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The Newt Bomb

How a pulp-fiction fantasy became a GOP weapons craze.

Speaking to a Washington conference earlier this month, Newt Gingrich heartily recommended a disturbing apocalyptic thriller currently on The New York Times' best-seller list. Written by William Forstchen, One Second After tells the story of what happens to a college town after the lights go out. Not just the lights, actually, but electrical devices of all kinds. Phones go dead, computers fritz, cars won't start. That this is a more than an inconvenience quickly becomes apparent: Patients die in powerless hospitals, and frozen food begins to rot. Word spreads that airliners have simply dropped from sky, including Air Force One. (The president is dead.) Squirrel meat is traded for ammunition as Mexico reclaims Texas, China occupies the West coast, and cannibalistic mobs rampage everywhere else.

As it happens, Forstchen has co-authored several books of historical fiction with Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker. So, when Gingrich spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual policy conference, he was all too happy to plug his friend's book--but also to drive home a policy point. "It's based on fact, it is accurate, and it's horrifying, and we have zero national strategy to respond to it today," Gingrich said. He laid out a vision in which three small nuclear weapons detonated at the right altitude would eliminate all electricity production in the United States. Which is why, he concluded, "I favor taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites. "

Gingrich's doomsday scenario involves something known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. It is a scientifically valid--if not strategically realistic--theory based on the effect that gamma rays released by exploding nuclear weapons have when they interact with the earth's atmosphere. One or more bombs of the right size, exploded at a high enough altitude, could theoretically fry the circuitry of all electronic equipment lacking special protection--that means everything from iPods to televisions to power plants.

People have fretted about an EMP blast since the cold war. But now, discredited by the Iraq war, Gingrich and a cadre of conservative hawks are resurrecting the chilling vision and applying it to a new world of rogue states and terrorist groups. The attention-grabbing narrative of the pulse threat offers them a fresh argument for some familiar hobbyhorses--namely a multibillion-dollar national missile-defense system and even preemptive military strikes against charter members of the Axis of Evil. ... http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a25fb1f1-aced-41bb-9d30-fa0de6a531fc

9/11 re-enacted: Wikileaks publishes September 11 pager messages

Whistleblowing website publishes 'intercepted' texts in order officials and witnesses sent them

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2009/nov/25/september-11-wikileaks-pager-messages

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On another consipracy note: Conspiracist prominent in movement claiming president Obama is an imposter http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/barack-obama-british-conspiracist

 

Will Airlines Have to Answer for 9/11 After All?

An article in Saturday's New York Times describes how all the families suffering losses on 9/11 have now taken settlements, receiving some $7 billion from the government and $500 million in private suits—all the families, that is, save one: the family of Mark Bavis, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175. The family is seeking damages directly from the airlines, a lawsuit that represents the last real possibility for an independent inquiry into the culpability of these private carriers—not to mention the "regulators" at the Federal Aviation Administration, who appeared intent on serving the airlines rather than the public. It's a long shot perhaps, but the Bavis suit might achieve some of what the expensive, timid, and inconclusive 9/11 Commission Report could not. As the Times article points out, they have identified several areas in which the airlines' negligence contributed to the events of 9/11: Their lawyers' investigation has zeroed in on "failures at airport security checkpoints, flawed cockpit doors, inadequate training and how the industry ignored confidential government warnings about terrorist threats."

My 2005 book, The 5 Unanswered Questions About 9/11, also explores these same areas and sets out in detail the chain of evidence that demonstrates airline and government negligence leading up to the attacks. A few excerpts: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/09/one-911-familys-brave-effort-expose-airline-culpability