31. Ron Paul has even called Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma city bombing) a terrorist. One can't say something more taboo than that to the Alex Jones type. He is the most realist of all candidates, the most grounded in fact and the least conspiracy believing candidate available. I learned about Ron Paul through serious study of no nonsense news and politics websites.

joshuabrucel at 6:03PM on Jul 13th 2007

32. Wow this conspiracy theorist Scott got debunked pretty fast. How bout you omit the part that says Ron Paul is a truther or else you will lose any credibility if you had any? Please tell me did you do your research (or are you intentionally spreading lies)?

PBronstein at 5:46PM on Jul 13th 2007

33. IIRC, Dr Paul has specifically addressed Scott's disingeous "issues". As far as other issues scott may have, perhaps a Dr...

www.ronpaul2008.com/donate

michael at 6:06PM on Jul 13th 2007

34. First I'd just like to say that there is really nothing I wouldn't believe that Bush and Cheney wouldn't do to accomplish their agenda. I've never seen a more 'ends justifies the means' oriented pair in politics before.

Second... While I seriously doubt anyone would be stupid enough to risk actually carrying out a 'self inflicted' attack, it's far easier to picture scenarios when they simply disregard intelligence and let something 'slip by' and thereby gain the justification they so desperately want to start attacking countries willy-nilly and indicentally would give a huge boost to the neocon annointed candidates... Rudy, McCain and Freddy.

tsoldrin at 6:27PM on Jul 13th 2007

35. Scott, you write:

"Of course none of you respond to the fact that Saint Ron actually believes that the Bush administration would gin up a fake terror attack to gain power to invade Iraq."

Are you really that unaware of recent history, Scott?

The Bush Administration did not need to "gin up a fake terror attack to gain power to invade Iraq" as you claim.

Instead it had a REAL terror attack (9/11) which it then falsely associated with Saddam, "weapons of mass destruction," "niger yellowcake," etc. in order to "gain power to invade Iraq."

Thats 6 year old news... do you own a TV?

alex at 8:02PM on Jul 13th 2007

36. Scott, I don't know if you are trying to trick your readers or trick yourself. Good Laugh though.

louie sankey at 6:06PM on Jul 13th 2007

37. Where is the evidence that Ron Paul is a Truther? All Ron Paul did was to explain the concept of blowback. Of course, no candidate but Ron Paul has the courage to talk about blowback. However, in intelligence circles, blowback is old news. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, has endorsed precisely what Ron Paul said. The 9/11 report says the same thing. Even Paul Wolfowitz said the same thing. Is there any expert in foreign affairs who disagrees with the concept of blowback? I am not aware of any.

As far as your dismissal of Ron Paul is concerned, consider the choices:

A: War-mongering neocons.
B: Spineless Democrats.
C: Ron Paul, an honest politician who will follow U.S. Constitution, downsize DC, end personal income tax, bring all troops home, end preemptive war, protect our borders -- not everyone else's, and protect civil liberties.

Hm, this is a tough one... What should we do?

USA liberty at 6:11PM on Jul 13th 2007

38. Who are the nutjobs? Who is insane?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=847J99MkUdk


I'd be very surprised if Ron Paul didn't win the election:

1. NO IRAQ WAR - NONINTERVENTION

2. TRUE BORDER SECURITY

3. ABOLISH INCOME TAX

What more do you want?

The message of peace and freedom is growing exponentially and America likes what it hears - an honest leader with common sense.

toonces at 6:12PM on Jul 13th 2007

39. Scott, are you unfamiliar with the concept of a false flag operation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

It is a well-known military tactic and has been for thousands of years. Is this like when Giuliani appeared to be unfamiliar with the concept of blowback?

Buckwheat at 6:16PM on Jul 13th 2007

40. You know it is so comforting to know that the citizens of this country are so dialed in on whats going on around them. For anyone in this day and age that does not believe that our government or any other government would not attack it's own citizens has been hanging around the kool-aid fountain to long. The article below took about two minutes to find on the www, there are thousands more if you actually are interested in truth - it's a little long but you might find it eye opening...and if you don't believe what your reading dig into the subject, you won't believe what you will find out about our fine upstanding government !!

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/lieofthecentury_
text.html
THE LIE OF THE CENTURY

"All war is based on deception." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
There is nothing new in a government lying to their people to start a war. Indeed because most people prefer living in peace to bloody and horrific death in war, any government that desires to initiate a war usually lies to their people to create the illusion that support for the war is the only possible choice they can make.

President McKinley told the American people that the USS Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor by a Spanish mine. The American people, outraged by this apparent unprovoked attack, supported the Spanish American War. The Captain of the USS Maine had insisted the ship was sunk by a coal bin explosion, investigations after the war proved that such had indeed been the case. There had been no mine.

