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As The Weekly Standard rightly notes this is a sad piece of conspiracy theory with no evidence for its claims. The Standard of course fails to identify the author (Paul Craig Roberts) or point out that the piece originally appeared at LewRockwell.com.

They do manage to ask Rand Paul to take a position on it, probably the only reason they covered it.

Do they have opinions on all the writings of Midge Decter, Frank Gafny, and anyone and everyone else published in neocon land?

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Update:

I was of course curious about what Ron Paul supporters would say about this. Would they double down and construct bizarre justifications of it as a knee jerk reaction to attacks by neoconservatives and others?

So last night at one of the perpetual DC libertarian happy hours, I asked someone, a friend and good person, who has worked for Ron Paul and his organizations for years:

Me: So what did you think of that Paul Craig Roberts article on the Ron Paul Institute website?

Ron Paul apparatchik: Awww….I think…that article…has some interesting points…at the beginning…and then made some more interesting points…and then just took a flying leap with no logic whatsoever…into conspiracy theory.

Third Person (who works for a non-Ron Paul, free market, organization): Paul Craig Roberts is crazy. It’s like he couldn’t get a job after the Reagan administration and he went crazy.

RPA: Paul Craig Roberts and Bruce Bartlett both couldn’t keep their careers going after the Reagan administration so they had lunch and decided to both become crazy ideologues, Roberts went with Alex Jones and Bartlett went with Paul Krugman.

TP: But Roberts went crazier because even Alex Jones says there is no evidence Charlie Hebdo was a “false flag” operation.

RPA: No one at The Ron Paul Institute asked my opinion before they published that piece.

Me: Maybe the editors in Tehran didn’t call you because it was long distance?

RPA: Tehran? You mean Russia? No Putin didn’t call either.

Me: Oh you mean the senior editor, not the managing editor?

The conversation then devolved further into jokes about whether the Ron Paul Institute would be publishing new shirtless photos of Putin.

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P.S. I put so called “conspiracy theory” blogs in our blog roll, if they are intresting, if they aren’t anti-Semitic, if they cover other interesting topics, if they are published abroad and offer an international perspective. I haven’t put RPI in in part because I haven’t had time to monitor it and see if the bad outweighs the good.

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Categories Alex Jones, Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theory, false flag, Lew Rockwell, Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute, Weekly Standard

Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein grills Ron Paul Institute

24 Apr

No need to fear that hiring ex-reason editor Tim Cavanaugh to manage The Daily Caller will temper its neoconservative impulses. Editor Jamie Weinstein does a borderline hatchet job on the new Ron Paul Institute, selecting several board members and variously asserting or implying that they are 9/11 truthers or have unAmerican and unpatriotic revisionist views of Abe Lincoln.

It may not be Weinstein’s best performance, at least not as journalism. It looks like the only person he actually contacted, and that only via email, is the new Institute director. The various academics, whose views are certainly fair game for questioning, he seems not to have contacted, but simply to have quoted, possibly not fully in context, from assorted articles they’ve written in the last decade. It’s especially ironic that Weinstein seems scandalized that anyone might suggest that the federal government may have hidden aspects of 9/11 (if nothing more than its culpability by acts of omission), during a week when it is clear that the government is lying, if only to cover up its incompetence, in both the Bhenghazi murders and the Boston marathon bombing.

On the other hand, Ron Paul may have damaged his own career, in a way Rand Paul has not, by speaking to anyone who’d listen, back when the media had consigned him to the waste lands, even if these associates were kooky on issues other than the areas of agreement. It may not be the DC’s intent, but Ron Paul could be more careful now about who he has at his Institute.

Having been on the receiving end of this kind of treatment from the leftovers, I’m not that sympathetic. Why pussy foot around and imply people are kooks or anti-Semites (including the Jews among the board members mentioned) by implication because they don’t share the establishment views of things? Just say it outright. I think our problem today is more government lies and coverups, and media that enable them, than dippy conspiracy theorists.

Here’s Mr. Weinstein’s piece:

The academic board for former Rep. Ron Paul’s recently unveiled Institute for Peace and Prosperity includes at least one 9/11 Truther and two of the most well-known apologists for Iran’s theocratic government in the United States.

In Washington last week, Ron Paul launched his policy institute, with the goal of mobilizing “colleagues and collaborators of Dr. Paul’s to participate in a broad coalition to educate and advocate for fundamental changes in our foreign and domestic policy,” according to its website.

One of the academic board members for the institute is Eric Margolis, an independent journalist who has questioned whether Osama bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and wondered in writing whether the attacks were not instead really orchestrated by “America’s far right or Israel.”

“After 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised Americans the State Department would issue a White Paper detailing bin Laden’s guilt. Afghanistan’s Taliban government asked for this document before it would extradite bin Laden, as the U.S. was demanding,” Margolis wrote in a 2010 article entitled, “9/11. The Mother of all Coincidences.”

“The White Paper was never produced, and the U.S. ignored proper legal procedure and invaded Afghanistan. We still wait for evidence,” the journalist asserted.

“I remain uncertain that Osama bin Laden was really behind the attacks. Much circumstantial evidence points to him and al-Qaida, but conclusive proof still lacks,” he continued.

In the article, Margolis propagated the conspiratorial notion that the 9/11 attacks could very well have been President George W. Bush’s Reichstag fire.

“On 28 February, 1933, fire, set by a Dutch Jew, ravaged the Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag,” he wrote.

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“While the Reichstag’s ruins were still smoking, Adolf Hitler’s government declared a war against ‘terrorism.’ A ‘Decree for the Protection of People and State’ was promulgated suspending all legal protections of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberties. The Reichstag fire allowed the government to round up ‘terrorism’ suspects without due process of law and made police powers near absolute. Sound familiar?”

“I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up,” Margolis concluded. “Just, perhaps, the Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to blame.”

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