Inspired this evening by a notice from the 9/11 Skeptics Movement in the UK, I am publishing another free chapter from my book, Slingshot to the Juggernaut: Total Resistance to the Death Machine Means Complete Love of the Truth.
Our friends in the UK are trying to get their Courts and BBC to pay attention to important legal evidence. It may be noteworthy to look at three different attempts that we activists on this side of the pond undertook to get the case heard in our courts.
Did we win? Not yet. But remember, every "no" is one step closer to a "yes."
Chapter
2
from Slingshot to the Juggernaut
Truther
as Court Reporter: How America’s Number One Taboo Topic Is Mistreated in the
“Halls of Justice”
Let’s look at and compare two numbers.
The first one is fourteen million. That’s how many dollars were spent in the 9/11 Commission’s “official investigation” of the 9/11 attacks. Fourteen million dollars is less than one third of the amount spent on Ken Starr’s investigation of President Clinton.
Our next number is five hundred times
larger. It’s seven billion.
That’s the sum total spent by the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The
serious money was put into a hush-fund vehicle that paid the victims’ families
not to sue.
With
9/11, the powers that be did a quick investigation that blamed no one and said
nothing. The government then spent five hundred times more on shutting people
up. The real cover-up was not the Washington, D.C., insiders who wrote a
ridiculous and spotty 9/11 report; it was preventing justice in the courts by
muzzling the victims who in their limitless grief would of course attempt to
find relief by suing the U.S. government, the airlines, and the intelligence
agencies that either “failed us” through “incompetence” or did something much
more nefarious.
If
you compare the two numbers as a ratio, you see that the 9/11 Commission was
funded with 0.2% of what we spent on the victims’ hush fund. Seven billion
dollars can pack a wallop. But not everyone has been hushed up, and there’s the
real story. This chapter will look at three heroic Davids who dared take on
Goliath. These activists and attorneys sought to overturn one juggernaut of a
well-capitalized cover-up.
In
the United States, people are raised to believe that “everyone can get their
day in court.” But with 9/11, each time evidence was presented that something
was terribly wrong, the dispensers of American justice reacted by moving to
crush the plaintiffs.
In 2009, I served as the canvass director
of the New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN). NYC CAN was an
effort to rejuvenate the stalled NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative. The founders of
New York 9/11 Truth had made some progress collecting signatures to put the
9/11 investigation question on the NYC ballot. But at the outset of 2009, the
new NYC CAN director, Ted Walter, and friends decided that “NYC 9/11 Ballot
Initiative” needed to be rebranded as something a bit more palatable, a bit
more acceptable to the average New York voter. The new name, NYC CAN, was
upbeat and positive. It was trendy, and felt in rhythm with Obama’s pert slogan
“Yes, we can.” In fact, that year, some activists even dared to dream that
Obama himself might open a new 9/11 investigation.
Part
of the new mission at NYC CAN was to simplify the message. Our new style would
be to coolly and calmly present the request for a voter’s signature, to allow
voters in New York City a chance to vote on a 9/11 independent investigation.
No long debates.
Ted
and I ran a tight operation. We had T-shirts and a training manual. We gathered the required signatures, over eighty thousand. We
were optimistic that we could overcome the systemic biases in the legal system
against 9/11 skepticism. We were wrong.
The
ballot access laws in New York State required fifty thousand valid signatures
for a popular referendum to be placed on New York City’s ballot. But the New
York Supreme Court judge decided not to allow us to ask the voters the question
about a new 9/11 investigation. The legal decision, when you read it, is
twisted and tense, both sad and funny.
At one point the court says that this would have been too much “direct
democracy,” and that this just isn’t done in New York State.
The
judge accused us of “tortured reasoning,” but he himself seems to have been
suffering from prejudiced assumptions. The court shows its hand in this regard
by referring to the “international terrorists” that it assumes were responsible
for 9/11. If the court already had a culprit, why would it have let us open a
new investigation into just who those “terrorists” were?
There
were some legal gray areas from the first draft of the NYC 9/11 Ballot
Initiative that did come back to haunt us. For example, we projected quite a
large budget, and claimed we could raise the $14 million all from private
donations. The judge didn’t think this was realistic. But who knows—this judge
was clearly uninformed about the size of the potential base of supporters.
At
one point, our attorney asked the judge about Building 7. The judge answered,
“Building what?” That comment inspired NYC CAN to start a new TV ad campaign to
raise awareness about one of 9/11’s smoking guns, WTC Building 7, which
imploded at free-fall speed around 5:21 pm
on 9/11, without having been hit by a plane. WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein
even admitted on PBS that he had decided to “pull it,” but the media and the
courts and even the giant insurance agency all decided to let that odd comment
slide.
