being said, I don't know how many other journals she submitted it to, so I might be talking out of my ass, as our American friends say. They do. So I think that's all we have to say about that particular paper, which means that's all we have to say for this particular episode. Have you anything to say before we go out and you use your magical box to play the going out-y music?
00:59:13
Speaker
Well, I'm just going to say that, as usual, there'd be a patron bonus episode accompanying this episode. So if you are a patron, you've got more stuff to listen to. And if you're not a patron, well, then you have the opportunity to become one for at least a dollar a month. That's a dollar US. That gets you access to all of the additional content that the podcast provides. If you want a special shout out, it costs you $3. There's even more tiers for producers and executive producer roles if you are so inclined.
00:59:42
Speaker
And in our bonus episode, we're basically going to talk about January 6th and some of the fallout from what happened after the storming of the Capitol building in Washington DC. So patrons, stick around for that. But everyone else,
01:00:03
Speaker
I guess there's nothing more to say but listen to us for next time. Do we know where next time is going to be? Are your plans still very much up in the air? They are very much in flux so I'm assuming in this stage that I'll still be here at Auckland next week and the week after so next week we might have a bring along a conspiracy or as I call it what the conspiracy to excite and hopefully please Josh
01:00:32
Speaker
Spectacular. Oh well, until then, I don't believe there's anything more to do. Then simply say goodbye. Toodly pip. Oops, sorry, I just censored myself there. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me, Dr. M.R.X. Denterth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
01:01:01
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.