By Craig McKee
When it comes to the 9/11 “terrorist attacks,” the mainstream media had very little credibility before May 2, 2011. Now they have none.
Over and over the media just repeat what U.S. officials say about 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and the “war on terror” without hesitation, and most of the time without any scepticism at all. Often, allegations made by the U.S. government are reported as if they are established facts. They might as well just print the damn press releases verbatim.
The bin Laden story becomes more and more unbelievable with every new development, and the media are eating it up without the slightest question.
Here’s how the legend goes now: After the most intensive manhunt in human history, evil mastermind Osama bin Laden is finally found and “taken out” in a heroic, Rambo-esque raid that could have been planned by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Bin Laden’s body is then buried at sea, making it impossible for any independent source to verify the circumstances of his death, or even his identity. Photos of the body won’t be released by Washington because they fear Muslims will be incited to violence. Apparently, killing him isn’t inflammatory, but taking a few Polaroids is a whole other matter.
The latest addition to the Orwellian charade is that bin Laden had a journal which shows that he was not the frail figurehead we’ve heard about. Turns out he was still running the day-to-day operations of the still very dangerous organization.
In fact, according to anonymous U.S. government sources, his very convenient journal tells us he was encouraging al-Qaeda cells to plan massive attacks against American targets and to kill as many U.S. citizens as possible. We even learned that he wanted another attack on the scale of 9/11. Boy, are we lucky he thought to write all this stuff down! Most evil tyrants are too busy plotting and killing to keep such meticulous records. Without them, we might not have realized how terrified we all should still be.
So this mother lode of incriminating evidence supposedly proves that “9/11: The Sequel” is on its way. Great to know the war on terror is alive and well. This will save all those annoying discussions about whether the military budget should be reduced or whether we should stop taking away individual rights and freedoms because of “terrorism.” Maybe we should go back to that helpful coloured terror chart!
It seems that all these bin Laden references to new attacks were just suggestions, however, because there appears to be absolutely nothing specific mentioned. Odd.
The story so far…
Let’s start with the fortified compound no one knew about even though it was right under the noses of the Pakistani military. Is it believable that they didn’t know? Is it credible that U.S. intelligence couldn’t find out where bin Laden was regardless of co-operation from the Pakistanis?
What about the months of planning that went into the raid? Apparently no one was in a rush to get it done despite the devious plots being hatched inside the compound’s walls. How well would it have gone over if Barack Obama had spent months carefully planning the raid only to have a massive terrorist attack happen before it was carried out?
Then the raid itself: first we were told bin Laden returned fire, using his wife as a shield. Then we heard that he was unarmed and never used his wife as a shield. We were told that bin Laden was somehow part of resisting the raid, but without a weapon.
And it seems we may never know more, because bin Laden was supposedly executed by the Navy SEALs. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald, there won’t be any embarrassing or revealing trial to enlighten the world.
Was bin Laden shot as we’ve been told, or has he been dead for years? We really haven’t been given proof either way. We just have to take their word for it. And the media are happy to do just that.
The most absurd part of the story was bin Laden’s body being buried at sea because of “Islamic tradition.” The first time I heard this, I thought it was a joke. Apparently the media didn’t find it funny. They were quite happy to report it like it was the most logical thing in the world.
Last night on The Colbert Report, we were treated to Lawrence Wright (author of The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11) telling us that other terror groups are now chomping at the bit to take over from al-Qaeda. We don’t even need a new enemy now; it’s enough to suggest that there will be one.
We also don’t know if the Americans knew where bin Laden was all along (a very strong possibility, I feel). If they did, they could have waited until his value as a live threat became less than his value as a dead trophy.
We do know a couple of things, though. We know there is a mountain of evidence showing that the 9/11 “attacks” could not have been carried out by 19 guys with box cutters. We know there had to have been involvement at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and perhaps other governments. This latest bit of theatre changes nothing.
We know that the FBI leadership kept its agents from zeroing in on bin Laden in the months before and after 9/11. We know that the Taliban government in Afghanistan offered to turn bin Laden over if the U.S. would show the evidence that he was guilty. They said they had evidence but it never materialized.