Hitler used this principle of lying to his own people to initiate an invasion. He told the people of Germany that Poland had attacked first. The Germans, convinced they were being threatened, followed Hitler into Poland and into World War 2.

FDR claimed Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. It wasn't. The United States saw war with Japan as the means to get into war with Germany, which Americans opposed. So Roosevelt needed Japan to appear to strike first. Following an 8-step plan devised by the Office of Naval Intelligence, Roosevelt intentionally provoked Japan into the attack. Contrary to the official story, the fleet did not maintain radio silence, but sent messages intercepted and decoded by US intercept stations. Tricked by the lie of a surprise attack, Americans marched off to war.

President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to send Americans off to fight in Vietnam. There were no torpedoes in the water in the Gulf. LBJ took advantage of an inexperienced sonar man's report to goad Congress into escalating the Vietnam

It is inescapable historical reality that leaders of nations will lie to their people to trick them into wars they otherwise would have refused. It is not "conspiracy theory" to suggest that leaders of nations lie to trick their people into wars. It is undeniable fact.

This brings us to the present case.

Did the government of the United States lie to the American people, more to the point, did President Bush and his Neocon associates lie to Congress, to initiate a war of conquest in Iraq?

This question has been given currency by a memo leaked from inside the British Government which clearly indicates a decision to go to war followed by the "fixing" of information around that policy. This is, as they say, a smoking gun.

But the fact is that long before this memo surfaced, it had become obvious that the US Government, aided by that of Great Britain, was lying to create the public support for a war in Iraq.

First off is Tony Blair's "Dodgy Dossier", a document released by the Prime Minister that made many of the claims used to support the push for war. The dossier soon collapsed when it was revealed that much of it had been plagiarized from a student thesis paper that was 12 years old!

The contents of the dossier, however much they seemed to create a good case for invasion, were obsolete and outdated.

This use of material that could not possibly be relevant at the time is clear proof of a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Then there was the claim about the "Mobile biological weapons laboratories". Proffered in the absence of any real laboratories in the wake of the invasion, photos of these trailers were shown on all the US Mainstream Media, with the claim they while seeming to lack anything suggesting biological processing, these were part of a much larger assembly of multiple trailers that churned out biological weapons of mass destruction.

The chief proponent of this hoax was Colin Powell, who presented illustrations to the United Nations on February 5th, 2003.

This claim fell apart when it was revealed that these trailers were nothing more than hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons. This fact was already known to both the US and UK, as a British company manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.

Colin Powell's speech to the UN was itself one misstatement after another. Powell claimed that Iraq had purchased special aluminum tubes whose only possible use was in uranium enrichment centrifuges. Both CIA and Powell's own State Department confirmed that the tubes were parts for missiles Saddam was legally allowed to have. Following the invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise were found.

Powell also claimed to the United Nations that photos showed "Decontamination Vehicles". But when United Nations inspectors visited the site after the invasion, they located the vehicles and discovered they were just firefighting equipment.

Powell claimed the Iraqis had illegal rockets and launchers hidden in the palm trees of Western Iraq. None were ever found.

Powell claimed that the Iraqis had 8,500 liters (2245 gallons) of Anthrax. None was ever found.

Powell claimed that Iraq had four tons of VX nerve gas. The UN had already confirmed that it was destroyed. The only VX ever found were samples the US had left as "standards" for testing. When the UN suspected that the US samples had been used to contaminate Iraqi warheads, the US moved quickly to destroy the samples before comparison tests could be carried out.

Powell claimed that Iraq was building long-range remote drones specifically designed to carry biological weapons. The only drones found were short-range reconnaissance drones.

Powell claimed that Iraq had an aggregate of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical and biological warfare agents. Powell gave no basis for that claim at all, and a DIA report issued the same time directly contradicted the claim. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq following the invasion.

Powell claimed that "unnamed sources" confirmed that Saddam had authorized his field commanders to use biological weapons. No such weapons were ever used by the Iraqis to defend against the invasion and, of course, none were ever found in Iraq.

Powell claimed that 122mm warheads found by the UN inspectors were chemical weapons. The warheads were empty, and showed no signs of ever having contained chemical weapons.

Powell claimed that Iraq had a secret force of illegal long-range Scud missiles. None were ever found.

Powell claimed to have an audio tape proving that Saddam was supporting Osama Bin Laden. But independent translation of the tape revealed Osama's wish for Saddam's death.

Colin Powell's UN debacle also included spy photos taken from high flying aircraft and spacecraft. On the photos were circles and arrows and labels pointing to various fuzzy white blobs and identifying them as laboratories and storage areas for Saddam's massive weapons of mass destruction program. Nothing in the photos actually suggested what the blobby shapes were and inspections which followed the invasion, all of them turned out to be rather benign. In at least one case, the satellite Powell claimed had taken one of the pictures had actually been out of operation at the time. And many questioned why Powell was showing black and white photos when the satellites in use at the time over Iraq took color images.

