According to my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the word “conspiracy” derives from the Latin “conspirare,” which means literally “to breathe together” in the sense of agreeing to commit a crime. The primary definition is “planning and acting together secretly, especially for a harmful or unlawful purpose, such as murder or treason.”

It was in this sense that Mark Twain astutely observed, “A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.”

Conspiracies are common. If they weren’t, police stations would not need conspiracy units to investigate and prosecute crimes such as “conspiracy to import cocaine” or any other collusion on the part of two or more people to subvert the law.

Unfortunately, too many people smugly chide “conspiracy theories” as if they imagine that such a derisive characterization reflects superior intellect—whether or not they know anything about the issue in question. It’s a pitiful display of ego inflation and intellectual dishonesty, yet it appears to be a common approach preferred by those either short on information and critical thinking skills or harboring a hidden agenda.

Here are a few examples of past “conspiracy theories” that have been commonly derided but were later determined to be credible:

1933 Business Plot: Smedley Butler, a decorated United States Marine Corps major general, who wrote a book called War is a Racket, testified before a congressional committee that a group of powerful industrialists, who had tried to recruit him, were planning to form a fascist veterans’ group that intended to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt and overthrow the government in a coup. While news media at the time belittled Butler and called the affair a hoax, the congressional committee determined that Butler’s allegations were credible, although no-one was prosecuted.

Project Paperclip: After “winning” World War II, the US imported hundreds of Nazis and their families through “Project Paperclip,” so-named because ID photos were clipped to paper dossiers. It was set up by an agency within the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA. Along with creating false identities and political biographies, Paperclip operatives expunged or altered Nazi records and other criminal histories in order to illegally circumvent President Truman’s edict that prohibited Nazis from obtaining security clearances. Thus, high-level Nazis waltzed into sensitive positions of authority and secrecy in the US military-industrial establishment, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), major corporations, and universities. These Germans were conveniently referred to as “former Nazis,” but “former” was commonly just a euphemism for “active” and “ardent.”

Consider the irony of the United States’ moon mission. In order to successfully land men on the lunar surface and return them to Earth, the US depended almost exclusively on Nazis. A notable example was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a member of the Allgemeine SS, who would eventually lead the US space program. Von Braun had exploited concentration camp labor in Germany to build V-2 rockets at Peenemünde, and German aviation doctors’ gruesome and often fatal experiments at Dachau and other prisons afforded information that would help keep American astronauts alive in space.

While many Americans would prefer to call it a conspiracy theory, the United States defeated the Nazi organization in Germany only to transplant that ideology directly into the US after the war, and not just among members of the lay population but, more significantly, among members of the very “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower (a five-star general during WWII) had presciently warned the nation about in his 1961 message of leave-taking and farewell.

Operation Northwoods: Declassified documents revealed that in 1962 the CIA was planning to execute false flag terrorist attacks, such as killing random American citizens and blowing up civilian targets, including a US airliner and ship, in order to blame Castro and justify invading Cuba.

Gulf of Tonkin: President Lyndon Johnson used a contrived version of this 1964 event to justify escalation of the Vietnam War. It was claimed that Vietnamese gunboats had fired on the USS Maddox. It never happened—or at best was grossly distorted and overblown—yet the story served to prompt Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided the public justification Johnson needed to attack North Vietnam. This led to the deaths of about two million Vietnamese people and fifty thousand Americans.

MK-ULTRA: As its code name suggests, MK-ULTRA was a mind control program run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence for the ostensible purpose of discovering ways to glean information from Communist spies although its applications were undoubtedly more far-reaching. It employed various methodologies including sensory deprivation and isolation, sexual abuse, and the administration of powerful psychotropic drugs such as LSD to unwitting subjects, including military personnel, prisoners, and college students. Many of them suffered serious consequences. One biochemist, Frank Olson, who was secretly slipped a strong dose of LSD at a CIA meeting, suffered a severe psychotic break and died when, for whatever reason, he plummeted from his apartment window to the pavement below. Such revelations came to light in 1975 during hearings by the congressional Church Committee (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. These investigations were hindered by CIA Director Richard Helms who in 1973 had ordered the MK-ULTRA files destroyed.

Operation Mockingbird: This was a CIA media control program exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. It revealed the CIA’s efforts from the 1950s through the 1970s to pay well-known foreign and domestic journalists from “reputable” media agencies such as the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Miami News, and CBS, among others, to publish CIA propaganda, manipulating the news by planting stories in domestic and foreign news outlets. During the hearings, Senator Church asked an agency representative, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” The speaker eyed his lawyer then replied, “This I think gets into the details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in executive session.” In other words, he didn’t want to admit the truth publicly. He gave the same response when asked if the CIA planted stories with the major wire services United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP). In his 1997 book, Virtual Government — in the chapter “’And Now a Word from Our Sponsor – The CIA’: The Birth of Operation Mockingbird, the Takeover of the Corporate Press & the Programming of Public Opinion” — Alex Constantine claims that during the 1950s “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts.” I’m curious to know what the estimate would be today.

