Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad challenged the official narrative at the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2012.
March 13, 2017
Dr. Graeme MacQueen is the former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He was an organizer of the Toronto Hearings on 9/11, is a member of the Consensus 9/11 Panel, and is a former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
By Graeme MacQueen (Special to Truth and Shadows)
On November 23, 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Fidel Castro gave a talk on Cuban radio and television.[1] He pulled together, as well as he could in the amount of time available to him, the evidence he had gathered from news media and other sources, and he reflected on this evidence.
The questions he posed were well chosen: they could serve as a template for those confronting complex acts of political violence. Were there contradictions and absurdities in the story being promoted in the U.S. media? Who benefitted from the assassination? Were intelligence agencies claiming to know more than they could legitimately know? Was there evidence of foreknowledge of the murder? What was the main ideological clash in powerful U.S. circles and how did Kennedy fit in? Was there a faction that had the capacity and willingness to carry out such an act? And so on. But beneath the questions lay a central, unspoken fact: Castro was able to imagine—as a real possibility and not as mere fantasy—that the story being promoted by the U.S. government and media was radically false. He was able to conceive of the possibility that the killing had not been carried out by a lone gunman on the left sympathetic to Cuba and the Soviet Union, but by powerful, ultra-right forces, including forces internal to the state, in the United States. Because his conceptual framework did not exclude this hypothesis he was able to examine the evidence that favoured it. He was able to recognize the links between those wishing to overthrow the Cuban government and take more aggressive action toward the Soviet Union and those wishing to get Kennedy out of the way.
In the immediate wake of the assassination, and after the Warren Commission’s report appeared in 1964, few among the elite left leadership in the U.S. shared Castro’s imagination. Vincent Salandria, one of key researchers and dissidents, said: “I have experienced from the beginning that the left was most unreceptive to my conception of the assassination.”[2]
I.F. Stone, a pillar of the American left leadership, praised the Warren Commission and consigned critics who accused the Commission of a cover-up to “the booby hatch.”[3] The contrast with Castro is sharp. Speaking well before the Warren Commission’s emergence, Castro mocked the narrative it would later endorse. Several other prominent left intellectuals agreed with I. F. Stone, and declined to criticize the Warren Commission’s report.[4]
Noam Chomsky, resisting serious efforts to get him to look at the evidence, said at various times that he knew little about the affair, had little interest in it, did not regard it as important, and found the idea of a “high-level conspiracy with policy significance” to be “implausible to a quite extraordinary degree.”[5] He would later say almost exactly the same thing about the 9/11 attacks, finding the thesis that the U.S. administration was involved in the crime “close to inconceivable,”[6] and expressing his disinterest in the entire issue.
Not everyone on the American left accepted the FBI and Warren Commission reports uncritically. Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd, for example, encouraged dissident researchers.[7] In fact, several of the leading dissident investigators, such as Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher, were themselves, at least by today’s standards, on the left of the political spectrum. But they were not among the elite left leadership in the country and they were, to a great extent, unsupported by that leadership during the most crucial period.
Chomsky’s use of the terms “implausible” and “inconceivable” has stimulated me to write the present article. I have no new evidence to bring to the debate, which is decades old now, as to how his mind and the other great minds of the U.S. left leadership could have failed to see what was obvious to so many. My approach will assume the good faith of these left leaders and will take as its point of departure Chomsky’s own words. I will explore the suggestion that these intellectuals were not able to conceive, were not able to imagine, that these attacks were operations engineered by intelligence agencies and the political right in the U.S.
Why would Castro have had less difficulty than the U.S. left leadership imagining that the assassination of Kennedy had been carried out by and for the American ultra-right and the intelligence community?
What we imagine to be true in the present will surely be influenced by what we have intimately experienced in the past. Castro’s imagination of what U.S. imperial powers might do was shaped by what he had witnessed them actually do, or attempt to do, to him and his country.
Castro referred in his November 23 talk not only to the economic warfare against Cuba, but to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But, of course, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose had been active in the interim between these two latter events, and he was familiar with its main lines. Perhaps he was not familiar with all its components. As far as I am aware, he did not know on November 23, 1963 of the 1962 Operation Northwoods plan, endorsed by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba through a multi-faceted false flag operation that included terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, to be falsely blamed on Cuba.[8] Had he been familiar with this scheme he might have cited it on November 23 to bolster his case.
Castro: questioned JFK and 9/11.
Castro was certainly familiar with many plans and attempts to assassinate him, which were eventually confirmed to the U.S. public by the Church Committee’s report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”[9] But, to the best of my knowledge, he was not aware when he gave his November 23 talk of an assassination-planning meeting that had taken place the previous day. On November 22, the day Kennedy was killed, while Castro was meeting with an intermediary who conveyed Kennedy’s hope that Cuba and the United States would soon be able to work out a mode of peaceful coexistence,[10] members of the CIA were meeting with a Cuban to plot Castro’s death. The would-be assassin was not only given poison to use in an assassination attempt; he was also promised support by the CIA for a shooting, such as was taking place at that very time in Dallas. He was assured that “CIA would give him everything he needed (telescopic sight, silencer, all the money he wanted).”[11]
The Church committee used the term “ironic” to refer to the fact that the shooting of John Kennedy took place on the very day a Kennedy-Castro peace initiative was being countered by a CIA plan to kill Castro.[12] Why was there no discussion of the significance of the fact that the same people who were working for the overthrow of the Cuban government considered Kennedy and his peace initiatives serious obstacles to their plans?
Castro noted in his November 23 talk that Latin American rightwing forces might have been involved in the Kennedy killing. These forces, he said, had not only openly denounced Kennedy for his accommodation with Cuba but were pushing for an invasion of Cuba while simultaneously threatening a military coup in Brazil to prevent another Cuba. Castro could not know at the time what we now know, namely that the threatened coup in Brazil would indeed take place soon—on April 1, 1964. It would lead to a wave of authoritarianism and torture that would spread throughout Latin America.
If, therefore, we try to make the case that Castro’s critique of the mainstream account of Kennedy’s assassination was the result of paranoia, denial, and a delusional tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, we will have a hard row to hoe. Almost all the operations he mentioned in his talk, and several operations he did not mention, did involve conspiracies. Cuba was at the center of a set of actual and interconnected conspiracies.
I am not suggesting that because Castro imagined a particular scenario—ultra-right forces killing John Kennedy—it must have been true. That is not the point. The point is that only when our imagination embraces a hypothesis as possible will we seriously study that hypothesis and put it to the test.
The evidence accumulated over many years has shown, in my view, that Castro’s view of who killed John Kennedy was correct. In fact, I think the evidence presented by the first wave of researchers fifty years ago settled the matter.[13] However, it is not my intention to try to prove this in the present article. My topic is the left imagination.
The silencing, by an elite American left, of both dissident researchers and those who have been targets of Western imperial power has reached an unprecedented level in the interpretation of the events of September 11, 2001. The inability of the Western left leadership to imagine that these events were fraudulent—that they involved, as Fidel Castro put it in 1963, people “playing a very strange role in a very strange play”—has blocked understanding not of only of 9/11 but of actual, existing imperialism and its formation and deformation of world politics.
9/11 and state officials facing imperial power
Talk about blaming the victim. Three days after 9/11 the eminent economist Celso Furtado suggested in one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers that there were two explanations for the attack. One possibility, Furtado implied, was that this savage assault on America was the work of foreign terrorists, as the Americans suspected. But a more plausible explanation, he asserted, was that this disaster was a provocation carried out by the American far right to justify a takeover. He compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany.[14]
Celso Furtado compared the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon to the burning of the Reichstag.
Kenneth Maxwell wrote this paragraph in 2002. At the time he was the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The paragraph is from an article written for the Council entitled, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil.” In writing his article Maxwell clearly felt no need to give evidence or argument as he dismissed Furtado. He must have felt his readers would agree that the absurdity of Furtado’s remarks was self-evident. Furtado’s claim would be off their radar, beyond their imagination.
Certainly, Furtado’s imagination had a wider scope than Maxwell’s. Could his personal experience have had something to do with this? Furtado was more than an “eminent economist;” he was an extremely distinguished intellectual who had held the position of Minister of Planning in the Goulart government when it was overthrown in the April 1, 1964 coup in Brazil. Furtado said in a 2003 interview:
The United States was afraid of the direction we had been taking; this phase ended and we entered—as someone put it—the peace of the cemeteries, it was the era of the dictatorship. Thirty years went by without real thinking, without being able to participate in movements, with the most provocative and courageous young people being hunted down.[15]
Did Celso Furtado have a wild imagination when he implied there was U.S. support for the coup? Not at all. The coup was not only hoped for, but prepared for and offered support at the highest level in the U.S. [16]
Furtado has not been the only sceptical voice on the Latin American left. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, himself a major target of U.S. imperial force, entered the public debate. The Associated Press reported on September 12, 2006:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that it’s plausible that the U.S. government was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chavez did not specifically accuse the U.S. government of having a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, but rather suggested that theories of U.S. involvement bear examination.
The Venezuelan leader, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush, was reacting to a television report investigating a theory the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives after hijacked airplanes crashed into them in 2001.
“The hypothesis is not absurd … that those towers could have been dynamited,” Chavez said in a speech to supporters. “A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion.”
“The hypothesis that is gaining strength … is that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world,” Chavez said. “Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq.”[17]
Actually, scepticism in Venezuela about the 9/11 attacks was not new. In March of 2006, for example, well known survivor and eyewitness of the September 11, 2001 attacks, William Rodriguez, had spent time with high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Chavez, and had given talks on television and in universities in that country.[18]
The culmination of this Venezuelan scepticism was a statement in a legislative resolution of the country’s National Assembly. The resolution, apparently passed unanimously in the fall of 2006, referred to the 9/11 attacks as “self-inflicted.”[19]
Chavez: “Those towers could have been dynamited.”
