Archive for the ‘911’ Category
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bbc_wtc7_videos.html
Download Video 15.6 MB WMV full video
Richard Porter, the head of news at BBC World issued this explanation of the BBC World video:
- We’re not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.
- In the chaos and confusion of the day, I’m quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate – but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did – sourced our reports, used qualifying words like “apparently” or “it’s reported” or “we’re hearing” and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.
- Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I’ve spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn’t remember minute-by-minute what she said or did – like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wires services.
- We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I’d love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don’t help clear up the issue one way or another.
- If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error – no more than that. As one of the comments on You Tube says today “so the guy in the studio didn’t quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy… “
Below are some selected comments made in reply to Mr Porter’s explanation:
| How deservedly ironic that the BBC gets exposed for what it really is (a propaganda bureau that attempts to indoctrinate Britain and the world with a false reality) so soon after the airing of the appalling hit piece (9/11 conspiracy files) last Sunday night. Please show some respect for the BBC and the license fee paying public by answering a simple question. How did the BBC know that Building 7 was going to collapse 20 minutes before it actually did when prior to 9/11 no steel-structured building had ever collapsed due to fire? |
| I’m not a conspiracy nut. But this footage of your reports of WTC7 collapsing a full 20 minutes prior and repeatedly discussing it’s collapse is highly suspicious.
If you were talking about a building that never did collapse, well then you’d just look incompetent. But as we all know, building 7 did, in a feat that suspended all laws of physics and logic, collapse spontaneously due to fires on floors 7 & 12. You can’t possibly expect us to believe this. Let’s look at all the pieces here.
Grant us logical thinkers at least one thing. This is highly suspicious. The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed. Oh, and the ez-out phrases like ‘it appears’ and ‘we’re receiving reports that..’ were not used throughout this footage. Especially when the anchor starts talking about the (lack of) body count since there was so much time to evacuate since the collapse of WTC 1-2. The BBC needs to reveal what source they drew the conclusion that WTC7 had collapsed. I do not necessarily think the BBC is a witting participant in some 9/11 conspiracy, but it’s definitely looking like you were a pawn. Revealing who/where the BBC received the information that WTC7 had collapsed would be a good start in clearing your name. |
| To report that a building had collapsed before it had done so would be an odd sort of error, wouldn’t it? A bit like reporting that the Lord Mayor’s trousers had fallen down before they did so |
| Let’s say for a second that you messed up and reported a building going down that didn’t – why the exact one that DID? What are the odds? Why not by mistake report a building going down that DIDN’T actually go down?
You lose footage of one of the most important days in modern history… 😉 Out of all the surrounding buildings that suffered massive damage – WTC 3,4,5,6 – and assorted others that suffered minor damage (amoung them, WTC 7 – Salomon Brothers Building), BBC – by merely a mistake and in confusion – picked exactly the right one that was going to fall -…. 😉 BBC should go to Vegas, with those odds – you’d be rich. BBC is not part of the conspiracy – but you are just a bunch of pathetic dupes. You capture the biggest smoking gun in history … and your response is ….. to call yourselves incompetent and go play ‘blind/deaf/dumb monkey’ on your public. Good job, Guys!! |
| “If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error – no more than that.”