CIA Drug Smuggling: It’s no longer a secret that clandestine arms of US Intelligence have profited from running drugs for many years. I first became aware of the issue when a Vietnam veteran claimed he had helped load opium cultivated in Laos onto military transport planes. The opium was turned into heroin and shipped around the world, sometimes in the visceral cavities of dead soldiers. A Hollywood version of these events is portrayed in the film Air America, but the movie is based on historical truth. When the US military presence in Southeast Asia declined and the focus shifted to Central America, cocaine became the new revenue source. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb ran a well-documented three-part series in the San Jose Mercury News called “Dark Alliance” alleging that traffickers with US intelligence ties had marketed the cocaine in Los Angeles and other cities where it was turned into the new and highly addictive form known as “crack,” inflicting a scourge that claimed the lives and freedom of thousands. One guy I met in Compton who had been arrested for crack possession described the drug this way: “It doesn’t really get you high,” he said. “You just want more.” Webb’s allegations were confirmed by an LAPD Narcotics Officer and whistleblower, Michael Ruppert, and the story received additional confirmation from CIA contract pilot Terry Reed, whose story is revealed in his 1994 book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA. According to Reed, the sale of cocaine was used to finance the Contras in Central America when congressional funding was blocked by the Boland Amendment. He claimed the operation was run out of Mena, Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. Military cargo planes were flown to Central America with military hardware, he said, and then returned to Mena loaded with coke.

I could add to the list, and it would be a long one. The Iran-Contra scandal, Watergate, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Tuskegee syphilis experiment—there is no shortage of crimes that were planned and committed by two or more people and thus constituted conspiracy. Conspiracies happen, and before any crime is solved it spawns theories. There are people who look at these theories rationally using logic and discernment, and there are others who are illogical, engaging in fallacious, emotion-based thinking and jumping to unjustified conclusions based on little or no evidence. The term “conspiracy theorist,” however, has been manipulated to suggest only those in the latter category.

The John F. Kennedy assassination provides a good example of how the term “conspiracy” has been misapplied to disparage people who find fault with official versions of major events. After Kennedy was murdered, very few people questioned the Warren Commission’s verdict that Lee Oswald had shot the president unassisted, and anyone who challenged that belief was branded a “conspiracy nut” (or buff) unworthy of respect or consideration. Forty years later, a 2003 Gallup poll revealed that 75% of the US population believed there had been a conspiracy to kill JFK.

Apparently some people have a psychological need to protect themselves from unpleasant realities, so it’s easier for them to label others as conspiracy nuts than to assimilate hard but discomforting facts. In the case of the John Kennedy assassination, even a congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded in 1979 that there had been a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. They tried to soften that reality by calling it a “limited conspiracy” as if Oswald’s drunken cousin had helped him and not elements of US Intelligence, but the fact remains that the US government has officially admitted there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. “Conspiracy theorists” were finally vindicated, but I’ve never heard anyone apologize for disparaging their names and questioning their sanity.

“9/11,” of course, is the current topic that yields the most accusations of conspiracy nuttiness. Anyone who challenges the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions are branded “conspiracy theorists” (or nuts, wackos or kooks) as were their predecessors when JFK was killed.

History repeats itself.

One of the strange truths about the 9/11 affair is that members of the 9/11 Commission also called the event a conspiracy. That alone shows the term is being intentionally manipulated. In the Commission’s view, the conspirators were exclusively fanatical Muslims, but somehow that investigative body has been exempt from accusations of conspiracy theorizing even though they called the event a conspiracy. Apparently one must challenge the official version of events to qualify as a “conspiracy theorist.”

I asked Jim Marrs, the popular author and critic of various official versions of history, what he considered to be the origin of “conspiracy” as a derogatory term and how it has been manipulated: “The term ‘conspiracy theory’ was consciously submitted to assets of the CIA back in a document from the 1960s to be used to counter factual information that was continually being made public regarding the Kennedy assassination. From there, these assets, including media personalities, pundits, academics and government officials, expanded the term to become a pejorative for any statements not complying with the Establishment line,” Marrs said. “However, its repetitive overuse, plus the fact that the 9/11 attacks obviously involved a conspiracy, today has lessened the impact of the term.”

Many critics of the 9/11 Commission report make some valid points, and it’s not fair to simply dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when the very people they’re countering also claim there was a conspiracy. The question is simply: whose conspiracy was it?

Even officials tasked with investigating 9/11 knew there was plenty of deception involved. Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, said on page four of his book The Ground Truth, “At some level of government, at some point in time, there was an agreement not to tell the people the truth about what happened.” In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, the two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, outlined reasons they believe the government established the Commission in a manner that ensured its failure. These reasons included delay in initiating the proceedings, too short a deadline for the scope of the work, insufficient funding, and lack of cooperation by politicians and key government agencies including the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and NORAD. “So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail,” the chairmen said.

How much clearer can they be?

Conspiracies exist. They have always existed, and not wanting them to be true does not invalidate their existence. I think it’s time we reject the intentional misappropriation of the term “conspiracy” by forces attempting to manipulate public opinion and restore the term to its original and proper meaning. As long as we observe logic and reason, there is no intellectual dishonor in contemplating and discussing conspiracies, and doing so is imperative if we wish to retain what’s left of our liberties.

The post Rethinking Conspiracy appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

For the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, the mainstream media has offered an unprecedented level of apparent bias against reasonable people invested in justice for the victims of 9/11. The majority of articles below imply that “truthers” are driven by a fear of chaos and uncertainty to draw comfort from misdirected rage. Most of the articles make sweeping generalization about those involved while others are outright insulting.

The post 10th Anniversary 9/11 Truth Hit Piece Roundup appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

I have little doubt that over the years, Bill Moyers and Robert Parry have received a multitude of emails from people demanding they give attention to the cover-up of 9/11. I have little doubt that a large majority of those emails talked about “crazy” theories, or made accusations of them for not covering certain issues. Unfortunately, there are people in the 9/11 Truth Movement who do these things. I, myself, have been known to write a nastygram on occasion.