And we know that the FBI, by its own admission, had “no hard evidence” against bin Laden for the 9/11 false-flag operation. That doesn’t stop the media from referring to bin Laden as the mastermind behind 9/11.
The truth is that the whole bin Laden scenario sounds like it belongs in a Hollywood movie, not in the real world. People have apparently decided they are ready for a happy ending, and the U.S. government has given it to them. Whether it’s real or fictional doesn’t seem to matter.
It is really quite amusing and sad.
Amusing how many millions of people believe that real terrorists existed – even though not one attack took place after 9 11. The underground attack that took place in England has not been proved to be linked to Bin Laden.
Sad – because their are millions of really dumb people out there who would rather spend the majority of their time watching the Jersey Shore and eating hamburgers with 0 trans fat.
I am not a a huge political junkie yet I do have common sense. In observing the events of the past few weeks – it is easy to see that something does not mix. Why were there pics of Hussein after his death and not Bin laden ….we all know the answer and in a way , it is sad that the world did not end on Saturday .
Rick Keene
Not only has the London event not been linked to bin Laden, it was almost certainly a covert government operation. The floors of the trains were blown upward, meaning that the explosives had to have been planted underneath. They couldn’t have been in backpacks as was claimed. Did you know that the Madrid train bombings in 2004 took place exactly 911 days after 9/11?
Too much ….just too much …
I totally agree with your account of bin Laden’s assassination. My own initial thought was: they must have thought that they needed it for some reason at this point in time … if only to enable Obama to go down in their own rewritten version of history as “THE President Who Took Out The Most Evil Man In The World” (but likely for a number of other propaganda-related reasons as well, killing some other birds with the same stone).
I also agree about what you say about the culpability of the media in keeping the official 9/11 fairy tale afloat and sailing. But I also find it difficult to believe that EVERYONE in the media is completely taken in by the official myth. I would rather imagine that there exists an inestimable number of people (in all areas, including govenment) who are simply frightened out of their wits over letting their doubts be known – or, of acting in a whistleblowing capacity by revealing suppressed evidence, etc.
There exists an incredible level of fear surrounding the subject of 9/11 (not to mention the mounting fear level in the world at large). Is it only a matter of time – of staying the course until these levels of fear begin to erode and disintegrate of their own accord? Or, can something be done to speed this process? I’d be interested in knowing your take on this…
… and since I thought about them while I was writing the above, here are a few verses from Yevgeny Yevtushenko, thrown in free of charge:
“A certain scientist, Galileo’s contemporary, / was no more stupid than Galileo.
He knew that the earth revolved, / but he had a family. / And after he got into a carriage with his wife / after accomplishing his betrayal, / he reckoned he was advancing his career,
but in fact, he’d wrecked it.”
(“A Career”, written for Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, “Babi Yar”)
What can we do? That’s the big question. I think we have to get active and spread the word the best we can. Let everyone know where you stand so that others will begin to reconsider their positions. I link all my articles to Facebook and I know some of my “friends” think I’ve gone off the deep end. But I no longer care. I’d rather be seen as a crazy person and be right than a reasonable person with his head in the sand.
There’s a great initiative by former Senator Mike Gravel designed to get an investigation of 9/11 on the ballot in Massachusetts. I’ll be writing about that soon.
Thanks for the comment.
You’re quite welcome. In the meantime, I’ve had the chance to think through a bit more thoroughly what it was I was getting at above. I hope you’ll forgive me when I add these further thoughts on the media’s role in suppressing the facts surronding 9/11. Take your time in answering – there’s no hurry.
During the question and answer session following David Ray Griffin’s presentation at the Toronto hearings, Griffin was asked whether Wikileaks might provide any help in the quest for 9/11 truth. Griffin answered that he didn’t think so since the Wikileaks revelations came too long afterward, no longer belonging to the 9/11 time frame (I’m paraphrasing both question and answer). All of this is obvious: one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find any 9/11 revelations in the much later appearing Wikileaks publications.
