Can We Say Inside Job Now?

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

20 years after the fact, the facts still don't jibe with the official narrative of what happened on 9/11 any more than they had the day they were crafted, maintained and reinforced by elected officials, bureaucrats and the mainstream media. To this day, anyone who questions the official narrative in even the slightest, despite photographic and video proof that the official narrative doesn't hold water, is uncharitably called a "truther."

     Conspiracy theorist, in other words. In one of her very, very few lucid moments, Marjorie Taylor-Greene questioned whether or not a jumbo jetliner struck the Pentagon on 9/11 and that observation is immediately and invariably lumped in with her other conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers and the like. This, despite the fact video evidence taken at the Pentagon that day plainly shows a 14 foot-wide hole with windows on either side still perfectly intact. Was 9/11 an inside job? Well, virtually everyone hearing those two words reflexively screams, "NO!"

     OK, have it your way.

   This isn't about 9/11 but 1/6, the first time the Capitol was attacked since the British did so in 1814. Jonathan Karl of ABC has a new book out about Trump's White House (who doesn't, these days?) and it's called Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. As with all such books, advance copies have been sent to news agencies and snippets about the book get leaked out to the press. Selling the sizzle instead of the steak, in other words.

    So, we've been been hearing the sizzle hissing and popping over ABC's Chief White House Correspondent's book for weeks. I'll pause briefly to make an editorial aside by noting that with all the books that have come out about the Trump White House, what's most remarkable is the nearly complete lack of overlap. Each new book seems to come with it revelations not revealed in other books. In other words, there was so much slime and dirt in Trump's White House that it's become obvious that, far from draining the swamp, Trump actually had deepened it to the point where it was bottomless.

     Yet, during an interview with the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, Karl revealed something in his book that caught my eye and made me sit up and take notice. It was when Karl revealed for the first time what was the office that got sacked the most during the January 6 riot: It was the Senate Parliamentarian's office. Karl had mentioned something first revealed last August, that Washingtontunnels.com saw a massive spike in traffic in the days leading up to the insurrection.

     But a tunnel map will not give you the locations of specific offices. That the rioters knew exactly where to go without ever having been there, what to look for and when to do it more than implies insider help. Help from a party that goes by the acronym GOP. Remember, several GOP congressmen were giving guided tours the day before the riot even though such things were outlawed as of March 2020 because of the pandemic.

 

"Lordie, I Hope There Are Tapes!" 

That's the Senate Parliamentarian's office right after the riot on January 6th that Karl had judged to be the most ransacked and vandalized office on Capitol Hill that day. It looked as if it had been tossed by the FBI or a Category 5 Tornado. But, as Karl said, this wasn't a random vandalism. These people had guidance from those on the Hill who were very invested in keeping the pro forma Electoral College certification from continuing as planned.

     The reason why they were there and why they'd tossed the office so thoroughly was because the Parliamentarian's office was where the Electoral College votes were stored until they could be taken to the House. When the Capitol was breached and lawmakers began scrambling for their lives, one junior staffer, averred Karl, had the presence of mind to grab the three antique mahogany boxes containing the votes and to run out of the office with them.

     This is how close we came to not having a vote certification: That a nameless girl just a few years out of high school had to single-handedly run through the halls of the Capitol building with the precious votes needed while Trump leered at his human countermeasures sacking the Capitol. Yes, the future of our next government was literally in the hands of one scared young woman.

     So who had given the rioters this specific intelligence? Mikie Sherrill, Democratic congresswoman out of New Jersey, said on Facebook Live a week after the riot that certain Republican members of Congress gave guided tours of the Capitol, even though they'd long since been banned. Democratic Congressman Jim Clyburn's office was ransacked, despite it being so out of the way even veterans of Capitol Hill have difficulty finding it.

     The same day as Sherrill's Facebook Live, in one of the most chilling stories of all, the panic alarm system under the desks in Ayanna Pressley's office were ripped out even before the riot, meaning someone on Capitol Hill, in the Capitol building, wanted Pressley isolated and, most likely, dead. 

     To quote former FBI Director James Comey's testimony on that same Hill years ago, "Lordie, I hope there are tapes!" Because, as far I know, not one single frame has been released to the public or even to the January 6 Select Committee of the security tapes of the Capitol on January 5th. Once again, nearly a year later, I'm asking, "Where are the tapes?" That and, "Can we say 'inside job' now?"