Showing posts with label 911. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 911. Show all posts

Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies Review

Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies
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Jim Marrs is a veteran journalist who isn't afraid to examine topics that are suppressed by institutions of power. In this book, Jim joins the growing number of authors who have challenged the official tale of the events of September 11, 2001, making the case that the evidence points to the attacks being an inside job. The motives, methods, and plans are all presented for the reader, incriminating those in power in the USA. Nearly 3 years after the attacks, Jim Marrs has collected much information [most of which can be quickly found on the Internet on websites of the many independent researchers of 9-11 and related shadowy activities]. One would have to create a very bizarre and improbable conspiracy theory to attempt to deny the main assertion Marrs presents in this book. Jim Marrs deserves credit for collecting the available research and presenting it coherently for the public to examine. Marrs book has garnered the praise of persons such as John "Men Are From Mars" Gray and Catherine Austin Fitts, the whistleblower who has been a victim of those who she once served as assistant housing secretary in the Bush Sr. Administration. Hopefully, more public figures will soon begin to acknowledge the criminal nature of our leaders and encourage the public to reclaim control over the country from the existing power structure. Until then, enjoy books like this one and let the mainstream media folks know that they are merely acting as press-titutes when they spout "official" tales rather than reporting what really happened.

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Film and Television After 9/11 Review

Film and Television After 9/11
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When I saw the title of this book and ordered it, I thought (as implied by the title) that it was using 9-11 to mark off a time period, and would offer some essays about television and film since then. This is not really what this text is. Published in 2004, but probably written mostly a good deal earlier, the event of 9-11 itself weighs very heavily in virtually all of the essays. I would say 'Film and Television in light of 9-11' would probably be a better title. A couple of the essays in fact deal with how films (specifically 'Manhatta' and 'King Kong', as well as Holocaust documentaries) made before 9-11 appear afterward.
Most of the essays subvert the aura of American exceptionalism (i.e. the mentality that this is the most awful thing to happen to anyone) that surrounds 9-11. Some look at the ways 9-11 was projected into culture, for example the effort to cut the Twin Towers from several projects in the pipeline on 9-11. Whether the towers were cut (incurring the wrath of those who claimed that therefore 'the terrorists won') or not (and thereby eliciting disruptive cheers from audiences when they appeared, as in Glitter) their presence was deeply felt. Another essay describes the way the most disturbing footage filmed on 9-11 has not been screened, and how this footage is slowly emerging on the internet. The author suggests that this will help demystify the event. Relevant, but relatively unknown, foreign films, such as the European collaborative film 9'11''01 (which compared 9-11 to a number of events around the world, practically a taboo in the US) are also described. In the aforementioned essay discussing Manhatta, the way in which the twin towers embodied a sort of monumental modernity that quashed what stood in its way, replacing it with a flat, mathematical order, is noted. This sort of modernity produces targets of terrorism (we might add it finds its opposite in the geography of Afghanistan, where, as Donald Rumsfeld noted, the US military quickly ran out of targets to bomb). The now almost forgotten thriller 'The Sum of All Fears' shows up in several essays, since its depiction of a nuclear bomb detonating in Baltimore makes it relevant. This film made little lasting impact on American culture, suggesting the perils of trying to produce this sort of book so quickly after the event in question. An essay on Malkmalbaf's 'Khandahar' makes an odd reference to NATO troops in Afghanistan as 'peacekeepers' (they are not, by practically any definition of that term), suggesting unintentionally possible complicity of this film with this liberal imperialist mission. One essay describes 24, but only the first season. The show really focused more aggressively on 9-11 themes from the second season on, although the writer's suggestion that the alliance between Jack Bauer and presidential candidate David Palmer echoes the alliance between fire fighters and upper middle class financial workers in the offices attacked on 9-11 is intriguing. The essay comparing the mythology of King Kong-the return of the repressed of the third world, coming to Manhattan, and, in the 1970s version, scaling the Twin Towers--and its relation to Bin Laden was quite good.
The essays in this book are generally interesting. This is a topic it would be worth returning to, now that a good deal of time has past and more perspective can be brought to bear.