Uh, it WASN’T an error… That’s the point. You keep harping on about what a chaotic day it was. Then why didn’t the anchor say something like, “We’re getting some unconfirmed reports of some other building apparently collapsing… We’ll have to check up on this… etc.” No, he had (23 minutes before hand) the name of the building, the correct # of floors in the building (47), the explanation of the collapse (weakened by other collapses), and he was reporting that the building was apparently empty. You even had graphics made up for the scrolling info at the bottom of the screen. That is some pretty precise reporting for a day of chaos when everyone was “…trying to make sense of what they were seeing… and what was being told by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wires services.” And there lies the key (perhaps). No doubt the info was just being fed to the anchor and reporter off the wires as the news would cross… So, which agency fed that bit about WTC7 collapsing? AP? Reuters? VOA? We’ll probably never know, but you got the information from some source more than 23 minutes before it happened (had to be longer than 23 minutes, because there must have been some delay from the time the story came over the wires and the time the anchor actually got the news out on the air). Do I think the BBC is “…part of a conspiracy”? No… but you were played perfectly by some entity, IMO. |
| With respect, the response to this issue is unacceptable. At the very least you are minimizing your error and trivializing the life’s lost or the potential of life’s that could have been saved. In the most important final 7 minutes and 15 seconds of the said segment the words “apparently”, “it’s reported” or “we’re hearing” ARE NOT USED in context of building 7. The words used are those have definite and past tense. “Now more on the latest building collapse in New York,…the Solomon Brothers Building collapse… and indeed it has” “What can you tell us about the Salomon Building and it’s collapse?” “When it collapsed” Ticker –“The 47 storey Salomon Brothers building close to the World Trade Centre has also collapsed.” Who is responsible for the newsroom in desk and floor prompters being used by the news presenter? Who is responsible for the news report on the bottom screen news ticker? Who is responsible as the newsroom floor source for giving these people information? What is the complete list of editors and journalists responsible for this program on said day? The words in your statement #4 of footage being lost may very well redefine irresponsible. The BBC Media Management policy clearly states TWO broadcast standard copies be retained one on a separate site as a master. As follows. Ref No. Policy Area / Policy Statement 01 Components to be Retained 01-01 The following components to be retained:- Two broadcast standard copies of all transmitted/published TV, Radio and BBCi output – one to be stored on a separate site as a master One browse-quality version for research purposes, to protect the broadcast materialhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/docs/historical_information/ archive_policies/media_management_policy_overview.htm#top |
| If the footage had continued, we’d all have been able to watch WTC 7 collapse right on your program.
Good thing you lost the feed five minutes before THAT happened in front of all your viewers. What in the world would you have said if that had happened? What is going on here? I’d like a little truth please. |
| I never actually thought I would live to see the day that things would surpass even Orwell, Huxley, Wells, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Zamyatin, Ayne Rand, on and on…but, the virtual reality that the “media” create for us now is truly more unfathomable than even those great minds warned us of. |
| Contrary to the dismissive tone of the “explanation”, whether or not the building was known to be about to fall goes to essential point of culpability for 9/11, foreknowledge.
Those who are in the dock and being cross-examined are not allowed to wave their hands and create a plausible explanation. It’s gone too far for that. There is a disastrous war built on false evidence, and that falsification process may have begun much sooner than is generally now understood. In ordinary life, a witness who lies about one thing will be assumed to lie about everything. And we aren’t talking about private matters, but about the essential role of a government to defend its country. This issue is about credibility of news sources during a terror attack, in which a rush to judgment resulted shortly in an invasion of a sovereign nation, and the BBC know it. Thousands upon thousands of lives have been lost thus far, and there are doubtless more to come |
Ivy Leaguers for an Independent Investigation
March 4, 2008
Declaring dissenters to be mentally ill is a tactic as old as time itself. The Soviets would declare political dissidents to be mentally ill and would ship them off to a mental institution.
The US mainstream media still insist that those who demand an independent investigation must suffer from some sort of mental illness. The Australian Media, the Canadian Media, the Japanese media and the Italian media have for the past few months been airing charges of 9/11 as an inside job. The Italian media has done what the US media is too afraid of doing – allowing family members on air to criticize the official story.
Furthermore, The head of the Coalition of 9/11 families, Bill Doyle, has stated that half of the families suspect 9/11 was an inside job. It is perfectly natural to question the government. It is the constitutional duty of government to leave no stone unturned when investigating a crime as massive as 9/11. The fact that two members of the 9/11 Commission have recently written to the New York Times claiming that the CIA obstructed their investigation, only serves to strengthen our case.
The tactics employed by the US mainstream media are despicable. They denounce questions as “conspiracy theories” in the same manner that the ruling elite denounced dissent as “heresy” during the middle ages. A conspiracy theory is not the equivalent of investigating a crime. 9/11 was a crime. Investigating UFO’s and concluding that they are extraterrestrial phenomena which is being covered up by the government IS a conspiracy theory. Investigating a crime is NOT a conspiracy theory. It is our duty as citizens of a constitutional republic to serve jury duty.