NYC
CAN’s leadership made a tragic decision not to appeal the New York State
Supreme Court’s decision. It’s not the decision I would have made, but my job
was already over and Ted had a commitment to attend grad school out of state.
We
lost that battle, but we haven’t lost the war. The NYC CAN experience made me a
student of how the courts can possibly be used to simply investigate the
biggest trauma of our lifetimes.
In
the next ten years of 9/11 Truth, I predict we will see less activism in the
streets and more court cases. That’s because more admissible evidence comes out
every year. This change is already underway. With lawyers like William Veale
and the Center for 9/11 Justice, we will have our day.
Before
we dive in and learn more about California attorney William Veale, let’s head
out from New York City, across the Hudson River, into New Jersey, where citizen
litigator Dom Meserlian is representing himself in a series of tussles with his
local municipal court.
On February 4,
2010, forensics engineer Don Meserlian
was brought to court in Fairfield, New Jersey, on charges of “harassment” of
police chief Mark Deuer. Meserlian had tried to compel Deuer to review an
accusation of “treason” in regard to the 9/11 attacks. He presented New
York–area seismic records from September 11, 2001, and a scientific study
published by physicists at Bentham.org. This peer-reviewed study of the dust
from the World Trade Center compelled Meserlian to claim that 9/11 was a crime,
and to suspect that it was an inside job. The reason he had “harassed” Chief
Deuer was that he understood certain laws compelled everyone, including him, to
notify local authorities in any situation where “treason” occurs. I put
“treason” in quotes because it’s an exact term, a precise word, that denotes a
crime carefully defined in the U.S. Constitution.
Meserlian
has dug up an old federal law still on the books: U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382). This law
prohibits “misprision of treason” and applies to all U.S. citizens and judges:
No one can fail to act when presented with strong evidence of treason.
Meserlian tested his interpretation of the law by phoning U.S. attorney David
Foster, who agreed that the law gives any citizen the duty to alert any judge
regarding treason.
In
Fairfield Municipal Court that day, however, prosecution, police, and Judge
Pomaco countered that the eighty-two-year-old Meserlian had been so “annoying”
to the police that he was guilty of “harassment.” Even though Meserlian would
lose his case, at the end of the trial, Judge Pomaco called Meserlian a
“patriot.” He allowed Meserlian ample time to make his case, over the
objections of the prosecution.
Maybe
the judge realized that the case law was on Meserlian’s side. The same
misprision statute has been used in two cases from the Civil War era. In those
cases, the judges pointed out that “treason” stands alone as the sole felony
our founding fathers saw important enough to define in the Constitution, which
states that the primary definition of treason is to “levy war” against the
United States. “Levy war” is defined in the case law as that which “wages” or
“causes or compels” the United States to go to war.
Following
that logic, then, since 9/11 compelled two long wars, and since credible
parties have asserted that the attacks may have been an inside job, the 9/11
issue is really a legal question of treason. A close reading of our
Constitution, therefore, would compel us to investigate that which caused and
compelled us to war. Even if the notion that the attacks may have been an
inside job is absurd or atrocious to some, the U.S. Constitution advises to carefully
examine any accusations of treason.
But
in court, Judge Pomaco wasn’t buying it. He kept directing the trial back to
the accusation of “harrasment” against Mr. Meserlian. Meserlian, for his part,
kept trying to talk U.S. Constitution. The court’s refusal to consider his
evidence of treason seemed to show that the court was prejudiced against his
controversial line of thinking. The judge found Meserlian guilty, but levied no
fine.
At
the end of the trial, Judge Pomaco gave an interesting speech: Don Meserlian
was a dedicated family man, an upstanding citizen, and a “patriot.” Pomaco went
so far as to describe the 9/11 attacks as “serious” and “a terrible tragedy.”
However,
Meserlian never asserted that 9/11 was merely “tragic.” Beyond Pomaco’s maudlin
speech, the 9/11 event, and the subsequent lack of scientific, unbiased
investigation are serious crimes. In both the NYC CAN case and the more local
Meserlian trial, the courts seemed to be wearing a form of mental blinder; the
Bush-Cheney story about 9/11 was somehow sacrosanct. The same men who, it is
widely acknowledged, lied and manipulated us into the Iraq War are somehow
presumed innocent of any malfeasance about bin Laden, anthrax, and the collapse
of three towers from two planes.
