I recently bought a copy of Maxim's magazine for an article it had on 911, which included the Pentagon Strike flash video. I didn't see this on SotT, but I could have missed it. If not, below is the article. Some friends saw me with the magazine and poked fun, not believing that I really 'bought it for an article'. For those not familiar with Maxim, it's better known for it's pictorials of women with few articles of clothes than for its articles covering the skinny.
I found a description of the Maxim audience in the below article:
So if the Maxim reader does do any internet searching of the above and comes across SotT (and according to a 2001 Mediamark research study the average Maxim reader is more internet active than the average American and readers of other men's magazines) they are already likely perverted (discouraged?) with their notions of David Icke, osit. David Icke, You're Not Helping!
I also found it interesting that the 'theory three' section was substantially shorter than the rest, although in reading it, it seemed to me the most powerful; of course it was then discredited as 'wild fantasy'.
I found a description of the Maxim audience in the below article:
Pentagon Strike is covered in Theory #3. When I first began typing up the article I noted that the cover headline included 'Stranger Than Fiction.' I hadn't read the recent 'Stranger than Fiction' (good article btw!) article on SotT so I thought it might be covering the 9/11 story in Maxim - it didn't, but it is an interesting synchronicity covering the same topic.The American Observer
Reading between the Lines
Traditional Men’s Magazines take cues from British competition.
By Eric Kay
New magazines make waves in the industry
This new breed of men’s magazines, known for covers featuring scantily-clothed women and light pieces on alcohol consumption, sex and pop culture, are referred to as laddies. Maxim, the most popular of the laddies came onto the scene in 1997 and drastically altered the landscape.
With a circulation of 12.8 million, more than double GQ’s and Esquire’s, Maxim has forced the traditional men’s magazines to make changes and incorporate certain successful laddie elements.
“The key moment was the arrival of Maxim because it was hugely successful with skimpily-attired women coupled with goofy stuff about beer and marked by having few serious pieces,” said Peter Carlson, magazine critic for the Washington Post. “So when that formula proved successful, it spawned a lot of imitators and got the attention of GQ, Esquire and Playboy.”
With more than 2.5 million readers annually, Maxim magazine is still finding new readers, according to Carlson. Its subscription base increased nearly 4 percent from last year.
Traditional Magazines Follow Laddie Formula
The hallmark of the laddie magazines is their quick-read nature, according to Carlson. Many of the stories in Maxim and FHM are barely a page long.
“I read Maxim for the reviews on books, games, music and whatnot,” said 23-year-old Blake Hering. “There’s always a decent military article and obviously the hot pictures of females. I also like the small tidbits of information you don’t find anywhere else.”
(...)
Maxim and For Him Magazine have locked their sites on the coveted 18-34 male demographic. Both magazines have 27-year-old median age readers with household incomes near $64,000, according to Media Post Communications, a media and advertising research agency.
(...)
There were also some smaller 'mini-articles' within this article. Of interest, below 'Theory #3' was one with David Icke: "Davis vs. Goliath - Among other things, uber-conspiracy theorists David Icke blames 9/11 on our shape-shifting, reptilian overloards." Isn't it interesting that right under the 'Pentagon strike section (where there is no mention of Signs-of-the-times), David Icke is indulged ...as a crackpot.Maxim said:(on cover)
9/11 Conspiracy Theories - Stranger Than Fiction
(Under table of contents, pg. 8)
Conspiracy Theories
106 WHAT REALLY BROUGHT DOWN THE TOWERS?
It’s four and a half years after 9/11, and there’s still much unknown about that day. We examine the theories, from remote-controlled planes to our own government’s intentionally letting it all go down, no matter how absurdly bat-s*** crazy they happen to be.
(pg. 106-111)
What Really Brought Down The Towers?
- Planes flown by terrorist?
- A remote-controlled aircraft?
- Preplanted explosive devices?
As major questions surrounding the official version of the truth emerge, "What really happened on 9/11?" is becoming the new "Who shot JFK?" of a new generation. How crazy are the new conspiracy theories? Depends how far down the rabbit hole you're willing to go.