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The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century Review

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
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Although I am a large fan of America's Secret War and respect Mr. Friedman's logical thinking and intelligence, this book is an undertaking so far beyond the capability of man -trying to outline how the next 100 years of history will look- that even though it started off captivating it ultimately left me feeling like the whole thing was a fool's errand. It's not that the author is illogical or a nutcase as some of the negative reviewers have suggested, it's just that there's no way to meaningfully try to predict the simply unpredictable, regardless of the complexity of your analysis. And as the author stretches his future history farther and farther away from the present it simply becomes an implausibility on top of an implausibility on top of another implausibility to the point that any value the reader could derive nearly evaporates and I wish I had spent my time reading actual history.
Of course the author believes some rough prediction of the future is possible based on trends analysis, an understanding of strategic nature, and other such information. I immediately concede that trying to predict the future is not only necessary as a basis for security planning but can be done profitably over maybe 10 years, 20 at the extreme, but only if you build in a huge amount of risk management / "reserve" into your planning results to account for the inevitable unexpected. Thus my critique is simply with the overly ambitious timeline of the author rather than the endeavor itself.
There are some positives of the book which were informative and argue in favor of reading perhaps the first half for pertinent information and analysis. This information revolves around such things as brief overviews of European history and it's rise to power, a brief and plausible (though not necessarily entirely convincing) theory of a cyclical nature of American politics/economics/history, explanations of Russia's geostrategic challenge and how it has historically approached it, global demographics (birth rates declining, the reasons why they are declining and the possible results) and some highlights of the Chinese economy and political system in addition to some other fascinating minor topics. Frankly these topics could have easily formed the basis for an excellent book that tries to project what they could mean over a more modest timeframe, which coupled with Mr. Friedman's direct and straight to the point writing style would have been well worth it. But beyond this the book is more interesting as a work of science fiction than a source of illumination or fuel for strategic analysis.
Even over the relatively strong first half of the book or so there were some things that struck me as cautionary flags with regards to the author's conclusions. Mr. Friedman is Bismarckian to a very high degree, and pretty much limits his assumptions of state behavior to each state trying to enforce a balance of power amongst all other states within its means. There is seemingly no consideration of moral factors, such as alignment of like minded cultures or political/economic systems because they are like minded, in his analysis. His explanation of US grand strategy culminates in what strikes me, as an active duty US Navy Officer, as incongruous. (Which I can't figure since he has close military ties and his son is also in the military.) He essentially claims that US grand strategy is to ensure dominance of the oceans, which is correct but only a single facet of a much more variegated and complex animal. But in his analysis of how this grand strategy has influenced American action he tries to explain that this has motivated America to intervene in Kosovo and Iraq, i.e. to forestall an eventual Eurasian power from building a Navy that can challenge ours! Serbia and Al-Qaeda seemed pretty far from that goal to provide the clarifying rational of American behavior, and this explanation fails to account why we are doing nothing to forestall Chinese and Indian naval developments, and why the previous CNO and current CJCS, Adm. Mike Mullen, launched the "1,000 ship Navy" designed to reduce the need for enlarging the US Navy size by leveraging closer ties with allied nations' navies and developing their naval capabilities synergistically. He also claims that as part of our strategy of preventing a dominant Eurasian continental power we went into Iraq to intentionally de-stabilize central Asia. Again, this flies completely in the face of my entire personal experience in the military, as so many of our forces are working themselves to the bone to try to re-stabilize the region away from weak and antagonistic states that allowed the growth of radical Islam to stronger, more functioning entities that can integrate better with the world and root out Islamic fundamentalism on its home territory. Such a change requires a period of instability to go from a "bad" regime to a "good" one, but that necessary instability is a daunting obstacle being actively tackled and not a goal. (Whether what we are doing is a pipe dream or not is an entirely different matter, but I personally find his explanation of our current strategy simply false, if not quixotic.) Instead it is the overtly stated belief of the US strategic community that it is exactly instability and/or weak autocratic based regimes that causes groups like Al-Qaeda to operate. Other concerns I have with his analysis are that Iran, especially a nuclear Iran, makes virtually no appearance, nor does India. Also, in my subjective opinion, he completely under-rates the strength and staying power of radical Islam essentially claiming that is already defeated and won't even be a factor beyond the mid 2010's, and thus he more or less ignores it.
And although it is probably ridiculous to critique an absurdity, there were some issues I had with his analysis of the period of the 2040's and beyond. He envisions an American space based strategy with three very large (i.e. hundreds to thousands of crewmembers) space stations he calls "battle stars" forming its core. Each would be a command and control node as well as being armed with directed energy and kinetic weapons, and he claims that they will be built under the assumption that they are invulnerable. Yet given the delicate nature of lightweight space structures (in order to be able to get them into space at an affordable cost) and the relative ease of anti-satellite weapons to wreak massive damage on such a system cheaply, his assumption that the US will think they are invulnerable flies completely in the face of a technological reality that is already widely recognized in the US space community. Last, he also envisions hypersonic aircraft providing close air support for ground forces, which is frankly ridiculous. There is more I could quibble with his far out year predictions, but honestly what would be the point?
An odd book. Mr. Friedman has some formidable strengths that shone brilliantly in America's Secret War, and glimmer here and there in the Next 100 Years, but beyond the midway point the book sadly devolves into the absurd.