Rational
analysis of 9/11 shows a masterful crime that demands masterful investigation. As
the Bible says, when injustice is perpetuated for so long, even the stones will
begin to cry out for justice. In court that day, it was sad to see Judge Pomoco
smiling at Meserlian and trying to show some kind of integrity, some kind of
humanity and virtue. The man was simply unable to sidestep his prior
assumptions about 9/11. His substitution of sentimentality for a dispassionate
review of evidence itself shows prejudice. The stones cry out. The cool blue
fluorescent lights of the New Jersey courthouse seemed to mask the sound of the
U.S. Constitution being ripped apart in the back room.
As
9/11 justice activism heads increasingly to the courts, future judges will have
this problem: The 9/11 Truth movement’s evidence is compelling, scientific, and
verifiable. Meserlian, national director of a new group called the Citizens’
Committee for a 9/11 Grand Jury, is a lifelong forensics engineer. In his
thirty-five years of giving testimonies, he has never lost a case.
September
11 is remarkable for its emotive power, but also for the crime’s complexity and
for its curious lack of judicial review. Rational, clear-headed analysis of
9/11 has led an entire movement of intelligent citizens to conclude that the
perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks remain unindicted inside U.S. military and
intelligence. They have evaded scrutiny by most media. Yet domestic and
international public opinion shows a sharp break with the Bush-Cheney-Obama official story[AT1].
The
Meserlian trial is historic. It brought about a new era for U.S. citizens who
are skeptical about 9/11. Meserlian is one tough cookie, and a bit of an
eccentric. He’s also a charming guy who plays a mean violin and can jam with
you at the drop of a hat. Meserlian has done the world a favor. He has more
guts than we did at NYC CAN. He raises the stakes and points us to laws to
remedy our need to investigate that which we can no longer ignore: treason. Say it out loud, now: “Treason!”
This
case must now be picked up and made to judges of similar but even greater
sympathy than Judge Pomaco. We want the sympathy without the sentimentality. We
want rigor; we want the crucible of cross-examination. In the court of the mass
media, our evidence is not considered. Instead, the sneering Washington
consensus pats itself on the back for making dismissive generalizations. They
call us “cranks” and “kooks.” Meanwhile, we prepare for our next day in court.
The
authors of the U.S. Constitution wanted accusations of treason to be treated
with exquisite care. Even among our broken judiciary, surely there is a judge
who understands this. Maybe it’s up to you and me, my dear reader, to go out
and find that judge. Because if the fate of NYC CAN and Don Meserlian don’t
inspire you to action, look at what the system did to attorney William Veale:
It sought to crucify him for his love of justice.
In
the spring of 2010, I met attorney William Veale in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,
at the aptly named Treason in America conference. We had been in touch via
email, but at the conference, we gave a speech together about how an ad hoc “citizens[l2]
grand jury investigation” could be formed and given actual subpoena power, and
legitimacy by the system.
Veal’s
logic is based on the Fifth Amendment:
No
person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless
on a presentment or
indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the
land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or
public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put
in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be
a witness
against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Veale explained what he meant by use of
“presentment” in a memo I asked him to write:
The
first provision of the Amendment has to do with Grand Juries, requiring
an Indictment, which is a legal accusation requested by a prosecutor
or a Presentment, which is a charge made by a Grand Jury without
the request of a prosecutor. Presentments have had a rich history in
this country, but fell into disrepute under varying circumstances. There is
no mention of presentments in the Federal Criminal Code, and there hasn’t
been since the late forties. There can, however, be no sounder basis of
legal action in this country than the words of the Fifth Amendment. The presence
of the word “presentment” in the Amendment means there must of
necessity be a mechanism for its use, no matter how desperately the writers
of the Criminal Code may have wanted it to vanish.
Aha!
So, that means at the bedrock of the Constitution is the power of the people to
indict criminals, without using a prosecutor. We already have a tool to create
a grand jury of citizens. That should make every skeptic, every Truther,
excited about getting real justice. Veale adds:
The
grand jury is in its essence a democratic institution. It was designed to be
a rein on the government, putting between it and an accused citizen another
group of citizens who would decide whether or not the government
prosecutor was acting with cause. Since the representatives of the
citizens are not discharging their obligations as some of us have envisioned,
we are not in a position to look to our elected representatives for
justice in the instance of 9/11. We may look to history for a procedure to
follow. In colonial days and after the revolution, communities were small
enough that town hall meetings played an important role in governance.
