Samuel W. Bodman, "Remarks to the US Chamber of Commerce's 4th Annual North America Forum," June 16, 2008.

[Bodman is the little-known US Secretary of Energy, the Department that, among other things, manufactures nuclear weapons. In this speech he discusses the North American Energy Working Group, which is a key component of the Security and Prosperity Partnership. He speaks of biofuels R&D through the Trilateral Agreement for Cooperation in Energy Science and Technology.

The US Department of Energy has also awarded funds for six large-scale carbon sequestration projects with a capacity to store one million or more tons of carbon dioxide in deep saline reservoirs. He mentions two projects that entail partnerships with the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia.

Needless to say, he speaks of "safe" and "emission free" nuclear, and if you buy that, he also dreams of eliminating the environmental impacts of coal. Sigh. On another theme, he believes that government intervention is appropriate, indeed "a responsibility" when it comes to "sustained funding" for research and development. Not health care. Not education. Not labour standards. Not legal services. -jlt]

Thank you very much, Ron, for that kind introduction and for the critically important work that you and your colleagues do at Lawrence Livermore. I also want to thank my good friend Secretary George Shultz - along with his esteemed co-chairs for this event, Peter Lougheed and Pedro Aspe, for inviting me to be with you. It's a pleasure to be here.

The way I see it, this event could not come at a better time. With its focus on enhancing cooperation among the United States, Canada and Mexico - and on bringing together representatives of our governments and the private sector - you are helping to develop and achieve real and lasting solutions to some of our world's most significant challenges. And when it comes to the global energy landscape, the challenges we face are certainly massive and pervasive. I don't need to remind you of where we stand.

Increasing global demand for energy, rising prices, a lack of adequate investment in new supply - which goes back several decades - along with harmful regulatory and policy environments around the world have coalesced into a global energy reality that is not sustainable. And, of course, producing enough affordable energy to meet demand is not our only challenge.

We also must confront global climate change and continue to look for ways to develop and use energy that are cleaner, more efficient and more sustainable.

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FEATURE"Challenging the 911 orthodoxy: a review of 'Zeitgeist,'" November 6, 2007.

Zeitgeist is a movie that challenges what it calls the 911 Myth.

The 911 Myth: 19 Hijackers, directed by Osama B. Laden, took over 4 Commercial Jets with box cutters and, while evading the Air Defense System (NORAD), hit 75% of their targets. In turn, W. Trade towers 1, 2, & 7 collapsed due to structural failure through fire in a “pancake” fashion, while the plane that hit the Pentagon vaporised upon impact, as did the plane that crashed in Shanksville. The 911 Commission found that there were no warnings for this act of Terrorism, while multiple government failures prevented adequate defense.

The film proceeds to dismantle this myth piece by piece.

[clip Zeitgeist - no warning signs]

But these familiar voices are members of the Bush Administration, not the Keen-Hamilton commission. Actually, the Executive Summary of the 911 commission says that quote “Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers.”

The Zeitgeist version of the so-called 911 myth clearly mis-represents this finding of the Keen-Hamilton commission.

Strangely, Parts I and III of the film are not about the events of 911 at all, even though the film's website does say that "he most important issue is exposing 9/11 and thus exposing government sponsored Terrorism."

Part I is a religious discussion that concludes after about 40 minutes that Jesus Christ didn't exist. Anyone familiar with James Frazer's Golden Bough will recognize an argument that is similar except that it lacks the complexity and subtlety of the original. The Zeitgeist narrative consistently modifies and distorts the multi-faceted history of numerous mythologies to favour its own predetermined conclusion.

A local correspondent sent me an Australian blog article on Zeitgeist with 300 comments:

One of these comments finds the religious part of Zeitgeist "particularly misleading" Using the example of the Egyptian god Horus, this writer points out that the story is complex. Horus was an Egyptian god from the earliest times of Egyptian civilization. "There is no single story of Horus." Horus "took on many different forms and characteristics." There is no reason to believe that Horus was born to a virgin, that there was a star in the east at his birth, that he was adorned by kings, that he was a teacher at the age of 12, that he was baptized and began a ministry at 30, that he had 12 disciples and travelled about performing miracles such as walking on water.

