There are 27,386 books about the 9/11 attack currently being sold on  Amazon.

The authors of 27,385 of them are still alive, or dead from natural causes.

 

That leaves Philip Marshall, author of a self-published book about 9/11 called “The Big Bamboozle.”  

In a small town in Northern California earlier this month, Marshall, a 56-year old ex-airline pilot, murdered his two children, Alex and Macaila, in their sleep, and then took his own life.

“A Murphy’s man killed his two children with a Glock 9mm handgun before turning the weapon on himself at his home in Forest Meadows late last week,” reported the local newspaper.

When deputies arrived, the paper reported, they found the children dead, lying on the couch with gunshot wounds, along with a dog that belonged to Marshall’s estranged wife.

“Former airline captain Philip Marshall, 54, killed his son Alex, 17, and daughter Macaila, 14, each with a single bullet to the head, as they slept nestled under blankets on the living room couch. He then pointed the gun at his head and committed suicide.”

That’s what happened…at least if you believe the police.

Human tragedy…or sinister black op?

But there are others today encouraging the notion that the Marshall family tragedy was, instead, a sinister government ‘black op.’

Marshall, these people say, was in possession of secret knowledge about the 9/11 attack, which he was about to reveal to a waiting world.

In “The Big Bamboozle” Marshall 'reveals' that “the sad truth is that all of the solid evidence points to a dark collaboration between members of the Bush Administration and a covert group of Saudi government officials.”

Wow. Fasten your seatbelts.  The only big shocker is that Philip Marshall appears to be the last person to discern Saudi influence behind the 9/11 attack.  It’s not even front page news. And its certainly nothing to kill him over. 

If it were, there would be at least 15,000 authors, Madsen and myself among them,  already dead.

But those selling the notion that Marshall was murdered ignore his book, so embarrassingly obscure that few knew of its existence before his death.

Instead they cite the brief relationship Marshall had over 30 years ago with Barry Seal, a life-long CIA pilot whose cocaine smuggling in military C123 military cargo planes funded the Contra’s war in Nicaragua and fueled the cocaine epidemic of the 1980’s.

Marshall himself used this brief association, in his author’s bio on Amazon, to spin a tale of nearly life-long derring-do.

But while this may be understandable hyperbole by an author hoping to hype his book, its embarrassingly thin gruel as support for an allegation of a government murder and cover-up.

A bad attitude can sometimes be a good thing

And this is where I entered the picture, after receiving several dozen increasingly frantic emails from people who knew of my book about Barry Seal, wondering what I knew, and what I was going to do, about this unspeakable government crime.

Asked one, “Are you following the Phillip Marshall thing?”

I replied, “Nope. Looks like suicide to me.”

At that, my correspondent got a little snarky with me, which is okay; I can—and sometimes do—get snarky with the best of them.  “Well I guess this guy from the NSA doesn't know what he's talking about,” he sneered.

One the creepiest things about the community of people who find themselves dissatisfied with the lies they hear from the government is that these same people, who pride themselves on being the sort you can’t pull the wool over, no matter what, are as reliant on authority figures as the “sheeple” they bemoan.

The only thing about Philip Marshall’s death that is even potentially extraordinary is that he had a brief brush with the dark side of the force half-a-lifetime ago. Some apparently think this somehow gave him the keys to the hidden vault of secrets.

Similarly, reporter Wayne Madsen, because of former employment at the NSA, must perforce be privy to secret knowledge mere mortals of the non-spook variety will never understand. Madsen himself, who I consider a friend, would be the first to deny this.

Even well-respected author Anthony Summers, about whom I have not yet written (waiting for the bile to subside first) kept looking to his "sources" in the CIA and FBI to validate eyewitness testimony from creditable eyewitnesses on the ground in Venice Florida.

He was waiting for some authority figure to give him the shot.

The result was that when his tome on 9/11 was released,  the only shocking new finding he could point to hadn't even made it into the book.

I was soon to learn that there is nothing but Marshall’s long-ago association with Barry Seal on which to base allegations of government assassination. This is evidenced by the fact that the name of Barry Seal, a man dead for more than 30 years, recurs almost more often in stories of Marshall’s death than does his own.

