First of all, I am not at all averse to the idea that the US government may have hatched and rehearsed the 9/11 scenario as far back as the mid-1970s. This seems quite plausible to me.
Unfortunately, that does not yet mean that McNiven's story is true. In fact, I approach it with greater caution for the very fact that it is very much something that I would like to see confirmed.
So far McNiven's story fails the smell test, and I'll tell you why.
The 8-page deposition by McNiven, dated Nov 10, 2003, is available at his site in the form of a scanned PDF file:
http://www.codenamegrillfire.com/docs/affidavit.pdfI'm interested to see if any of the other participants he mentions will come forward.
His claim that he was given orders to expose the story if a 9/11-style event ever happened disturbs my olfactory sense. (As does the Capitalization of Every Other Word and the Curious Incompleteness of the Narrative.)
But one question really sticks out: If the exercise was held in 1976, how is it that he brought up Clinton as a possible future president?!
McNiven recalls the participants being asked to come up with a suitable political situation for the attack. The answer given is "hamstringing": the outgoing presidential party has set up the new president of the incoming party with a booby trap (the attack).
Who might play such a role as president, the participants are asked...
At this point, McNivens relates doing an impersonation of Bill Clinton shaking President Kennedy's hand as a boy, "like in that picture that ran in the newspapers..."
Did any such pic run in the papers in the mid-70s? If so, why should it be memorable to McNivens? Is McNivens recalling the pic from the early 60's? Why is he coming up with Clinton in the 70's, when Clinton was not yet even governor? Is this some bizarre mental mix-up? Is McNiven confused, or mind-controlled?
Are we meant to think that Clinton had already been designated for the presidency at that early date? If so, how would innocent young McNiven have guessed?
Miming the handshake would not be anything his other participants would recognize as a trademark gesture that would make them think of Clinton in 1976...
Szymanski covered the McNiven story without mentioning this bizarre and telling detail. Now the same author has got a new story that on its face seems far less plausible than McNiven's: of someone claiming to have invented a kind of future-telling device and being visited by a row of black cars from which Osama's brothers emerge to warn of the future 9/11 attack. In 1987. Only source is a man speaking on a park bench in Philadelphia.
Again, this could still be true. But it ain't of any journalistic use, not without any other source or documentary backing for at least some of the details. And the hokeyness of Szymanski's invocations of the founding fathers etc. seems to be a sorry attempt to hide how thin the story actually is.
Again, I know from the black-box example that Szymanski gets facts wrong. He's published in AFP, along with the similarly suspect Christopher Bollyn.
Let the reader beware...