Few of these guys simply talk. More accurately what they do is spew. Like a printer cranking out multiple copies of a statistical prospectus, they seem hellbent on spitting out every fact, figure, and thread of conjecture in their heads before the paper runs dry. About Dick Cheney's connection to the strangely precedent right-wing Project for the New Century think tank. About Mohamed Atta's U.S. intelligence connections and love of pork chops and strippers. About implausible demolition patterns observed at the World Trade Center on that fateful morning.
"There are so many problems with the official story of 9/11, it's hard to know where to start," says Sander Hicks, a 34-year-old independent publisher from Brooklyn whose "middle-of-the-road Christian values" father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960's. "A person of intellectual honesty cannot embrace that story."
On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center collapsed in an implosion of concrete, flying steel, and human bodies. In Washington, D.C., the Pentagon suffered a giant, blackened gash in a recently renovated section. Meanwhile, United Airline Flight 93 plummeted into a rural Pennsylvania field, killing everyone on board.
Just about everyone agrees on that much. Four years later, a growing and increasingly prominent group of Americans believes that a government conspiracy is the only explanation of "the New Pearl Harbor" that makes any sense. Armed with a spate of books, compelling videos, and a recent high profile ad campaign, the loose community that some call the 9/11 Truth Movement has moved from the shadowy basements of the Internet out into the open. Across the board, the movement operates on the conviction that the U.S. government is keeping the whole truth under wraps. And that it either planned or allowed 9/11 to happen as a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and rolling back civil liberties at home.
"It's becoming a cause," says Jimmy Walter, the millionaire who runs reopen911.org. Walter is blowing stacks of cash on cable TV spots and full-page ads in The New York Times, plus funding the free distribution of DVDs (more than 365,000 so far, he says), to demand new investigations into the attacks. "It's hard to say it feels good, but it actually does feel good to stand up and be a patriot."
While Walter may be the Truth Movement's most prominent promoter, it's not a one-man crusade: Just check out the six million hits on a google search for "9/11 conspiracy." Or a 2004 CNN.com poll in which 89 percent of respondents said they believe there's a U.S. government cover-up surrounding 9/11.
The surest sign of the conspiracy movement's growing momentum: opposition. Two major magazines, Popular Mechanics and Scientific American, recently devoted features to debunking various 9/11 conspiracy theories. In September 2005, a book by two British journalists, titled 9/11 Revealed, prompted the U.S. State department to post a detailed critique of the authors "absurd, sinister interpretations" on the agency Web site.
"That's the first time the government has ever taken notice of any alternative ideas," says David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of philosophy at California's Claremont School of Theology, who dropped his respected and prolific scholarly work to write 9/11 conspiracy books (The New Pearl Harbor, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions). "We all thought that was a pretty big step."
In fact, the government had refuted earlier 9/11 rumors. But the movement has an answer for everything. One might ask, for instance, wasn't it the threat of WMDs, not 9/11, that sold the American public on the need for war in Iraq?
"September 11 was very important to Iraq because it squelched domestic dissent," explain Hicks. "They waged the invasion of Iraq on the heels of the Afghanistan invasion, which conveyed the sense that we were unbeatable. You've got to remember the context." In other words, it all fits together - if you listen carefully to the way they tell it.
THEORY #1
There were no suicidal Islamic highjackers.
The case: In the days after 9/11, Americans came to know and hate the 19 terrorists, commanded by a nefarious Egyptian named Mohamed Atta, who used boxcutters and a perverted version of Islam to hijack airplanes, level the towers, smash up the pentagon, and bring the United States to a virtual standstill. But what if they actually had nothing to do with it? Some of the most sensational 9/11 conspiracy theories insist that Atta and company were framed.
"The jets were controlled by advanced robotics and remote-control technology, not hijackers," insists Carol A. Valentine on her website public-action.com, which peddles a wide range of conspiracy theories. Hang on it gets wilder.
Elaborate umbrella theories involve the use of multiple decoy planes, remote controlled commuter jets packed with explosives, and the manipulated passenger lists. The most incendiary idea: that all four "hijacked" planes were secretly directed to a U.S. Air Force base, were all their passengers were loaded onto United Flight 93, the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. Some variations of other theories tie in here, including claims that the story of hero passengers thwarting the terrorists on Flight 93 was, amazingly, fabricated, cell phones and all.