In a sneering attack on the Chavez government in the Miami Herald, journalist Phil Gunson felt no need to support, with evidence or reason, his claim that Chavez was merely engaging in “anti-imperialist rhetoric.”[20] Presumably he knew the imaginations of Floridians could be trusted to block out the possibility that the insane rhetoric about 9/11 might have some truth to it.
One year later, on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Fidel Castro, at that point ill and retired from government but still keeping up with political events, made his own conclusions known. “That painful incident,” he said, “occurred six years ago today.” “Today,” he said, “we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.” Castro listed several anomalies and omissions in the official reports. For example, he said: “The calculations with respect to the steel structures, plane impacts, the black boxes recovered and what they revealed do not coincide with the opinions of mathematicians, seismologists…demolition experts and others.”
Referring to the attacks generally, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically, Castro said: “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”[21]
This was a poignant admission by the man who had grasped the falsity of the Lee Harvey Oswald story one day after Kennedy’s assassination.
Reporting on Castro’s remarks in the Guardian, journalist Mark Tran said: “Fidel Castro today joined the band of September 11 conspiracy theorists by accusing the US of spreading disinformation about the attacks that took place six years ago.”[22]
Tran seems to have worried that the dismissive “conspiracy theorist” term might not put an end to the matter for readers of the Guardian, so he added two brief factual claims, one having to do with DNA evidence at the Pentagon and one having to do with a 2007 video allegedly showing Bin Laden giving an address.
The contempt for Castro’s intelligence, however, was breathtaking. Tran implied that his “facts,” which could have been found in about fifteen minutes on the Internet and which were subsequently questioned even by typically uncritical mainstream journalists, were beyond the research capabilities of the former President of Cuba.[23]
Indeed, much of the Western left leadership and associated media not only trusted the FBI[24] while ignoring Furtado, Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly and Fidel Castro; they also, through silence and ridicule, worked to prevent serious public discussion of the 9/11 controversy.
Among the U.S. left media that kept the silence, partially or wholly, are:
Monthly Review
Common Dreams
Huffington Post
Counterpunch
The Nation
The Real News
Democracy Now!
Z Magazine
The Progressive
Mother Jones
Alternet.org
MoveOn.org
In the end, the most dramatic public challenge to the official account of 9/11 by a state leader did not come from the left. It came from a conservative leader who was, however, a target of U.S. imperial power. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2010, President Ahmadinejad of Iran outlined three possible hypotheses for the 9/11 attacks.[25] The first was the U.S. government’s hypothesis—”a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.” The second was the hypothesis that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.” The third was a somewhat weaker version of the second, namely that the assault “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Ahmadinejad implied, though he did not definitively claim, that he favoured the second hypothesis. He went on to suggest that even if waging war were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack—he did not think it was—a thorough and independent investigation should have preceded the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
He ended his discussion of 9/11 with a proposal that the UN set up an independent fact-finding group to look into the 9/11 events.
In reporting on this event, The New York Times noted that Ahmadinejad’s comments “prompted at least 33 delegations to walk out, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, all 27 members of the European Union and the union’s representative.”[26]
Ahmadinejad proposed that the UN investigate 9/11.
The Times’ report was given to remarks that sidestepped the Iranian president’s assertions. Ahmadinejad’s remarks were made to endear himself to the world’s Muslim community, and especially to the Arab world. Ahmadinejad was playing the politician in Iran, where he had to contend with conservatives trying to “outflank him.” Ahmadinejad wanted to keep himself “at the center of global attention while deflecting attention away from his dismal domestic record.” Ahmadinejad “obviously delights in being provocative” and “seemed to go out of his way to sabotage any comments he made previously this week about Iran’s readiness for dialogue with the United States.”
The possibility that Ahmadinejad might have been sincere, or that there may have been an evidential basis for his views, was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the reported response to Ahmadinejad’s talk by the United States Mission to the United Nations was harsh:
Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.
Where were these anti-Semitic slurs? In his talk the Iranian President condemned Israeli actions against Palestinians and included as one of the possible motives of a 9/11 inside job the saving of “the Zionist regime” by U.S. government insiders. But how is either of these an anti-Semitic slur? He said nothing in his speech, hateful or otherwise, about Jews. He did not identify Zionism, as an ideology or historical movement, with Jews as a collectivity. He did not identify the state of Israel with Jews as a collectivity. He did not say “the Jews” carried out the 9/11 attacks.
And what did the U.S. Mission mean when it said that Ahmadinejad did not represent the views of Iranians? His views on 9/11 were probably much closer to the views of Iranians than were the views of the U.S. Mission. As will be explained later, the great majority of the world’s Muslims reject the official account of 9/11.
In his address to the General Assembly the following year, Ahmadinejad briefly revisited this issue, saying that, after his 2010 proposal of an investigation into 9/11, Iran was put “under pressure and threat by the government of the United States.” Moreover, he said, instead of supporting a fact-finding team, the U.S. killed the alleged perpetrator of the attacks (Osama bin Laden) without bringing him to trial.[27]
In 2012 another leader in the Muslim world made his position on 9/11 known. Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had been Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and was still in 2012 a significant power in his country and a major figure in the global south. By then he had spent considerable time discussing 9/11 with several well-known members of the U.S. movement of dissent (including William Rodriguez and David Ray Griffin)[28] and had indicated that he questioned the official account. But on November 19, 2012 he left no doubt about his position. In a 20-minute public address introducing a day-long international conference on 9/11 in Kuala Lumpur, he noted:
The official explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers is still about an attack by suicidal Muslim extremists, but even among Americans this explanation is beginning to wear thin and to be questioned. In fact, certain American groups have thoroughly analyzed various aspects of the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon building, and the reported crash in Pennsylvania. And their investigations reveal many aspects of the attack which cannot be explained by attributing them to attacks by terrorists—Muslims or non-Muslims.
He went on to give details of the official narrative that he found especially unconvincing, and he concluded that the 9/11 attack:
…has divided the world into Muslim and non-Muslim and sowed the seeds of suspicion and hatred between them. It has undermined the security of nations everywhere, forcing them to spend trillions of dollars on security measures…Truly, 9/11 is the worst manmade disaster for the world since the end of the two world wars. For that reason alone it is important that we seek the truth because when truth is revealed then we can really prepare to protect and secure ourselves.[29]
There is no need to quote Western media coverage of Mahathir’s remarks because, as far as I can tell, there was none—an outcome Mahathir had predicted in his talk.
Now, of course, it is possible that these current and former state officials had not seriously studied 9/11 and were simply intoxicated by anti-imperial fervour. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Those who visited Venezuela well before the public pronouncements in that country in September of 2006 noted that officials had collected books and other materials on the subject of 9/11.[30] And Malaysia’s Mahathir had been meeting people to discuss the issue for years. There is no reason to doubt what he said in his 2012 talk: “I have thought a lot about 9/11.” The dismissal of these leaders by the Western left is puzzling, to say the least.
Educator Paulo Freire, himself a victim of the 1964 coup in Brazil, pointed out years ago that when members of an oppressor class join oppressed people in their struggle for justice they may, despite the best of intentions, bring prejudices with them, “which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think…and to know.”[31] Is it possible that the left leadership in the U.S. has fallen into this trap?
The dismissal of 9/11 sceptics has been carried out through a silence punctuated by occasional outbursts. The late Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch was given to outbursts. Not content to speak of the “fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists” and to tie them to the decline of the American left, Cockburn even took the opportunity to go beyond 9/11 and pledge allegiance once more, as he had in previous years, to the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald hypothesis[32]—a hypothesis that had, in my opinion, been shown to be absurd half a century ago.
In a January 2017 article entitled, “American Psychosis,” Chris Hedges continued the anti-dissent campaign. Crying out that, “We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors,” Hedges announced that:
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump’s election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history… We don’t know “who really knocked down” the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies.[33]
The hall of mirrors is real enough but Hedges’ rant offers no escape. As far as I can discover, Hedges has made no serious study of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and has, therefore, no idea who knocked down the buildings.[34] Moreover, he appears never to have seriously thought about what a “conspiracy theory” is and what he is denouncing when he denounces such theories. Does he really mean to suggest that the American ruling class, in pursuing its interests, never conspires?
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
9/11 and public opinion
If state leaders familiar with Western imperial power have questioned the official narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks, what about “the people” beloved of the left?
Actually, sorting out what portion of the world’s population qualifies, according to ideological criteria, as “the people” is a difficult task—an almost metaphysical exercise. So let us ask an easier question: what, according to surveys undertaken, appears to be the level of belief and unbelief in the world with respect to the 9/11 narrative?
There have been many polls. Comparing and compiling the results is very difficult since the same questions are seldom asked, in precisely the same words, in different polls. It is, however, possible to set forth grounded estimates.
In 2008, WorldPublicOpinion.org polled over 16,000 people in 17 countries. Of the total population of 2.5 billion people represented in the survey, only 39% said they thought that Al-Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks.[35]
The belief that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks is, I suggest, an essential component of belief in the official narrative of 9/11. If only 39% is willing to name Al-Qaeda as responsible, then a maximum of 39% can be counted as believers of the official narrative.
This WorldPublicOpinion.org poll is, for the most part, supported by other polls, suggesting that the U.S. official narrative is, globally, a minority view. If these figures are correct, of the current world population of 7.5 billion, roughly 2.9 billion people affirm the official view of 9/11 and 4.6 billion do not affirm it.