The government has failed to determine who truly carried out 9/11. Osama Bin Laden’s FBI most wanted poster does not accuse him of being responsible for 9/11 – because there is no hard evidence connecting him to 9/11. It is now OUR duty to examine the evidence and determine what truly happened that fateful day.
Saying that 9/11 was an inside job is the result of carefully and objectively examining the evidence surrounding that disastrous crime in much the same manner that we would examine that evidence were we performing jury duty. I have not met ONE person who has carefully examined all the evidence and has concluded that ALL questions have been answered.
If you still have any doubts, the following mental health professionals have examined the evidence and have concluded that 9/11 was an inside job.
Psychiatrist Carol S. Wolman, MD
Psychiatrist E. Martin Schotz
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, as well as Radiology, at Duke University Medical Center D. Lawrence Burk, Jr., MD
Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Ruters University Barry R. Komisaruk
Professor of Psychology at University of New Hampshire William Woodward
Professor of Psychology at University of Essex Philip Cozzolino
Professor of Psychology at Goddard College Catherine Lowther
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies Ralph Metzner
Professor of Psychology at Rhodes University Mike Earl-Taylor
Retired Professor of Psychology at Oxford University Graham Harris
Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Nebraska and licensed Psychologist Ronald Feintech
Ph.D. Clinical Neuropsychologist Richard Welser
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=6228
Thank you George Washington Blog
Astounding FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report as CIA veteran Robert Baer calls for investigation to be re-opened
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Astounding newly released FBI documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act show that alleged 9/11 hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi had booked future flights to San Francisco and Riyadh, suggesting that he was unaware of his eventual fate aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the plane that hit the World Trade Center’s south tower.
The papers consist of a 300 page Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline (PDF link) that was used by the 9/11 Commission but not made public until now.
The 9/11 Commission failed to mention in its final report that Al-Ghamdi was booked onto several flights scheduled to take place after 9/11, including another flight on the very day of the attacks.
The fact that Al-Ghamdi had booked post-9/11 flights obviously gives rise to doubts about whether the alleged hijacker knew the 9/11 attack was a suicide mission and even brings into question if he was on the flight at all.
Citing “UA passenger information,” on page 288 under an entry pertaining to “H AlGhamdi,” the FBI timeline reads: “Future flight. Scheduled to depart Los Angeles International Airport for San Francisco International Airport on UA 7950,” reports Raw Story (excerpt below).
Al-Ghamdi was also booked to fly on September 20, 2001 from Casablanca, Morocco to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and September 29, where he planned to fly from Riyadh to Damman, Saudi Arabia.
The FBI timeline documents also contradict with several other details of the 9/11 Commission Report, notably on the movements of alleged Flight 77 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.
According to researcher Paul Thompson, he believes the Commission cherry-picked the dates of the alleged hijacker’s movements in order to shield their ties with high-level Saudi Arabian officials.
He points to the redaction of the name of a person who is a known employee of a Saudi defense contractor, Omar al-Bayoumi, who lived at the same location, reports Raw Story.
“We know it’s Bayoumi,” said Thompson, “because after 9/11, the Finnish Government mistakenly released a classified FBI list of suspects that showed Bayoumi living in apartment #152 of Parkwood Apartments.” That information is available here.
“But also important is that it strongly suggests that the hijackers already had a support network in Southern California before they arrived,” Thompson continued.
“In the official version of the story now, the hijackers drift around L.A. listlessly for two weeks before chancing to come across Bayoumi in a restaurant [according to Bayoumi’s account],” Thompson added. “Whereupon he’s an incredible good Samaritan and takes them down to San Diego, pays their rent, etc.”
”But from the FBI’s timeline, we now know the hijackers started staying at Bayoumi’s place on Jan. 15 – the very same day they arrived,” Thompson says. “So obviously they must have been met at the airport and taken care of from their very first hours in the US. That’s huge because the FBI maintains to this day that the hijackers never had any accomplices in the US.”
Alleged Hamza Al-Ghamdi appears in his “martrydom tape,” which interestingly enough was only released in September 2006, post-9/11 just like his flight plans were.
