2006.09.28 The Onion Peeled
This was published at 911blogger.com on Sept. 28, 2006.
This is the hard part. Having peeled the onion (see Part 3), what do we do with it? Since I didn't set out to change reality, but only to reconstruct it, maybe I shouldn't even try to answer this question, because whatever answer I give will be unsatisfactory--to me as well as everyone else. I will be denounced as a wimp and perhaps a cointelpro agent by those who want a revolution, in the form of a popular uprising or a General's Coup, with indictments and arrests. Morgan Reynolds, a former Bush appointee in the Dept. of Labor and director of the Criminal Justice Center in Dallas, has a list of a couple of hundred names, from Bush and Cheney on down, that he is ready to send to the dock, if only there were a prosecutor willing to do it. Col. Donn de Grand-Pre, U.S. Army (ret.), predicts a military "counter-coup" in the near future by generals and officers fed up with the takeover of the military by the civilian "globalist elite" (who staged the coup on 9/11). More than a few seem ready to fight. As one reader of Part 3 put it: "We know the truth, we're not going to back off, we're not going to abandon hope, AND WE'RE GONNA KICK THEIR ASSES!"
At this end of the spectrum, even the word "impeachment" provokes vituperative disdain:
Calls for "impeachment" advance a left-gatekeeper meme that is designed to conflate any opposition with the official controlled opposition (principally the Democratic Party, moveon.org, etc.). Very clever way to muddy the waters and BURY the 9/11 murder/treason/fraud crimes by watering them down and trivializing them. After all, there a million implied reasons for "impeachment": from Valerie Plame to WMD to Abu Ghraib to Tom Delay garden-variety corruption--all watered-down and undifferentiated, all red herrings and all completely subordinate to the generic brainwashing and social-control functions of the fake Democratic/Green/whatever "opposition." After all the president before this one was IMPEACHED for a misplaced cigar and a stained blue dress. So the American public (and the world at large) has already been educated and conditioned to interpret the IMPEACHMENT meme as a twisted joke and trivialization of crimes. Anyone who is serious about nailing the 9/11 perps will not be calling for "impeachment." They will be calling for ARRESTS--indictments, arrests and criminal trials. Because the term "impeachment," especially in American popular understanding, equates to false, fake phony opposition and media preoccupation with sex in the Oval office.
At the other extreme, there are those who react just as Big Brother wants us to, either by not going inside the onion at all, no matter how "radical" their politics (Noam Chomsky), by not going beyond layer 2, where "complexity" makes any sort of action impossible except "more research" (Kyle Hence, see Part 1), or by succombing to the "shock and awe" of transparency. As another reader wrote:
If we believe that man's continued evolution is both inevitable and irresistible, should we not simply accept the emerging changes in social engineering and political control in the hope that, by not slowing down the rate of change with seemingly futile protest, evolution will more rapidly progress towards a more enlightened age?
So let us take stock again of the reality Time and Big Brother have offered us, adding one more world (a much less populated one) for those who believe in the Transparency theory. (World no. 2, those who think Bush et al. did it, can accommodate both the Stupidity theorists and the Complexity theorists.) If we compare this with the situation in 1968, five years after the JFK assassination, there are similarities (a war on in both cases), but there is also a significant difference. How many candidates for Congress were running on a "re-investigate the assassination" platform? I don't think there were any, and I doubt that there were any who even mentioned it.
Today, however, five years after 9/11, we are also in the middle of a war with a rising body count and no sign of an end, much less "victory," and that is indeed more of an issue than 9/11 in most people's minds, but there are at least seven congressional and one presidential candidates running with "9/11 truth" in their platform:
Karl Schwarz (for president, 2008)
John Buchanan (for president, New Hampshire)
Mary Maxwell (New Hampshire, 2nd District)
Carol Brouillet (California, 14th District)
Robert Bowman (Florida, 15th District)
Mathew Woodson (Oklahoma, 5th District)
Craig Hill (for senator, Vermont)
Dennis Morrisseau (for representative,Vermont)
[Since writing this I have discovered others. 911truth.org also lists:
Howie Hawkins, Grn, NY, Senate
Web: hawkinsforsenate.org
David Nolan, Lib, AZ, House Dt 8
Web: nolan2006.org
Samm Simpson, Dem, FL, House Dst 10
Web: sammsimpsonforcongress.org
Bob Fitrakis, Ind, OH, Governor
Web: bobforohio.com
Donna Mancini, Lib, KY, House Dst 3
Web: myspace.com/donna4freedom
Michael Metti, Lib, CA, Senate
Brian Moore, FL, Senate
Peter White, Indep, MA, House Dst 10: peterwhiteforcongress.com
Morgan Stack, Irish parliament, in Cork South Central and Kerry North constituencies.
