Moyers says 9/11 truthers are propagating a “big lie.”
By Craig McKee
Over the past two or three decades, I have admired certain prominent members of the American political left: Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Gore Vidal among them. More “popular” journalistic voices like Michael Moore and Phil Donahue have also been in my good books for their progressive stances on various issues.
But since I’ve become more involved in questioning the official story of 9/11, my perspective about who really wields power and who is standing up for the truth in a meaningful way has radically changed.
As recently as 2008 when Barack Obama was elected, I viewed the victory of a Democratic candidate for president over a Republican as a victory for the good guys (not that I didn’t see the flaws in the Democrats, don’t get me wrong). I’ve come to realize, however, that the real power is being wielded behind the scenes, quite independent of who is elected president.
When it comes to commentary, it is easy to write off the irrationality of right-wingers like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh (the thoroughly vile Ann Coulter gets a category all to herself). But it’s the voices that I used to listen to with admiration that have truly disappointed me.
The latest prominent progressive to lose their lustre is broadcaster Bill Moyers, the veteran journalist and commentator, who has brought intelligence to the exploration of the power structure and how freedom of thought and speech are threatened by it.
With his work at PBS over the past 25 years or so, I have admired Moyers more than I have any other broadcast journalist in America. But his view of the 9/11 Truth movement has led me to lose all faith in his ability to see through his own preconceived ideas about democracy – and the simple importance of fact over prejudice.
In a speech given in January 2011, Moyers attacked the Truth movement for having “no real evidence.” He said that truthers had cherry-picked “a few supposed anomalies” to propagate a “Big Lie.” I wonder how many of David Ray Griffin’s books he has read? Clearly the answer is none.
Joining the rest of the so-called liberal media, Moyers has ignored the evidence available to him and has reached an ill-informed and dismissive position. In his speech, he used the term “conspiracy theory” to write off any challenge to the official story. One would expect more from someone who has made a career of looking beyond what passes for truth in mainstream commentary.
Moyers says truthers built the “inside job” storyline by ignoring the al-Qaeda evidence. Ironically, Moyers has neatly described what he and other official story advocates have done. The official scenario of boxcutters, fundamentalist Muslims, exploding towers, disappearing planes, and incompetent pilots who suddenly became able to pilot 757s was built on a pile of lies that doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory examination.
Of course, Moyers (who was press secretary for Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s) is not the only prominent left leaning figure to completely miss the boat on 9/11. Noam Chomsky has rejected any notion of U.S. government involvement while failing to cite any factual justification for his position.
As was pointed out in great detail in Barrie Zwicker’s excellent book Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11, Chomsky has outright dismissed the 9/11 Truth movement – actively ignoring much of the evidence that the official theory is false. He takes the fashionable view of the left that the attacks were the logical result of U.S. imperialism around the world. This is what I used to think. This is what the perpetrators of 9/11 are quite happy to have us think.
Moore, although he has paid lip service to wanting more answers about 9/11, basically echoes what Chomsky says. Moore mocks the Bushes and questions whether their loyalties are more to the Saudi Arabian friends than they are to the American people. He says we haven’t been given all the facts concerning the Pentagon “crash,” but he stops there.
To his credit, Ralph Nader has openly called for a new investigation into 9/11. He points to the efforts of the Bush administration to block any inquiry as an indication that something is terribly wrong.
Let’s face it. The mainstream media (and this includes Moyers, Chomsky, and Moore) are not going to go to bat for the truth about 9/11. They’re going to remain non-committal (Moore) or downright hostile (Moyers and Chomsky).
Fortunately, the people who have driven the Truth movement since 2001 are still fighting for the break that will turn it all around. Instead of looking to Moyers and Chomsky for leadership, we’ll have to look to David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage (when he sticks to discussing the towers), many other committed individuals.
And we have to look to each other. Every individual has their part to play in demanding the truth about 9/11. One of my favourite political buttons sums up what must happen: “If the people will lead, the leaders will follow.”
Disappointment abounds. Although I push for a new investigation of 9/11, something the 9/11 debunkers bring up would undoubtedly hold true. Namely, if the new investigation doesn’t agree with the conspiracy speculations (wild-ass or otherwise) regarding who done it and how, it’ll get dismissed by the 9/11 truth movement as a sham.