However, it is well known and said by many that after the 9/11 attacks, the media in this country did not do it’s job. Dan Rather said on May 17, 2002, “there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.” On April 25, 2007, Dan Rather told Bill Moyers that “there’s no question that we didn’t do a good job. We weren’t smart enough, we weren’t alert enough, we didn’t dig enough, and, we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.” Helen Thomas was adamant about the media’s failure after 9/11. “They (the media) rolled over and played dead.”

Here is just one example of too many to mention of the media not doing it’s job.

On January 31st, two acts of civil disobedience for 9/11 Justice were committed in front of the White House and 10 Downing Street respectively. Not one news outlet reported on it. Even a news outlet that promised me they would report on it, did not. The excuse given to me was that Egypt’s revolution was more important.

On that same day, the September Eleventh Advocates released a statement pertaining to 9/11 Whistleblower Berhrooz Sarshar. This statement asked, “that the transcript of Mr. Sarshar’s interview be immediately declassified,” and that they respectfully request, “that the former Chairman, Governor Thomas Kean, Vice-Chairman, Mr. Lee Hamilton and the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Mr. Philip Zelikow, promptly answer the questions herein.”

Neither Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, or Philip Zelikow responded. As a result of their refusal to respond, 9/11 Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds released a transcript of one of the times Berhrooz Sarshar testified. This transcript speaks of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and an order from above to disregard any knowledge of it. Not one news outlet reported on it.

9/11 was the event that created the “Post-9/11 World.” If any information comes out that says we were lied to about that day, then that is essential, newsworthy information. Period. For some reason, our media doesn’t agree with me.

It is the media’s job to make sure citizens’ are aware of what’s going on in their country, and in the world. It is absolutely essential that we are an informed citizenry because if we aren’t, then we pay a huge price.

With that in mind, can you blame advocates for 9/11 Justice for getting angry with the media for not covering the obvious problems with the “official account” of 9/11? Bill Moyers says the facts still matter. I agree, and that’s why I wrote an article entitled The Facts Speak For Themselves. You may agree or disagree with some of the content in that article. However, I challenge you to tell me after reading it that it isn’t absolutely imperative to have a real investigation into the 9/11 attacks, the event that created the “Post-9/11 World.”

Click Here To Read Bill Moyers Attack Against Advocates For 9/11 Justice.

The post Response to Bill Moyers on 9/11 Truth appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

(Last October, I angered some on the Left by noting that the four previous examples of progressives trying to punish Democrats by sitting out elections or supporting third parties – 1968, 1980, 1994 and 2000 – didn’t work out very well, either in the short- or long-term. I meant the piece to be a historical review of these tactics but it apparently touched some raw nerves.)

Similarly, my brief criticism of the “truthers” prompted a wave of angry e-mails and blog postings. In part, I was accused of showing inadequate respect for the “truther” research and was scolded for not delving deeply enough into the intricate arguments behind their claim that 9/11 was an “inside job.”

But the truth is that I have devoted way more time to these preposterous notions than they deserve. And, since time is a zero sum game, every hour wasted on this strange parlor game means that real crimes and government wrongdoing get neglected. Still, there may be lessons to be learned here, though not the ones the “truthers” would want.

In following the curious twists and turns of the “truther” movement over the past nine years, I have become concerned that the anti-empiricism which has long infected the American Right has now spread to some quarters of the Left (although I realize that many on the Left reject the “truther” allegations as nonsensical and that some on the Right have embraced them.)

Indeed, if you were to teach a course on sophistry, you might wish to make a case study of the “truther” movement, which has deployed nearly every imaginable example of false logic, from the use of endorsements as a substitute for evidence to insistence that any miniscule doubt on one side of an argument requires its rejection while even the thinnest possibility on the other must be accepted as serious, if not true.

This kind of evidentiary game-playing is what I had grown accustomed to in dealing with the neoconservatives, such as their exaggerations of foreign threats, from the 1980s (when Nicaragua’s Sandinistas were a danger to the Panama Canal and Texas) through George W. Bush’s presidency (over Iraq’s WMD) and even to today (with worries about Iran’s nuclear program).

For instance, when Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons were arguing for war with Iraq, they insisted that even a one percent possibility that they were right about Iraq sharing WMD with terrorists meant that their fear must be accepted as certainty, while the counterpoint that Iraq had no WMD had to be proven to some impossible 100 percent level. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “One Percent Madness.”]

Using such imbalanced – and irrational – constructs, in effect, predetermine the outcomes, since you can never prove something to 100 percent certainty and there is always a chance for some one percent feasibility on the other side. These loaded-dice arguments can lead nations into ill-conceived wars or persuade people of arguments that otherwise would be dismissed as crazy.

‘Truther’ Narrative

Though many “truthers” shy away from an explicit recounting of their presumed narrative – favoring instead “poking holes” in the official story – here is some of what they seem to believe:

Operatives working for President Bush wired 100-plus floors of the World Trade Center towers with explosives as well as the support structure of nearby Building Seven. They did all this – a complicated process that would have taken a large team of experts weeks and would have required extraordinary access to the buildings – without anyone seeing anyone doing any of this.

Then, when the two planes crashed into the towers on 9/11, Bush allowed them to burn for a while before deciding that the maximum psychological effect required that the buildings be brought down. So, the explosive charges were detonated remotely in sequential order from the top down.

After the fire and devastation spread next door to Building Seven, Bush’s team also detonated explosives there to bring down that smaller tower, presumably with the motive of destroying government documents that were located in offices there.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a third plane was approaching the Pentagon. Passengers onboard made frantic phone calls describing the hijacking. Plus, since the Pentagon is not in some secret location – it sits next to Interstate-395 and can be viewed from high-rises across the highway in Crystal City – some hundred or so people reported seeing the plane head into the Pentagon.