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Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision Review

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision
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This work is the definitive analysis of the intelligence failures leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It is not an historical account of the attack, but is rather a concise analysis of the mistakes made by naval intelligence authorities in Hawaii and the U.S. during the months leading up to the attack.
The book offers a unique analysis of the attack, and doesn't pull any punches. Human failures are analyzed, as well as bureaucratic failures, which were many. The reader comes away with a better understanding of the attitudes prevelant among intelligence authorities of the time, as well as an insight into their workings.
This is not a book for those just beginning their studies of the attack. It is more appropriate for someone who already has a good understanding of the historical timelines of the attack, the Japanese perspective of U.S. military policy at the time, and the military and civilian authorities involved in the attack and their roles.
The only negative comment regarding the book is that it offers rather tedious reading at times. But to serious researchers this is more than offset by the volumes of information gleaned from it.
This is a "must-have" book for serious Pearl Harbor researchers.

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The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé Review

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé
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In THE NEW PEARL HARBOR REVISITED, David Ray Griffin provides a brilliant and much-needed companion to his path-breaking and movement-building book on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor (NPH; 2004). Now, on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of those horrific events, Griffin surveys in detail all the main lines of evidence against the official account of 9/11 to have emerged during the last four years. THE NEW PEARL HARBOR REVISITED (NPHR) has been designed as volume 2 of a two-volume set with NPH as volume 1; together they provide a thorough and up-to-date case against the official conspiracy theory (they can be bought separately, of course).
Griffin has already published four other books that provide in-depth analysis of most of the evidence to have emerged since 2004. NPHR's main purpose is to provide an easily accessible survey of all of the new evidence, so that it is now possible for a beginner to the subject (including journalists and members of Congress) to master its enormous complexity simply by reading two books. NPHR is structured identically to NPH; each chapter in NPHR comments and builds on the corresponding chapter in NPH. Much of the content is entirely new; there are many facts and analyses in NPHR which Griffin presents for the first time, and which literally make the book an up-to-the-minute statement of the case.
In the Preface, Griffin explains why he undertook to "update" The New Pearl Harbor. In the Introduction he outlines the continued failure of the press to investigate any of the questions raised against the official account, and the lame attempts, especially by the main "progressive" or "left" appendages of the press, to portray such questioning as lunacy. He provides a brief overview of the history of "false-flag" operations, including the Pentagon's Operation Northwoods, halted by President Kennedy. Griffin then argues that the term "conspiracy theory" is used dishonestly to prevent investigation of the claims of critics (and never to describe the government's theory about 19 Arab hijackers controlled from a cave in Afghanistan).
The very substantial first chapter tackles two major issues, the timing of events related to flights AA 11 and UA 175 and the collapses of the WTC buildings. Griffin shows that the 9/11 Commission's new timeline is contradicted by much solid evidence and is inherently unbelievable. The Commission claims that the military was not notified by the FAA of the flight emergency on flight UA 175 until much later than the time the military itself had claimed during the years between 9/11 and the publication of the Commission's Report in 2004. The Commission based its new claim on the "NORAD Tapes," a set of purportedly genuine tapes of telephone communications between the FAA and NORAD on the morning of 9/11. But these tapes were never produced until 2004, after the glaring holes in the Pentagon's defense against the charge of a standdown had become evident, and are probable fakes, which Griffin shows would have been easy to produce. The strongest indication that they are indeed fakes is that they contradict mountains of highly diverse independent lines of evidence.
Then he treats the new official story about how the Twin Towers collapsed, as presented in the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Report of 2005. He thoroughly deconstructs NIST's five "crucial claims": (i) that designers of the buildings had not anticipated the possibility of airliner impacts; (ii) that many core and peripheral columns were severed by the plane impacts, and that fire-proofing material was stripped off many other core columns; (iii) that the now-unprotected core columns were then weakened by fire to the point of buckling; (iv) that the floors then sagged and pulled the perimeter columns inward; and (v) that the downward momentum of the upper portions of the buildings was so great that they collapsed "essentially in free fall," i.e. that there was virtually no resistance at all to the fall through the undamaged lower portions of the buildings. For each of these claims Griffin is easily able to show that NIST in fact provides no supporting evidence for them!