In the case of local corruption, where the prosecutor was engaged
in criminal activity, the people themselves would convene a grand
jury for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting an offending official.”
As
a part of our presentation at the Treason in America conference, Veale and I
handed out a “Truth over Treason” form, on two-part NCR paper. It was a kind of
legal document that forty-four individuals that day agreed to sign. By signing,
they agreed to contact their local judges and attempt to find a judge willing
to look at the evidence of treason.
In
the meantime, Veale was preparing for the trial of April Gallop, a soldier and
9/11 victim who suffered injuries in the Pentagon that day.
The
Navajo say, “You can’t wake a person pretending to be asleep.” Some refuse to
even look at evidence of wrongdoing on 9/11. Veale calls that thing the “fortress
of denial.” On the website of the Center for 9/11 Justice, he and his team of
attorneys explain:
The attacks of September 11th were part
of a complex and elaborate psychological operation that created in each citizen
to a greater or lesser degree a fortress of denial, which has prevented many
from any forthright attempt to investigate the truth about 9/11. Before justice
will be allowed to breathe, that fortress must be destroyed.
Veale’s
client is former Pentagon soldier April Gallop. Alongside her two-month-old
infant son, Elisha, Gallop was injured in the Pentagon that day.
If
the official story were correct, Gallop would be dead. On the first floor, in
the fifth corridor, of the Pentagon’s E ring, her desk and her baby boy were in
the direct pathway of one of Flight 77’s 2.3-ton jet engines. Instead, Gallop
was knocked unconscious and came to in a disaster. Office debris was
everywhere, but plane parts were not.
“I
didn’t see any seats, any metal, any baggage; I wasn’t covered in jet fuel.”
In
a 2007 speech in Irvine, California, Gallop told the audience, “Most of the
debris we were encompassed with was pertaining to office things: concrete,
books, computers, tables, things to that effect . . . With that in mind, I
would have never believed that it was a plane, simply because I didn’t see
particular things. According to the Pentagon renovation team [who mapped out
where everyone was], we were thirty-five to forty-five feet away from the place
of impact.”
Representatives
from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines visited Gallop in the hospital to
discuss what her public statements would and would not say. “They wanted to
train us, or specifically communicate to us how they wanted us to express the
story, what happened, but I couldn’t do that . . . They wanted to ensure that
we communicated things as they made the official story. I just couldn’t do that
based on what I saw on the inside.”
In
a military hospital, a captain from the U.S. Army suggested things to add to
her story. Gallop objected. According to Gallop, the captain’s parting words
were “I’m going to leave you with this. This is what it was, this is what you
saw, and this is what you’re going to say you saw. And we’ll be back to
transport you to Walter Reade.”
“Life
afterwards has been just as traumatizing as having the experience,” reports
Gallop. A female Fox News reporter let slip that the Pentagon was telling the
media not to speak with Gallop. Fox News, fearing exclusion from future
Pentagon news feeds, complied with the request.
The
lawsuit that William Veale and company eventually filed on behalf of Gallop is
a great opportunity for historians to pause and reflect just how many strange
anomalies there are around 9/11 and the Pentagon. The primary smoking gun cited
in Gallop v. Cheney is
that transportation secretary Norman Mineta testified to the 9/11 Commission
that Dick Cheney was in an underground bunker at the White House that morning
by nine thirty. Cheney was monitoring radar, and beside him was a young male
aide. As the wayward “Flight 77” (if that is what it was) wandered out to the
West Virginia area and back, the aide built the tension by telling the VP, “The
plane is fifty miles out; it’s now forty miles out . . . do the orders still
stand?” Cheney whipped his head around and said, “Of course the orders still
stand—have you heard anything
to the contrary?”
This
testimony was deleted from the 9/11 Commission website, and, when later asked
about the oversight by a camera crew from the movie Loose Change, former secretary Mineta was surprised
to hear it had been left out.
There’s
also the problem that the National Transportation Safety Board and the 9/11
Commission Report could not agree on the final flight path of Flight 77. In a
similar way, 9/11 researchers Citizens’ Investigation Team went to Arlington
Cemetery, around the Pentagon, and found eyewitnesses who said the plane came
from a more westerly direction, over the Navy Annex building and north of the
Citgo station. The official flight path has the plane coming up in a more
northeast direction, smacking into a light pole that then somehow inserted
itself perfectly into the windshield of local cab driver Lloyd English.
Flight
77’s flight data recorder showed the massive jetliner descending at a sharp
angle; then, before impact, the recorder mysteriously stopped recording data.
