9/11 truther Michael Ruppert exposed as victim of con man Delmart Vreeland

[MikeWB]

From 'debunkers'...

9/11 truther Michael Ruppert exposed as victim of con man Delmart Vreeland

Michael Ruppert is an ex-detective with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), who claims that he was drummed out of the force in 1978 because he had uncovered evidence of CIA involvement in narcotics trafficking. His proudest boast is that he blocked the Senate's confirmation of the Director of Central Intelligence, John Deutsch, as Secretary for Defense in December 1996 by publicising his Agency's role in pushing drugs. This claim has not been acknowledged by more reputable sources (see, for example, Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, p.535).

As the author of Crossing the Rubicon and the From the Wilderness website he is also one of the few - if not only - members of the 9/11 truth movement to advance a comparatively coherent thesis challenging what truthers call the "official story". Put simply, Ruppert argues that the September 11, 2001 attacks were plotted by then-Vice President Dick Cheney and a shadowy government cabal in anticipation of imminent global oil shortages. 9/11 would provide Cheney and his co-conspirators with the opportunity to wage a war to secure America its oil supplies in the Middle East.

But Ruppert has one other claim to fame which he would probably prefer not to see publicised. He is - in his own way - the victim of a confidence trickster.


The con-man in question is fellow American Delmart Vreeland, known to conspiracy theorists as "the man who predicted 9/11″. Vreeland's story has been extensively covered by the Toronto-based radio journalist Ron Aninich. It makes for disturbing reading, but not for the reasons a truther might suppose.

On December 6, 2000, Vreeland was arrested by police in Toronto on charges of fraud, forgery, threatening death or bodily harm, and of obstructing a peace officer. The Canadian police were informed that he was wanted in Michigan for similar offences, and he became subject to extradition proceedings over the following months. On September 14, 2001, Vreeland told his custodians an astonishing story. He claimed that he was a Lieutenant in the US Navy (USN), attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). From September 4-7, 2000, he was on a clandestine mission to Moscow to steal classified documents related to Russian space weapons systems. During that time, Vreeland stole documents purporting to contain evidence of a plot to destroy landmarks in New York, Washington and other US cities. As "proof", Vreeland provided a note to Canadian court officials on October 7 which he had written prior to 9/11. This note contained a list including the WTC, the Sears Tower in Chicago and the White House, and the melodramatic phrase "Let one happen. Stop the rest!!!". Vreeland did not explain why he chose not to do more beforehand to alert the Canadian authorities' attention to an imminent terrorist attack on his own country. Nor did he explain why his warning note didn't contain any more pertinent information of use to any agencies (Canadian or US) seeking to thwart the attacks – such as a date upon which they were scheduled to occur.

Vreeland fought extradition on the grounds that the conspirators responsible for 9/11 - which included the Russian security services, drug-dealers, organised crime and US government agencies - were waiting to silence him once he was extradited back to the USA , and his lawyers repeated his assertion that he was a clandestine agent in the ONI. Ruppert believed Vreeland, and publicised his case, treating him as the "one man who, in a rational world, could totally expose the complicity of the US government in the attacks of September 11th". He also poured scorn on journalists such as David Corn, who questioned Vreeland's reliability. However, the Canadian judiciary concluded that Vreeland's story was a pack of lies from start to finish (for example, he was discovered to have been discharged from the USN during his basic training, and at the time he was supposedly in Moscow uncovering the 9/11 plot, Vreeland was actually in police custody in St Thomas, Ontario).

On September 11, 2002, the Toronto Sun reported Vreeland's "disappearance". He was due to appear in court on the 9th and 10th for extradition hearings, but he had vanished without a trace, leaving his flat "ransacked". Surely this was indicative of Vreeland's honesty: he had clearly been kidnapped and silenced by the US government and its minions in order to keep the truth from the American people? Nope. He miraculously appeared South of the border, two years later. On October 24, 2008, Vreeland had his final brush with justice: he received a life sentence from a court in Colorado after his conviction for "13 felony charges, including inducement of child prostitution, sexual assault, sexual exploitation of children and distribution of cocaine". Ruppert's "White Knight" had manipulated two young boys "into performing sex acts and making child pornography".

The "man who predicted 9/11″ turned out to be a liar, a felon, and a paedophile.

Reading through the sordid details of Vreeland's case, I find myself asking why Ruppert thought that his "smoking gun" was anything other than a fantasist and a con-man. Granted, he could not have predicted that his witness would turn out to be a sociopathic sexual predator, but the ex-LAPD detective could have done what Aninich did, and traced Vreeland's criminal career prior to his arrest by the Toronto police. Ruppert's day job used to involve tracking down men like Vreeland and putting them behind bars. But in order to push his tall tales, Ruppert would have to suspend all his critical and sceptical intellectual facilities.

What would a proper sceptic have done? Ruppert might have asked himself whether he could really believe the claims made by a man who presented himself as a cross between Arthur C. Clarke and Jason Bourne. Yet instead, he took at face value the word of someone who claimed to be a Lieutenant, USN, despite having failed basic training; who claimed that in 1986 he had designed the space weapons technology behind the Star Wars programme (on the back of a high school education, and no science degrees); and who stated that the US military had sent him on a clandestine intelligence-gathering mission to Moscow, despite the fact that he couldn't speak Russian or read the Cyrillic alphabet. Any of these tall tales should have triggered Ruppert's bullshit detector, but he accepted them without demur.

Rather than set up a hypothesis ('Was 9/11 committed by some government or agency other than al-Qaeda?') and rigorously analyse the evidence both supporting and disproving this supposition, Ruppert dogmatically clung to the belief that the September 2001 attacks were an "inside job", and he scavenged for proof - no matter how tenuous or weak - which supported his preconceived "theories". This counter-empirical and blinkered approach to intellectual enquiry left him open to manipulation and humiliation by a charlatan who simply wanted to escape the jail time which was his due.

The harsh fact is that Vreeland stole something important from Ruppert. In this case he did not steal his victim's money, valuables, or (as was tragically the case with his two young victims in Colorado) innocence. He stole Ruppert's credibility, and that is a commodity which this particular truther will find it exceedingly difficult to recover.

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Posted in 9/11 conspiracies.
Tagged with 9/11 'truthers', 9/11 conspiracies, CIA, Delmart Vreeland, John Deutsch, LAPD, Michael Ruppert.
By Joseph Welch    29 January 2009