(Send further information to politics911@911truth.org.) --MDM, Oct. 3, 2006]
Their email addresses are here, some of the at least; the rest have to be contacted online via their websites:
Samm@sammsimpsonforcongress.com
One big reason for this difference is that the connection between the assassination and Vietnam was relatively non-existent in the public mind in 1968. Even today, despite the Oliver Stone film JFK, whose main thesis is that the assassination was an inside job by the warmongers whom Kennedy was threatening to deprive of their lucrative war in southeast Asia, respectable sources continue to disbelieve it (see my long correspondence with Noam Chomsky on this point). By contrast, the connection between 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and possibly Iran, is very clear, being the original "official" (though fraudulent) justification for them.
Thus there are at least two strong streams of pressure, the anti-war movement and the 9/11 truth movement, that can potentially merge into a dangerous threat to Big Brother. Unfortunately, though, the "9/11 truth movement" is cracked into a number of pieces, failing to present one face, which would make it stronger and more dangerous to the powers-that-be. It would only be logical for it also to be teeming with deep-cover agents of Big Brother intent on keeping the "movement" fragmented and chasing its own tail. What exactly was the substance used to explode the WTC? Was it a plane or a missile at the Pentagon? Were the videos of the WTC faked? Can a largely aluminum plane really sink into a steel-frame concrete building without any sign of damage or immediate explosion, disappearing into the wall of a building like a hot knife into butter? Were there any planes at all? Where is the plane debris?
As long as "researchers" can be kept busy with their research and internecine squabbles ("no-planers vs. "plane-huggers"), they will not organize themselves into a political movement. Hence it is to Big Brother's advantage that the potential opposition remain fragmented in as many separate pieces as possible. Thus we have researchers calling each other "frauds," "liars," "plagiarists," "agents," "shills," etc., when with a little tolerance amongst themselves they could agree on a concerted action, like impeachment, as the basis for moving a lot of people in a way that Big Brother would have to notice.
The first devastating rift in the movement came over the Pentagon attack. Some claim the plane had to be a smaller one, but was still a plane; others say it was a cruise missile or a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, such as the Global Hawk). Those who agreed on controlled demolition of the WTC concentrated on their differences, with the more conservative group taking it upon itself to "debunk" the more speculative groups, thus doing the government's job, but with the justification that they were actually fending off a government set-up, a trap, which would be sprung at some point in the future when the government releases the videos of the Pentagon hit, of which there seem to be about a dozen. "Aha," the government will say, "you see your theories about no-planes are wrong and ridiculous. We can see that now because we can see the plane in the Pentagon videos--just like we saw the planes in the WTC videos." This, fear the conservatives, would be a deadly blow to the truth movement in general.
Others argue that this conservative approach is really cointelpro strategy to prevent people from accepting the idea that no plane hit the Pentagon, because once they do that, the government is definitely exposed. If forced to, if there is enough public pressure, the government might admit that those clever A-rabs must indeed have planted explosives, and then try to explain how they could do that with the security of the buildings guaranteed by none other than the president's little brother Marvin. That in any case would be easier to explain, or stall on, than the Pentagon story, because nobody is going to believe that bin Laden's 19 Arabs shot a missile or a UAV into the Pentagon, or that anybody could do that except the US military itself. Thus one can argue that it is in the interest of Big Brother to limit the discussion to the question of controlled demolition at the WTC.
