Little did we know at the time, 9/11 was not a normal day of blue sky aviation. On the contrary, it was one of the busiest days in the history of American aviation, a dense forest of live fly exercises, drills, simulations, fake radar injects and utter confusion. And that was before the attacks even began. This is the story of 9/11 that you didn't watch unfold on your TV that fateful day in 2001. This is the story of the 9/11 War Games.

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The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on "a vast tapestry of lies" that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad.

But, as Pinter said, "I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory."

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been "more malign that benign, more demonic than divine." He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11^th, while in this one - a prequel - he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a "false flag empire."

Centuries before the Mongols took over the Eurasian steppe, the horse nomads of the Uyghur Empire responded to an epic drought through clever trade deals and unlikely alliances.

The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid climate "freeze-dries" everything, including centuries-old trees that once grew on lava flows in Mongolia's Orkhon Valley. A recent study of the tree-ring record, published in March, from some of these archaic logs reveals a drought that lasted nearly seven decades - one of the longest in a 1,700-year span of steppe history - from A.D. 783-850.

Decades of prolonged drought would have killed much of the grass that the Orkhon Valley's domesticated horses relied upon. Yet the dominant steppe civilization of the era, an empire of Turkic horse nomads called the Uyghurs, somehow survived nearly 60 years of the drought, a period about seven times longer than the Dust Bowl that devastated the central U.S. in the 1930s.

Based on surviving Chinese and Uyghur documents from the drought years, the study's authors concluded that the Uyghurs survived by diversifying their economy and using international diplomacy to boost trade. Rather than driving the Uyghurs to plunder neighboring territories - as other steppe empires tended to do - the drought led them to take advantage of their location on the Silk Road and reinvent their economy. The Uyghurs' relatively peaceful strategies seem to have staved off total collapse for a surprisingly long time. "They were champs," says physical geographer and study co-author Amy Hessl of West Virginia University.

An amphora filled to the brim with gold coins dating back to the 5th century has been found in an archaeological dig in Italy.

The collection, which contains an unspecified number of gold coins, was discovered in the Italian province of Como on Wednesday in a theatre basement not far from where the ancient city of Novum Comum once stood. The 5th century is when the Roman Empire fell.

Ronen Bergman's new book, "Rise and Kill First". Rise and Kill First is a staggering, investigative account of dozens of Israeli killings over many decades by Ronen Bergman, a leading Israeli journalist who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Bergman has cultivated sources throughout the Israeli security establishment, and in creating what is often a page-turner that relates the details of one lethal operation after another, he tells his story entirely from the Israeli perspective.

As a result the book's tone is set by the black humor of Bergman's sources: the Israeli government killers. The author revels in their jargon - Red Page is the name for a "kill order" - and in their snuff jokes, the grisly humor that Israeli operatives employ when they describe killing Palestinians and other Arabs in their interviews with Bergman.

Fishermen in Northern Ireland pulled in the catch of a lifetime on Wednesday (Sept. 5), when they caught an enormous Irish elk skull that's estimated to be more than 10,500 years old. The impressive specimen is about 6 feet (1.8 meters) across and is almost fully intact.

Raymond McElroy and his assistant, Charlie Coyle, caught the massive antlers in their fishing net in the northwest region of Lough Neagh, a large freshwater lake. The men were fishing in water no more than 20 feet (6 meters) deep, about a half mile from shore, said Pat Grimes, a local historian who shared his photos of the impressive discovery.

"I was shocked to begin with when I got it over the side [of the boat] and saw the skull and antlers," McElroy told BelfastLive.

Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) have been extinct for more than 10,000 years, and were one of the largest deer species to ever roam the Earth, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology. The name Irish elk is a bit of a misnomer on both parts, in that they're technically deer, and were found well beyond Ireland - they were present throughout Europe, northern Asia and northern Africa. Still, remains of these large beasts have been found in the bogs and lakes of Ireland more often than other parts of the world.

A chance discovery by a team of archeologists in Turkey may have revealed one of the most significant sites in the history of Christianity after years of fruitless searching. And they're now planning an underwater museum.

When Constantine I, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, chaired the ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, bishops from across the world descended on Lake Ascanius to iron out divisions in the early Christian church. The modern-day lake, Lake Iznik in Turkey, has for years been the focus of archaeologist trying to find treasures from that ancient time.

Now it turns out, what they had been searching for was right in front of them the whole time. And they finally found it thanks to some new aerial photographs commissioned by the government of Bursa province. The snaps clearly revealed the structure of a church submerged underwater.

Turkish archeologist Mustafa Şahin, who is the head of archaeology at Bursa Uludağ University, has been undertaking field surveys of the lake since 2006, but had never discovered the church. The ironic thing was, according to Şahin, the Bursa City Hall photography team had been capturing aerial photographs of the lake since 2013, "but hadn't thought of contacting any expert."

Neolithic tribes in Europe were producing cheese more than 7,000 years ago, archaeologists have discovered, after cheese residue was found in pottery discovered at digs on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia.

Analysis of the fatty residue revealed evidence of soft cheeses and yoghurts dating back 7,200 years, 4,000 years before the previously known date for cheese-making.

"This pushes back cheese-making by 4,000 years," said Sarah B McClure, associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.


The discovery was made at two archaeological sites in Croatia, where the remains of Neolithic villages and evidence of house structures were found, along with stone tools, pottery fragments and animal bones.

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How did the war in Afghanistan start? And how did NATO become involved in this conflict? These details are never discussed because they have for nearly two decades been hidden behind a shroud of secrecy. But now, after nearly two decades of lies, the remarkable truth about the secret documents that helped launch the Afghan war can finally be revealed. This is the story of The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War.

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A Roman water-mill located in what is likely to be one of the earliest industrial complexes in human history was not, as previously thought, critical for supplying the local population but had a more seasonal function, isotope analysis has shown.

The complex, which in its day comprised eight mill units sporting 16 wheels, is called Barbegal and located near the town of Arelate in France. It dates from the second century CE and was built under the aegis of the Roman occupation. Its foundations and other elements remain well preserved today.

Originally discovered in the 1940s, the Barbegal site is regarded as one of the earliest extant examples of how Roman industry developed in response to improvements in engineering. Writing in 1996, French archaeologist Phillippe Leveau characterised it as an example of "the role of technological change in the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages".

The site was also subject to continuous improvement. A report in 2007suggested that the range of millstones found there meant that Roman builders tested several designs to "take advantage of the increased power of hydraulically driven mills".

The mill had an estimated production capacity of 25 tonnes of flour per day - enough to feed the Arelate population of 27,000.

Impressive though Barbegal undoubtedly was, it was not an entirely indispensable piece of Roman infrastructure, a team headed by Gül Sürmelihindi from Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University now suggests.