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Issue 9 - Fall 2004 / Winter 2005page. 7 |
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BY BARRIE ZWICKER
Hello. I’m Barrie Zwicker, journalist and media critic. Welcome to The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw.
On this program, we ask questions the 9/11 Commission and the media never asked. We introduce experts you’ve never seen before, and provide background you never get. We recommend books, magazines, videos and DVDs you’ve probably never heard of, and websites the media keep under wraps.1 We avoid thought-stoppers such as ‘anti-American’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’, and that new word, ‘believedtobelinkedtoalQaeda’.
US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared: "The greatest thing we have to fear … is fear itself." And indeed, fear may well be the greatest single human motivator. It can serve us and it can save us. But ill-founded fear – that’s another story. For instance, before we commit to a war based on a threat we’re told to fear, before we commit our children’s blood, and billions of dollars to that war, we’d better be sure the threat is real, that a clear and present danger exists. Because war itself is to be feared.
The ‘War on Terrorism’
US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought fear. Today’s leaders traffic in it, chiefly the fear of … terrorism. That’s it. Not global warming. Not the end of oil. Not domestic and worldwide injustice. Not rampant militarism, not war itself, or even war without end. Just … terrorism. The words are hypnotically repeated: terrorism, terrorist, terrorist threat, and of course, ‘believedtobelinkedtoalQaeda’. These words appear in millions of newspaper and magazine headlines and are embedded by the billions in stories.
But it’s the so-called "war on terrorism" that’s in our faces practically 24/7 as the inescapable focus of our existence and the justification for great sacrifice.
Donald Rumsfeld: "One day our grandchildren will look back on this time and ask, ‘How was the War on Terror won?’ And we will tell them about the brave men and women who gave their lives so that we could live in freedom."
BZ: Some would have it that our support for this new quasi-religion, the so-called war on terrorism, is the measure of our commitment to country and civilization. This program explores interwoven fictions that make up the fabric of the so-called war on terrorism. It explores the promiscuous issuing of terror alerts. It explores the biggest secret and dirtiest deception of all: bloody terrorist events carried out, not by foreign but by our governments, to trick the public into supporting war and police state agendas. We explore, in particular, the radioactive core of today’s terrorist hysteria, namely the official story of 9/11, the over-arching fiction and crime and cover-up of our time.
Before you see this program, or after you do, there may well be another state-sponsored dirty deception. If there is, and the information in this program helps you to see it for what it is, it will have been worthwhile.
The ‘Official Story’
The sacred text at the heart of the so-called war on terrorism is the official narrative of what happened on September 11th, 2001. Namely, that the whole of US intelligence, civil aviation, military and the political apparatus is caught completely off guard by one evil man and his small network of co-conspirators.
George Bush: "America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining."
BZ: That provides ready-made, easy-to-hate villains and their motives. "They hate our freedoms," George Bush repeats, over and over. But the official story just doesn’t make sense, as we will show. It’s exploited, as planned, by its creators, the government. But final responsibility for the unbelievable story, living on to the extent it does in the public mind, lies with the vast majority of my colleagues in the mainstream media. If they ever start to do their job properly and examine it skeptically, the official story will crumble into dust finer than that of the Twin Towers.
Now absolutely no one disagrees that 9/11 was a conspiracy. Conspiracy is at the heart of the official story, after all – a conspiracy perpetrated allegedly by Osama bin Laden. But what if the conspiracy were hatched not in a cave in Afghanistan, but in Washington, D.C., at the highest levels of the US government? What if the public found out the official story is a Big Lie? How might that change plans for endless war?
There are other paths to true security and lasting peace. The first step on those paths is to expose the official 9/11 story for what it is, a contrived fiction. And then to demand a true accounting of what happened on 9/11 and who was behind the events of that day.
Retail and Wholesale Terrorism
Terrorism has been with us for a long time. It tends to be the last resort of the powerless suffering under acute injustice. And as such, one person’s terrorist is seen by another as a freedom fighter. This is what Noam Chomsky calls retail terrorism, that carried out by angry or paid individuals. But then there’s wholesale terrorism, that carried out by states.
Robert Jensen writes in the Houston Chronicle: "For more than five decades, throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism. And it has supported similar acts of terrorism by client states."
He could have reached back further. In his new book The American Empire and the Fourth World, Anthony J. Hall, according to one reviewer, "connect(s) the unspeakable crimes visited upon indigenous people since the conquest by Columbus in 1492 to … today’s so-called war on terror …"
According to Hall himself, "the imagery of terrorism (has) replaced that of savagery and (then) communism as the main explanatory catch-all to describe the real, illusory or manufactured enemies of the American way of life."