Now, of the 61% who do not affirm the official view of 9/11, a large percentage says it does not know who carried out the attacks (by implication, it does not know what the goals of the attackers were, and so on). But the number of those who think the U.S. government was behind the attacks is by no means trivial. The figure appears to be about 14% of the world’s population.[36] If this is correct, roughly 1 billion people think the U.S. government was behind the attacks. Of course, this figure includes children. But even when we exclude everyone under 18 years of age we have 700 million adults in the world who think the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
It is not clear if the Guardian’s “band of September 11 conspiracy theorists,” which Castro was said to have joined, consists of this 700 million people or if it consists of the entire group of 4.6 billion non-believers. Either way, we are talking about a pretty large “band.”
Do these poll results prove that the official narrative is false? No. Do they prove that blaming elements of the U.S. government is correct? No. But these figures suggest two things. First, the official story, despite its widespread dissemination, has failed to capture the imaginations of the majority of people on the planet. Second, the minds of 700 million adults have no trouble embracing the possibility that elements of the U.S. government were behind the attacks.
What can be said about the views of that segment of the world population that is most clearly targeted by Western imperialism today?
The so-called Global War on Terror, announced shortly after the 9/11 events, has mainly targeted countries with Muslim majorities.
The 2008 WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of people in 17 countries included five countries with majority Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented in the survey (399.6 million people in 2008), only 21.2% assigned guilt to Al-Qaeda.[37]
In 2011 the Pew Research Group surveyed eight Muslim populations. Of the total Muslim population represented (588.2 million in 2011), only 17% assigned guilt to Arabs.[38]
The evidence suggests that scepticism toward the official account among Muslims has been growing. In December of 2016 a published poll of British Muslims indicated that only 4% of those polled believed that “Al-Qaeda/Muslim terrorists” were responsible for 9/11, whereas 31% held the American government responsible.[39] This is remarkable given the unvarying, repetitive telling of the official story by British mainstream media and political parties.
Are British Muslims wallowing in feelings of victimhood, which have made them prey to extremists peddling “conspiracy theories?” As a matter of fact, the British think tank that sponsored the 2016 poll has drawn this conclusion. But the think tank in question, Policy Exchange, has a special relationship to the UK’s Conservative Party and appears to have carried out the poll precisely in order to put British Muslims under increased scrutiny and suspicion.[40]
Cannot the left, in its interpretation of the views of this targeted population, do better?
Most peculiar and disturbing is the tendency of left activists and leaders to join with state intelligence agencies in using the term “conspiracy theory” to dismiss those who raise questions about official state narratives.
There seems to be little awareness among these left critics of the history of the term.[41] They seem not to realize that they are employing a propaganda expression, the function of which is to discourage people from looking beneath the surface of political events, especially political events in which elements of their own government might have played a hidden and unsavoury role.
In the case of the 9/11 attacks it is important to remember, when the “conspiracy theory” accusation is made, that the lone wolf alternative, which was available for the John Kennedy assassination, is not available here. Everyone agrees that the attack was the result of multiple persons planning in secret to commit a crime. That is, the attack was the result of a conspiracy. The question is not, Was there a conspiracy? The question is, Who were the conspirators? Defamation cannot answer this question.
Conclusion
Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job.[42] Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
I am not concerned in this article to demonstrate the truth of the “inside job” hypothesis of the 9/11 attacks. Ten years of research have led me to conclude that it is correct, but in the present paper I am concerned only with the preliminary, but vital, issue of imagination. Those who cannot imagine this hypothesis to be true will leave it unexamined, and, in the worst of worlds, will contribute to the silencing of dissenters. The left, in this case, will betray the best of its tradition and abandon both the targets of imperial oppression and their spokespeople.
Fidel Castro sounded the warning in his November 23, 1963 speech:
Intellectuals and lovers of peace should understand the danger that maneuvers of this kind could mean to world peace, and what a conspiracy of this type, what a Machiavellian policy of this nature, could lead to.
***
(*l would like to thank Ed Curtin for his inspiration and advice.—GM)
***
[1] Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy (Brookline, Massachusetts: Kurtz, Ulmer & DeLucia, 1996), Appendix II.
[2] Michael Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Michael D. Morrissey, 2007), 436.
[3] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 241.
[4] Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 14ff., Appendices VII and VIII.
[5] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000 (Chomsky’s position is a continuing theme in the book); Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, Appendix VIII; Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11 (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006), chap. 5, p. 206.
[6] Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-Up of 9/11, 208 and throughout chapter 5.
[7] Morrissey, Correspondence with Vincent Salandria 1993-2000, 421.
[8] “ANNEX TO APPENDIX TO ENCLOSURE A: PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA (OPERATION NORTHWOODS, pp. 137 ff.),” 1962, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1244&relPageId=137.
[9] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” Church Committee Reports (Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1975), http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm.
[10] Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 275.
[11] “Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”
[12] Ibid.
[13] Examples of first wave researchers are Salandria, Lane, Meagher, and Weisberg. Several important early articles by Salandria are found in Schotz, History Will Not Absolve US: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, while Mark Lane’s first book was Rush to Judgment (New York, N.Y.: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992; originally 1966). Sylvia Meagher’s early book was Accessories after the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities & the Report (New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1976; originally 1967), and Harold Weisberg’s first major work was Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report (Skyhorse Publishing, 1965).
[14] Kenneth Maxwell, “Anti-Americanism in Brazil,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002.
[15] “Developing Brazil Today: An Interview with Celso Furtado–’Start with the Social, Not the Economic’,” NACLA Report on the Americas 36, no. 5 (2003).
[16] “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup: Declassified Documents Shed Light on U.S. Role” (The National Security Archives, The George Washington University, March 2004).
[17] “Chavez Says U.S. May Have Orchestrated 9/11: ‘Those Towers Could Have Been Dynamited,’ Says Venezuela’s President,” Associated Press, September 12, 2006.
[18] “Venezuelan Government to Launch International 9/11 Investigation: Truth Crusaders Walter and Rodriguez to Appear on Hugo Chavez’s Weekly TV Broadcast,” Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com, March 31, 2006.
[19] For this information I have depended on Phil Gunson, “Chávez Attacks Bush as `genocidal’ Leader,” Miami Herald, November 9, 2006.
[20] Ibid.
[21] “The Empire and Its Lies: Reflections by the Commander in Chief,” September 11, 2007, Discursos e intervenciones del Commandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo. de Estado de la Republica de Cuba.
[22] Mark Tran, “Castro Says US Lied about 9/11 Attacks,” Guardian, September 12, 2007.
[23] Sue Reid, “Has Osama Bin Laden Been Dead for Seven Years – and Are the U.S. and Britain Covering It up to Continue War on Terror?” The Mail, September 11, 2009.
[24] The FBI was officially in charge of the investigation of the crimes of 9/11, and the Bureau bears ultimate responsibility for the official narrative of 9/11, which was adopted uncritically by other state agencies and commissions.
[25] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Before the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (United Nations General Assembly, New York, N.Y., September 23, 2010).
[26] Neil Macfarquhar, “Iran Leader Says U.S. Planned 9/11 Attacks,” The New York Times, September 24, 2010.
[27] Daniel Tovrov, “Ahmadinejad United Nations Speech: Full Text Transcript,” International Business Times, September 22, 2011.
[28] Richard Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures,” COTO Report, August 10, 2011, https://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/last-man-out-on-911-makes-shocking-disclosures/. The information about David Ray Griffin’s 30-60 minute discussion with Mahathir is from my personal correspondence with Dr. Griffin.
[29] Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, President of the Perdana Global Peace Foundation and Former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Opens the “9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth” Conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZdgaViIyI.
[30] Roepke, “Last Man Out on 9/11 Makes Shocking Disclosures.”
[31] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York, N.Y.: Seabury Press, 1970), 46.
[32] Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left,” Counterpunch, November 28, 2006. For a critique of Cockburn see Michael Keefer, “Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,” 911Review.com, December 4, 2006.
[33] Chris Hedges, “American Psychosis,” Truthdig, January 29, 2017.
[34] Those interested in the destruction of the buildings may consult the website of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. And see Ted Walter, BEYOND MISINFORMATION: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 (Berkeley, California: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc., 2015); and Steven Jones et al., “15 Years Later: On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses,” Europhysics News 47, no. 4 (2016): 21–26
[35] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11” (WorldPublicOpinion.org, September 10, 2008), https://majorityrights.com/uploads/who-did-911-poll.pdf.
[36] Ibid.; “Why the 9/11 Conspiracies Have Changed,” BBC News Magazine, August 29, 2011.
[37] “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11.” The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2008 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[38] “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist: Common Concerns About Islamic Extremism” (Pew Research Center, July 21, 2011), http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist/4/. The figures I give have been arrived at by using data from the poll in combination with country population data for 2011 from the Population Reference Bureau.
[39] “Unsettled Belonging: A Survey of Britain’s Muslim Communities.” (London: Policy Exchange, December 2, 2016); “‘What Muslims Want:’ A Survey of British Muslims by ICM on Behalf of Policy Exchange.” (London: Policy Exchange, December 2, 2016).
[40] Graeme MacQueen, “9/11 Truth: British Muslims Overwhelmingly Reject the Official 9/11 Story,” Global Research, December 29, 2016.
[41] Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013).
[42] Civil society researchers have, of course, already begun the job. Good books to begin with are: David Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Second edition (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Publishing, 2004); David Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, The Cover-Up, and the Exposé (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Publishing, 2008); James Gourley, ed., The 9/11 Toronto Report: International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001 (International Center for 9/11 Studies, 2012). Additional sources include the websites of Consensus 9/11 and the Journal of 9/11 Studies.