Former 20-year veteran CIA case officer Robert Baer, who has previously asserted that 9/11 has aspects of being an inside job, told Raw Story that the new developments immediately demand the 9/11 investigation be re-opened.
“There are enough discrepancies and unanswered questions in the 9/11 Commission report that under a friendly administration, the 9/11 investigation should be re-opened,” wrote Baer.
“Considering that the main body of evidence came from tortured confessions, it’s still not entirely clear to me what happened on 9/11,” he concluded.
Raw Story provides further details concerning how the documents shed more light on the role of Saudi authorities and their complicity in the attack.
These new revelations mark the most astounding 9/11-related developments in many months and are sure to kick of a firestorm of new doubts about the crumbling official government story.
Original Article:
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/february2008/022808_alleged_hijacker.htm
More Lies From The Bush Fascists
By Paul Craig Roberts
22/02/08 “ICH” — – President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.
The fight over the Protect America Act has everything to do with our safety, only not in the way that Bush and McConnell assert.
Bush says the Democrats have put “our country more in danger of an attack” by letting the Protect America Act lapse. This claim is nonsense. The 30 year old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the executive branch all the power it needs to spy on terrorists.
The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.
To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush’s accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bush’s illegal spying.
Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10488458/ when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.
Bush pressured telecom companies to break the law in order to enable his illegal spying. In court documents, Joseph P. Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications International, states that his firm was approached more than six months before the September 11, 2001, attacks and asked to participate in a spying operation that Qwest believed to be illegal. When Qwest refused, the Bush administration withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nacchio himself was subsequently indicted for insider trading, sending the message to all telecom companies to cooperate with the Bush regime or else. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/16/former-telcom-ceo-bushs-illegal-spying-began-months-before-911-attacks/
Bush has not been held accountable for the felonies he committed and for leading telecom companies into a life of crime.
As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush’s illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.
Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.
With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won’t be safe unless Bush is very powerful.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.
Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.
Republicans have used the “war on terror” to create an unaccountable executive. To prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorial office, it is crucial that Congress cease acquiescing in Bush’s grab for powers. As the Founding Fathers warned us, the terrorists we have to fear are the ones in power in Washington.
The al Qaeda terrorists, with whom Bush has been frightening us, have no power to destroy our liberties. Compared to the loss of liberty, a terrorist attack is nothing.
Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.
LewRockwell.com
Article: http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts236.html
President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.
The fight over the Protect America Act has everything to do with our safety, only not in the way that Bush and McConnell assert.
Bush says the Democrats have put “our country more in danger of an attack” by letting the Protect America Act lapse. This claim is nonsense. The 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the executive branch all the power it needs to spy on terrorists.
The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.
To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush’s accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bush’s illegal spying.
Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.
Bush pressured telecom companies to break the law in order to enable his illegal spying. In court documents, Joseph P. Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications International, states that his firm was approached more than six months before the September 11, 2001, attacks and asked to participate in a spying operation that Qwest believed to be illegal. When Qwest refused, the Bush administration withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nacchio himself was subsequently indicted for insider trading, sending the message to all telecom companies to cooperate with the Bush regime or else.
Bush has not been held accountable for the felonies he committed and for leading telecom companies into a life of crime.
As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush’s illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.
Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.
With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won’t be safe unless Bush is very powerful.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.
Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.
Republicans have used the “war on terror” to create an unaccountable executive. To prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorial office, it is crucial that Congress cease acquiescing in Bush’s grab for powers. As the Founding Fathers warned us, the terrorists we have to fear are the ones in power in Washington.
The al Qaeda terrorists, with whom Bush has been frightening us, have no power to destroy our liberties. Compared to the loss of liberty, a terrorist attack is nothing.
Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.
Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).
Author of San Francisco Chronicle piece warning of internment camps says government bombed its own citizens
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
A former Congressman says that the U.S. government created Al-Qaeda and was involved in bombing its own citizens on 9/11, telling a national radio show that elements of the Bush administration assisted the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.
Daniel Hamburg is a former Democratic Congressman who was elected to the 1st Congressional District of California in 1992 and also subsequently ran for Governor of California, finishing in 3rd place.