Some of the plane’s wreckage was strewn across the Pentagon grounds, and authorities later reported recovering the plane’s black box inside the Pentagon. But “truthers” insist that no plane hit the Pentagon; that Bush’s team attacked it with a missile.

However, nobody saw a missile. Nor would there be any way to explain the plane wreckage on the grounds, since nobody saw more Bush operatives driving around the Pentagon grounds planting fake pieces of the plane – even as emergency personnel and others rushed to the crash site.

To label the “truther” version of the 9/11 events nutty would seem an understatement – and there are other parts, including stuff about fabricated voice messages, that are arguably crazier. Indeed, the “truther” account has sometimes struck me as a parody meant to bring ridicule on more serious conspiracy investigations such as those into the JFK assassination.

As I pointed out in the earlier story – the one focused on Palin’s victimhood – there has not been a single witness (or document) emerging from the ranks of Bush’s supposed operatives to suggest that any of the “truther” narrative happened – even though the scope of this conspiracy would have required scores, if not hundreds, of participants.

Having covered many real government conspiracies in my career, I can assure you that there are always witnesses who speak for a variety of reasons: a guilty conscience, a boast to a girlfriend, a plea bargain when they get in legal trouble on something else.

In writing about Oliver North’s secret Iran-Contra network in the 1980s, our team at the Associated Press had two dozen sources. For our first Contra-cocaine story in 1985, Brian Barger and I had a similar number of sources, including documents from Costa Rica and a White House official describing a CIA analytical report on a Contra helicopter purchased with drug profits.

Yet for the “truther” conspiracy theory, more than nine years have passed and not a single witness has emerged who participated in planting the explosives floor by floor in the Twin Towers or carrying out the missile attack on the Pentagon or any other capacity that the conspiracy would have required.

Manufacturing a Case

Lacking any real evidence, like a knowledgeable witness or a government document, the “truthers” have built their case on alleged anomalies in the collapse of the buildings and on the shape of hole left in the side of the Pentagon. Though in all cases scientists and engineers have provided plausible explanations for these events, the “truthers” have tried to counter by marshalling their own supporters who are willing to challenge these analyses.

For instance, the “truthers” have long claimed that the collapse of Building Seven is the prima facie case for their conspiracy theory, especially, they say, its drop at near freefall speed. However, the speed of the collapse should not be all that surprising because Building Seven had a large atrium. Once the atrium’s supports were breached by the shock of the Twin Tower collapse and a resulting fire, Building Seven would logically fall into the open space at near freefall speed.

Similarly, the structure of the Twin Towers, with interlocking beams allowing them to have height without the weight of older skyscrapers, would have produced the falling in on itself effect once the beams were weakened by the impact of the planes and the heat from the fires.

However, since the events of 9/11 were unique – i.e. no one had tested flying fuel-laden passenger jets into buildings identical to the Twin Towers or the Pentagon – it is impossible to assess the various factors with 100 percent certainty. Thus, under the rules of the “truther” parlor game, the official analysis must be dismissed and a contrary analysis – however implausible – must be taken seriously.

On other points, the “truthers” have simply stretched the truth. For example, one “truther” claim was that they had discovered a residue of explosive thermite in the World Trade Center wreckage. However, when I checked their source, I saw that the claim was actually that the residue was consistent with thermite, not that it was thermite.

Much residue found after a major fire can be “consistent” with thermite, but beyond that, scientists noted that thermite doesn’t provide the explosive force for a building demolition. So, the “truthers” transformed their discovery into “nano-thermite,” a claim that is still making the rounds.

As for the Pentagon attack, the “truthers” claim that the aluminum wings of the plane would have cut a horizontal gash in the reinforced concrete walls of the Pentagon. Scientists, however, have explained that the angled-back wings actually would have compressed against the sides of the plane creating the more circular hole that was left.

But the “truthers” have claimed that the circular hole proved that Bush’s team had fired a missile into the Pentagon (though no one had seen such a missile.)

Similarly, evidence that al-Qaeda actually carried out the attack – that it was as Jon Stewart has said “an outside job” – must be rejected. Even confessions (or boasts) from al-Qaeda leaders must be thrown out because, the “truthers” insist, these admissions only resulted from torture (for those in U.S. custody) or from CIA fabrications (for those not in U.S. custody).

So, when Ayman al-Zawahiri issues one of his videos seated in front of a poster of the burning Twin Towers or when Osama bin Laden praises the hijackings, those statements must have been faked by the CIA – and you can’t prove to a 100 percent certainty that they weren’t, can you?

A Disinformation Campaign

My concern about the “truther” movement dated back to almost its origin. Because of the position of Consortiumnews.com as an Internet site which has investigated real conspiracies since 1995, I was in on many of the early e-mail exchanges regarding the 9/11 case.

Essentially, the discussion broke down this way: Some participants felt that Bush had demonstrated his arrogance and incompetence when he brushed aside warnings about a likely al-Qaeda attack. (This is the position that I personally feel is best supported by the available evidence).

A second group, however, took the same evidentiary frame and gave it a nasty twist, that Bush knew the attack was coming and “let it happen.” (Though I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to support this conclusion, this analysis at least has the benefit of some factual foundation.)

But there was a third group, which maintained that something more dramatic was needed, that Bush had so bamboozled the American people that they needed to be shocked out of their trance – and to do that required convincing them that “Bush made it happen.”

Perhaps, because of its splashier allegations, the “Bush made it happen” crowd — with claims about “controlled demolitions” and a “missile hitting the Pentagon” — emerged as the dominant force in the “truther” movement, eclipsing those who favored more targeted investigations into such areas as 9/11 funding and the role of Bush’s allies in the Saudi royal family.

