The world is full of bad people but the good news is that here in America our First Amendment makes it easier to spot them.

Via NBC:

The  festival, “9/11 Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming our Future,” is organized by the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance, a group that formed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The lineup of films and speakers kicked off at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland this afternoon, and will continue on Sunday at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco after a march from Justin Herman Plaza to the theater.
   
Similar events are being held in Seattle and in Toronto, and a portion of those events will be broadcast live in the Bay Area as part of the film festival.

The slate of films includes “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup,” “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” and “We Were Also Killed on 9/11: First Responders.”

“We’ve had rallies every year,” said Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance co-founder Carol Brouillet. She said the group organized its first film festival in 2004 and has had similar events every year since.

She said the main goal of the festival is to inform attendees about “the disparity between the official version and the actual events.” …

The rub below the fold:

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Call me fussy, but I prefer that my conspiracies and cover-ups actually involve conspiracies and cover-ups.  The Tillman Story, a new leftist documentary on football player turned Army Airborne Ranger turned friendly fire casualty turned symbol of…something…posits a massive conspiracy to do…something…and an enormous cover-up of…something…but never quite explains what.  However, there are lots of ominous shots of George Bush and Karl Rove, so we can somehow gather that whatever it is is, in some way, all Bushitler’s fault.

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This is a bad film, both in its execution and its intent.  As a lawyer, it insults my intelligence.  As a veteran, it insults my professionalism.  As an audience member, it failed me as a film.  Pat Tillman, first seen in footage sitting nearly silently in a studio, begins the film as a cipher and ends as a cipher.  I know little more about the man or his motivations than I did coming in.  All I know is that I could not wait for it to be over.

This over-praised documentary is based on the premise that there was an enormous, mysterious conspiracy surrounding the death of Pat Tillman, which is a problem for the filmmaker since it is clear there is no giant, mysterious conspiracy surrounding the death of Pat Tillman.  The filmmakers cannot explain who conspired, or what they conspired to do.  Was there a cover-up?  Of what?  The film desperately wants there to be one, as does the family – perhaps that would give them the story the producers need and generate the meaning the family wants.  But, as the film demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt, there isn’t one.  This is a story of mistakes, not malice. (more…)

[Ed. Note: Not having seen the upcoming critically-acclaimed documentary "The Tillman Story," and not being familiar with the story, I asked Jim Hanson of Big Peace if he would lay it out for us. Since making that request both Kurt Schlichter and I have seen the film, so there's much more to come. My thanks to Jim for his sober, comprehensive and insightful work here.]

Pat Tillman left one of the most sought after jobs on Earth as a star in the NFL to join the Army and volunteer as a Ranger. It was a noble, patriotic and selfless act that deserves to be his legacy. Unfortunately the circumstances surrounding his death get more attention than the sacrifice he made for this country. There is a movie coming out called “The Tillman Story” that seems to perpetuate some of the worst conspiracy theories about his death. It is important that we separate myths from reality. This piece will focus on the circumstances of the incident and the immediate reaction from the military in the weeks that followed.

Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan in 2004 was a tragic accident and resulted from fratricide. He was shot by members of his own unit who failed to identify an Afghan soldier and Tillman as friendlies. There are those who want to cast doubt on that and claim that there was a crime committed and that Tillman was murdered, but there is simply nothing in the evidence available that points to that. I have read hundreds of pages from the multiple investigations of the incident and there is simply no way to get that many people to tell almost exactly the same story of how the incident unfolded. (more…)

Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray. Bob Elliot was the father of Chris Elliot, who we didn’t know at the time would turn out to be funnier than his dad. The magazine was started by a guy named Al Feldstein. Well, actually, it was started by a guy named Harvey Kurtzman, a brilliant genius who lasted three issues and then got kicked off his own creation by the publisher, who hired Feldstein to take over. I guess Kurtzman was a little too nuts even for Mad. He was a powerhouse of a guy whose girlfriend at the time was a hot young babe named Gloria Steinem. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

Anyway, I guess Feldstein was just crazy enough to make the magazine a huge success. Now long retired and living in Montana (which seems to be a magnet for marginally crazy people), Feldman, an old lefty, recently forwarded an e-mail to a friend of a friend of mine who forwarded it to me. A million plus people have watched this e-mail by now. It’s a slickly produced film attacking Barack Obama. Any surprise that the President’s base is now turning on him?  It explains that he (Obama), is in the pocket of some amorphous, only hinted-at, world-wide society of manipulators who are behind everything bad in the world: “The Trilateral Commission, founded and conceived by David Rockefeller and his obscenely wealthy (redundancy?) Bilderberg Society cohorts… an amalgam of carefully chosen members of ‘The Elite’… the powerful rich… from the three main areas of the world: The U.S.A…. Europe… and Japan… who would slowly and carefully maneuver the free people of the Earth into a ‘One World’ system of Corporate/Fascism.” This is very old stuff. Conspiracy fodder. Been around for years in one form or another. International bankers turning Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a single country, etc. And it’s all slickly packaged with music and graphics. (more…)