Another piece of evidence consists of documents which President Bush referenced as in his 2003 State of the Union Speech. According to Bush, these documents proved that Iraq was buying tons of uranium oxide, called "Yellow Cake" from Niger. Since Israel had bombed Iraq's nuclear power plant years before, it was claimed that the only reason Saddam would have for buying uranium oxide was to build bombs.

This hoax fell apart fast when it was pointed out that Iraq has a great deal of uranium ore inside their own borders and no need to import any from Niger or anywhere else. The I.A.E.A. then blew the cover off the fraud by announcing that the documents Bush had used were not only forgeries, but too obvious to believe that anyone in the Bush administration did not know they were forgeries!

In the end, the real proof that we were lied to about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That means that every single piece of paper that purported to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was by default a fraud, a hoax, and a lie. There could be no evidence that supported the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In a way, the existence of any faked documents about Iraq's WMDs is actually an admission of guilt. If one is taking the time to create fake documents, the implication is that the faker is already aware that there are no genuine documents.

What the US Government had, ALL that they had, were copied student papers, forged "Yellow Cake" documents, balloon inflators posing as bioweapons labs, and photos with misleading labels on them. And somewhere along the line, someone decided to put those misleading labels on those photos, to pretend that balloon inflators are portable bioweapons labs, and to pass off stolen student papers as contemporary analysis.

And THAT shows an intention to deceive.

Lawyers call this "Mens Rea", which means "Guilty Mind". TV lawyer shows call it "Malice aforethought". This means that not only did the Bush Administration lie to the people and to the US Congress, but knew they were doing something illegal at the time that they did it.

All the talk about "Intelligence failure" is just another lie. There was no failure. Indeed the Army agents who erroneously claimed that missile tubes were parts for a uranium centrifuge received bonuses, while the Pentagon smeared Hans Blix, and John Bolton orchestrated the firing of Jose Bustani, the director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, because Bustani was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad.

The President of the United States and his Neocon associates lied to the people of the United States to send them off on a war of conquest.

Defenders of the government will point to the cases listed at the top of the page as proof that lying to the people is a normal part of the leader's job and we should all get used to it. And because "Everybody does it" that we should not single out the present administration. But this is madness. We do not catch all the murderers, yet when we catch a murderer, we deal with them as harshly as possible, in order to deter more murderers.

Right now, we have the criminals at hand. and, while other leaders in history have lied to start wars, for the first time in history, the lie stands exposed while the war started with the lies still rages on, to the death and detriment of our young men and women in uniform. We cannot in good moral conscience ignore this lie, this crime, lest we encourage future leaders to continue to lie to use to send our kids off to pointless wars. Lying to start a war is more than an impeachable offence; it the highest possible crime a government can commit against their own people. Lying to start a war is not only misappropriation of the nation's military and the nation's money under false pretenses, but it is outright murder committed on a massive scale. Lying to start a war is a betrayal of the trust each and every person who serves in the military places in their civilian leadership. By lying to start a war, the Bush administration has told the military fatalities and their families that they have no right to know why they were sent to their deaths. It's none of their business.

Our nation is founded on the principle of rule with the consent of the governed. Because We The People do not consent to be lied to, a government that lies rules without the consent of the governed, and ruling without the consent of the governed is slavery.

You should be more than angry. You should be in a rage. You should be in a rage no less than that of the families of those young men and women who have been killed and maimed in this war started with a lie.You need to be in a rage and you need to act on that rage because even as I type these words, the same government that lied about Iraq's nuclear weapons is telling the exact same lies about Iran's nuclear capabilities. The writing is on the wall; having gotten away with lying to start the war in Iraq, the US Government will lie to start a war in Iran, and after that another, and after that another, and another and another and another because as long as you remain silent, and as long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

As long as you remain inactive, the liars have no reason to stop.

None.

It is time to fire the liars.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing" .
--Edmund Burke

ceb at 6:27PM on Jul 13th 2007

41. You should research the Gulf of Tonkin and USS Liberty incidents if you do not believe that the government would sacrifice its own for a political agenda. One incident that Dr. Paul cites is the 1953 Operation Ajax overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq. The US helped protect British oil interests by overthrowing Mossadeq via our CIA and installed the Shah of Iran. Bush contemplated painting a US spy plane in UN colors and fly it over Iraq as provocation to give the US a pretext to declare war. And, of course, there is Operation Northwoods, which Kennedy rejected. This was a plan drawn up by the joint chiefs to provoke a war with Cuba.

And there are scores of other examples throughout history. Look at the Reichstag Fire and subsequent passage of the Enabling Acts in Nazi Germany. They pinned blame on Van DerLubbe, but it was orchestrated by Goering.

Ask Peter Powers of Visor Consultants about the London bombings of 7/7 and how his company was staging a drill that day with precisely the same targets that were hit that day.