This information is inconsistent with the “five frames” of blurry video
released by the Pentagon, which show a flat blur parallel to the ground
slamming into the Pentagon wall.
Or,
let’s recall that Clinton holdover Richard Clarke testified that Rumsfeld and
Myers were in the Pentagon, running the show, recorded via video conference, as
the Pentagon plane was approaching.
As
Veale puts it, “Whatever efforts they made to prevent the attack on the
Pentagon were unsuccessful, even though sufficient time and armaments existed
to mount a defense. If they were in the National Military Command Center, in
full view by Richard Clarke, and presumably taped on a video-teleconference
screen, they cannot avoid the scrutiny that ordinarily follows failure in the
line of duty.”
On
March 14, 2010, Second Circuit judge Denny Chin dismissed Gallop’s suit with
prejudice and heated denunciation. He ignored the sixty-five pages of evidence
that court procedures required him to treat as presumed true. Instead, he
ignored the anomalies about what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers were doing on
9/11, and what they said and did about it afterward. In fact, Chin avoided
mentioning any of those three by name altogether. Veale later said, “It was
like discussing the indictment of someone for robbing a liquor store without
ever naming the suspect.” But Chin was content to ignore much and dismiss the
entire suit as “cynical delusion and fantasy.”
Perhaps
it’s fortunate that Chin levied such incendiary language. On Veale’s side were
two other fine attorneys, one of whom, Dennis Cunningham, is a strong writer.
In discussing Chin’s logic, Cunningham used a deft mix of empathy and
passionate appeal for reason beyond prejudice. He often conceded to the court
that the underlying presumptions of its case were “indeed shocking” and
“outrageous” but also “substantial, and serious” and based on “an elemental knowledge of human history”—i.e., “evil is
attracted to power.”
Power,
by this radical logic, is therefore naturally a primary suspect when it comes
to the highest crimes and cover-ups. Of course, this kind of radical, populist
logic is not Chin’s federal court’s cup of tea. Chin was rather lazy, according
to the plaintiffs, and content to make a “blanket
determination, not based on the factual allegations it was faced with but on
the Court’s [read: Chin’s] subjective, personal reaction to the horror of the
very thought of the wrongdoing alleged,” and therefore, “the plaintiffs’ claims
were absolutely implausible—as a matter of law, as it were, emanating from the
depth of the Court’s gut—and therefore frivolous, and to be quashed without
recourse.”
Veale
and company appealed. One year later, they were promised “five minutes” at a
three-judge appeals court hearing in New Haven, Connecticut. One of the judges
scheduled to preside was none other than president George H. Walker Bush’s
first cousin judge Scott Walker. Walker refused to recuse himself, despite a
motion from the plaintiffs. It went downhill from there.
On
April 4, 2011, I traveled with one of the junior attorneys on the case, Mr.
Mustapha Ndusa, from New York City to New Haven to attend the appellate hearing
of April Gallop.
Having
attended the appeals hearing of FBI agent Richard Taus years earlier, I was
reminded that a three-judge courtroom looks like a triumvirate, a gang. Three
judges instead of one means three huddled together in collusion, whispering
loudly and talking over each other, talking over attorneys. In New Haven, they
interrupted each other as much as they interrupted Veale. The spirit of an appellate court is already one of
an intensely adversarial nature, so it’s especially chaotic and bitter when
your cause is asking questions about 9/11.
Attorney
Bill Veale was heroic, leaning over and vociferously defending the cause. When
he was hot, he was white hot. “Evil does exist. Power is attracted to it.” He
was a poetic prophet against a new devil.
In
his twenty years of hard labor as a public defender, Veale served the battered
proletariat. As court-appointed defense counsel, he tried to get poor crooks
and accused crooks good deals and reduced time. Today was his first appearance
in federal court.
Veale
got about twenty minutes to make his case. Some of the judges did show some
humanity, like the time they let Veale have a final two minutes to catch his
breath and make his final points. But then when Veale began to speak, Judge
Walker would interrupt with an idle, long-winded request that they go through a
list, vocally, of who the defendants were in this case: vice president Dick
Cheney, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, JTOS Meyers, and John Does
#1-X.
At
one point, Bush cousin Judge Walker also made an “out of the blue” comment of
his own. He did acknowledge that “there is a lot of controversy about this
topic.” He looked out directly at the galley, where we fifteen Truthers sat
among the day’s usual gaggle of fidgety lawyers and heiresses appealing estate
matters of decaying Connecticut wealth. In the jury box sat twelve or fifteen
bored-looking kids in blue suits and dresses, a distracted field trip from Yale
Law School. But when the case was over, all fifteen Truthers stood up at once.