Hamburg co-wrote a well-received recent article carried by the San Francisco Chronicle in which he outlined the program to incarcerate American citizens in internment camps, which have already been publicly built, during a time of declared national emergency.
Appearing today on the Alex Jones Show, Hamburg said he was working on an article about missing nuclear bombs in relation to the Minot nuclear warheads mishap and agreed that it was possible the story could be used as a cover for the staged detonation of a nuke to be blamed on Al-Qaeda.
“Any government that could bomb its own citizens in the major city of the country could do anything….you can’t put anything past them,” said Hamburg, clarifying that he was referring to 9/11.
“I’m in the assisted it to happen camp – I think there was a lot of help from the inside, this whole thing was not engineered from a cave in Afghanistan,” he added.
“The evidence that Al-Qaeda is actually an arm of the U.S. government is voluminous….I know that’s true,” concluded Hamburg, citing the PNAC group’s call for a new Pearl Harbor shortly before the 2001 terror attacks.
“It’s hard for people to believe that their government could be as insidious as this one is but the evidence is there,” concluded Hamburg
Original Article: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2008/022208_congressman_involved.htm
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday February 17, 2008 10:08 EST
In response to my post on Friday pointing out that nobody outside of the handful of Muslim-obsessed faux-warriors is moved any longer by the Government’s endless exploitation of Terrorism to secure more and more unchecked power, National Review’s Mark Steyn said:
He may have a point: It’s psychologically exhausting being on permanent Orange Alert, especially as the reason for it recedes further and further in the rear-view mirror. A lot of Americans are “over” 9/11, and, while the event had a lingering emotional power, the strategic challenge it exposed has not been accepted by much of the electorate.
The truth is exactly the opposite. There is nothing more psychologically invigorating than the belief that you are staring down the Greatest and Most Evil Enemy Ever in History, courageously waging glorious war for all that is Good and Just in the world. Nothing produces more pulsating feelings of excitement and nobility like convincing yourself that you are a Warrior defending Western Civilization from the greatest threat it has ever faced, following in — even surpassing — the mighty footsteps of the Greatest Generation and the Warrior-Crusaders who came before them.For those who crave and glorify (though in their lives completely lack) acts of warrior courage, play-acting the role of the intrepid Warrior is uniquely satisfying. That’s why nothing can fill the bottomless spare time of bored, aimless adolescents like sitting in front of a computer commanding vast armies and destructive military weapons, deployed against cunning, scary and evil enemies. That’s why the Mark Steyns of every generation create such Enemies, because they are purposeless and aimless without them.
Steyn deeply flatters himself into believing that only he and his tragically small (and shrinking) band of warrior-comrades can bear the “psychologically exhausting” burden of defending The West and its freedoms. Sadly, most Americans — he says — are too weak, too brittle, just not up to the task of bearing the heavy burden of prosecuting the war against the omnipotent jihadi super-villains.
But not Steyn and friends. They are society’s freedom fighters, the Progeny of Churchill, Patton and Napoleon, bravely and tenaciously manning the barricades of Civilization itself. They’ll find a powerful and protective Warrior who leads them; advocate all sorts of fascinating technologies and complex spying schemes to wage the War; spend hour upon hour chatting about battles and tactics and strategies; and endlessly depict themselves as besieged though tenacious. Far from being “psychologically exhausting,” convincing yourself that you are all that — as Steyn and comrades explicitly do — is to bathe oneself in self-affirming and self-glorifying virtue. Nothing could ever compete with such glory when it comes to psychological fulfillment.
Adam Smith, all the way back in 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, described the fun, entertainment and deep psychological fulfillment which Wars against Supremely Evil Enemies provide to many who don’t have to fight them:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . .
They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
One finds vivid illustrations of the twisted syndrome Smith identified in most of Steyn’s war cheerleading comrades, especially its leaders. From Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker profile of Joe Lieberman:
Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”
Far from being “psychologically exhausting,” the Wars against the Most-Evil-Enemies-Ever that take place inside the head of the Mark Steyns and Joe Liebermans are exhilarating and fun, and they provide the weak, purposeless and powerless with their only opportunity to feel strong, purposeful and powerful. Here, for instance, was the response from Steyn’s warrior-comrade, Andy McCarthy, to my post on Friday and to what Steyn wrote:
Glenn Greenwald? Yawn.