Craig, I believe that the entire battle, which is properly arrayed as a dialectic (even if you are not a Marxist or, more accurately, Hegelian, as I am not), from at least 1963 (JFk assassination) to now, is consistently waged between adherents to collectivist “security” and those (us, for the most part) of individual liberty, freeing us, unlike the other side, it seems, to exercise critical judgment.
1947. Creation of the National Security State.
Who says Marx is “more accurately” a Hegelian? Have they studied the issue?
Hello Craig
What is your opinion of Rebekah Roth?
She has many great insights. No?
Thanks for your input
Hi Vic, I’d suggest you pose that question on the Roth post by Paul Zarembka. You’ll find once you read that article why Roth is now seen as a problematic figure.
https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/a-novel-idea-rebekah-roths-methodical-illusion-and-what-happened-to-the-planes-on-9-11/
The American people, and by extension we in Canada, have fantastically receptive imaginations. We were able to imagine a scenario in which John Hinckley Jr.’s brother Scott was scheduled to dine with Vice President Bush’s son Neil the night before Reagan was shot, and the meeting was unrelated to the shooting of Reagan. What a funny conversation if the dinner took place twenty-four hours later after a successful shooting: “My brother shot and killed the President!” “No kidding? And now my Dad is the President. What a funny coincidence!”. If we swallowed that, we’ll take down anything our masters throw at us.
I knew who had the MO of 911 as soon as it happened. It was the event to take us to war in Iraq even though they didn’t attack us. Madeline Albright at the Akron Peace Conference asked the Akron, OH university students to go to war for Israel. They said, “H… no we won’t go to war for Israel”. So now there was an excuse. The events did not add up with our Air Force missing, etc. It was an inside job with the help of two small countries (Durbin even admitted it as so but he didn’t name the countries).
Donald Trump exhibited imagination similar to Fidel Castro’s in the immediate hours after 9/11, when on a radio program he noted the impossibility of planes slicing through the steel beams positioned only 24 inches apart throughout the exterior of the structures, like the proverbial “hot knives through butter”.
Mr. Trump’s clear disinterest (more than 15 years later) in the historically massive event of 9/11, and absent any hint he’ll be calling for a real criminal investigation any time soon, leaves 9/11 truth advocates for Trump an existential dilemma without available and viable explanation, or possible imminent resolution. Creator/God bless and empower those men and women who persist in morally justified efforts to bring the truth.
The idea that your Creator/God is going to empower anyone to do anything is the sort of Magical Thinking that fosters the inculcation of fantastic rubbish into people’s minds. Fatastic rubbish like the official 9/11 story. Whatever shall we do if the Creator/God doesn’t bless and empower the “morally justified”?
Bobo,
Spiritual power is the only force capable of shattering the coverup of 9/11. Whether people believe that or not is a matter of personal choice and respected. Peace.
That is just nonsense and in fact flies in the face of scientific analyticial processes that underlie any human advances in understanding. Rest assured, I do not in any way respect a western person in 2017 with your belief system.
Bobo,
Sir, the purpose of my original comment was certainly not to stoke an argument over the existence of a supreme being, Creator, God, Allah, Krishna, or whatever term one may use to describe their deity. I do not engage in arguments over religion as that is the most personal of matters for every individual, and one which absolutely must be respected. Rest assured, I do in all ways respect a person in 2017 with your belief system.
Jerry, the deep state propaganda to get the masses to reject spirituality and embrace pure materialism has been strong. Kudos to you for resisting that effort, and for your evolved response to Bobo.
Prayer is a vast and complex topic about which I could write many thousands of words. But here I will simply say that I pray and my prayers are answered. No one can convince me otherwise.
Peace, Sheila
Sheila,
The spiritual realm is vast and complex for certain, and the billions of words written by men and women through history attests to that. In thanks for sharing your thoughtful comment, you may be interested in reading the non-fiction classic “The Life Divine” by Sri Aurobindo, who passed away in 1957 in India. If you (or others who pass this way) would like to download his book, which many scholars consider Sri Aurobindo’s masterwork, it is downloadable for free at the following link.
Best wishes,
Jerry
http://www.auro-ebooks.com/the-life-divine/
Thanks Jerry, I’ll check it out.
To those, like Bobo, who think that only what can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched is real, I would ask: do you believe in radio waves?
What a ridiculous non sequitur and strawman. Again, this line of Magical Thinking is what permits elites to manipulate the masses in the manner of the 9/11 operations.
Rather a weasel response, insofar as you skip past arguing over the existence of your magic entity and move right on to asserting it’s singular power. You clearly do not respect people with my lack of belief system, or you wouldn’t have printed that rubbish.
Nice one Jerry. Very dignified response
Trump also exhibits limited imagination when trying to pin ubiquitous eavesdropping on Obama, as if a mere president ever had any serious control over what certain elements in the deep state can do. At least this latest charade has made the discussion of ‘the deep state’ a regular mainstream thing, and people can start to appreciate the scope of unelected powers, and perhaps connect the dots between the contents of Vault 7 and the CIA-Mossad’s desperate global attempts to control the course of public narrative by targeting all free thinkers.
your correct on what a mere potus can do in regards to the so called deep state.but this is a scam ,the revelation by wikileaks .it will be bantied about and made meaningless as has all 9/11 jfk disgusions have been.first off its not anything called the deep state. and if you speak about who they are ,you will be chopped off at the knees. this may be the final step in taking away freedom to the internet.they are already speaking about a finger print /facial recognition as a the way they will stop you from using the net.that camera on your device /computer is staring back at you.
That only shows Trump knows the truth but wants to hide and suppress it. He is known to be or said to be friends with that big cheat Silverstein.
The planes did NOT “slice” through the towers they smashed through the outer wall due to their massive kinetic energy. Real planes really smashed through the walls.
A really well argued essay. Thank you, that was inspiring!
This is the kind of careful, academic-in-the-best-sense article that should appeal to reasonable people—a declining portion of the populace, it would seem.
MacQueen restricts his boundaries, as is necessary, and raises questions of enduring significance.
It’s ironic in a particular way that he cites failure of the imagination (on the part of all too many left figures and the left in general) as central. Ironic because “failure of the imagination” is invoked in the 9/11 Commission report as the reason “intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks.” (Wikipedia).
Give Philip D. Zelikow, the prime mover behind the Commission whitewash, his due. He knows a keystone—failure of the imagination—when he sees it. The irony is that this keystone was used by Zelikow as a cover-up tactic. Perhaps it’s projection as well.
Stifling the public’s imagination is one means of successfully pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.
Taking MacQueen’s piece now as a foundation for further discussion, I note one serious omission, or perhaps downplaying: the possibility that the “failure” of particular left figures and the left in general is not all or primarily due to lack of imagination, but rather may be explained to an alarming extent as due to infiltration of the left by agents of the state, rendering the left as “controlled opposition.” It’s widely known and appreciated that “divide and conquer” is a tried and true strategy of rulers.
I don’t mean to say that all leaders on the left are agents of the state. Far from it. For me, or for anyone, to claim such would itself be highly irresponsible and—super ironically—divisive.
But it is responsible to cite, thus stimulating our imaginations, particular persons and factions on the left from history that were in fact agents of the state, as opposed letting them off the hook as persons or factions suffering simply from lack of imagination. Or ignorant. Or dupes. There’s a plethora of examples.
If the Irish Republican Army (IRA) may be proffered as an example of a leftist organization, just one case would be that of Freddie Scappaticci. He rose over years to be head of security for the IRA. As an article by Matthew Teague in the April 2006 Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/04/double-blind/304710/) put it, Scappaticci “eventually … became one of the most important spies in Britain’s history, working his way toward the IRA’s heart.” His handlers, British intelligence, or more particularly MI5, a paramilitary police unit called Special Branch, gave him the code name Stakeknife.
Not only that, but in his richly detailed and absolutely fascinating article Teague writes—the present tense arising from the fact that the news broke while he was conducting an interview with a former IRA supporter—that Denis Donaldson, the legendary IRA hunger-striker, “has just been expelled from Sinn Féin, about three minutes ago. For being a British spy.”
As Wikipedia records: “On 16 December 2005, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams announced to a press conference in Dublin that Donaldson had been a spy in the pay of British intelligence. This was confirmed by Donaldson in a statement which he read out on RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, shortly afterwards.” Donaldson had been, Teague writes, a “folk hero” on the left “who led hunger strikes early in the Troubles.”
There are no doubt those on the left who grasp the provenance of 9/11 but lack the courage to speak out. Those familiar with this blog will also be familiar with the penalties attached to speaking out. Others yet in the progressive camp may have made a strategic decision that to keep mum on their true grasp about 9/11 is simply a price they must pay in order to continue their otherwise valuable work for justice and peace. Sacrificing, as it were, some truth (in the case of 9/11, a whopper of a truth) for the larger causes of justice and peace.
Negotiating this internally for public intellectuals on the left must put them between a rock and a hard place. I have considerable sympathy for those who think it through and decide to stay mum. At the same time surely truth should be paramount, the underlying foundation for justice which in turn is the final basis for peace. In that order.
My sympathy evaporates for any on the left, but especially leaders or would-be leaders, who go on to slag Truthers, in the worst cases invoking the nasty “conspiracy theory” label.
Left leaders who engage in that particular name-calling deserve no sympathy, nor do they qualify as suffering from the “failure of imagination” malady. Rather they deserve to be considered candidates for the designation as possible or probable state agents. Depending on the totality of what is known about them.