The hall of (very smudged-up) mirrors

So: here is where we enter the funhouse. But before we do, let’s consider what is at stake.  

This is, after all, America, the country which is home to more REAL conspiracies than exist in all of the rest of the world combined.

So one must feel somewhat conflicted when forced to choose between these two views of the Marshall family tragedy: it was “A black ops hit made to appear as a suicide,” as a headline for one of Madsen’s articles has it.

Or…well, let’s let someone who was there, Kevin Raggi, the Coroner in Calaveras County (made famous by Mark Twain’s short story “The Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County”) describe the other way of viewing the crime.

Raggi  told local reporters that it was one of the most heartbreaking scenes he’d ever seen, adding “Everyone was having a hard time.”

“You walk in there and you lose your breath and want to walk out and start crying,” he said. “It was heartbreaking. It’s incomprehensible.”

Was it just another unspeakable human tragedy, in a time, and a country, where such things have become all too common? Or was it a fiendish government black op designed to keep ‘we the people’ from ever learning the truth?

"Going back to school"

I was pointed to a transcript of a radio interview of Madsen conducted by Kevin Barrett,  a self-styled "American Jihadist."

Read a typical comment left on Jarret’s website after Madsen's interview, "Speaking of “government” (i.e. Bolshevik Jewish) treachery, I’m sure most readers here have by now heard of (and/or seen) the so-called “No More Hesitation” targets being offered to “law enforcement” agencies by (and I’m going to out on a limb here and speculate) some Jew-owned company,”

“He was a former associate of the CIA/DEA informant Barry Seal, the notorious CIA cocaine smuggler,” opined Jarrett on the show. “And if you think Phillip Marshall killed himself and his two children as the police are trying to claim; well, I don’t know…you need to go back to school.”

His guest, Wayne Madsen, is a (usually) more creditable source.

“Well Phillip Marshall, I have to admit,” Madsen tells Jarrett, “I wasn’t all that familiar with his work. But when I read his biography along with the…some really scurrilous news reports that, ‘yknow, he was this, ‘yknow, this repressed killer who snapped, and put a gun on the head of his 17 year old son and his 14 year old daughter, and his little pet Shih Tzu, Suki, y’know, you start to wonder what in the world is going on here.”

The implication that there is something unusual about a “repressed killer who snapped and put a gun to the head of his 17-tear old son and 14-tear old daughter" seems a little…unusual.

"Dad kills kids & self"

Here’s a quick investigation that you can perform right at home: Google "dad kills kids and self." 

Then read (if you have the stomach for it)  all 84 million hits. I sifted through a few:

Husband of missing Utah mom kills sons, self;

Dad kills wife & kids, then himself over Obama's re-election

Father killed his two children and then himself after family split

DA: Mass. dad shoots 2 kids, 1 fatally, kills self

Quebec Father Kills Children & Self — Burns Garage

Herndon father shot wife, children before killing himself

Father kills his two children then himself on trip to Grand Canyon

I stopped after reading a deeply disturbing story out of Boynton Beach Florida, where a father killed his two sons as their mother begged for their lives. Then, after telling her he’d let her live so that she could suffer forever, he shot himself.

A verifiable fact amidst a the heavy breathing

By itself this isn’t proof that Marshall wasn’t killed by the government. But added to the fact  that, of the 27,000 books on 9/11, all but Marshall are sleeping peacefully at night sets the bar pretty high for anyone seeking to prove he was murdered.

A bar the self-promoting nay-sayers apparently don’t even know exists.

Consider the one verifiable fact amidst all the heavy breathing abiut a government black op, Marshall’s association with Barry Seal.

Here’s what happened: 

Seal’s pilot’s license had been suspended while he awaited trial in Miami. He engaged Marshall to fly him back and forth between there and his home in Baton Rouge.

The much-older Seal did have one protégé who was Marshall’s age, a man I found and interviewed for Barry & 'the boys.' Of the dozens of close Seal associates I interviewed, not one ever mentioned Philip Marshall.

In fairness, the world of aviation in Louisiana, which I wrote about in a book about Barry Seal called “Barry & the boys,’ can best be described as “murky.”