He then proceeds to demonstrate that NIST ignored vast amounts of relevant evidence for controlled demolition of the buildings: explosions witnessed by first responders; horizontal ejections of huge sections of steel perimeter columns; melting of steel, indicating temperatures far higher than can be reached by jet-fuel and office-materials fires; and residues indicating explosives were used, including iron and aluminum microspheres in dust from the WTC (a typical product of thermite reactions) and "red chips" in the dust with thermite's chemical signature.
Griffin concludes Chapter 1 with a survey of the strong evidence for controlled demolition of WTC 7, the 47-story skyscraper that was not struck by a plane, had only minor fires inside, and yet collapsed into its footprint late in the afternoon at free-fall speed (in under six seconds). Although tasked with an explanation, NIST had still not provided one when Griffin's book went to press. Griffin lays out in detail the many explanatory challenges still ahead for the agency, including the vertical, symmetrical collapse; the pool of melted steel underneath the debris pile for weeks afterwards; the free-fall speed of collapse; the similarity of the collapse to classic controlled demolition; the testimony by NYC officials Barry Jennings and Michael Hess reporting explosions inside hours before the building collapsed; the foreknowledge, hours before, that the building was going to fall; the array of evidence that the building was intended to fall in the morning at about the same time as the Towers; the media's premature announcement of its collapse; and Larry Silverstein's evident admission that the building was demolished. (Now that NIST's report on WTC 7 has finally appeared, one can see that it fulfilled Griffin's expectation that it would simply ignore all the evidence that is inconsistent with its fire theory of the collapse.)
In Chapter 2, Griffin takes up the many developments since 2004 with respect to Flight 77 and the events that occurred at the Pentagon. He shows that Solicitor General Ted Olson's claim to have received phone calls from his wife Barbara on Flight 77 cannot be true: it is self-contradictory (sometimes he claimed she called on a cell phone, and at other times on a seat-back phone), and it has even been abandoned by the FBI in its summary evidence of all phone calls from all the flights submitted at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in 2006, which said that no connected call was made by her. These claimed calls from Barbara Olson were the principal "evidence" put forward to substantiate the assertion that the Flight 77 was still in the air and headed toward Washington D.C., and that it was hijacked by Arab Muslims.
Griffin then presents a detailed analysis of a broad array of physical evidence indicating that the Pentagon was not struck by a Boeing 757: photos of the damage to the outside of the building; lack of suitable debris; lack of video evidence; lack of time-change parts from the planes; no flight data recorder with the correct serial number has ever been produced; lack of a seismic signal of such an impact; the inexplicable C-Ring hole inside the Pentagon; the contradictory eye-witness evidence; the implausibility of terrorists striking the West Wing, farthest away from the offices of the top brass; and the known inability of Hani Hanjour to fly an airliner with the skill required by the claimed 330-degree downward spiral at high speed.
Again Griffin shows that the 9/11 Commission has distorted and suppressed evidence for the evident standdown of the air defense system, principally by creating a new timeline of events (based again on the dubious "NORAD Tapes") of Flight 77 and thereby claiming the FAA did not notify the Pentagon of the flight emergency in time to intercept the plane. This claim falls for the same reason it does in the cases of flights 11 and 175: it contradicts reams of evidence from multiple independent sources, and is supported only by the Pentagon's and the Commission's claim that the tapes are genuine. In addition Griffin shows that the Commission's claims that no interceptor aircraft were available at Andrews Air Base, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers were unavailable to coordinate a defensive response, are false.
Griffin also surveys witness accounts of bombs inside the Pentagon, considers the question why there was no evacuation of the building (even under the Commission's claimed timeline there was ample time for evacuation), asks why Wedges 1 and 2 might have been selected by the real perpetrators, shows that the Commission suppressed the account of Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta that is most plausibly interpreted as indicating that a standdown order had been given by Vice President Dick Cheney to prevent interception of a craft approaching the Pentagon, and several other important lines of evidence.
The many mysteries of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania are the subject of Chapter 3. Griffin's analysis of the evidence developed since the publication of NPH in 2004 has led to a fundamental shift in his perspective on Flight 93. He no longer assumes, as he did at the time of the earlier book, that phone calls from the plane provide any evidence for what occurred onboard. This is because it is now clear that cell phone calls from planes at high altitude were technologically impossible on 9/11. And yet, family members and others evidently received cell phone calls that morning from people on the flight. As there is no basis to imagine all the recipients are lying, they must...Read more›

