To the editor:
 
 Journalistic integrity would require that Tom Paine.com point out 
 that the David Corn endorsement of the recent Popular Mechanics 
 attack on 9/11 conspiracy theories was a selective deception.   Most 
 of the claims supposedly debunked by the Popular Mechanics article 
 are laughed at by most of the skeptics of the official 9/11 story -- 
 they are fake claims used to discredit the real evidence.   Two of 
 the photos that Popular Mechanics used to "debunk" some of the 
 sillier claims of conspiracy were actually copied from a website that 
 has exposed some of these fake conspiracy claims as a COINTELPRO type 
 strategy to discredit 9/11 skeptics.   Compare the photos used by 
 Popular Mechanics with the effort to debunk the silly claims by the 
 website http://www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/pod.html#addendumC and 
 you'll see how cynical the PM article really is -- a deliberate piece 
 of propaganda to use fake claims to attack critics who have raised 
 some very serious questions (virtually all of which are ignored by 
 the PM article).
 
 This sort of straw man argument -- create fake claims and then 
 dismiss them -- has a long history, something that any serious 
 examination of the many claims for official complicity in 9/11 must 
 look at.   Some of the claims are hoaxes, some are not.   Some of the 
 hoaxes are so ludicrous and accepted by virtually no one that many 
 9/11 skeptics strongly suspect (with ample justification) that they 
 were created and put on the internet solely to provide a straw man to 
 knock down.
 
 Two exceptional analyses of this practice are at  "Popular Mechanics 
 Attacks -- Its 9/11 LIES Straw Man"  by Jim Hoffman 
 http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html and "Popular 
 Mechanics' Deceptive Hit Piece Against 9/11 Truth" by Jim Hoffman 
 http://911review.com/pm/markup/index.html   Other bogus claims are 
 exposed at http://www.oilempire.us/bogus.html -- which accurately 
 predicted that these fake claims would be used to reinforce the 
 official story.
 
 I hope that TomPaine.com will amend its website to include links to 
 these articles, which are sober analyses of how the disinformation 
 surrounding these issues is working.  Really, your publication of 
 Corn's support for the Hearst Corporation's strange article is 
 embarrassing.
 
 The fact that some claims for complicity are not true is a huge 
 distraction from the fact that the official story of 9/11 is also not 
 true.
 
 Perhaps TomPaine.com will dare to discuss any of the following facts 
 (although they can't be as easily ignored as the bogus claims 
 highlighted by Popular Mechanics and David Corn):
 
 
 * there were well documented, numerous warnings from US allies that 
 9/11 was about to happen and warnings provided to a few not to fly or 
 get out of the way
 
 * the "plane into building" wargame in Virginia on 9/11 and the NORAD 
 "live fly" exercises that were also conducted on 9/11
 
 * the fighter planes sent the wrong way from Norfolk (over the 
 Atlantic, instead of toward DC). 9/11 was a cloudless day, and this 
 scramble happened after the towers were hit (but before the Pentagon) 
 - what's their excuse?
 
 * stock trades a few days before 9/11 betting the value of American 
 and United Airlines would drop
 
 * the fact that Flight 77 hit the nearly empty, recently 
 reconstructed and strengthened sector of the Pentagon -- something a 
 terrorist would not have chosen (or been able) to do
 
 * the anthrax attacks on the Democratic leadership in the Senate and 
 on the media, which came from an Army lab, not Islamic terrorists
 
 The "Complete 9/11 Timeline" (cooperativeresearch.org) and "Crossing 
 the Rubicon" (fromthewilderness.com) have the most authoritative 
 accounts of what really happened.  Popular Mechanics does not dare 
 mention the documentation in these and other quality reports about 
 9/11 complicity.
 
 
 Popular Mechanics is part of the Hearst media empire.
 
   The term "yellow journalism" came from shoddy reporting from Hearst 
 newspapers, most notoriously Hearst's promotion of the fake claim 
 that Spain had blown up the USS Maine in Havana harbor (the pretext 
 for the Spanish-American war).
 
   First they ignore you, then they attack you, then you win ...