What Wikileaks HAS accomplished, however, is to create a globally changed atmosphere in the civic sphere regarding how governments worldwide rely heavily on maintaining state secrets. We “knew” it all along – but when the hard proof makes it into the light of day – well, these “revelations” have a rather different impact. In effect, Wikileaks has made a hole in the fabric of the curtain behind which we were not supposed to look. I’m asking whether this hole might be exploited and made larger – or, to use another metaphor, so that the fabric covering the official lies begins to unravel a little bit quicker.
One cannot hope to make any headway with mainstream outlets such as the NY Times or Der Spiegel (whose acess to and subsequent publicaton of Wikileaks material is well known). On the other hand, mainstream media employs numerous journalists whose personal views may not always fall perfectly in line with the official stances of their employers. Therefore, it would seem to make sense to systematically remind journalists (no matter where they’re found) of their responsibility to approach what has been made known by civil society in an impartial and professional manner (or, as Graeme MacQueen has put it “…It’s not a question of trusting ANYBODY [either government or civil society] – but it’s a question of respecting civil society enough to READ the bloody stuff that they write.”)
I’m not a journalist (actually, I’m an artist living in Germany since 1990). A recent poll conducted by the reputable Emnid Istitute revealed that “85.5% of Germans
are convinced that the US government is not telling us the real truth about the attacks of 9/11; two thirds think that the German government can be blackmailed.” In 2002, the German journalist Mathias Bröckers published one of the first books dealing with the inconsistencies in offical 9/11 account. In July of this year Bröckers published a further book (with Christian C. Walther): “9/11 – Ten Years later. The Collapse of a Building of Lies” (according to Bröckers, the book will also appear in English translation). In a recent TV interview Bröckers stated that in the time since his first book appeared, a number of his journalist colleagues have approached him saying that – while they fully agreed with the evidence he’d presented in his 2002 book – they didn’t want to have anything to do with the subject. (Incidentally, Bröckers has had extensive interviews and reviews of his recent book on all three major public TV outlets in Germany: 3sat, mdr and ARD. All were extremely favorable.) It would seem – to me, at least – that journalists need to be more persistently reminded (in the best case by journalists) that they are not doing their jobs. This is what journalist Glenn Greenwald does relentlessly with his journalist colleagues when it comes to the subjects of war, the culture of state secrecy, the US Government’s disregard for the rule of law, etc.- while Greenwald himself appears to let the official account of 9/11 go wholly unquestioned.
One the most frustrating things about 9/11 to me is the attitude of journalists. I have worked in mainstream journalism for more than 20 years, and if you have really strong non-mainstream opinions about politics you start being viewed as someone who can’t be counted on to be “objective.” This is truly unfortunate, because what they really mean by objective is that you don’t challenge the existing power structure. People who are willing to shake the tree, so to speak, are marginalized. The ones who have ambitions of career advancment quickly learn what views will help them achieve their goals.
On Wikileaks, I do not share the optimism that it might rip that curtain wide open. In fact, I’m downright suspicious of the whole Wikileaks phenomenon. It happened too easily and has been too readily embraced by the mainstream press. I think it’s entirely possible that the whole thing is a front, and that it is intended to do two things: to give people the false sense that it’s possible for our media to give us the real secrets of government, and to justify a later clamp down on Internet freedom. We’ve already heard talk of “cyber terrorism” and even a “cyber 9/11,” whatever the hell that means.
I believe the medium- and long-term goals of the power elite include taking away the freedom of the Internet under the guise of fighting “threats.” We can’t expect any help for this from Julian Assange (who rejects all talk of 9/11 being an inside job).
No – I certainly don’t expect anything from Assange relating to 9/11 truth, either. My only point about Wikileaks is that – intentionally or not – it has underscored in the public consciousness that state secrets are real, rampant and ongoing (this is the hole or opening I was talking about). The official 9/11 account is surrounded by state secrecy. Wikileaks as a phenomenon is something else altogether … and I basically agree with your assessment of it. My only wish is that journalists in the 9/11 Truth movement would focus on the fact that many of their colleagues are not advancing their careers by “not rocking the boat” – but actually destroying them … and execute this knowledge in the manner of a Glenn Greenwald.