To do less than considering them (privately) as possible or probable agents until it is proven otherwise, is indeed a failure of imagination.
The extent and the sophistication of state surveillance, spying and psychological warfare against anyone or any entity deemed a threat by the deeply entrenched and super-resourced powers of the American Empire can barely be imagined. Likewise the magnitude and multiplicity of ways of their infiltration of any organization or movement seen as a threat or even potential threat.
Imagine the latest tranche of CIA secrets from Wikileaks, Vault7, arguably the largest such in history (https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/), as the tip of the iceberg.
I appreciate your thought that their are agents of the deep state in the left. However, I have put a fair amount of thought into the people I know who cannot seem to accept 9/11 for what it was, in spite of logical arguments or evidence. These people have all been brought up with the idea that the United States government is good and holy and could never do such a thing as was done on 9/11. One of these people, a civil engineer who should know his physics, was brought up in a very restricted social environment in Norway, where any thought that might contravene the ideas of society must be strongly rejected under pain of punishment, usually by being ostracized. As a result, he simply blocks out the logical physics and refuses to look at any evidence. For all of these people, realize that very large numbers of people fervently believe that the religion they were brought up with is the one and only, and will not examine any evidence to the contrary. In the same way, the idea of the holiness of the U.S. government is part of their identity and to deny that would be denying part of their identity, bringing about fear of the dissolution of the ego. To get beyond this is something that people spend their entire lifetimes or more trying to do. So, when I cannot penetrate a persons mental obstacles with basic physics or other evidence for those who cannot understand physics, I fall back to more subtle strategies, just getting people to go beyond their emotional obstacles, and don’t expect to win the argument in any near time frame.
I misused the word “their” when I should have said “there”. WordPress really needs to look into allowing editing our comments.
@sorgfelt, David Ray Griffin touches on this is “National Faith.”
.”. . These people have all been brought up with the idea that the United States government is good and . . . .”
This is on the right track and applies to many people. But not to critics such as Cockburn, cited in the article. Cockburn had no delusion about the holiness of the USG. No, I think there is another cognitive brake at work here.
For people like Cockburn and Chomsky and Amy Goodman, etc., etc., the implications of the truth of 9/11 strike at something more fundamental. And that is their dearly-held belief, as polemicists and journalists, that the power to change misguided government lies in marshaling the facts and framing the argument. Though fervently believed by Cockburn, Chomsky, et al., this may not be true in light of the truth about 9/11.
If the alternate theory of 9/11 is true, and if the people who have the keys to the White House, Congress, Pentagon and Supreme Court will execute such a plan to achieve their ends, then there is no avoiding the conclusion that those same people don’t give a flying fuck about the best crafted arguments or facts. When it suits them the 9/11 conspirators go to lower Manhattan and kill with impunity just as they go to Baghdad or Damascus to kill. What some skinny old man with a pony tail writes in his blog, however widely read, is of no consequence to the 9/11 conspirators.
Cockburn, Chomsky, et al, and all that they have devoted their lives to do not matter in the contest that is laid bare by the truth about 9/11. This truth is more debilitating to the left political class than is the uncontroversial idea that the USG is corrupt and disgusting.
Stakeknife and the Gladio revelations are the Rosetta Stones for interpreting Western Intelligence actions within their own countries.
Many thanks for a wonderful article, Graeme and Craig!
I suppose that now, in my less cynical moments, I can give the gatekeeper left the same out the Bush administration claimed after the attacks — “failure of imagination.”
If we need any further evidence of the spreading epidemic of mass insanity and murder based on big lies and evil deceptions, there’s this news today:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-cia-power-drone-strikes-military-a7628561.html
“Truth” is a war between two 1% segments of the population, because 98% of people simply don’t care, don’t care to know!
While the ruling 1% is wealthy, powerful, highly organized, highly institutionalized and operate in secrecy with impunity, the “truther” 1% is fragmented, unsophisticated, disorganized, poor , operate in public forums and are always subject to elimination by legal or illegal means. Everyone in between is essentially either a useful idiot, or a useless idiot in this regard
That said, many us don’t have even the slightest idea what it may feel like to be in possession of particular knowledge or evidence that would be threatening the secrecy of these operations and the perpetrators. Many witnesses, whistle blowers and researchers have been eliminated some way or another. To think that, were any of us in such a position, we would publicly come out and expose the truth and save humanity but risk the lives of friends and family as well as our own, is very unrealistic, if not totally delusional.
This principle applies to word leaders as well, as the refreshing article above clearly illustrates as it goes down the list of leaders who have indeed dared to speak up, as a result of which they have brought the wrath of the empire and its overt and covert tentacles onto themselves, as well as their people.
This is a very well written article and thanks for doing it, Graeme.
Just in the last few days I dialogued with another Marxist who said that he had gotten burned decades ago (why I didn’t ask) on analyzing such conspiracies. He said that there are enough open outrages and that we have trouble getting enough attention even to those, let alone the hidden/complex ones.
He didn’t try to claim that JFK wasn’t assassinated by the U.S. operatives and he wouldn’t dump on Castro for what is quoted here, but he simply thinks we have enough problems just convincing folks about the open stuff, let alone hidden actors.
For example, he would probably say that the bombings of Iraq into oblivion is enough to discuss, that it is so wrong/immoral that we can work on these open ones, and yet still not feel we have penetrated consciousness enough.
Like dropping two A-bombs, and forgetting that history.
If my friend is even half correct, what our the limitations of his staying in his context, and thus, alternatively, the strengths for us moving where Graeme wants folks to entertain? I have thought of some responses, but not ones that hits home enough to workers and activists, not merely the intellectuals.
Graeme McQueen hS done it again. This is a well-deserved whallop of the tunnel vision of what passes for the intellectual left in the US. Fortunately, every rule tends to have its exceptions, and in tbis regard I’d like to point to illustrious example of one Cynthia McKinney, who dared even as elwcted congressional representative to ask taboo questions about 9/11 from the halls of Congress. If it is inappropriate to class her among the left’s intelle tual leadership at the time, it surely is not now…. there is no one better suited to this epithet today, though perhaps we should qualify her as a leading intellectual leader of what might better be called the “alt Left,” distinguished from its wider membership precisely in its recognition of 9/11 Truth and other Deep State phenomena.
Great article!
“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.” – Albert Einstein
Great article Graeme. Thank you for writing it, I will share it around facebook and email it to my 9-11 truth friends. You are a hero to me and many others for speaking out about the fraud of 9-11, which is pretty obvious if one examines the facts. To hell with any and all this “spying” crap by the government or anyone else. Free speech must prevail. As an Iraq war veteran, it took a lot out of me when I fully realized that the WTC buildings were actually blown up on live TV that day, and that we were fed a completely false narrative while many were in shock. I was already in the Army on 9-11 and my boss was at the Pentagon that morning but wasn’t injured in the bogus “attack” there. Meeting many other 9-11 researchers like myself online over the years, I’ve joined a grassroots 9-11 Truth social media banner campaign. Please see/share the information on my page here http://iamthefaceoftruth.com/Michael_Atkinson I have a video with you on it at the bottom of the page (9/11 Commission Report bars 503 1st responder eyewitnesses). Again, thank you for sharing the best truth you can.
I’ll go a step further than the author is willing to with respect to Chomsky. Chomsky is not stupid. He is quite capable of seeing and evaluating independent evidence on both 1963 and 2001. There is at this point absolutely no doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset and the “Fair Play for Cuba” was a ruse. This has been documented by Jim Douglass, the interviews/confession of James Stiles and others. Nobody will convince me Chomsky doesn’t know that.
Yet he sticks by his belief this and the contradictions of 2001 are “not important.” It pains me to have to question whether Noam Chomsky is perhaps the ultimate “limited hangout” artist or “gatekeeper.”
Chomsky is protecting Zionists with regard to his absurd stance on 9/11. He probably thinks he is protecting Israel but in truth he is protecting Zionist filth. Of course he knows it was a false flag inside job but the problem is that he probably knows the evidence points to Israeli and American Zionists and he doesn’t want Israel blown off the map which they should be for the genocide of the Palestinians alone but add 9/11 guilt on top of that and there is no saving Israel.
It is indeed ironic that the 9/11 Commission used the same lack of “imagination” rationalization to explain the US military and intelligence community’s “failure” to defend the now deceased victims of the attacks of 9/11. “9/11 report condemns ‘failure of imagination'” By Alec Russell in Washington 23 July 2004 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1467701/911-report-condemns-failure-of-imagination.html
“America’s long-awaited report into the September 11 attacks was published yesterday with a damning indictment of the system of government, citing “deep institutional failings” in defending the country from attack. After 20 months of investigations the independent commission blamed the administrations of President George W Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton, for failing to combat the danger… Mr Kean, a Republican, spoke of a failure “of policy management, capability and above all imagination; on that September day we were unprepared. We did not grasp the magnitude of a threat that had been gathering over a considerable period of time.”
9/11 Commission an “independent commission” my ass!
It was, the only problem is the conspirators does not let their voices to be heard enough. The conspirators actually create these nonsense in order to confuse you people and they are very successful in it.
@ Aleksander, your assertion that the 9/11 Commission was independent is absolutely ridiculous! You can’t be serious. You’re either a troll or so ignorant it hurts. Please study some more if it is ignorance.