We may have seen some evidence of this limited hang-out beginning to happen, when Bush make the remark recently about "explosives" at the WTC, although this may have been a mere slip of the tongue. Despite the internal bickering, the truth movement, merely by growing, has become united and more threatening, I think, on the issue of controlled demolition, which is easily expressed and which hardly anyone in Time's world no. 2 (or 3) disagrees with. This could lead to real empowerment, if people had the will and ability to build a political movement on the basis of what they agree on instead of fighting like Kilkenny cats.
Why is it that we find the word impeach on so few 9/11 truth websites? How many of the 9/11 truth candidates listed above have a link to any of the rest of them? (None that I could find.) Why are they not working together? Candidates with a common stand on an issue like 9/11 cannot afford not to work together, can they?
This demonstrates, to quote Salandria again, how "the transparent nature of the assassination" [read "9/11"] has "served to paralyze us in a gripping sense of inadequacy" and "effectively destroyed politics." Even without the anthrax letters to two Democratic senators and the news media shortly after 9/11, the notion that this attack was supported by forces considerably more powerful than the current Republican officeholders must have imposed itself on many of those close to the seats of power. It has been suggested that all of the major intelligence services around the world understood immediately that it was an inside job. For any of them to admit this, of course, is an entirely different proposition. The most effective dissenters so far have been Republicans, like Morgan Reynolds, Paul Craig Roberts, and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Why haven't the Democrats, or the Greens or the Libertarians, for that matter, jumped on 9/11 like dogs on a bone, especially after the totally fraudulent nature of the Commission Report has been so clearly exposed?
David Griffin, who is probably the person most responsible for this exposure, speculated at the end of his recent talk in Copenhagen that the "elites," of whatever party, fear an "economic breakdown" if the truth about 9/11 is revealed. Griffin replies that the only thing worse than an economic collapse would be an ecological collapse, caused by global warming or a nuclear winter following nuclear war, which are unfortunately two likely scenarios with the Bush administration.
In the opinion of many, myself included, the most debilitating blow to the 9/11 truth movement is dealt by people like Noam Chomsky, who says the evidence against a US government conspiracy is "overwhelming," quite consistently with his stand over the years against (non-government) conspiracy theories (see "My Beef with Chomsky"). How can one listen to this eminent, and without question brilliant and learned, scholar say this and not feel it must be true, or if not completely true at least so close to the truth that it must be taken very, very seriously? Who can say, and still feel comfortable about it, that this is utter nonsense, or an out and out lie? It reduces me, or elevates me, take it as you will, to blank verse ("Noam").
The only reasonable explanation for the ostrich-like attitude of people like Chomsky, and many of the politicians and media elites, is that they are perfectly well aware of the transparent nature of 9/11, just as they were of the JFK assassination. Shortly after Oliver Stone's JFK came out, Ted Kennedy was interviewed and made the comment, "I think you'll find in the end that the Warren Commission was the most responsible party." I think this is verbatim; I am sure at least of the word responsible. What did he mean by that? Honest? No. Truthful? No. Responsible most likely in the same sense that David Griffin has been given to understand about 9/11: the highest priority is to prevent a general "breakdown." A secondary but also high priority may well be physical self-preservation (remember Paul Wellstone), or at the least preservation of your reputation and access to public attention and the media. A "conspiracy theorist," unless his name happens to be George Bush, is automatically "outrageous" and a kook, no longer to be taken seriously by the mainstream media or, our rulers hope, by anyone else.
Even if we have a thousand different answers to the question of the identity of the Mysterious Secret Forces behind US government power, we know they transcend the current administration. Fletcher Prouty, with whom I enjoyed an extended correspondence, originally put his finger on "the CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World," as he subtitled his 1972 book The Secret Team, but he was never able or cared to name any of the members of this team outside the CIA except T. V. Soong and Averell Harriman. In his second book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy he used Churchill's expression "High Cabal," and in his letters to me (see my Correspondence with Vincent Salandria, 2007) explicitly exonerated the CIA, whom he had apparently come to think of as merely the tools of the High Cabal. My reaction to that was the same as my reaction to all of the Mysterious Evil Forces theories: if the cops are corrupt (the tools of darker forces), you go after the cops. Why? Because we know who the cops are, and we have (theoretically, at least) legal procedures by which to challenge them.