These more extreme “truthers” started out with their “made it happen” conclusion and then assembled their case. That is the opposite of how real truth-seeking occurs (with the evidence first assembled and then objectively analyzed before any indictment is made).

Some on the Left have defended the “truthers” as at least well-meaning, since Bush’s administration was seen at the time as assaulting the U.S. constitutional republic and possibly creating an American-style fascism. The ends of disrupting Bush justified the means of spreading disinformation.

There was a sentiment, too, that Bush, Cheney and the neocons (who seemed to wish for something like another Pearl Harbor to justify their military interventions abroad) deserved a taste of their own medicine, even if the “truther” narrative was wildly implausible.

As the years went by, I would occasionally cross paths with “truthers” and listen to other arguments they made for their cause. Some felt that their movement was the “only” approach that was getting “traction” against Bush. Others claimed “9/11 truth” could be the impetus to get progressives to invest in media (something that I have long advocated).

Yet, these pitches were about achieving political ends, not about meeting the evidentiary needs of a serious investigation.

Indeed, at times, “9/11 truth” has taken on the feel of a political movement, if not a cult. One elderly historian told me that he had felt “pressured” by “truthers” to give them something that they could cite as an endorsement of their position. Other notable people on the Left have described meetings with “truthers” as akin to “recruitment” sessions.

So, despite the latest rash of angry e-mails, I repeat my advice in the wake of the Tucson massacre – that just as one would hope the Right would rein in some of its crazy allegations about President Barack Obama’s birth and its violent rhetoric against members of Congress, one might also expect that the Left would show similar care in its propaganda attacks on President Bush.

Update: On Sunday, in a profile of alleged Tucson gunman Jared L. Loughner, the New York Times reported that as “a curious teenager,” Loughner “became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government. …

“His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government.”

Given how a mentally disturbed young person can process information (or disinformation), it is incumbent on all of us who speak in today’s public square to be responsible, especially when we make serious allegations like suggesting that Bush and the U.S. government “made” 9/11 happen.

The need for this careful behavior is true for the Right and it is true for the Left. The Center (including the mainstream press) also has a deep responsibility to examine suspicions of government wrongdoing when there is credible evidence and to have the courage to speak truth to power regardless of the pressures and consequences.

For the Center to renege on that duty (such as when the mainstream press attacked Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine reporting in the mid-to-late 1990s) may be rationalized as “good for the country” in the short-term (by discrediting ugly truths) but whitewashing only feeds the public’s appetite for conspiracy theories on the Right and the Left.

In other words, to help avert future tragedies like the one in Tucson, all parts of the U.S. political/media system need to work better and take their responsibilities to the public more seriously. That would include not spreading wild accusations with weak or non-existent evidence, but it also would require holding Bush and his associates accountable for what they actually did.

Surely, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to decry (and investigate) what Bush did in office: his use of torture, his misleading the nation to war, his reckless tax cuts for the rich, his botched economic policies, and, yes, his failure to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks.

However, it doesn’t help the cause of accountability to make unfounded allegations against Bush – indeed it hurts. By floating unsubstantiated and bizarre claims about “controlled demolitions” and a “missile hitting the Pentagon,” the “truthers” actually make it harder to proceed with investigations into important areas of doubt about 9/11, like the financing and the Saudi role.

As for the crazy stuff, enough is enough.

Related Article: Robert Parry Decoupling From Reality

The post Robert Parry's 9/11 'Truth' Parlor Game appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The 9/11 truth movement is all too familiar with these kinds of attacks, but this all-out assault of lies and hypocrisy by the Washington DC-based Rock Creek Free Press must surely be a milestone in snitchjacketing.

911blogger.com front paged the article on their site, where it has been thoroughly deconstructed in the comments section. 9/11 whistleblower Kevin Ryan called the attack “ignominious” and challenged the newspaper to publish his rebuttal. One particularly piercing analysis of the Rock Creek hit piece is provided by Michiel de Boer aka SnowCrash.

Read ’em and weep: 911Blogger.com Accused: Is Leading 9/11 Truth Site Working For The Other Side?

The post 911blogger.com Accused of "Working for the Other Side" appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

An Assessment of the 9/11 Truth Movement

Five years ago – on my birthday – the shadow government of the United States murdered over 3,000 of its own citizens (and hundreds of others) in a “false flag” operation designed to galvanize public support behind a war for control of the world’s last remaining energy reserves. Many of us quickly saw through the “big lie” of 9/11 and began a movement to expose it, to reveal the truth, in the hopes that this would bring an end to the War on Terror, a war destined – if it continues – to turn nuclear.

And now, five years later, what have we accomplished?

In short, everything and nothing. We began this movement to convince the American public and the world that the official story of 9/11 was a lie, and that ruling factions within our own government were the real perpetrators. This we accomplished. Opinion polls conducted over the last two years show that the majority of Americans believe the US government was complicit. We bombarded every mainstream and alternative medium available with information, from Air America to internet blogs. We handed out leaflets in cities and towns across the country, held signs on street corners, wrote letters to everyone we could think of. And you know what? It worked. Today it is rare that I talk to a person who doesn’t believe the US government was involved in the attacks in some way. Compared to just two years ago, when people would look at us like we were crazy for suggesting such a thing, this is an amazing success.

Or so it seems. For at the same time, not a single perpetrator of 9/11 has been prosecuted, and the War on Terror continues unabated, as does the endless stream of lies and propaganda designed to keep us fearful and compliant. Why this discrepancy? What accounts for the 9/11 Truth Movement’s seeming victory in shattering the American public’s blind acceptance of the official story, and the stark reality that nothing has changed politically? In other words, why, in the midst of total success, have we failed?