Castro was so emphatic because the accusation was against a pro-Cuban Left and he would have had definite and clear information from his intelligence sources that they or their supporters were in no way involved. And I don’t think Castro ever plotted any assassination attempt against any American President or prominent politician or minister, etc. It is a pity that the so-called ‘left’ including Noam Chomsky have neglected and even brushed aside the 9/11 truth arguments. This article is quite illuminating and I request one and all to sign my online petition demanding an international inquiry into the 9/11 tragedy: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/General_Secretary_United_Nations_Institute_an_international_inquiry_and_investigation_into_the_911_tragedy/?twi&utm_source=sharetools&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=petition-304830-General_Secretary_United_Nations_Institute_an_international_inquiry_and_investigation_into_the_911_tragedy&utm_term=noHash%2Ben
Joe Q. Public’s is not aware of the historical literature on large numbers of admitted false flag attacks, or the majority of the controversial false flag claims that point to the CIA. Regarding JFK and 9/11, Joe dismisses the ideas as too implausible for this set of reasons: 1) He doesn’t believe the set of conspirators in the US government could be that evil/treasonous, 2) He doesn’t have any plausible model for how they could have kept it all secret (from him and people like him), 3) he feels that the mainstream media would have informed him if it was true, and 4) he believes that the mainstream media would not continue to insist these claims are nutty if there were good facts behind them.
I propose a platform of methods to reach Joe. This platform starts with respect for Joe and support for his reasons as rational and sensible. The burden of effort must fall on the explainer to communicate the surprising reality – to show that what is widely accepted and seems completely reasonable is, nevertheless, wrong. Here are some details:
1) Point out the many, many elements of untold & forgotten history which are not really disputed by historians, but yet remain unknown to Joe. Stone and Kuznick’s Untold History is one source for relevant Cold War examples. The truth of the US role in the Indochina Wars – Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia is one giant example by itself. Historian specialists know these facts, today,, but Joe does not. Ventura & Russell point out here that even the ancient fact that many people were involved in the plot to murder Abraham Lincoln is a relevant example because those details are omitted from the school curriculum, replaced with the lone, disgruntled gunman story/pattern.
2) Untold history includes the many evil deeds of the CIA and times when they went against the POTUS – witnessed by their own archives and told in books like “Legacy of Ashes” or your example of Operation Northwoods, discovered first by James Bamford, accidentally, using FOIA’s to research the NSA.
3) A relevant part of untold history are the many examples where the US government turned out to be deceiving the public, along with many examples where the MSM worked very hard to kill conflicting narratives. Vietnam is again a key example, well documented by Herman & Chomsky in “Manufacturing Consent”. The impossibility of publishing a book on the JFK assassination in 1964, in the United States, that was critical of the official account has been documented by many who tried. The lack of media coverage for the civil verdict against the US govt. in the case of MLK and William Peppers’s expert advocacy for the claim that the FBI was a plotter is another example. Herman & Chomsky provide one model for why the MSM work that way. The additional hypothesis of large cover CIA involvement with the media is another – c.f. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/02/cia-one-main-peddlers-fake-news.html
4) Point to a large number of cases where criminal behavior Deep State behavior and lying about it is supported by tons of evidence. Point out that in many of the alleged false flags involving the CIA, the FBI was called in to “investigate” and to suppress dissent. In some cases, especially JFK, the evidence of FBI coverup and fabrication of evidence is enormous and provides key support for the subordinate claim that the CIA or other Deep State did it.
Josh Stern,
You will agree the following recently published 31-minute film “Stand For The Truth” aligns perfectly with your ideas for reaching “Joe Q. Public” – allowing full awareness of the harsh, excruciatingly painful, yet absolutely necessary-for-healing reality of what truly occurred on September 11, 2001…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvAv-114bwM
This is nonsense. You must understand that people who profit from 9/11 have huge interest in misinforming the people and this documentary comes from this intention.
What do you mean, Aleksandar? Which people do you think profit from 9/11? And what does this documentary have to do with profit?
9/11 started the aggression on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. The profit comes from producing of weapons the government pays to them and from control of these countries including the resources (oil). Those who have done it do not like you people even to come close in guessing who was responsible for it, so that they produce such documentaries to put you on wrong truck. These people are the Rothschilds. Here is the explanation: http://www.sarovic.com/jacob_rothschild_is_guilty.htm
There are huge profit motive in the $1 trillion++ *annual* US Security State budget, which *is* driven by phony wars, false flags, US supported terrorist groups, etc. I haven’t seen any evidence of policy coordination or particular power by the many far-flung descendants of the Rothschild family. The question above could be re-phrased: What makes you object to the evidence in that particular video as one particular piece of evidence?
“The aggression on” the countries you mentioned started before some of them were countries. The US elite has repeatedly plotted to overthrow the government of Syria, going back decades. The country was created through the colonial aggression of France and Syria. The US elite determined and set about to overthrow the government of Afghanistan before the Soviet occupation ever occurred. Lybia was the subject of all manner of attack for four decades before Ghadaffi was finally murdered. This phenomenon did not start with the 9/11 events.
I’ve seen that video. In my thinking, From memory, it contains a few interesting pieces of evidence, including a presumed expert’s opinion of the forensics of the building collapse, some scuttlebutt from inside NIST, a loud noise before Bldg7 falls, perhaps a few other things. There are lots of other important pieces of evidence that it does not mention or include, and it mostly focuses on the 1 expert’s opinion.
Could you say a bit more about why you focus my attention on that one video?
Yes, most presentations countering the OCT, particularly 30-minute ones, by necessity have to leave out “lots of other important pieces of evidence” because there is so much of it, relating to both the destruction of the buildings and other aspects of the crime. To anyone who’s spent a fair bit of time looking into 9/11, whether or not it was either an inside job or the buildings were demolished with explosives just isn’t up for debate. It’s such a complete waste of time debating with those who are mentally and/or emotionally intransigent. The time is far better spent trying to reach people who are capable of making the shift in attitude, and I believe this recently released AE911Truth presentation featuring Mr. Ketcham is a powerful tool in cracking that door to which the aforementioned intransigents have long since bolted shut and thrown away the key.
Skeptics want to know things like this: 1) Why does the MSM and US govt. aggressively dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories as nonsense if they are true and well evidenced? 2) Why would a group of people, not a few lone nuts, do such evil things? 3) How could any group get away with it and cover it up? 4) How could the FBI be fooled, aren’t they pros at investigating things? 5) Someone must hijacked those planes and died, if they were not religious fanatics, then what was their motivation? If they were religious fanatics, why would they work with govt. insiders? Maybe a half hour video isn’t the format to address those things; perhaps a high-level outline that can be explored down to the level of exquisite detail and encyclopedic support is a better format; the encyclopedia takes a long time, but one can get a sense from the outline of what is there and use some probes to start checking. Seeing some answers and a promise of more and connection with the starting doubts can hopefully inspire confidence and motivation for further research.
Conspiracy happened but nothing similar people think. Those people who made it are bosses of the government. Those who did it were religious fanatics. The are helped by the conspirators but they did not know it. They were approached by the Muslim alias. Even if the whole investigation is performed it cannot come to the conspirators because they are extremely smart.
There are several circumstantial pieces of evidence pointing at Dick Cheney. In the big picture, it is more important to argue for “inside job” than to pick out any small set of people as the mastermind ringleaders.
One might do well to stop using the term “conspiracy theories” to refer to analysis of the 9/11 events. People conspired to commit the actions that took place on that day, whatever the nature of those actions were. In response to your questions: 1) Any scenario that deviates from the official narrative implies malfeasance or significant incompetence by elements of the US state. A failure to promote and investigate evidence of such malfeasance by the MSM implies the same two problems in the MSM itself. What organization fosters indictments against itself? 2) Nineteen hijackers and the alleged terror networks do not constitute a few lone nuts. The official narrative requires acceptance of the notion of a group of people doing exactly such evil things. 3) Criminals get away with crimes all the time. If a scenario that varied significantly from the official narrative indeed occurred, then the cover-up consists of the official narrative itself, which came from elements of the US state apparatus, the prinicpal benficiaries of the events. 4) If one holds the notion that the FBI are “pros at investigatint things” one knows nothing about the history of the FBI and is beyond reach with regard to this particular subject. 5) If they hijackers were not religious fanatics, and there is evidence that they were not, then, any characterization of their motives is entirely speculative. Perhaps you might want to check out this outline and weigh it’s value as a “high-level outline”.
http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project
“conspiracy theories” is the accepted term that people understand, so I use it too. For some people, the term has a flavor of multiple actors keeping a secret, for some it has the flavor of things they are interested in investigating, for some it has the flavor of false, paranoid claims…for me, it means claims about historical or current events by human actors which the MSM denies and which would impact many views of the World were they to become widely accepted and evidenced. I use the related, but different idea of “Untold History” where it applies. Vietnam interests me because it is a huge event where a conspiracy still exists to keep much of its accepted history “untold”. There is a conspiracy theory, important to me, that I came to through my own research, about what CIA Operation Mockingbird looks like today. I need more objective 3rd party evidence to convince others. Rebutting your replies:
1) Entrenchment is not a sufficient explanation for MSM hostility to 9/11 conspiracy stories and evidence. There are many working reporters now who were not yet reporters in 2001. If the forum was open for reporting they could have a huge scoop and attack many followers by writing on that. Well, you say it will still make the older editors look bad. My contrasting theory is that the MSM have always backed the war state in general, and the CIA in particular. There are many, many other stories that the press does not cover which are CIA criminal acts. Just the other week the MSM did not cover the publication of a book by Pablo Escobar’s son detailing his father’s business interaction with the CIA in the narcotics trade. The public knows Escobar’s name already. But the story was blocked. There are gazillion examples. Your theory doesn’t explain them.