Fuel for the fire: Some say the four 9/11 planes' light passenger loads - the most crowded had 81 aboard while Flight 93 had just 37 - suggest someone deliberately capped ticketing for the four flights. As for the hijackers themselves, conspiracy theorists cite numerous media reports of alleged 9/11 jihadists (or at least Arab dudes with the same names) turning up alive after the attacks.
Believe it or not? To believe this (and many 9/11 conspiracy theories), you have to believe that the government is evil enough to cook up a head-spinningly complicated plot against its own people in its largest city. Once you've made that leap, remote-controlled decoy planes don't seem that far-fetched.
THEORY #2
Explosives - not planes - really brought down the World Trade Center towers.
The case: On March 26, 2000, more than 4,450 pounds of gelatin-based nitroglycerine, linked by 21.6 miles of orange detonation cord that burned 24,000 feet per second, was ignited in Seattle. Barely 17 seconds later, the monstrous kingdome - 400 plus tons of structural steel and 52,800 cubic yards of concrete - crumpled neatly to the ground in a controlled demolition. Almost as if by magic, the damage was limited to the dome’s own footprint.
Is it odd that the collapse of the Twin Towers looked eerily similar to just that kind of prearranged job? Conspiracy theorists think so. Rejecting the official story - that 1,800-degree infernos sparked by burning fuel fatally weakening the Towers’ steel support beams - they say planted explosives destroyed the buildings.
“It’s undeniable,” says Jim Hoffman of 911research.com. “There’s never been a fire induced collapse of a steel frame building before.” William Rodriguez, a 20-year WTC maintenance worker insists he heard and felt a massive explosion in the basement floors - “I just thought a generator blew up” - just before the first plane struck. He is suing George Bush and others for “knowingly failing to warn of 9/11."
A video on reopen911.org uses red arrows to track supposed “mysterious explosions” within one tower as it collapses. Conspiracists agree that two airplanes hit the WTC, but point to the towers’ rapid fall and the fact that the massive buildings “pancaked” straight down into their own foundations as evidence of other forces at work. Lots of attention goes to World Trade Center 7, a 47-story building that was not struck by a plane, but also collapsed upon itself after the attacks.
Fuel for the fire: The implosions were highly unusual, as the magazine Fire Engineering pointed out in 2002. Bringham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, who recently released a scientific paper questioning the cause of the Twin Towers’ collapse, notes that even FEMA concluded the official reasons for WTC7's collapse had “a low probability of occurrence.”
Believe it or not? In Popular Mechanics’ anti-conspiracy feature, engineers say steel doesn’t need to melt to lose it structural integrity. And for this theory to work, you have to believe that someone could booby-trap some of the world’s busiest buildings without anyone noticing.
THEORY #3
American Airlines Flight 77 never crashed into the Pentagon.
The Case: Officially terrorists piloted American Airlines Flight into America’s military headquarters. But if you watch “Pentagon Strike,” a hair-raising video widely circulated on the internet, you see a much different version of events.
Set to a throbbing backbeat of ominous techno, the video fires a barrage of questions and statements aimed at contradicting the accepted story. IN REALITY, A BOEING 757 WAS NEVER FOUND, it says, going on to claim that the debris at the Pentagon shows no evidence that such a massive plane hit the building. AIRPLANE CRASHES LEAVE WRECKAGE, screams one screen shot. Eyewitness quotes scroll over pictures of the buring building, suggesting a small commuter plane...or a missile...or a military jet...or explosives. Why the video asks, did the Feds hustle to clear debris away and seize surveillance film? (The video can be seen at pentagonstrike.co.uk.)
Fuel for the fire: Hani Hanjour, the alleged hijacker pilot, reportedly sucked so bad in lessons that he couldn’t safely fly a single-engine Cessna, much less pilot a 155-foot-long Boeing 757 into a 7,000-foot dive, turning 270 degrees into a ground-level target at 530 mph.
Believe it or not? Many eyewitnesses did report a full-size plane, and many in the Truth Movement refute this as the type of wild fantasy that discredits their more reasonable claims.
THEORY #4
OK, maybe Al Qaeda did it. But the government let it happen.
