On 4th July 2011 the Greens will control nine seats in the Federal Senate, giving them the balance of power and ushering in a new era of enviro-politics.

Tonight Josh Jackson and I wade into the battle over carbon taxes and attempt to restore some sanity to the debate.

In particular we take a look at the influence of socialism on the Greens, with former communist Lee Rhiannon now in the Senate (hence the watermelon image above). Rhiannon was a member of the hard line Socialist Party of Australia which continued to support the Soviets after the brutal supression of the Prague uprising in 1968.

From The Australian:

Ms Rhiannon was also involved in a public spat over her communist past with author Mark Aarons after he published his account of his parents' prominent involvement in the pro-Moscow Communist Party of Australia. The CPA split from Moscow after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring moves for "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the same year a new spirit of liberty swept the Western world.

Aarons wrote that Ms Rhiannon and her parents left the CPA to join the Socialist Party of Australia, which continued to support the Soviets.

Ms Rhiannon claimed in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald that she "joined the 1968 protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia."

But in a letter of his own, Aarons attacked Ms Rhiannon's "astonishing" attempt "to deny the facts in the book about the views and activities of her parents".

"Rhiannon also joined the SPA, whose main rationale was to support the invasion and the Soviet Union generally," he wrote.

"Rhiannon's refusal to condemn the invasion (and the shooting of Polish workers) is recorded in the University of NSW student newspaper Tharunka (1972). Denial will not alter the facts."

In the second half we present the annals of Charlie Veitch - an "ex-truther" who had a spiritual revelation on the road to New York City (all expenses paid by the BBC) which made him realise that his conspiracy theories were wrong and stupid and why he should trust Big Government.

We take a look at the psyops aspects of Mr. Veitch's conversion to the official view of 9/11, and what  the BBC is trying to achieve.

Related Links

• Green tide washes into the red-seated chamber
• Green's communist past not the ticket for Senate
• The watermelon party
• Carbon tax won't apply to petrol price
• Brown, red, Green - and a Tokyo Rose
• 9/11 Troll Alert
• 911: The Charlie Veitch Situation
  
  

Coinciding with the approaching 10th anniversary of 9/11, it seems we are experiencing a new campaign to undermine and destroy the 9/11 truth movement.

Truther groups have been buzzing over the past two days with news about the "defection" of Love Police founder Charlie Veitch from the 9/11 truth movement. Charlie claims to have had his mind changed in New York by experts and patriots who convinced him to let go of his paranoid conspiracy delusions and accept that 9/11 was in fact carried out by Al Qaeda after all.

In the light of the possible disruption caused and doubts raised by Veitch, I feel it's important to remind everyone of what I, as webmaster of www.911oz.com, the Australian 9/11 Truth Movement, believe and don't believe.

Firstly, let me make it absolutely clear: I don't believe the US Government orchestrated 9/11.

Surprised? Well read on...

When we talk about a bank robbery being an "inside job" we generally mean that someone inside the bank helped make it happen, not that the bank robbed itself. The same kind of reasoning applies to the proposition that 9/11 was an inside job: there may have been a few insiders within the government who enabled it, but the job was probably carried out by an external team of mercenaries. The question of who conceived, planned and funded the operation remains unanswered.

Unfortunately the 9/11 "inside job" theory has come to imply, for many, total complicity and top down orchestration by the government. This revised interpretation of "inside job" is often attributed to 9/11 truthers by those who wish to discredit and silence them. Many truthers don't quite appreciate the nuances of meaning, and allow their views to be characterised in this way. This exposes them to ridicule based on the implausibility of thousands of government employees being involved in a murderous plot and keeping it secret.

I do believe there were people within government who assisted in 9/11, but that is a far cry from saying the Government orchestrated the attack. One of the main reasons I believe there were people within government who assisted is because we have irrefutable evidence that WTC Building 7 was blown up - and it would have been virtually impossible to get access to that building without government clearances.

Another point which strongly suggests complicity by agents within government is the way in which the Bush administration avoided an investigation. They avoided forensic investigations of the building fires and they ducked the majority of questions brought by family members to the 9/11 Commission. Both Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath.

I concede these points do not prove the government "did it", but they raise pertinent questions about certain individuals within government.

I do not believe that "no plane hit the Pentagon".

There is just not enough evidence to support the "no plane at the Pentagon" view. I do believe that the people have a right to see all the available video evidence which would prove the government's thesis that a plane did hit the building. The fact that the government will not provide that evidence once again suggests they are hiding something. This demands investigation.

I do believe that confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was tortured. I believe he was waterboarded at least 183 times. This fact itself puts a huge hole in the government's case and provides another irrefutable reason why there needs to be a new independent investigation.

I do believe that top government officials lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and also attempted to frame Saddam Hussein for conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks. Such gross dishonesty would lead any sensible person to doubt the veracity of unproven claims about Osama bin Laden and 9/11.

Conspiracy debunkers like to represent the 9/11 truth position in terms of the positive claims made about specific events. They try to conflate all those different claims into a generalised concept of what "truthers" think. Thus, claims about holograms and space beams are combined with theories about the destruction of the twin towers, the Pentagon "flyover" and voice-morphing technology. They often avoid WTC 7, because that is the hardest one to debunk.

The arguments of Charlie Veitch, who recently converted to the official 9/11 conspiracy theory, are illustrative of the "troll debunker" style. Charlie suggests that 9/11 truthers are paranoid and delusional, and that their fertile imaginations are running rampant, leading them to invent fantastic theories about events which have more mundane explanations. He completely neglects the point that much of 9/11 truth consists of analysis of the inconsistencies in the official viewpoint in conjunction with acknowledged facts such as those presented above.

That approach can't be "debunked" at all - so it's ignored.

Building 7 remains a problem though, even for Charlie Veitch, who asserts (based on mysterious un-named sources) that the collapse of WTC 7 can be explained by the damage sustained from the collapse of the twin towers earlier in the day.

It's a convincing argument, only there's a problem - it was rejected in the official NIST report:

"Other than initiating the fires in WTC 7, the damage from the debris from WTC 1 had little effect on initiating the collapse of WTC 7." - NCSTAR 1A, p xxxvii

In closing let me affirm that I remain determined to uphold what we have been fighting for since the beginning of this movement. We need a real investigation. We need to find out what really happened. We need justice. We need reconciliation.