2) My question about a “group” was not about al Qaeda – it was about a group within the US govt. that helped/enabled them and then covered up the truth. That is the “conspiracy” we are discussing. Who and why? The video wasn’t addressing that.
3) Most crimes do not have nearly so much focus. How did outside the govt. criminals just get away with planting explosives in both towers, building 7, etc. that were sufficient to bring them down instantly? How did they get the SEC to cancel an investigation into their options trading in American and United Airlines prior to the attack? How did they get the FBI to block several internal calls for investigation into the 9/11 attackers in the year prior to the attack? How did they get the CIA to keep a couple of known terrorist off the watch list and then slip them back on just days before the attack? How did they get the FBI, CIA, and Bush admin to block inquiries into the attack? All of those things are inside job things involving many different people in different agencies in a conspiracy to commit mass murder. That is not like some ordinary crime. The video wasn’t addressing that.
4) We sort of agree here. We agree that disabusing the the public and MSM about their notions of the FBI is relevant here. That is part of the explanation that is needed to reach most of the public. That is part of my point. It requires a bigger explanation with a lot more context. The video wasn’t addressing that.
5) We are both, I think, promoting a theory that al Qaeda (and/or other Arab Terror groups) was actively collaborating with US spook insiders or other criminals not related to them. This requires both evidence and explanation and is surprising to most of the public. The video wasn’t addressing that.
Thank you for the link to the historycommon site. It looks interesting and I will check it out. I notice and commend the site for featuring RSS. I may add it to my list of “IndyNews” sites (which includes untold history). The following, downloadable page has URL/RSS,Twitter handles for a variety of sites.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/15vubeeh3fxamcc/IndyNewsRSS.html
What people? Flavor? It’s pretty clear that your term is useless if it can’t be understood to have a specific meaning when used in a specific context. Likewise your term “untold history” is useless, and frankly, ridiculous. Untold by whom? With regard to the rest of your post, it seems to be pretty much strawmen. I never mentioned ‘entrenchment”. Do you not under understand the word “malfeasance”? With regard to point 2, you entirely failed to address what I said about your “question”. In point 3 you’re begging the question. With regard to point 4, your statement about how the MSM views the FBI is entirely unsupported, and frankly, a meaningless statement as you’ve attributed a universal state of understanding to a complex entity made up of countless people with different relationships to the FBI and vastly different levels of understanding of the nature of the FBI. With regard to point 5, I’m not promoting any theory. I’m addressing what I see as major short-comings in your posts. Your “untold history” catch-phrase is an oxy-moron, suitable for drawing viewers to Netflix to be sure, but intellectually entirely unsound. The fact that you listed incontrovertible trip like “infowars” pretty much says it all.
1) I couldn’t extract any detailed hypothesis/theory about the MSM from your words. My guess about what you meant was apparently off the mark. “They are all crooks” doesn’t strike me as convincing, & “malfeasance” is vague – e,g, it might mean that they too lazy to uphold fine journalistic standards. 2) The important motive question I was referring to was about the motives of people within the US govt., and also the motives of people within any other govts. who were in the know. If you were ignoring the content of what I wrote earlier and simply making a sort of plea for stylistic precision, then yes, I ignored that possibility, but it is isn’t constructive. 3) You have my permission to substitute ‘could’ for ‘did’ and try again. 4) In the USA, the FBI has been, and continues to be, accepted as the primary authority for investigation of many major crimes, including most that come into consideration as “conspiracies”. There is no real alternative or rival. The US Congress constantly consults the FBI and no other authorities. When local Police seek greater expertise, they most often turn to the FBI, and rarely to any other agency, public or private. This situation is problematic, but your response to my point is weak and evasive. Challenging the honest, authority, and legitimacy of the FBI is a significant task…a hurdle for making arguments that depend on those views. I believe it is logically easier to support when one notes similar problems involving the FBI in a very long list of criminal incidents where a connection to CIA, terrorism, or national politics is likely. 5. Untold history is Peter Kuznick’s preference and I’m a fan of his work. I feel that the meaning is simple to grasp. As he states in the link I provided above, it is not meant to include topics where a majority of basic facts are considered very controversial and still being debated.
Hijackers must be religious fanatics. Who else would die in the name of idea?
This was exactly the intention of conspirators.
Josh,
Peter Michael Ketcham was essentially “Joe Q. Public” up until the summer of 2016, when he started his journey of 9/11 enlightenment after talking with a longtime woman friend. Mr. Ketcham can be seen as a powerful,concrete example (before the summer of 2016) – one which is valuable for breaking through fears to enter 9/11 research territory, because he’s clearly an educated, completely rational adult – of those falling under the aggregate category of people who had not, for reasons you accurately noted, yet discovered the truth.
Best regards.
Ok, we do have an interesting disagreement. I’ll try to describe it some more & the views I hold. By way of additional introduction, my overarching view is that the CIA, FBI, NSC, and also some high ranking permanent elements of DOD and NATO are a true fifth column…extremists, criminals, traitors, whatever one wants to call it, they ignore the public law to pursue their own Shadow empire building and happily sacrifice the lives of many innocent people in the process. Large numbers of conspiracy theories involving those elements have some underlying truth to them. Many conspiracies can be usefully viewed through the lens of factors that benefit the budgets, prestige, or freedom of action of those agencies (or prevent losses in any of those categories). I’ll write”budgets” again, but that one is especially important, and also includes black budgets – e.g. the CIA’s long history of heavy involvement with the international drug trades.
You and I and the rest of the World are more ready to appreciate the views of people we happen to already agree with than those we do not agree with. For example, if you believe in some particular religion/metaphysical story, then you are more apt to be impressed with the heartfelt testimonial of someone who has recently converted to your view. You are more likely to seem them as smart and honest and sensitive to truth. Conversely, if your prior belief is that this religion is a bunch of hogwash, then you are much less likely to be impressed by their conversion testimonial.
One of the ideas I am trying to get across above is that people who support various conspiracy theories should try to learn from the intellectual positions of their critics. Some critics may be insincere or paid shills, but many turn out to be sincere, smart people who have simply taken a different path through the world of data, theory, and experience. The idea I am promoting is that one can try to rationally understand these critics, skeptics, ignores, in terms of both the info and conceptual frameworks they are missing, and the conceptual frameworks that prevent them from looking. Extreme, and ultimately corrupt, MSM bias plays a big role in that. But claiming that instantly becomes a much bigger theory than most people want to try and support. In fact, it is supportable, but one has to treat it as a distinct research topic.
How would you know an educated, completely rational adult?
Big bang has come from the floor collapse (that was the weakest point in the construction) and that produced the energy which demolished the building.
Barry Jennings was a witness to explosions in Building 7 before the WTC collapsed. He was mysteriously dead from a heart attack 1 day before scheduled to testify for 9/11 govt. commissions. No mention of Bldg 7 is included in their reports (which in fact do not actually even address any forensics of the attacks or any possibility of any conspirators other than al Qaeda). William Rodriguez was a witness to explosions in the basement of the North Tower. He was harassed by the FBI. One can find videos related to both and hear both speaking on YouTube. I can help out with some links if they don’t pop up for you.
Danny Jowenko was a very credible expert on controlled demolitions.
He never went back on his opinion that Building 7 was a controlled demolition.
He had to be made an example of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtbRd6gzFWk
– a comment from outside the gate somewhere – I think there’s lots of imagination on ‘the left’, but for some reason the ‘left leaders’ such as Mr McQueen here want to keep the stage for themselves, and won’t give any push to people trying to get themselves heard in the public debate. C’est moi, for example, it’s not inaccurate to say that I have been trying to get new ideas introduced for years now, and can’t get a hearing anywhere. If you’re ready for some new ideas – Democratic Revolution Handbook http://www.rudemacedon.ca/drh/000-home.html .
@Dave Patterson, where on Earth do you get that Mr. MacQueen wants to keep the stage for himself?
I think the most plausible explanation for Chomsky is that he’s on the CIA’s payroll along with Oliver Stone and Seymour Hersh – and Gof knows who else – as a star limited hangout go-to.
Seymour Hersh and Oliver Stone are two well-known people who have done a lot to highlight CIA crimes. Hersh was blackballed from the New York Times for his efforts, and now writes news and editorials for the London Review of Books, which one guesses is the widest circulation publication that would have him. Hersh clearly has real sources inside the CIA, but those sources don’t know anything about JFK or 9/11. Stone and Kuznick’s “Untold History of the United States” is valuable for many, many untold facts about the Cold War period.
Chomsky’s work is also valuable…e.g. Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent documents the extreme media omissions and bias regarding the Indochina Wars and Latin American counterinsurgencies. Why does Chomsky vocally reject JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories? My guess is that this is a matter of intellectual style…in his multiple professional careers, Chomsky has been wildly successful, from a young age, with Occam’s Razor minimalist theories. The stories that successfully explain JFK and 9/11 are abductive maximalist theories.
I agree about Chomsky, as does Miles Mathis: http://mileswmathis.com/chom.pdf
Some top websites for collecting *facts* that are relevant to various conspiracy theories, historical and current day:
Amazon.com
ConsortiumNews.com
CorbettReport.com
GlobalResearch.org
KennedysAndKing.com
InfoWars.com (low S/N ratio and high politics/fact ratio, takes patience)
MaryFerrell.org
MintPressNews.com
Muckrock.com
Newsbud.com
NSArchive.gwu.edu
PressTV.com
RT.com
Spartacus-educational.com
TheDuran.com
TheIntercept.com
WashingtonsBlog.com
WhoWhatWhy.org
21stCenturyWire.com
Many feature search to look for older articles and RSS to keep up to date with new ones.