The judges noticed it: There is
a public with a bunch of questions, and sharp suspicions about the Bush-Cheney
9/11 story. We were hoping the judges would keep that in mind when considering
at the evidence and arguments levied by Veale, April Gallop, and the Center.
After all, it looked like even Judge Walker knew some of the questions people
had, by acknowledging the widespread skepticism.
Judge
Walker, of course, was not picked to write the inevitable denial that came from
the Second Court of Appeals. Judge Calabrese did, and stuck to the script Judge
Chin had used: Huff and puff about how outrageous the claim is, but don’t
actually respond to the evidence presented.
So,
sixty-five pages of evidence, from sources such as the Bush White House’s own
officials Clarke and Mineta, can be tossed away as nothing but “pure speculation and conjecture.” The three-judge appellate court
stepped on the gas and added an aggressive layer of bile and mockery to its
denial, which opens with:
As the sentient world well recalls, on
the morning of September 11, 2001, agents of the al Qaeda terrorist
organization hijacked commercial airplanes and attacked
the World Trade Center in New York City and the national headquarters of
the Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia.
Calabrese pointed out
that Gallop’s case could be thrown out on the basis of “estoppel”; i.e., she
had sued someone else before on similar grounds. However, she lost before, and
according to the legal definition of “estoppel” cases, “estoppel” stops you
only if you won something, using a different argument, in an earlier case. “Absent
success in a prior
proceedings,” argued the Supreme Court in New Hampshire v. Maine, the courts are not supposed to deny
appeals by citing estoppel.
In
court that day in New Haven, Veale pointed out that new evidence about 9/11
factual data “is coming out all the time.” Therefore, Gallop’s prior suits were
irrelevant. The nature of her claims changed based on new evidence.
In
the denial, Calabrese then made the harsh claim that Veale “failed to provide”
any of this new evidence. That’s rather unfair, given that Veale was already
over his five-minute time limit and was constantly being interrupted with asinine
points of clarification from the bench. All of the evidence was outlined and
prepared for court. It was described in summary form in sixty-five-page
documents.
If
Veale had been asked about what new evidence has come out recently, we know
from the Center’s various briefs on behalf of Gallop that Veale and company are
not shy about talking about the evidence of the sophisticated demolition
explosive nano-thermite at the WTC. The peer-reviewed Bentham.org study found evidence of
nano-thermite in four out of four samples of WTC dust.
But in their denial (a good word for it), Judge Calabrese called
this case an unnecessary imposition “on the government, which is forced to
defend against the appeal, and on the taxpayers, who must pay for that defense.
Accordingly, Gallop and her counsel are hereby ordered to show cause in writing
within thirty days from the date of entry of this order why they should not pay
double costs and damages in the amount of $15,000, for which they would be
jointly and severally liable.”
That’s
right. The judges just threatened to fine Veale $15,000. Imagine mobsters
killing someone who won’t pay protection money, to send a message to the world.
The threat of serious fines here shows that the judges didn’t actually believe
this case from Veale was lightweight “pure speculation,” but thought it a very
serious threat to a way of doing business.
Veale
protested this sanction and made a motion to have the three judges removed from
further involvement in this case. They were victims of 9/11’s shock and awe, he
argued, “unable to
conceive that their own government did that to them. And that means that when
they hear these allegations, they disregard them. They think they are the
product of lunacy, or delusion . . . [They imagine], ‘oh that couldn’t possibly
be true’ . . . And that is the existence of a prejudgment or a bias.”
The
judges responded to these motions with further denials and another set of
sanctions, this time personally targeted at William Veale.
The
American Bar Association did a terse article for the ABA Journal. The best part of the article was an
online comment from one John Flynn:
“Not
content with being simply moderately corrupt and dismissing the complaint before the Plaintiff can hale these Defendants
into Court and, I presume, even engage in
discovery [the period when both sides in a court case examine evidence], the 2nd Circuit sees fit to try and
chill other attorneys who may be considering
similar lawsuits by issuing an OSC (Order to Show Cause) on the plaintiffs attorney which I can only assume
will result in over the top, severe sanctions,
even though anyone who has looked at 9/11 in any detail knows there is at least sufficient evidence of the
plaintiff’s theory to defeat a MSJ (Motion for Summary
Judgment) and get to trial.”
Thanks for reading.
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