A sham is what it will be, because those in power cannot afford to let a truly independent investigation go where it needs to go, conclude what it needs to conclude, hold accountable those who did it, and change or re-structure things (like all of govt) to prevent us from be duped again (so soon). They have too much vested interest in the status quo and business as usual.
The rot runs deep.
Let us be careful who we name as leaders in the truth movement. Griffin has openly called for world government. He can write all he wants about 9/11- I don’t trust him.
I liked much of what Bill Moyers says, liked his website and his TV show, until I tried to make a comment on his website and discovered that I had been blocked, without being given a reason or responding to my email asking why. Eventually, I used another email address to register and make comments on his site, and got blocked again. The only thing in common with those blocking incidents is that I had just made a comment saying essentially that 9/11 was an inside job. What a shame. This means that Bill Moyers has a defensive attitude about some things that makes reason impossible. Maybe he has other motivations – I wouldn’t know,
Now I have been banned from Daily Kos, because of my 9/11 declarations, and found out that they seem to think that all 9/11 conspiracy theories have been debunked and anyone espousing any of them is banned. So that makes 9/11 deniers of two supposedly major proponents of democracy, truth and justice. This is very worrying, in spite of more people seeing the truth as time goes by.
Unfortunately, I also mentioned something that had some thinking that I was anti-Semitic. I am not. Unfortunately, the facts cannot be fully brought out without also mentioning some connections to Israel. I even subscribe to an organization of Jews for peace that don’t agree with much of what Israel does. Some people are too sensitive.
Moyers and Chomsky share more than just a willingness to shrug off 9/11. Chomsky shrugs off any suggestion that JFK was assassinated by someone–or some set of people–other than Oswald. Moyers also helped direct public attention to Oswald as the “lone assailant” through his position as press secretary to LBJ. Perhaps supporting an official masquerade is the price to be paid for subsequent opportunities. Then, once inside the beast (even nearly 40 years later), one cannot refuse a request to deny legitimacy again to people seeking answers to a new coup.
I’ve seen Chomsky convey a position that more or less dismisses the two Deep-State events, the Kennedy Assassination and the 9/11 events as irrelevant as they did not produce a radical change in the system. This argument seems very contradictory to Chomsky’s assertion that it’s important to pick a a creature like Obama over McCain, as the minute differences between the two wings of the Money Party can be the difference in hundreds or tens of thousands of lives lost. I am not sure how significant either event is in terms of increasing the carnage wrought by the Empire. The Rulers managed to get everyone to swallow Operation Desert Storm and the subsequent sanctions without too much trouble. Likewise the forty-person ‘genocide” in Kosovo went down pretty easily, along with the NATO”s coming-out party in Yugoslavia. I really liked Moyers’ documentary about the Secret Government many years ago, but even that work ignored the real aspect of narcotics trafficking in the Deep State. A question that one might ask is, ‘how much of a threat is Chomsky given that he’s been allowed to keep a job in the heart of the military-industrial complex for six decades?”
How very ironic that these anti-war “progressives” run away from the mother of all “manufactured consents” that ushered in the erosion of civil liberties and wars they so decry.
I think that your assertion that 9/11 is the ‘mother of all ‘manufactured consents'” requires fleshing out. As to the notion that it ushered in the “erosion of civil liberties and wars”, you might want to take a look at an odd little episode sometimes referred to as, ‘the Vietnam War”, or the the disagreements commonly known as “World War One” and “World War Two”. The fact that Americans were convinced to send a few million young men to France in 1917 shows that some industrious person or other was hard at work fabricating some agreement to participate in that carnival of love.
Against this backdrop [WW1], the government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. The motives behind this decision were various: aside from a genuine belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause, held by Lloyd George among others, Britain’s leaders hoped that a formal declaration in favor of Zionism would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries, in the United States and especially in Russia, where the powerfully anti-Semitic czarist government had just been overthrown with the help of Russia’s significant Jewish population. Finally, despite Britain’s earlier agreement with France dividing influence in the region after the presumed defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd George had come to see British dominance in Palestine—a land bridge between the crucial territories of India and Egypt—as an essential post-war goal.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-balfour-declaration