It's taken some time to come to this conclusion, but The Mole is now totally convinced that there's a conspiracy to be uncovered about the story of the collapse of the two World Trade Centre towers in New York in September 2001.
There's a film going the rounds called Loose Change, explaining how the towers were brought down by previously placed explosives, not by the impact of the planes which people think hit them. In a Guardian article recently, Tim Sparke - the producer of that film - said that although the heat generated by burning fuel from the planes wouldn't have been sufficient to melt the steel in the towers, there were nevertheless pools of molten metal under the rubble, “and these pools remained molten for weeks after the collapse”. Well - that statement clinches it. There can be no other explanation for all this apart from a conspiracy by the US authorities. A conspiracy, that is, to feed gibberish to gullible people so that they will waste lots of their time - and lots of other people's too - pursuing scientifically nonsensical theories, and hence distracting attention and energy from serious political work at the same time as making sensible critics of US policy look ridiculous by association.
If some US government mastermind was able to find a previously undiscovered metal which would help to hold a building up, and which also stayed molten for weeks at ambient temperatures, they'd be clever enough to find an easier way of taking over the world than persuading thousands of people to take part in a secret conspiracy to fake a terrorist attack on New York.
Half reconciled
Nicaraguan diplomats at the UN have tabled a resolution to declare 2009 the “International Year of Reconciliation”. They said that the Year would be a vehicle for creating “a fraternal [sic] human society”.
Well, the idea of a society which only values the male half of humanity is probably all that can be expected from representatives of a country where - during the recent election campaign - all the political parties were outbidding one another in their attempts to most fully outlaw abortion.
Fraudulent fluffiness
The recent High Court case where the Campaign Against Arms Trade was applying for an injunction against BAE Systems to force it to hand over internal CAAT documents it had got hold of - as reported in this issue of PN - provided fine entertainment for anyone able to spare a day in central London.
Although this case is delaying CAAT's judicial review action against the government over its dropping of a fraud investigation against the arms company, BAE tried to claim that since they're not directly the object of the judicial review, the two cases aren't really connected. Even the judge couldn't keep a straight face when the death dealers' barrister claimed that BAE had “no interest in” the judicial review.
And BAE's lawyer was also scathing about the nature of CAAT, which was not, apparently, to be seen as some nice fluffy organisation. Why, they had even supported civil disobedience, and didn't want respectable arms companies to go about their legitimate business. As she put it at one stage - though these weren't her exact words - BAE might well flog torture equipment to dictators around the world, but reading someone else's emails, well, the very thought of it...