Wake me up when he’s interviewed some of the people trying to kill us and spent a few weeks with people maimed in terrorist attacks (I’d have spoken with the dead, but they were unavailable).
Look at how personally vital — how indispensable — the War of Civilizations is to McCarthy, to his identity and sense of purpose. He doesn’t even need to go anywhere near combat, or fight in the Wars he cheers on. He still gets to be on the front line — a gruff, hard-nosed, no-nonsense veteran-warrior who has been in the trenches, who has stared down the ugly realities of the Civilization Wars and — despite it all — still soldiers on. Think of the emptiness and loss of purpose if the Threat from the Enemy were exaggerated and all of that faded away.
This is why our nation’s faux-warriors can never be reasoned with. It’s why their greatest fear is having the Threats from Our Enemies be put into rational perspective, alongside all the other garden-variety manageable threats we face. To argue that they are exaggerating and melodramatizing the Enemy and the threat is to take away from them that which is most personally important to them.
Just consider the grandiose, baroque rhetoric they employ. What they are defending — today’s U.S. — is not merely good. It’s not even great. It’s not even the greatest thing there is on the Earth right now. No — it’s much more grand than that: it’s the Greatest Country ever to exist on the Earth in all of human history. That’s what they’re defending; that’s the magnitude of the burden they bear, the incomparable importance of the crusade they lead.
Conversely, the Enemy they are facing down (from a safe distance) is not merely threatening or evil or scary or formidable. No, it’s much, much more than that. This is the greatest Enemy that exists on the planet, the most cunning and nefarious and evil force the world has ever seen — not just now, but for all of human history. There is nothing remotely like the depravity and power of this particular Enemy — and there never has been. Ever. Everything these faux-warriors face and defend is superlative; there has never, ever been a war like the one they are waging. None of the old rules apply. This is all unique, unknown, the first and most important of its kind.
What’s most confounding about all of this is that they completely evade the most basic instruments of self-evaluation. All they have to do is look back and realize that every generation, in every country, has been plagued by factions suffering from the same self-glorifying delusions — that they alone are the Brave Warriors willing to engage in the Most Important Battle for Civilization Ever. None of it’s new. Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter described exactly this psychological affliction in his famous Harper’s essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.
Shouldn’t basic self-awareness compel the faux-warriors who read that to at least entertain the thought: “Maybe my belief that I’m waging an apocalyptic War of Civilization against The Uniquely Evil Enemy is grounded in a psychological need, one that is extremely common if I look to the past, rather than an objective assessment or any sort of political belief or ideological conviction. Maybe I’m exaggerating the threat posed in order to inflate my own importance and give myself a sense of purpose and power as I convince myself that I’m waging all-important (though risk-free) war.”
Over the past couple decades, prior to the Bush Era, the people who needed the sort of psychological fulfillment that comes from prancing around as Hofstadterian faux-warriors waging Civilization Wars obtained their fulfillment from playing board and video games or, at worst, dressing up on the weekend in camouflage costumes and — rather than playing golf or going fishing — marched around in militia formations, primed to defend the nation from Janet Reno and her squadrons of hovering U.N. black helicopters. It was equally pathetic, but at least the damage was minimal.
But the 9/11 attacks and ensuing events catapulted their paranoia and powerlessness syndromes from clownish sideshow to dominant political faction. And their fevered, self-serving fantasies have empowered the Federal Government beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, created a completely out-of-control domestic surveillance state, subordinated even the rule of law to the lawless dictates of Security State officials, and dismantled long-standing constitutional protections and political values so basic that they were previously beyond debate. In Civilization Wars, all is fair and justified — torture, lawbreaking, domestic spying, limitless government power, because the imperative of their crusade outweighs all.
All of that is bad enough. But listening to the authors of these events martyr themselves by claiming that their crusades are “psychologically exhausting” is really too much to bear. The reason they pursue those crusades endlessly, and will continue to pursue them until stopped, is precisely because the only thing they find “psychologically exhausting” is the prospect of having to live without their Supreme War of Civilization, whereby they defend the greatest things ever, under siege from the most Evil villains ever, with them — and only them — courageous and tough enough to “do what needs to be done” to triumph.