It must have become clear by now why I said at the beginning of Part 1 that Time and Big Brother have made it relatively easy for us by dividing reality into only two worlds rather than three or four, or indeed an infinite number, depending on how many theories of Mysterious Evil Forces one wishes to entertain. This is, in fact, all we need to understand the world, as long as we also understand that the demon we are confronted with in world no. 2 is not limited to the Bush administration, or the CIA. George W. Bush did not kill JFK, even though there is some evidence that his father was involved (see Webster Tarpley's George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography), and the neo-cons could never have pulled off what they have pulled off without the consent of a higher power, a power great enough to silence the mainstream political opposition and news media.
The Kennedy family, as exemplified by the quote above from Teddy, have acquiesced to the murder of two of their shining sons by this Power Elite (to use yet another phrase, this one coined by C. Wright Mills), but lest anyone forget, the King family did not. They got their trial , albeit a mere civil suit for $100 in damages against Lloyd Jowers for violating MLK's civil rights, but the point is, it was established in a court of law that this was done by way of murdering him, in a conspiracy involving not only the minor player Jowers but also the United States government.
THE COURT: In answer to the question did Lloyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King, your answer is yes. Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes. And the total amount of damages you find for the plaintiffs entitled to is one hundred dollars. Is that your verdict?
THE JURY: Yes (In unison).
Now, if you have a conspiracy to murder a citizen of a country, and one who is a dissident and potentially revolutionary leader besides (MLK had come out against the Vietnam war the year before, at about the same time as Robert Kennedy, who was murdered under equally suspicious circumstances the same summer), who do you think had to be the leader of that conspiracy?
The King family got what they wanted, which was a trial and a verdict that said, not literally and not legally but in effect, that the government murdered MLK. It is totally inconsequential that obvious government agents like Gerald Posner immediately inundated the mass media with articles assuring the public that this was only a civil suit, not a criminal trial, so the standard of proof was much lower ("preponderance of evidence" vs. "beyond a reasonable doubt"). Furthermore, the US government was not on trial, so whatever was said in the verdict about government complicity had no legal standing. Posner extended this, with unabashed legal sophistry, to imply "no factual standing," since legally speaking, the guilt of the government, as opposed to the guilt of Lloyd Jowers, had not been established as a fact. This is like saying that it may be established that X killed Y at a certain time of day (amongst many other incriminating pieces of evidence), and that may then be considered a "fact," but strictly (legally) speaking, the "fact" that the murder occurred at a particular time is not a "fact" because that "fact" was not the issue that was adjudicated. The argument that in a criminal trial more such evidence must be accumulated to prove guilt than in a civil trial does not make any individual piece of that evidence (such as the time of day or the complicity of the US government in a murder conspiracy) less "factual" or less true. This was the interpretation given to the trial as a whole by Posner, however--and to be honest, I have yet to find a lawyer who will accept my common-sense point of view.
Nevertheless, I am quite sure that my interpretation is the same as that of the King family, and that this was their purpose in pursuing the trial. I think it was also a consolation on the part of Big Brother, who after all could have quashed the trial the same way he quashed the Garrison trial of Clay Shaw in 1969. It was, I think, a way of saying to the King family (and to all of Black America and anyone else who was interested): "Ok, we did it, and here's your proof, or as much as you're going to get. So much for your historical record. Now forget it." It is what the spooks call a limited hangout, and it seems to have worked. At least, the brothers are no longer rioting, are they?
There is a streak of honesty in Big Brother. "Honesty" is the wrong word, of course, because he uses it as a tool of control, but it is "honest" in the sense that the truth, that is, part of the truth, is often the best way to lie. The spooks, I believe, call this "white propaganda." The transparency of "super-crimes" like the assassination(s) and 9/11 is of course the whitest propaganda, as explained in Part 3. For those who require something more concrete, we have things like the Jowers trial. It is not very far from that sort of limited hangout to the only slightly disguised confession that Time offered us--namely, that we have two choices, with them or against them, "them" meaning quite clearly the US government, and of course the Mysterious Evil Forces in control of the US government, but the pretense that there is a significant difference between these two ideas is apparently no longer seen as necessary.