Most of them are paid by the Rothschilds to produce fake news. http://www.sarovic.com/jacob_rothschild_is_guilty.htm
I’m not researching the Rothschild family. Can you provide me with some evidence that they fund those Indy News sites (not country Amazon, which I listed in the same sense as YouTube – a place with a lot of content that can be searched and explored).
I’ll say it again, your use of the term “conspiracy theory” demonstrates a fundamental failure to accurately name the subjects to which you refer. You might substitute the term “history”, although, having read the their content in the past, many of those sites you listed would be better characterized as “propaganda”. So perhaps you might say “top websites for collecting more propaganda”.
More people use the term “conspiracy” and use “history”, even “untold history”, to mean something else – c.f. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/124005
What a really badly constructed sentence that fails in every way to convey meaning to a reader.
You say you couldn’t work out this meaning: “‘conspiracy’, despite being a flawed term with some negative and unnecessary connotations, is still more descriptive and informative to most people than either ‘history’ or ‘untold history'”? So now I have told you.
You suggested ‘history’ and I tried to say why I don’t think that works as well.
I feel that I am quite good at judging the marks of propaganda bias and sorting through it. I prefer to see more things that I might otherwise miss. I view the MSM as suffering from extreme propaganda bias when it touches on topics that have a lot of political or foreign policy impact. Among the sites I visit nowadays which support comments, the majority use the Disqus system. This is convenient for tracking replies and comments across sites. One’s personal use can be either public or private. I leave my profile public so you can follow along if you like:
https://disqus.com/by/JJ_Stern/
We both seem to agree that the National Security Act of 1947 was a key step backward for civilization, and I am trying to be an advocate for that and some related points.
‘The Failure of Investigation.’
The odious myth-maker Zelikow knows; in conjunction with homeland enabling networks of ‘witting’ gatekeepers left, right and center- he knows the myth requires a vast ‘unwitting’ intellectual elite Convinced of their own cleverness; convinced they would recognize a complex false flag/deception taking place right in front of their eyes, if they saw one –
but didn’t
can’t ;
so,
it wasn’t.
It is happening right now with the blood drenched pedo-troupe ‘WhiteHelmets®’ being feted by Hollywood against all primary source reporting them an MI6/alQaeda/alNusra, SHAM operation. Orwell said: “..and at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.” Trick is, getting the rational/investigative/falseflag message in, between those two moments. When you own the media, you own the switch, consequently blocking that space.
Make-believe and cover-up is USA#1 !
How can the center hold when there is none?
Dear people, this is useless. Why do you pretend that the Government has the power. Everything what you need to find is who has the power and then you would know who to fight. Here he is: http://www.sarovic.com/jacob_rothschild_is_guilty.htm
I had wondered from the start if David Copperfield was not somehow involved in the fantastic illusions of 9/11 and lately I wonder if there aren’t some hypnotists involved as well. The blindness of many clever people to not see the obvious inside job possibilities of 9/11 looks like a nightclub hypnotist’s trick. (When I say “balderdash” your chair will catch fire. Balderdash. Yowwww!!!!) There are, I understand, a number of people immune to hypnotic suggestions. Could those people be us?
Do check out this wonderful 9/11 resource. http://www.takeoverworld.info
I have been a practicing structural engineer for 42 years. I know without a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was a FRAUD. Steel framed building simply DO NOT collapse in the manner they did on 9/11 unless they are intentionally demolished with sophisticated explosive systems.
There should really be no debate; this fact is perfectly obvious to anyone who understands basic physics and the attributes of structural steel. It continues to amaze me how the propaganda has been just so effective!
Right. Now on a practical level we need to put together convincing explanations for these things:
1) How various people identified to the public as experts in structural engineering, including but not limited to NIST, where persuaded to put forward explanations of the collapse to the public –
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/december5/wtc-125.html
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bazant/WTC/WTC-asce.pdf
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/experts/articles/eagar_nova/nova_eagar1.html
2) How the FBI and FEMA were persuaded to lie about an absence of explosives
3) How the MSM was persuaded to only report one side of the story and to attack those who tried to take the other side.
Clearly, we need more than testimonials.
For anyone who has spent sufficient time to look into the events of 9/11–and I mean looking at all sides of the spectrum of opinion–there are only two conclusions that can be reached: (1) that some sort of deep state involvement was necessary to pull off the New Pearl Harbor attacks; or (2) miraculous intervention occurred, and the name of God is indeed Allah. While I believe in God and respect the Muslim tradition, my money, in this particular case, is on the former.
“Conspiracy Theorists” is what those who are incapable of thinking for themselves have been conditioned to call those who can!
I just came across this fine article (on globalresearch.ca) and I just want to add that a full account of my correspondence with Chomsky is in my book “Looking for the Enemy,” available on Amazon. The point we debated, I think exhaustively (and exhaustingly at least for me!) was whether JFK had decided to withdrawal from Vietnam. I think subsequent “history” (e.g., McNamara’s memoirs) has supported a positive answer to this question, but for those interested in Chomsky our back-and-forth should be instructive, and I was not surprised when he later showed essentially the same head-in-the-sand behavior re 9/11.
Despite the shock of having to deal with his position on JFK and 9/11, I still greatly admire him, and not long ago I was able to get him and Paul Craig Roberts to do a podcast with Rob Kall on OpEdNews.com (for which Rob grabbed all the credit!). One can still speculate about his true motivations in expressing what are really just plain stupid opinions about JFK and 9/11, but there is no way to get inside his head.
Since Graeme mentioned my correspondence with Vincent Salandria, I also want to mention that I took up Vince’s idea of “transparency” that he applied to the JFK assassination and applied it to 9/11 in my book “The Transparent Conspiracy.” The idea here, in both cases, is that the perpetrators (“Big Brother”) want us to know they did it in order to shock and awe us into feeling helpless and hopeless — that all resistance is futile. As Vince saw, this message was intended to reach a relative few in the case of JFK, but this would build a vacuum at the core of any potential popular resistance that could only grow.
The intended recipients of that same message on 9/11, in my opinion, were a much broader swath of the population, and the message was much less subtle. Still, this theory — and it is pure speculation, of course — has gained little traction. The idea that Big Bro did it may be fairly widespread, but the idea that he made it clear that he did it in order to render us (psychologically) helpless has not been taken up by anyone, as far as I know. It still seems to me the most logical explanation for all that has happened.
I have read a few of Chomsky’s books, but since his “head-in-the-sand” stance on 9/11, I now believe him to be fake.
The issue for me has never been whether conspiracies are real. As night turns to day, many of them are. However, the more important question is who controls the spin and analysis of such narratives, and whether ulterior motives and unspoken agendas are being layered on them — which is a totally separate question from the truth or falsity of a given conspiracy theory. Unlike their comrades in the Global South, the Anglo-European Left has thoroughly ceded the ground on the “conspiracy theory” over to the right and far-right whereas “conspiracy theories” ought to be an important facet of the deeper critique and analyses of imperialism and capitalism itself. In desperate times such as these, among other things, the Left discredits itself with the masses and thereby facilitates fascist entryism when it fails to offer bigger picture answers whenever it refuses to deal with such matters. It is also one of many lingering elements of First World white chauvinism and racism which can attribute all kinds of mercurial motivations to governments and actors in the Global South — populated by brown and black people — but refuses to do so by applying the same standards to its own. It is as if implicitly people such as Chomsky and other establishmentarian Leftists in North America (esp. the original founder and current editors of CounterPunch) believe that only non-Anglo-European actors are capable of engaging in conspiracies, but never establishments in the US or Europe.
The points raised in this blog post are very important ones that people need to take on board and ignore at their peril, especially now that fascists are pulling all kinds of people into their ranks by taking conspiracy theories, layering them with their own spins and agenda, and then fishing in hundreds if not thousands into their own ranks
Howard Zinn along with Chomsky have been busted multiple times hence the label gatekeepers. The late great Hugo Chavez and Muhammar Qadaffi were real extraordinary men. Hopefully their life and their struggles shall be vindicated with time. Simple roman jurisprudence term CUI BONO
Although I have long since given up trying to “understand” Chomsky’s position on JFK and 9/11 (whence much of the “left” following his lead), logic requires two possible conclusions: 1) He is on the payroll and at heart a true believer; 2) He is sending us a message between the lines. The third possibility, that he is stupid, ill-informed and/or self-deceived (like the propagandized intellectuals he often describes) does not seem plausible to me.
1) and 2) are not totally mutually exclusive, but I tend to go with 2). Why would a smart man say such stupid things — and not generally but about two specific and obviously related topics (since both posit inside jobs). A smart man might assume that at least some of his smart readers/listeners would ask themselves exactly this question, and realize that he is telling us in the only way he can that we (the “conspiracy theorists”) are correct. If he has made a pact with the devil not to cross these specific lines, which is what it looks like, or else (and there is plenty to imagine for the “else”), he cannot tell us this directly, but he can indicate to us indirectly that this is the case (that he is effectively gagged on these subjects) but taking obviously absurd and totally out-of-character positions.
A refreshingly nuanced view of Chomsky, which is generally considered either the “God of Dissent” or “Zionist Gatekeeper” depending on the observer’s point of view. Thank you.
The controllers of chomsky’s public views on jfk and 911 would not allow him to communicate a “read between the lines” clue as it would be too obvious. Especially, given his so called anti establishment career of writings. He is a useless so called gatekeeper (moron).
But obviously it is not at all obvious, since I am the only human being I know of who has made this conjecture! As for being useless, I’m afraid not, since many follow his lead, and he is far from a moron.
Reblogged this on jamesrobertcoyle.
Mahathir is president of Malaysia again at age 93.