The case: Just as some believe the U.S. allowed the Japanese to bomb pearl Harbor in 1941 to drag the American public into a war the government wanted, many say at least a few in Washington knew what was coming on 9/11. Some suspect that someone, somewhere decided that a war against the Middle Eastern terrorists (and anyone else - cough, Saddam, cough - who got in the way) wouldn’t be all bad.
More than any outright conspiracy theory, the sense that the Feds botched a chance to stop 9/11 generates mainstream interest. Two members of congress, Democrat Cynthia McKinney and Republican Curt Weldon, aggressively question the government’s handling of advance intelligence. Recently, Weldon convinced 246 members of the House, from both parties, to sign a letter demanding a full investigation into Able Danger, a classified military intelligence effort to track Al Qaeda agents that began in 1999. According to a Weldon spokesman, the Department of Defense won’t allow key testimony on the project.
“The Pentagon has substantiated that Able Danger existed,” Weldon staffer John Tomaszewski says, “We were getting somewhere, and it abruptly halted. Why? There were three meetings where FBI guys showed up expecting to meet Defense intelligence, and the DIA guys just wouldn’t show us. Why was the exchange stopped?”
Fuel for the fire: Beside Able Danger, skeptics point to major miscues. On August 6, 2001 President Bush was given a now-infamous intel brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” which cited potential hijacking plans. So how off guard, they ask, could the government really have been?”
Believe it or not? Obviously someone f***** up. Does this mean 9/11 was deliberately allowed to happed? No. But the fact that, for example, guys like Dick Cheney’s indicted ex-chief if staff Scooter Libby, teamed up to write a 2000 report for the Project for the New American Century think tank speculating that a ‘new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to “rebuild America’s defenses” gives the theory plenty to go on.
THEORY #5
Someone else did it, but there’s too much we don’t know.
The case: One of the most common threads of conspiracy holds that some other hostile force either helped Al Qeada with the attacks, failed to warn the U.S., or did the job itself. Suspicions about Pakistani intelligence, the Saudis, Hussein, and others are out there, but suggestions that Israel had a hand in the attacks - or at least knew about them - are most commonplace.
Between May and September 2001, for example, the Feds deported more than 100 young Israelis who earlier in the year had shown up at Drug Enforcement Agency offices, military bases, and agents homes, snooping around under the pretext that they were art students looking to make sales. (The shady kids carried portfolios of shoddy, mass-produces art.) The strange visits occurred around the country, including areas where 9/11 hijackers are thought to have lived. According to a Salon.com report, several of these possible spooks lived just down the block from Mohamed Atta. Did the know something was up?
“The most shocking smoking-gun thing we have is the way Israeli intelligence were tracking Atta and were ejected from the U.S. on August 21 for getting too close,” says Hicks. “It shows the levels of protection Atta had.”
Fuel for the fire: Then there’s Saudi Arabia, home to most of the hijackers. The U.S. allowed prominent Saudis to scurry home at a time when no commercial planes were flying, a move that still looks either strange or sinister, depending on your point fo view. Meanwhile, Griffen notes allegations that Pakistan - up to its neck in the funding of Afghan jihadist - may have been in contact with Atta.
Believe it or not? Many of these theories stretch the patience of the most credulous. But, dismissing an entire tree for one rotten apple may be rash. For those who simply can’t wrap their minds around such an epic deception, many are eager to frame things in a more pragmatic perspective.
“Losing a couple of buildings in New York is nothing compared to the global capital at stake, Hicks says. “It’s like Jack Nicholson and John Hudson in Chinatown. As Jake Gittes, Nicholson asks Hudson, the magnet who’s monopolizing L.A.’s water supply, why he’s doing it. ‘You’ve got cars, women, and houses, so why are you doing it? Is it greed or power?’ And Hudson has this great pause before he says, ‘The future, Mr. Gittes - it’s the future.”
So if the Maxim reader does do any internet searching of the above and comes across SotT (and according to a 2001 Mediamark research study the average Maxim reader is more internet active than the average American and readers of other men's magazines) they are already likely perverted (discouraged?) with their notions of David Icke, osit. David Icke, You're Not Helping!
I also found it interesting that the 'theory three' section was substantially shorter than the rest, although in reading it, it seemed to me the most powerful; of course it was then discredited as 'wild fantasy'.
