by Matt Taibbi
E902.T345 2008
973.93—dc22
2007043204
v1.0
FOOTNOTES
*1These substitute speakers, incidentally, are called Speakers pro tempore, and most every day in Congress begins with the reading of a note from Hastert nominating this or that Republican colleague to act in his stead—one of the first rules of the modern Congress being that the primary actors of the House almost always have something better to do than actually show up on the floor.
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*2Congresswoman Jane Harman on January 4: “We have already spent at least $400 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. But only about 9 percent of those funds were approved through the normal appropriations process.
“The rest was passed in ‘Emergency Supplemental’ appropriation bills not subject to budget caps or the normal congressional oversight process. These supplementals—because their numbers do not appear on the budgetary bottom line—allow the White House to pretend it is maintaining a semblance of fiscal discipline. But our deficits are already spiraling out of control and there is no way to bring the budget into balance without taking the staggering war costs into account.
“The Bush Administration has claimed emergency spending is necessary because the costs of a protracted war on terror are not known. Nonsense. Both the Korean and the Vietnam wars were almost entirely financed through the regular appropriations process—not emergency supplementals.
“The White House will soon ask for over $100 billion in new emergency war spending. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than we spent in 1968, the most expensive year of the war in Vietnam. And the lion’s share of that funding was done through the regular process.
“There must be no more blank checks for this president, and I predict this will be the last ‘emergency’ supplemental in the new Democrat-controlled Congress.”
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*3Most Truther sites try to avoid speculating about what happened to the passengers of what turned out to be Flight 77, but the theory that the plane and its passengers were removed to a secret location and executed is bandied about a lot. I found one site that explained away the presence on Flight 77 of Barbara Olson, wife of solicitor general and friend to George W. Bush Ted Olson, by speculating that Olson was in on the plot to kill the passengers from the start: “For all we know Babs was in on the plot from the beginning and was even prepared with a suitable gas mask to protect her from the poison gas that killed everyone else onboard. If so, it is not unlikely that she is ‘making the bunker homey’ for the ‘housewarming’ when Bush and the Gang all arrive to ride out the apocalypse they have initiated. Or, she could have had a little plastic surgery and is waiting for Ted (who has recently quit his job) on that nice Caribbean Island they always wanted to retire to. They ‘meet and marry’ and everyone is glad to see that Ted has found love again!” www.cassiopaea.org/cass/boeing.htm
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†4The Cali, Colombia, flight is often presumed to have been cannibalized to play the role of the wrecked Flight 77. From Aftermath News: “James Hanson, a newspaper reporter who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan College of Law, has traced that debris to an American Airlines 757 that crashed in a rain forest above Cali, Colombia in 1995. ‘It was the kind of slow-speed crash that would have torn off paneling in this fashion, with no fires, leaving them largely intact,’ [he said].” http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/new-study-no-boeing-757-hit-the-pentagon
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*5Leading 9/11 Truther Jim Fetzer came up with this one: “In fact, debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 that was circling above the Pentagon or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them.”
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*6From FreedomFiles.org: “If you look at the pictures of the dogs doing searches at the Pentagon for body parts, they all have blanked faces, like there is nothing there to find.” www.freedomfiles.org/war/pentagon.htm
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*7I’d noticed that a lot of people in Texas didn’t finish their sentences. Because of a Zelig-like habit of imitating people around me—picked up, probably, from having changed schools a dozen times as a kid—I’d actually started doing it myself. At the time of this prayer meeting I actually had the letters “FYS”—finish your sentences—written on my thumb as a reminder.
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*8A Scripps Howard poll in the fall of 2006 indicated that 36 percent of Americans believed that it was either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the U.S. government either consciously allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen or helped actively in the commission of the attacks. “Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality,” commented Time magazine.
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*9 I took Moore’s participation to be evidence not so much that the filmmaker bought the Truther theory, but that he had recognized the strength of its demographic. Five years ago a Michael Moore might have been able to afford being labeled a left gatekeeper, but not now. In any case, Moore has always surfed financially on the momentum of the movement; after all, while it may not have blamed the attacks on Bush explicitly, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure didn’t spend a lot of time blaming bin Laden for the disaster.
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