So, there are countless examples throughout history of governments using terror or the threat of terror to control their populations. There is also countless examples of governments staged "false flag" terror attacks as a pretext to declare war for political gain.

Regardless, while most politicians are too politically correct and cowardly to entertain alternative theories and explanations, Ron Paul at least listens to what they have to say. There are still many unanswered questions about 9/11, which lends itself to the many conspiracy theories that are out there. Stuff like directed energy weapons, pods, and remote controlled aircraft sound rather far fetched in my view, and I think Ron Paul would say that as well.

However, please explain how building 7 of the WTC collapsed when it was not hit by an airplane. Please explain why Larry Silverstein said in a PBS documentary that they made the decision to "pull" building 7. Please explain how numerous put options on airlines went unclaimed - the identities are known as required by SEC rules - yet no one has been arrested or questioned about them. Explain Dick Cheney's stand down order and Norman Mineta's testimony. Explain why the Pentagon has only released four still photos from the Pentagon cameras, when there were hundreds of cameras that would have recorded it from multiple angles. Also, explain why the FBI confiscated video footage from the nearby Sheraton and Citgo and could easily disprove the Pentagon missile theories by releasing, yet still have not released the video evidence.

Further, explain how buildings fall at free fall speed without controlled demolition explosive charges. If you look at video of the collapse of the towers, you will see that they fall at free fall speed. Explain how molten steel was found weeks after the collapse and explain how Dr. Steven Jones of BYU found traces of thermate in steel samples.

Explain why Rudy Giuliani kept the emergency facilities in WTC7, even after the 1993 attack and after warnings from the NYPD. Explain how 3 steel structured buildings became the first EVER in history to supposedly collapse due to fire. Explain the audio of firefighters inside the buildings saying that they should be able to contain the fires with just a couple of lines. Explain the NYFD saying "it was if they had detonators or something" and "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way down" and numerous eyewitness accounts of explosions. Or, Dan Rather's statement that the WTC collapse was reminiscent of a typical controlled demolition. Explain Willie Rodriquez's testimony concerning explosions that he heard in the basement of the building and one of the last out of the towers before they collapsed. Explain how several of the supposed hijackers were reported by the BBC as still being "alive and well."

Millions of Americans and people around the world still have unanswered questions about the tragedy of 9/11, and no one has been arrested and tried. Ron Paul has given token support towards a new investigation, so you vilify him as being a "truther."

adam at 6:26PM on Jul 13th 2007

42. Here's a conspiracy theory for ya: We're situated on a round ball of matter that's travelling at 10,000 miles per second through space, in a galaxy that's hurtling through space at millions of miles per hour. It's a giant gyroscope! And get this -- matter has so far not been proven to exist! Each time our scientists break through the subatomic shell of the smallest bit of matter, only smaller subatomic bit are found -- all of them with energy fields that are probably there. In other words, matter is only probably here, since solid ground has yet to be discovered. Oh, and every molecule in our bodies is replaced by an entirely different one each year. And with each breath, we each inhale a few dozen of the same electrons that Caesar exhaled when he said "Et tu, Brute?" In addition, time is an illusion of the mind.

Wow, what a CONSPIRACY!!! You'd think that anyone who believes THAT would have to be out of their FREAKIN' MIND!!!

I can't handle anything more than tunnel vision, myself. It's the narrow view or nothing at all, for this dude. Life is much safer that way!

Larry C. at 6:26PM on Jul 13th 2007

43. is this guy serious? Dr. Paul is NOT a truther. Just because truthers support him doesn't make him a truther.

Danny at 8:10PM on Jul 13th 2007

44. Lets not forget how Bush made it perfectly clear that he would fire any member of his cabinet if they leaked the name of the CIA agent a few years ago....

well he seems to have admitted that that happened, but said "its old news now, lets move on". and oh yeah lets not forget Scooter Libby!

Despotism is real and its creeping in.

wolv at 6:41PM on Jul 13th 2007

45. Ron Paul is definitely not a 9/11 truther because his major argument about 9/11 is that our interventionist policies in the middle east caused blowback. This means that we made so many enemies in the middle east that eventually one of them attacked us. This is not even close to saying that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the US government.

In regards to his answer to the Gulf of Tonkin question, he is saying that tension has been building so much that a spark could unleash hell between US and Iran. He doesn't know in what form that spark may come. In Viet Nam it was the Gulf of Tonkin. Whether or not the Gulf of Tonkin was a conspiracy by the US government, the government is still culpable for pushing tensions so close to the breaking point that such an incident could lead to war. Ron Paul is saying that we are now pushing tensions to a similar breaking point right now with Iran.

Nothing in his quote suggests otherwise. It is true that Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist, but nothing Ron Paul said endorses such conspiracies.

PK at 6:44PM on Jul 13th 2007