The writer concludes by asking, "Why is it that the left is just as bad as the right at churning out pure propaganda?"

However, the 911 truth research too is more complex than this. Zeitgeist cannot be easily dismissed as either Democratic or left wing. Some of its analysis is decidedly right-wing, such as the link to Ron Paul's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Opposition to the North American Union, which is a left-of-centre issue in Canada is a far-right issue in the US.

The discrepancies I have called attention to are not terminal failures in the argument as it might be presented by others. But they do cast serious doubt on the ability of the Zeitgeist narrator to understand the facts and present them fairly. The version of events presented, not as an alternate hypothesis, but as 911 truth goes like this.

Criminal Elements within the US Government staged a “False Flag” Terror Attack on its own citizens, in order to manipulate public perception into supporting its agenda.

They have been doing these for years.


911 was an inside job.

What does it mean to say that 911 was an inside job? Who are the suspects? Who are the witnesses?

Unfortunately, the suggestion that it was Bush and the Washington neoconservatives has yet to take itself seriously. Imagine Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle putting on coveralls to spend their weekends cutting through the innermost beams of the World Trade Center and planting explosives. That version of the inside job has a lot of heavy lifting, yet no heavy lifters have been named, no blue collars. For that matter, the naming of names does not even include someone with skills as practical as a courtroom lawyer or frontline negotiator.

In an era when an unprecedented number of generals and intelligence analysts have stepped forward to denounce the War in Iraq, why is there not a single patriotic technician stepping forward to blow the whistle on another phony story by the Bush Administration? The absence of a whistleblower suggests uncommon loyalty for a project whose victims are not in any sense enemies of the US. That doesn't mean that it wasn't "an inside job." But there are some significant gaps in the data.

The neocons are bureaucrats and academics who normally work with squads of middle managers between them and the operational level. Not impossible, but not likely either. Let's just make a note that our suspects might be a large, highly disciplined group with a big budget and an uncertain, but absolutely committed, moral profile. Does that describe Blackwater or DynCorp or one of the other privatized military corporations? I don't know.

A second "inside job" scenario is that 911 was a media fabrication anchored by a bare bones operation in the real world. This might account for a different set of discrepancies such as the two airliners which Zeitgeist alleges did not fly into the WTC. Maybe they were airbrushed in. This implies a different line of inquiry and raises, at the least, a question about why those planes were necessary to the operation at all.

A third version of "inside job" would be a mole or even a leak. That would account for the parallel simulations in both the US and UK (somewhere else?) In fact, war games are not such well guarded secrets as you might think.

[clips: Zeitgeist - orchestrated by the state (complete with the melodramatic sound effects)]

As the first speaker says, a similar parallel simulation occurred on 911. Loose Change, an earlier movie on the same theme as Part II of Zeitgeist, lays out a chronology and gives detail that is less manipulated to fit the desired conclusion. In Loose Change, the simulation is not "exactly the same." The plane is a "small corporate jet." [Loose change - o god i don't know ]

In war, as in other games, there is a finite number of plays. Is it possible that someone planning a set of simultaneous attacks could wait to establish the timing and specific targets of those attacks until a publication like Army Times or a journal of the War College announced a certain type of war game simulation for a particular period?

The question that this raises is one that psychologists call locus of control and it forces us to recognize that all three scenarios challenge more than just Zeitgeist's "911 myth". They challenges the vision that we ordinarily have of the role of government, and that leads directly to the critique of globalization. But where do Zeitgeist and the 911 truth movement belong? The peace movement? anti-globalization? democratic reform?

Viewed as a discovery process or an exploratory attempt to establish the truth, the so-called 911 truth movement has been partly successful. It has challenged the orthodox view of the events of 911 01. It exposed discrepancies in the official version and raised an urgent question about what really happened.

However, it has not established a clear and plausible answer to that question.

Viewed as a discovery process, the 911 truth movement has a lot of clues and not much evidence. There is still a lot of homework to be done, one hopes with more attention to details like who said what.