This is the question I have been asking myself over the last few years. As co-founder of the first national activist organization for 9/11 truth, the 9/11 Visibility Project, I devoted two full years of my life to building this movement. And to see it grow from a handful of struggling yet dedicated individuals into the enormous yet ultimately ineffective movement it is today, saddens me to no end. Thus for me this is not merely an academic question. I mean it honestly: why, in the midst of a seeming total success, have we failed?

The answer to this question, many have concluded, involves the lack of political will of the people of the United States. It is one thing to know the truth, and quite another to act upon that truth. Democracy Now is a case in point. A great many of us have had conversations with Amy Goodman and the other producers of Democracy Now, and they all know the official story of 9/11 is a lie. Yet except for a few segments we forced them to air as a result of our public pressure campaign (where they for the most part ridiculed us), they have chosen not only to ignore 9/11 truth, but to affirm the official story again and again in their programming.

Many other examples can be given, not only from the left media, but from senators, congressmen, Eliot Spitzer, etc. How many of these people know the truth, yet do nothing? (Cynthia McKinney may be the one notable exception). Where is the political will?

But to blame the American people alone for their lack of courage in opposing US imperialism fails to ultimately answer the question, for we must also ask why such a lack of courage exists in the first place. Certainly it isn’t a lack of courage in general. The American population regularly demonstrates great courage and political will when it comes to social and domestic issues. And neither do I believe, as some cynical observers claim, that the majority of Americans secretly support US imperialism, that given the choice they would rather see millions of innocent foreigners die than reduce their own oil consumption and powerdown. If such was the case, there would have been no need for a 9/11, and there would be no need for the ongoing lies and deceptions. Simply citing the lack of political will among the American public thus begs the question, for the answer we seek is exactly that which accounts for this lack of courage when facing the truth of 9/11.

Here is my assessment. The reason for the discrepancy between what people know about 9/11 and what they are willing to do to stop the War on Terror; the reason we have ultimately failed, in other words, has to do with the scope and sophistication of the political and social control mechanisms used against us; namely, disruption and disinformation. I have been an activist for 20 years, and I have seen and experienced COINTELPRO-style disruption many times in the past. Yet never before have I witnessed it used on such a scale and with such precision as I have within the 9/11 Truth Movement. There are thousands of examples, but let me give you just a few.

1. When we launched our Democracy Now campaign, we asked activists and the general public to send them emails requesting they have David Ray Griffin on their show. We provided a sample letter, but encouraged people to write their own, and we asked them always to be polite. We also provided them the email addresses to send their letters, and we included our own email address in the mix, so we could see what kinds of letters Democracy Now was receiving. What happened was very telling. For every two or three emails they received that were respectful and well-written, they received one that was either highly insulting, vehemently anti-semitic, or down-right ludicrous. The timing and repetitive use of specific phrases among many of these emails revealed a coordinated effort to disrupt our campaign and convince Democracy Now not to associate with us.

2. When we launched our campaign to get the attorney General of New York State, Eliot Spitzer, to open a new investigation into 9/11, we began an online petition drive and received thousands of signatures. Shortly after our campaign website went up, another website was launched duplicating our campaign and promoting preposterous claims designed to make the 9/11 Truth Movement appear ridiculous. Thus a clear message was sent to Eliot Spitzer that opening a new investigation into 9/11 could easily destroy his reputation by associating with people who believe, among other nonsense, that the planes on 9/11 were merely holograms inserted onto TV screens.

And these are just examples of reactive disruption efforts (in response to things we do), which aren’t even the primary methods they use against us.

Controlling Your Opposition by Becoming It

One lesson the shadow government has learned over the last 40 years is that the best way to defeat your opposition is to become your opposition, and like many of those phony socialist and anti-war groups on college campuses that suck rebellious student energy and dissipate it ineffectively, preventing the formation of a legitimate, effective opposition, so have they taken over a large part of the 9/11 Truth Movement itself, channeling new skeptics (and old) into endless debates around physical evidence and other ineffective actions. During my entire time within the movement, I never once named publicly any individuals or websites I thought were intentionally promoting disinformation, or leading us down useless avenues, nor will I now. (This is to protect myself from reprisals, to avoid the further disruption caused by the endless cycle of “snitch jacketing,” and because you can never really prove who is an agent and who is simply duped by the disinfo itself, much of which is easily believable on the surface.) But to prove that agents are among us, and that they have succeeded in taking over the bulk of the movement, one needs to go no further than compare the number of people who believe no plane hit the Pentagon with the number of people who know about the simultaneous wargames that were taking place on the morning of 9/11, and that prevented NORAD from intercepting the planes before they hit their targets.

The former claim, widely believed, is perhaps the most successful and sophisticated disinformation campaign injected into the 9/11 Truth Movement. Supported by doctored video footage released by the Pentagon itself, it has almost single-handedly made the movement the laughing stock of Washington DC residents, hundreds of whom saw the plane hit the building, and thousands of whom have relatives or friends who did. And this was likely its intention, for it has successfully alienated from the movement precisely those DC professionals (senators, congressmen, federal judges, prosecutors, etc.) who hold enough power to effectively investigate and prosecute the crime. It has also been the primary wedge used to divide the movement from itself. While there is no space here to delve into the details of the “no plane at the Pentagon” hoax, I am forever indebted to Mark Robinowitz for having the stubborn persistency to keep challenging me back when I, too, believed the hoax. I am also immensely grateful to Jim Hoffman for his unparalleled analysis of the Pentagon physical evidence.