At last, a real eyewitness

But someone who knew Marshall at this time, his ex-wife, Ann Kallauner, a nurse in Louisiana, offered some clarity. Kallauner was wed to Marshall in 1985 (exactly the time frame when Marshall knew Seal.) 

She told the local Union Democrat that her ex-husband “provided a kind of taxi service for Barry Seal, who the paper (inaccurately) reported  “was assassinated by a trio of Medellin Cartel henchmen from Colombia.”

Kallauner said Marshall met Seal through “a friend of a friend” while teaching other pilots to fly from Lakefront Airport in New Orleans.

After Seal had his pilot’s license revoked, he hired Marshall to fly with him between New Orleans and Miami or Fort Lauderdale.

Seal often flew while Marshall remained in the jump seat, but Marshall never went with him into Nicaragua, she said.

“He wasn’t any Contra pilot,” said Kallauner. “That was all just a fantasy.”

A close associate of Seal’s, who asked to remain nameless, confirmed to me that her recollections were correct.

Kallauner also recited a litany of characteristics, also voiced to reporters by those who knew him at the time of his death, that have become well-known as markers in this all-too-common type of crime.

Marshall had problems with alcohol, was attention-seeking, egotistical, could be mean, and had a temper. He was nearly fired after yelling at a superior at Eastern Air Lines. He would throw clubs in the water while golfing.

“He had a problem with authority figures in his life,” she said. “One time he wanted me to roll down the (car) window to yell at a police officer.” 

When she refused, she recalled, “He kind of got mad and smacked me back against the seat.”

Could someone have “gotten” to the ex-wife? Well, sure.

Could they also have gotten to the current friends of Marshall’s, who—to avoid speaking poorly of the dead—have only delicately raised questions of  Marshall’s mental health at the time of his death?

Well, sure. But the only real question is: DID they? In the absence of compelling evidence to question their motives, the answer is simple. No, they did not. And here is where the disservice to the truth by attention-seekers and their  deluded and credulous followers becomes most apparent.

People who see conspiracies where none exist render ridiculous-by-association people questioning the multitude of  conspiracies that do.

More importantly, this is not the way things work in the real world.

How things work in the real world

America have not been kind to its real investigative journalists in recent years.

As a reporter for the Associated Press (but not for long), Robert Parry was the first to report on what came to be known as Iran Contra.

Pete Brewton did ground-breaking reporting at the Houston Post on the S & L scandal (The Mafia, CIA and George Bush” (1992) that led to his being shown the door.

And Gary Webb, who broke the story of CIA drug trafficking into the open, was summarily ushered out of newspaper reporting forever.

Webb represented a far greater threat to the powers that be than Phil Marshall ever could, even in his wildest dreams. But Webb wasn't murdered.

Gary Webb committed suicide on the day he lost his home. He'd already lost almost everything else: his family, his wife, his livelihood. An authentic American hero, Gary Webb was going to be moving home to live with his Mom.

He'd already asked his ex-girlfriend if he could share her apartment. At first she had said yes, but then changed her mind at the last minute, not wanting to lead him on in the hope that they'd rekindle a romance. Desperate, Webb asked his ex-wife if he could live with her until he regained his financial footing. She, too, refused. 

Into the buzzsaw

On the night before losing his house, Webb lost his last real possession. His motorcycle was stolen. 

He committed suicide the next day. And despite the nattering of clueless conspiracy theorists, I never doubted that that was exactly what happened.  And I have since had nothing but contempt for those who claim otherwise.

I'd been there. I'd spent a year living in motels after my first full-length documentary, "The Secret Heartbeat of America," failed to sell to television. I persisted. When Barry & the boys' was published, a lawsuit by one of Barry Seal's closest long-time associates kept the book out of bookstores for almost five years.

Again, I persisted. But I'd never tell anyone it was anything but a soul-killing dispiriting experience. It's an experience better people than me have faced again and again.

Telling the truth in America often feels like walking "Into The Buzzsaw," the title of a very good book about journalists exiled to the American gulag, a Siberia of the mind where nothing you do or report subsequently is ever treated seriously.

Expose anything this country's large institutions want kept under wraps… and the buzzsaw rips through you.

Because they don't have to kill you to render you ineffective.

For the oligarchy ruling this country today, that part is easy.