So, on one side – ours – the use of terror either is not admitted or is simply defined as not terror, and the other side’s terror is defined as the only kind of terror. Terror, then, needs to be put into perspective. ‘Perspective,’ writes Lawrence Martin, former Washington correspondent for The Globe and Mail, "is a ghost in American journalism. … Last year, acts of terrorism killed 300 to 400 people, ranking it so far down the list of dangers… that it is barely visible." He might have added that 300 is the number of Americans struck by lightning each year.
Another note about appearance and reality: the vast majority of people arrested as terrorism suspects are released without charges being laid. It’s the arrest stories with those Arab names and pictures that remain in the public mind as reality. Isn’t there a pattern of state-sponsored, media-abetted, deception here?
The Reichstag Fire –
‘Fact is Stranger than Fiction’But the dirtiest secret about terrorism is also by far the largest. Many spectacular acts of terrorism are fearsome fakeries carried out by cabals within governments. And I mean our own governments. The gold standard is the attack on one’s own country to mobilize public opinion for power, political gain and profit.
The Nazis masterminded the torching of the Reichstag – the German Parliament buildings – on February 27th, 1933, one week before a national election. That they did so is historical fact, portrayed best in William L. Shirer’s masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Within hours, Hitler and his henchmen designate the Communists as the villains, and label them terrorists. The government promises proof but never provides it. The communists did not do it. A single communist was the patsy.
The Big Lie of who torched the Reichstag is used by Hitler to sow fear. He bullies the German President to sign a decree suspending seven main articles of the German Constitution. The claim is that the Fatherland – think ‘Homeland’ – is under threat. Ensuing arrests and murders of communists and socialists terrorize anti-Hitler dissent. In the ensuing election Hitler does not get the majority he needs to rule, but soon after, he essentially seizes power. He then is free to launch pre-emptive strikes against other countries and wage a world war sold as patriotic. The ultimate result for Germans is calamitous: 600,000 civilians dead, seven and a half-million homeless – their country broke and in ruins. The Reichstag fire was a major turning point.
Within hours of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Bush White House designates the alleged villains. Within 30 days the US Constitution and the civil liberties of Americans are weakened by near unanimous passage of the Patriot Act. A war on terror is announced. Within months pre-emptive strikes are launched against Afghanistan and Iraq, though no evidence is produced that Iraq took part in 9/11. Dissent in the USA is under fire even as millions in the USA and worldwide oppose the Iraq war. The White House announces that the ‘war on terror’ – in effect, world war – may never end. At least a thousand Americans are soon to die in Iraq alone. Expenditures mount into the trillions.
The so-called war on terrorism justifies the mounting deaths of US soldiers and civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, justifies the little-publicized construction of giant new US military bases overseas and is the basis for the doctrine of pre-emptive war, contrary to international law and basic morality. It’s responsible for grotesquely ballooning deficits to pay for all this – debts being passed on to coming generations – and plans for even more expenditures on terror-fighting bureaucracies.
The so-called war on terror is cited as the ultimate basis for sharp increases in domestic spying and reduction in freedoms and civil liberties at home and attempts to criminalize dissent.
All this because the official, authorized truth is that foreign terrorists attacked the USA on 9/11. As we tape this in the Summer of 2004, fear grows as authorities and pundits predict more terrorist events – on the scale of 9/11, or greater. The I-word – ‘inevitable’ – is increasingly used.
Cui Bono – Who Benefits?
The designated scapegoats of 9/11 gained nothing positive from it. On the other hand, even the hardliners in Washington themselves agree 9/11 boosted their agenda. Who benefits from more of the same? The fear campaign, always resting on the official 9/11 story, looks deliberate.
Again, what if the official story of 9/11 is a Big Lie? You probably don’t know if you’re trapped inside the cocoon spun by the North American media industry, that there is in fact widespread skepticism about who was behind 9/11.
30% of Germans, according to reliable polls, think the US government had a hand in it. They remember that big Reichstag deception. A poll done in Canada in May 2004 showed 63% of Canadians think "individuals within the US government including the White House had prior knowledge of the plans for the events of September 11th, and failed to take appropriate action to stop them."
In this program we present some of the accumulating evidence indicating that lying behind the Great Deception of 9/11 is the Great Conspiracy of 9/11. But first, more historical context. When we come back, three true stories of fake attacks on America.
Barrie Zwicker is an author and broadcaster. He produced 'The Great Deception', a video that strongly suggests US government complicity in the events of 9/11. He has been for 15 years the regular media critic for VisionTV, a Canadian national cable channel. All rights reserved. Copyright belongs to the author.
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For the rest of this story, plus many more extras, please get your copy of Issue #9 at our on-line store.