However, considered as an exercise in political mythology, the 911 truth movement may be the only option on the current scene capable of mobilizing that 30-35% of registered voters who stay at home on election day, not out of apathy as the establishment would like to think, but as the only means available to give a corrupt and dysfunctional political system the bird. But that is a possibility for another day.

The search terms for the blog's Hot Topics have been changed to “US India nuclear” and “123 agreement” which is the name the deal goes by in India and “Hyde Act” which a US law requiring an annual certification by the US President, which, the Left in India says, is not superceded by the 123 deal and 123 agreement Canada. Unlike previous topics, this one is being widely followed in media outside the US, especially in India and among those who follow the nuclear issue. The Times of India, the Economic Times, Mumbai's Daily News and Analysis, The Hindu, the Chandigarh Tribune all had articles last week. A new American news aggregator called New America Media (aka New California Media) had a story as did the World Nuclear News. Nothing else here.


This article is published by James Terral under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. Commercial media must contact me for permission and fees. Some postings on this site are published under different terms.

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FEATURE"Secrecy, nonviolence and continental integration," October 2, 2006.

When Stockwell Day told the Penticton Herald there was nothing secret about a high-level meeting of business and government leaders from the US, Canada and Mexico in Banff earlier this month, he certainly did not deny attending the meeting.

"My travels are not secret," Day told the Penticton paper.

You could say he was just correcting the Toronto Star which had reported more than a week earlier "Day's office has been telling journalists that it cannot comment on the minister's private meeting and that journalists should understand this."

Still, the Conservative minority Government issued no press releases, held no press conferences, provided no background reports about the second annual meeting of what has come to be known as the North American Forum. The government has not released any information about the content of the discussions or the participants.

The meeting was, I suppose it is appropriate to say, exposed by Susan Thompson on the Vive le Canada website.

Although there was no final confirmation of who actually attended, documents leaked to Whistleblower magazine listed participants including such prominent figures as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mexican Secretary of Public Security Eduardo Medina Mora and Canadian Forces chief General Rick Hillier.

The event was chaired by former U.S. secretary of state George Schultz, former Alberta premier, Peter Lougheed and former Mexican finance minister Pedro Aspe.

Some of the expected participants names were familiar: Thomas d'Aquino of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Gordon O'Connor the current Minister of Defense, James Schlesinger Former US Sec. of Energy & Defense, James Woolsey former director of the CIA and a prominent neo-conservative with Freedom House, Perrin Beatty former Progressive Conservative Solicitor General and later Minister of National Defence, Anne McLellan former Attorney General and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, and John Manley, former Minister of Industry, Foreign Affairs, and Finance.

If it was not a secret meeting, it should at least be mentioned that an anonymous and uncomfirmed source on the Vive le Canada website said quote

"I spoke with some employees of the Banff Springs Hotel and they told me a few details. The busses came and left in the middle of the night. Banff Springs Hotel employees were told not to talk to the media about this. The one or two reporters who were digging for information on this were told by the hotel that all their media relations people were away. A limo driver was told not to tell anyone who he drove. The delegates stayed mostly on the 4th floor of the hotel and rarely left that floor."

Mel Hurtig, a noted Canadian author and publisher and former leader of the National Party of Canada, said the "secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process."

"What is sinister about this meeting is that it involved high level government officials and some of the top and most powerful business leaders of the three countries and the North American Forum in organizing the meeting intentionally did not inform the press in any of the three countries," he said. "It was clear that the intention was to keep this important meeting about integrating the three countries out of the public eye."

Who are these people? and why is Hurtig so sure this meeting was about what he Council of Canadians calls "deep integration"?

Is Mel Hurtig sounding paranoid here?

Writing for WorldNet Daily, Jerome Corsi spotted Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University, among those on the list of participants.

Pastor is widely known for his extensive writings arguing for the creation of a North American Union, a new super-regional North American government based on the model of the European Union, with the intent of subrogating the sovereignty of the United States.

Pastor was co-chair of the Council of Foreign Relations task force that in May 2005 released a report entitled "Building a North American Community."