On the other hand, the wargames comprise the very heart of the operation. On the morning of 9/11 itself, the FAA and NORAD were occupied in air defense drills simulating none other than multiple airline hijackings. These drills included fake blips inserted onto their radar screens, as well as remotely controlled aircraft in the air posing as passenger jets. Thus the perpetrators of 9/11 (those overseeing the wargames) were able to incapacitate the US air defense system without having to order a stand-down, allowing the operation to succeed. Because of the wargames, NORAD personnel did not know where to send the fighter jets when the supposedly “real” hijackings took place (likely also being flown by remote control). They acknowledged this during the 9/11 Commission hearings, with no follow-up questioning of course.

How many people have heard of the wargames compared to the “no plane at the Pentagon” theory? How many 9/11 Truth websites make reference to the wargames compared with the Pentagon hoax? And how many 9/11 truth activist organizations do you know emphasizing the wargames as opposed to all the various physical evidence arguments? The answer to these questions will tell you a lot about the state of the movement, and who really controls it. (Incidentally, the world should be forever indebted to Mike Ruppert, who put the pieces together about the wargames and presented them in their proper light, first on stage to a small audience in Toronto, which included myself, and then in full detail in his book, Crossing the Rubicon.)

So we shouldn’t place all the blame upon those individuals who willfully ignore the truth of 9/11. Certainly there is an element of cowardice involved, a lack of integrity, and a selling out. We know, for example, that Democracy Now received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Ford Foundation specifically to report on 9/11. But what would happen to Democracy Now if Amy Goodman chose integrity over money? The same thing, perhaps, that happened to Mike Ruppert? This is not to excuse Goodman’s willful ignorance, her selling out to the very government she professes to oppose. (I don’t listen to her show anymore, but I read From The Wilderness every day.) I simply want to recognize the immense power of that government, a power that can murder 3,000 people and get away with it, a power that can induce good activists to sell out, and better ones to flee the country. (Living to fight another day is not so condemnable, after all.) Herein lies an important factor in our failure.

More About Disinformation

One of the characteristics of 9/11 disinformation a lot of people have a hard time grasping is that much of it is designed specifically to convince people of US government complicity in 9/11. This might seem like a contradiction, until one understands that 9/11 disinfo is part of a broader system of mass manipulation where the opposing perspective plays an essential role. The basic idea is to control both sides of the debate, and frame it in a way that makes the opposing side ineffective (not necessarily unbelievable). In the end it doesn’t matter whether even a majority of the people believe the US government was complicit in 9/11 (this is already the case). What matters is only that the perpetrators can never successfully be prosecuted. Thus they pollute the body of evidence with red herrings and false lines of inquiry. If, in the process, they happen to cause some people to disbelieve the official story (as in the case with the “no plane at the Pentagon” hoax), all the better, because the end result is a weakening of any legal case that might be brought against them.

There is an important quote by E. Martin Schotz from his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy. It is: “One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known.” Conspiracy theories, in other words, provide the perfect cover for real conspiracies. When anything can be believed because the available information is a convoluted mix of truth, falsehood and probability; when the actual truth itself is convoluted, involving deception, mystery and illusion; then one is ultimately left to their own emotions to decide. And emotions, of course, can be easily manipulated. What do you want to believe? After all, it’s up to you. You’ll never know the truth, or at least you’ll never be able to prove it in a court of law. Do you really want to be marginalized and ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist? You get the idea.

The World Trade Center Collapse: A Necessary Illusion

In my two years of 9/11 truth activism, I never emphasized the physical evidence. I always knew it was a dead end that would suck the movement’s energy and accomplish nothing. But let me be straight up for a moment, if a bit speculative, because thinking about these things is helpful. They demolished the World Trade Center towers with explosives. I have no doubt about this, just as I have no doubt that the planes were flown by remote control. I also believe that hijackers did, in fact, board the planes (despite the articles claiming some of those named are still alive). I think the hijackers were trained US operatives (patsies), and that they likely did not know they were going to die. I also think the most probable explanation for the shoot-down of flight 93 is that the passengers did, in fact, storm the cockpit, only to discover that the plane was being flown by remote control. And so in order to prevent any of them from calling their loved ones and blabbing (yes, phones can work on planes), they had to shoot it down. Or perhaps the hijackers themselves learned their real fate and allowed the passengers into the cockpit to try to regain control of the aircraft. We’ll never really know, and this is the idea. “Anything can be believed,” and so it is equally plausible, as others have speculated, that the shoot-down of Flight 93 was planned from the beginning.

But the World Trade Center demolition is obvious, which leads to an important question: why did they do it? Wouldn’t simply crashing the planes into the buildings have been enough? Why bring them down completely? The typical responses here apply: They needed their “New Pearl Harbor,” a mass casualty event to shock the public into supporting a retaliatory war. They also needed a spectacle that wouldn’t be easily forgotten. These explanations are true enough. Another often cited and plausible one is that they needed to make the lie obvious enough that the people who mattered (government, corporate, and military leaders, for example) would know that they–the secret government within the government–did this and got away with it. This sends a powerful message of invincibility to anyone who might be thinking of opposing them. And the fact that they demolished building 7 later that evening in a classic-style demolition sure seems to support that argument. It’s as if they were saying, “just in case you didn’t get it the first time, we’ll show you one even more obvious.”