When Hugo Chavez held up Chomsky's book (Hegemony or Survival) at the UN the other day and called George Bush the devil, he was giving us the same message, in somewhat simpler terms, that David Ray Griffin gives us in Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. It is not that Bush himself, or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, is the devil, but that these people, and unfortunately the government they control, are serving the devil. Whether we take our terminology from the bible, Orwell, Mills, Prouty, or Dwight Eisenhower (the "military-industrial-complex"), in the end we are talking about what I think Griffin describes best as "demonic power."
This is a spiritual concept, but not an abstraction. Abstractions do not shoot presidents, start wars, or fly planes (or missiles) into buildings (or blow them up and make us think planes hit them). People do these things, and of course it is essential to find out whether these people are working primarily out of caves in Afghanistan or out of Langley, Virginia (for example). Thanks to the work of Griffin and many other 9/11 researchers, we are beyond that. The evidence, to use Chomsky's word but to come to a conclusion diametrically opposite from his, is "overwhelming" that the Bush administration, ridden by the same demon that rides over most of humanity today, orchestrated 9/11.
As Griffin says, just as "the American empire plays an explanatory role with regard to 9/11," 9/11 reveals that the US global domination project "is propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system" (p. 183). So it is important to keep spreading the word about 9/11, whether the culprits are brought to justice or not. In the larger picture, Griffin and Chomsky, disagree as they might on the nature of the 9/11 conspiracy, agree fully on the nature of imperialism, and particularly US imperialism. Griffin has made a major contribution, I think, in putting the struggle against imperialism in a spiritual light:
…the battle between divine power and demonic power is a real battle, which means that the outcome is not predetermined…
Insofar as we accept the idea that the divine purposes can be threatened by creaturely power, we can maintain our definition of the demonic--that it is creaturely power that, besides being strong enough to threaten divine purposes, is exercised in ways that are diametrically opposed to those purposes. From this perspective, we must conclude that the United States is today the chief embodiment of demonic power.
This perspective, to be sure, requires an enormous shift in our understanding of the relation between our country and our God. Most Americans who believe in God have been brought up assuming that America is at least basically on God's side, perhaps even the chief instrument of divine purposes in the world. To go from that understanding to the view that our country is instead the chief embodiment of demonic power, hence the primary threat to divine purposes on our planet, is not an enjoyable conversion. But it is, I believe, a conversion that is necessary if our beliefs are to correspond to reality and if we are to be in position to turn our country, and hence our world, in a different direction (p. 180).
Rome wasn't built in a day, and the Roman Empire wasn't deconstructed in a day either. Jesus, whom Griffin (and others) convincingly portrays as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, did his bit, but it is clear that we have to be in this for the long haul. This is the attitude we need to keep fighting, and not to give in to Big Brother's transparency ("shock and awe") strategy, while also recognizing the immensity and long-term nature of the struggle we are engaged in.
It is too easy to say the truth about 9/11 will never come out. We might say so, when we consider that the truth about the assassination of JFK (and others) will never come out either, but if we understand the nature of Big Brother/the Devil, we must also understand that the truth is not something we should look for in government documents or the New York Times. The truth about 9/11 IS out, and readily and amply available to anyone who can use the internet or walk into a bookstore (or watch a very rare broadcast on C-Span). What we can do with that truth, as Salandria (see Part 3) and Griffin have told us, is try to understand the world. That will certainly not lead to an immediate spiritual revolution--and here is where the notion of faith comes in--but it can help us figure out what to do to prevent the most immediate disasters.
A war on Iran, for example, with or without a nuclear first strike, must be prevented at all costs. Impeachment may be a "left-gatekeeper meme," but if it would keep George II from attacking Iran (US troops are already reported to be operating inside Iran), it must be done. Let us hope the Democrats gain control of Congress in November--and work towards getting that done--so that impeachment will become a realistic possibility.