— Glenn Greenwald
by Butler Shaffer
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
~ Arthur Miller
The 200l attack on the World Trade Center was a watershed event for the soul of Americans. Prior to that time, there would have been a significant questioning of the state employing its collective powers to injure or kill persons who had caused no harm to others. This is not to say that most Americans had a pacific spirit, or were unwilling to engage in warfare against others. The United States has long been a war-loving nation, particularly from the period of the Civil War when Americans reveled in a four-year-long holiday for butchers.
But Americans have long insisted that their government’s participation in the amassing of tens of millions of corpses be grounded in some so-called “rational” purpose; that there be some moral “justification” for the well-orchestrated carnage for which the United States would become the primary supplier of weaponry. If the state had to concoct events that provided the offense for which armed retaliation was then demanded, that became acceptable, as long as the details of the scheme could be kept suppressed, such as by labeling truth-tellers “paranoid conspiracy theorists.” As long as they could cling to their state-induced delusions that collective violence served some pragmatic or moral ends, most Americans have been content to allow the state a free reign.
In such ways have most of us sanctioned wars as necessary for protection against those forces who want to “take over the world” and subjugate and despoil us. During my lifetime, Adolf Hitler, “international communism,” and now some amorphous entity known as “terrorism,” have served the purpose of empowering “our” state to do the very things these outside specters are supposed to have in mind (i.e., subjugation and despoliation). Though we have long been taken in by such chicanery, we have insisted that the deception satisfy our beliefs that the state is protecting us from some genuine threat.
Likewise, most Americans rationalize capital punishment as a means of “deterring” criminal acts, thus safeguarding us from those who would victimize others. Without the illusion of deterrence, most of us would see the government’s formalized killing of “criminals” as little more than blood-thirsty revenge, and we would be less willing to accept the practice.
But September 11, 2001, changed all of that. Most Americans – cheerled by politicians, members of the media, and other sociopaths – succeeded in turning most of the country into a multi-million-member lynch mob. For more than six years now, most of our neighbors have been content to play out their roles as participants in a worldwide performance of The Ox-Bow Incident. Such erstwhile values as individual liberty, due process of law, evidence, public trials, habeas corpus, and the like, have been denigrated, their defenders accused of pro-terrorist dispositions.
What has become of the heretofore-insistence that state violence be justified by rational, pragmatic, and moral standards? That, too, has become totally irrelevant to most Americans. Why? What has triggered this nation’s free-fall into collective indecency?
The events of 9/11 were far more traumatic to most Americans than simply the loss of some three thousand lives and the defining edifices of the New York City skyline. That day shattered a number of popular illusions about the “security” people had been conditioned to expect from the nation-state. We had been taxed well into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and regulated to many of the finer details of our lives, for which we had developed the expectation that our lives – and way of life – would be protected from acts of foreign aggression. Of course, most of us didn’t care to question how – and for what purposes – these billions of dollars were being spent, just as most ordinary Germans, in the 1930s, had little interest in knowing why so many of their neighbors were disappearing. We had far more important matters upon which to focus our attentions: the lifestyles of Hollywood celebrities, whether the Chicago Cubs would ever win a pennant, and just what went on in the Oval Office during the Clinton years.
When nineteen men, armed only with box-cutter knives, were able to commandeer airliners and attack the World Trade Center, the solidity of “protection” we had been conditioned to expect from the state turned to warm jelly. The personal privacy and tax dollars we had surrendered to the state in the name of “intelligence gathering,” proved as worthless to us in foretelling the events of that day as they had in anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unconscious voices began to whisper to us that we had been duped; that we had spent much of our life savings in the purchase of a lemon; that, like country bumpkins in the big city with the egg money, we had been fleeced by slickers.
But such inner voices had to be silenced. We had invested our entire sense of being – our very identities – with the nation-state. If our nation had failed to meet our expectations, this would reflect badly on our personal sense of who we are. Furthermore, if the attacks of that terrible day were – as more perceptive minds are aware – the unintended consequences (or “blowback”) of terrible wrongs committed by the government with which we have identified ourselves, we must personally bear some of the responsibility.