About one-third of the listed members of CFR task force attended the Banff conference. One prominent participant in both was Carla A. Hills, who served as US trade representative from 1989 to 1993 and was the primary US negotiator for NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement].

American conservatives, like Phyllis Schlafly, and Human Events Magazine, have criticized policies which they believe would lead to an integrated continental court system and common currency on the grounds that they would lead to an erosion of US sovereignty.

Canadian criticism comes from the left and has more to do with "deep integration," the emphasis on deregulation and harmonization of standards, but also express concern about the loss of sovereignty and ultimately of a separate national identity.

The Council of Canadians has argued that this push towards economic union "will lead to the privatization of [Canada's] health care, the loss of control of our resources, further compromises in trade deals like what we have seen with the United States-Canada softwood lumber dispute."



What caught my eye was the presence of Berel Rodal, vice-chair of the International Centre for Nonviolent Conflict on the list of participants. It was strange to see what appeared to be a peace group there with the generals--including the US Admiral in charge of NORAD and the Northern Command--and the ministers of national defence.

ICNC is careful not to accept grants, contracts or funding of any kind from any government or government-related organization, or from any foundation, corporation or institution, public or private. As its website makes clear, "It is funded entirely by the family philanthropy of the founding chair," Dr. Peter Ackerman.

In addition to his role as founding chair of ICNC, Ackerman is also chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, an important US intelligence recruitment center, and is on the Executive Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Dr Ackerman was also a founding director of the Albert Einstein Institution.

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report for the years 2000 to 2004, its mission is to "advance the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action in conflict."

Numerous individuals and organizations interested in the potential of nonviolent struggle contact the Albert Einstein Institution. In recent years, requests for information or advice have come from people involved in conflicts in Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, Vietnam, China, Tibet, West Papua, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Angola,
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe. (qtd in Mowat)

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) trains and deploys youth movements on the ground to prepare the conditions for coups by fostering the impression that the targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and by destabilizing those regimes with their demonstrations and other nonviolent tactics. It is funded by the Soros foundations and the US government, through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. It is led by retired Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr. Gene Sharp.

The ICNC makes it perfectly clear that it

"will not assist activists in planning, organizing or conducting any actions; it will not provide political or strategic advice to those contemplating or engaged in nonviolent conflict; and it will not furnish funds to subsidize their operations."

These functions are performed by the Albert Einstein Institution, especially by Col Bob Hervey, a 30-year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency with plenty of

practical experience in subversive operations throughout Southeast Asia prior to his work with the institution. According to numerous reports, Helvey was the case officer for the US-sponsored coup in Serbia, was deeply involved in similar operations in Georgia, and according to at least on report, was on the ground in the recent coup in Ukraine.

It seems that the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict is up to its eyeballs in what Jonathan Mowat a writer for the the Online Journal called the PostModern Coup--popularly known these days as the color revolution.

ICNC Vice-Chair Berel Rodal is also formerly Director-General of the Policy Secretariat of the Canadian Department of National Defence and was probably right at home among the generals and ministers of war.

But why was Rodal present at the in Banff Meeting? Is a Postmodern Coup planned in one of the participating states?

Or are they already well under way?

Like the recent Mexican presidential election. Representatives of the Felipe Calderón campaign were present at the Banff meeting. That election has some of the hallmarks of the postmodern coup: huge demonstrations and encampments, allegations of electoral fraud.

Is Canada next? Maybe Hurtig doesn't sound so paranoid after all.

Mary Turck at the Resource Center for the Americas has noted similarities between the current electoral crisis in Mexico and the 2004 American presidential election, but nothing to suggest a common instigator, and especially nothing like the slick PR--the one word slogan, the color scheme, the fantastic media support for the opposition.

Drifting back to earth, I remember Day telling the Penticton Herald, quote "Anytime I get a chance to promote Canadian products and the need to make sure Canadians have good access to manufacturing and sales potential in the United States and Mexico, I will." But this is too modest. Day delivered the Keynote Address after dinner on Wednesday night.

It may still be early for outright paranoia, but it's not too soon to demand better answers than we are getting.

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