But there is another reason they demolished the World Trade Center towers, in my opinion the most important reason, which is that they needed the lie to be incredible. As Hitler and Goebbels understood, the bigger and more incredible the lie, the more people will believe it, because they will have to make a bigger psychological leap in order to disbelieve it. Mass manipulation of this kind plays on the natural desire many people have to conform, and it is much more difficult, psychologically, for the conforming individual to disbelieve a popularly-held incredible lie than a mundane one, for to do so would set one widely apart from the herd. To put this another way, imagine if they had merely crashed four planes into the ocean. How much easier it would be then for people to speculate that the government may have done this as a pretext for war. To do so would not require a really incredible contradiction of the official story, marginalizing oneself from the mainstream. It would not be so easy to dismiss such claims as “outrageous conspiracy theory,” and ridicule would be less effective. What is important to remember here is that propaganda of this sort is not designed to fool critical thinkers, but to provide conforming individuals with a reason not to start thinking critically. Thus the total destruction of the World Trade Center in such a dramatic yet obvious way was, in my opinion, an essential, psychological component of the operation.

Note: I have assumed that the reader of this article has some familiarity with the 9/11 Truth movement, and at least a rudimentary understanding of the physics involved in the World Trade Center Collapse. If not, there is an excellent, brand new DVD available: an in-depth analysis of the WTC Collapse from scientists Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan. Steven Jones is a professor of physics at BYU, who has risked his reputation to challenge the government’s official “pancake” theory of the collapse. A sincere and courageous academic who dared to come forward with the truth, he has subsequently been approached by less honest persons who many believe are trying to tarnish his reputation, in part by association with repugnant, anti-semitic viewpoints. And Kevin Ryan is a former lab manager at Underwriters Labs, the company that tested and certified the steel used in the World Trade Center. He was fired when he went public with information about the cover-up in a whistle-blowing letter we first published in November of 2004. In this DVD he explains in detail why the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report on the World Trade Center collapse is a lie.

Conclusion

In the Spring of this year, I gave a presentation on 9/11 truth to the Howard Dean supporters during a Democracy For America conference in Portland, Oregon. (Here is an mp3 of my talk if you want to listen to it.) I felt bad afterwards because there were a lot of new and enthusiastic 9/11 truth activists in the audience, folks who had only recently broke free from the matrix, so to speak, and I basically told them that I felt the movement was over, that we had failed, and that the window of opportunity for obtaining justice for 9/11 was closed for good. While I still believe this, after my talk I realized I didn’t leave any of these new activists with much hope. I want to try and do that now. Yet I don’t want to reaffirm a false hope that the perpetrators of 9/11 will ever be prosecuted. Rather, I want to try to help people transcend and integrate the truth of 9/11 into a broader awareness of the state of the world today, a world where there is much to be hopeful about.

The world today stands on the brink of a confluence three major, global crises: peak oil, global warming and the imminent collapse of the global banking system. All of these are inter-related, and have greed as their ultimate cause. Greed is the common human trait of wanting more than one really needs to be healthy and happy. It exists in (almost) all of us, to varying degrees. Gluttony, for example, the desire for more food or drink than one really needs, is a form of greed. So is lust. Envy, the desire to have what others have, is another form of greed. Greed, to put it another way, is the psyche’s unquenchable thirst for ever-increasing amounts of material energy. It is the false identification of the Self with the material world, and while I don’t want to get overly religious or spiritual here, it is important to understand this, because it allows us to empathize with those whom we may perceive as our enemies, those whom we believe are somehow different from us (yet there really is no “other”). It is only with compassion that we can begin to see the true nature of 9/11, the truth behind the truth, so to speak.

9/11 was a pretext to launch the War on Terror, a war to control the world’s remaining energy reserves in order to maintain the over-consumptive lifestyle that Dick Cheney insists is “not negotiable.” And the War on Terror was conceived in response to peak oil, which threatens to end the current system of corporate greed, over-consumption and exploitation. That system requires ever-increasing amounts of material energy to continue, and peak oil is nothing less than the end of that increase. The War on Terror is, therefore, a war on “terra” to maintain the illusion of perpetual growth, the myth that over-consumption can go on forever. It is an extreme manifestation of the ego’s desperate attempt to live forever, and it is doomed to fail. The earth is finite, and we cannot continue to to deplete its energy forever.

This can be seen as a crisis, which certainly it is, but it is only so in the sense that it demands a transformation of our political and economic systems, our consumption-based lifestyles, and our self-identities. As such it is also an opportunity, an opportunity to transcend our own greed, to face the truth of who we really are (interconnected with everyone else, and with the earth), and to make the necessary and inevitable sacrifices required of us. (Remember that sacrifice is not the giving up of the things we need. It is the giving up of the things we don’t need, including our illusions.)

The neocons are so far unable to make this necessary transformation. They are trapped in the very system they have created, but there are those all across the planet who are trying, starting small and making some of the necessary sacrifices. People are struggling everywhere to create cooperative institutions of mutual aid and solidarity, to resist the forces of ignorance and greed. One needs look no further then the Bolivarian Revolution sweeping across Central and South America to understand this. And there are many people here in the US, as well, exerting the same efforts, implementing a powerdown strategy and working towards the re-localization of social and political institutions.

The question lies in whether the forces of light (reason, compassion, truth) will overcome the forces of darkness (greed, fear, ignorance), whether the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution will sweep over the world, or whether the neocons and their counterparts in other countries will sweep the world away. This is up to us to decide, both collectively and individually, and we are constantly making that decision every moment, in every action we undertake. In that light, let us always remember that we can’t really fight fire with fire. We fight fire with water, and to the degree that we have failed thus far to end the War on Terror, is to the degree that we have based our own actions – our own activism – on anger or fear. I am no exception, and yet like many, I aspire.

Towards Peace and Truth,
Emanuel

The post Five Years Later: What Have We Accomplished? appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.