Each of us has a “dark-side” to our personality, qualities that our conscious mind prefers not to acknowledge. Whether we act in response to such “dark-side” forces or not, each of us has the capacity for dishonesty, violence, laziness, lying, irresponsibility, racism, and a whole host of other undesired attributes. Mature people acknowledge this fact and, in so doing, reduce the likelihood of acting upon them. Others, however, prefer to “project” such characteristics onto others (“scapegoats”) and then take retributive action against them in the delusion that they are doing something about such behavior. Politics mobilizes these “dark-side” energies into the kind of mass-minded behavior that America has become since 9/11.
Like a lynch mob, reason, moral principles, and factual analysis, find little expression in political mobocracy. When there has been a failure of expectations regarding our attachments to external entities, our “dark-side” forces seek out others upon which to inflict blame. Our economy is in great difficulty; our schools have failed our children; our tax burdens are some thirty times greater than they were in the Kennedy administration; our “defense” system does not protect, but embroils us in wars with more and more people throughout the world; our lives are increasingly policed, spied upon, surveilled, and regulated to ends that serve the interests of others; even our homes can be taken from us and given to corporate interests that desire them. The totality of such phenomena make us aware that the system we have regarded as indispensable to our well-being has failed us; that our world simply does not work well for us.
Is it surprising, then, that most Americans seem willing to scuttle the best characteristics of a civilized society in favor of taking their collective rage out on whoever gets in their way? The evidence is quite clear: neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people had anything whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11, and yet this fact hasn’t diminished the insistence, by most Americans, that the U.S. military remain in that country to kill more innocent Iraqis. Lurking behind the phrase “support the troops” is the real sentiment: “support the slaughter.”
Anyone who has done serious study of the use of torture knows that it is a most unreliable way of getting meaningful information. That such methods also violate basic standards of human decency makes torture both morally and pragmatically unacceptable to sane people. There was a time when Americans would have become incensed were it known that their government was engaged in the systematic torture of people. Today, however, most Americans – along with most of their elected representatives in Washington – refuse to repudiate the practice, demanding only that such atrocities be renamed to make them sound less offensive.
Likewise, capital punishment fails to satisfy the purposes of deterrence that have long been the stated rationale of this practice. Nonetheless, the grisly exercise of this ultimate assertion of state power over life continues to be defended by most Americans.
When America continues to war against a nation that has done us no harm – a war that has cost upwards of a million dead already – and embraces the torture of human beings, and insists upon capital punishment, the question must be asked: why? What purposes are served by such irrational, immoral, and fundamentally indecent acts? What forces have transformed heretofore civilized people into a herd of barbarians?
The answer lies deep within our psyches, wherein reside the “dark-side” forces that can be so easily mobilized to the most destructive of purposes. Americans continue to suffer from a failure of expectations regarding their collective identities. Nineteen men were able to circumvent the system Americans had naïvely believed would protect them, and carried out a horrific crime. The perpetrators, however, were killed in the attack and cannot be punished. The anger that comes from the state’s failure to perform as promised does not subside, and must be directed at someone. Like a man who has just lost his job, gets drunk, and then goes home to beat up his family, most Americans seem willing to express their rage at any convenient target.
The idea that “we” might be the victims of an attack – instead of the expectation that “we” be the perpetrators of attacks – has struck at the very heart of who and what most Americans believe themselves to be. Faced with the discomfort of such a traumatic awakening, most have been content to make the reptilian response of “see – act” and endorse any kind of violence against anyone who gets in their way and can be made to absorb their projected anger. Ron Paul – the only presidential candidate willing to end this immoral and irrational butchery – receives around 10% of the votes in the primaries. His principal opponent, John McCain, appears to be running away with the party’s nomination, on a platform endorsing the continuation of this war for “one hundred” or even “ten thousand years.” What clearer measure of the extent to which most Americans demand the indiscriminate killing of others! It is the continuation of this mindset that, more than any other single factor, will hasten the total collapse of this civilization.
February 18, 2008
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.
Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
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