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The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 Review

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11
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A theologist raising a lone voice against a high crime of state reminds one immediately of the Nazi scourge and the almost lone voice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom Hitler hanged a few days before the end, to rob him of any sense of victory or redemption that he might have enjoyed.
The Bush regime presented a similarly hard face of universalist missionary zeal, albeit not uniformed, with a messianic vision of putting the world to rights, an enormous military machine with which to do it, curfew-lite civil rights, and a consumer economy in a state of overheated boom. The post-9/11 regime granted the attacks religious icon status, with pictures of brave firemen at Ground Zero being played to children in school across the nation over the sound of the Stars and Stripes every morning.
The so-called War on Terror was declared, although it was strangely at odds with the Americans' indulgent attitude to terror as practised by the US-funded IRA in the UK, with the government of Mrs Thatcher being blown out of their beds at three in the morning at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and vast swathes of commercial real estate gutted in Manchester and London. Suddenly, America was rising up in righteous fury.
It now seems that America's righteous fury was directed into wars that the Bush regime had long been planning behind the scenes. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks might have been a pre-emptive measure against a war in Afghanistan that the Pentagon was already plotting. Or, perish the thought, did they occur as a pretext for that war?
Dr Griffin, a student of "postmodern process theology", whose latest academic work was entitled "Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion", does not come down either way in his study of the "disturbing questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11".
Neatly timing his book to coincide with the Presidential elections, Dr Griffin is content simply to rehearse all the arguments long published on the internet and to categorise them by stages of criminality, rather like a judge would in a court when considering the sentence. Judgement in this book would start with impeachment, disgrace and exile, and end with stringing from a lamp-post like Mussolini.
If any misdeed mentioned by Dr Griffin in this cool, rational appraisal of the evidence is ever endorsed by a brave whistle-blower, Bush and his team are toast.
Dr Griffin freely admits that he is advocating the writings of others, from Jared Israel and Mike Ruppert to Thierry Meyssan and Paul Thompson, author of the enormous 9/11 timeline. Unlike them, however, he does not get mixed up in detail. For example, he ignores whether there were hijackers or not, because it is not vital to the argument. He never mentions Israel or Mossad, thus avoiding the wrath of the ADL, Harvard university and a huge chunk of the American intelligensia. He sifts out the nuggets and lays them out in a beautifully organised case, categorising the charges by eight degrees of complicity. The logic of the evidence is inexorable, starting with the most screaming fact of all: standard procedure was ignored in all four hijackings, meaning that the airliners cruised to their targets without being intercepted---and the administration first said that no scramble was ordered until after Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon, then changed their story. That very fact is the most egregious case of gross incompetence, yet nobody's head has rolled. Indeed, the incompetence argument is denied every time by the absence of consequences for the culpable.
Dr Griffin presents the evidence that no airliner ever hit the Pentagon, and suggests that Flight 93 was only shot down when it appeared that the "Let's roll!" crowd of rebellious passengers were about to beat the hijackers.
He examines the evidence that the Twin Towers were felled by demolition charges, as was WTC 7, crammed with top-secret offices, seven hours later.
He examines all the evidence of collusion before the event, including the implication of Pakistan's security service, and lists all the benefits to the regime afterwards.
Finally, he takes his whole case and puts all the arguments that dismantle it, e.g. if only Ted Olsen's evidence suggests Flight 77 was hijacked, did Ted Olsen sacrifice his celebrity wife for the White House? This and many other examples could easily be put straight by the independent inquiry that Griffin is calling for. Finally, Griffin turns to the incompetence theory (already scuppered by the complete absence of rolling heads) and points out the enormous number of major coincidences that have to be accepted to allow it. They defy belief.
This book should put the Bush team on the run; perhaps they already are. Things have moved on radically since this work was conceived about a year ago. Bush's enemies have a leader in John Kerry, and they have missiles, in the form of torture photographs and videos obtained from perverts at Abu Ghraib jail. The images are being leaked almost daily, and Bush's poll ratings plunge with every fresh issue. He is holed below the water-line and sinking visibly. Senior Pentagon figures are calling for the whole team to be fired. Their days seem to be numbered.
However, another aspect of Dr Griffin's book holds true. If any of the "disturbing questions" have equally disturbing answers, we can expect a huge affirmation to occur in the form of an atrocity that will apotheosize the dim-witted president, enshrine his administration in the sacred blood of unending war and condemn Grifin's questions to the rubbish dump of history.

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At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor Review

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
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While science is my area of expertise, I have a continuing interest in history. That interest lead me to pick up Prange's book. Gordon Prange has devoted years to accumulating information about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That information includes interviews and military and government information from the USA and Japan. That accumulated information was then boiled down into this final work -- completed after Prange's death.
While there have been many books and theories proposed about why and how the debacle at Pearl Harbor took place, Prange's approach is well documented, and includes details of the pre-attack politics of the USA and of Japan. His book also includes detailed information about the attack itself, gleaned from interviews with those on both sides who actually participated in the event. But, even with that level of detail, I must admit that the most compelling part of the book for me is the section that follows the actual attack -- when the US government and the military were trying to figure out what actually happened, and who was to blame.
The final series of chapters of the book provide insight into the thoughts and tactics of Adm. Kimmell (CincPAC) and Gen Short (Commanding General of army at Hawaii), the two primary "interested parties" in the event.
Before reading the book, I had a tendency to believe that there may have been something of a conspiracy by the Roosevelt administration to get us into WWII, but after reading this account of Pearl Harbor, I am more likely to believe that the great success, including complete surprise by Japanese naval aviation was the result of a series of ill-advised decisions by the commanders at Hawaii rather than by any entity in Wash DC.
The sticky point in the whole affair was "magic" the US's code-breaking machine that allowed us to monitor coded diplomatic messages sent between Tokyo and some of its embassies. While "magic" was the source of a great deal of information that may have resulted in a different outcome at Pearl Harbor if the commanders there had access to it, we will never really know.
If you are interested in looking in repurcussions from the attack at Pearl Harbor, or if you have an interest in thinking about the whys and hows of the US entry into WWII, I urge you to read this book.
The writing is passable, though sometimes quite dry. The information is well documented, and is believable. This is not, however, a quick read -- there is a lot of meat in this book to be digested as you go along.
All in all an outstanding contribution to the telling of a sensitive piece of American history.
5 stars for content and believability.
Alan Holyoak

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