DEAR BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON

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victor, I am more than willing to respect that the blogs shouldn't be used for a quest on a 9/11 conspiracy.. also I fail to understand why 9/11 people would need N.C to help with their cause.. making an establishment link with 9/11 isn't that important, truly, there is other evidence to show that this establishment is no good.. having people committed to change is better aim so don't go too far away

And that is your thought process regarding the alleged U.S. government 9/11 conspiracy. You feel it in your gut and then you go and find the "convincing proof" you need....you find it on the Internet. And it takes you into a fantasy land that destroys what may be left of your capacity to be a rational and relevant actor.

From the IHT today :

He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. "In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible," he writes.

You know what ? I believe him. He had the best information network of the world, the best ressources available, intelligence ... everything. But what was the main basis of his convinction: just his guts. And he found the convincing proofs he needed.

 

Dmx: I honestly believe you are obsessed and can't let go. I keep telling you guys you are going to lose your minds over this endless nonsense.

In the real world, there are actual struggles to fight regarding empire and inequality at home and abroad and it is absolutely essential for progressive forces seeking relevance to ruthlessly cut ties with people who can't leave this childishness behind. 

You are part of a religious cult and the author you cite is one of your high priests. Your overlords will continue to feed your fantasies for as long as you are willing to swallow it.  I think its probably too late in your case.  It seems that you drank the Kool Aid and are now just waiting to die.

You will now be outraged and accuse me of disregarding your important "facts" but you are not listening.  I think you guys are crazy...mentally deficient.  You don't understand history, society, politics and policy and its unlikely you ever will.  I created a blog post for you....it has your name in it; go use it...knock yourself out there. No problem.

 

 

You admit that "there was a technically illegal conspiracy to drive the U.S. into war with Iraq. Very true." You even admit that it has leaked so it was not contained.

But they did it nevertheless. And it has not destroyed them. What is destroying them is not the exposure of the conspiracy but the failure of the war plans.

So you cannot justify that 9/11 was not an inside job because it could have leak and this would be utterly insane to take such a risk. You just admitted that the Irak conspiracy is a counter argument to this reasoning.

So why do you use an incorrect argument to prove your case ?

Then your are singing the "debunking" of Pop. Mem. Well their book is full of arguments which 1/ are pure speculations (like the pancake collapse theory) 2/ have be refuted sometimes even by US gov. agencies (this is the case for pancake collapse) 3/ and which also contradict each other (you cannot say that the fire was hot enough to melt steel and also that no pools of molten iron where found at ground zero).

Many of this false reasoning has been fully analyzed by David R. Griffin, as exposed by the introduction to his book "Debunking 9/11 debunking" by Paul Craig Roberts (contributor to Counterpunch and former assistant sec. of the tresury under Reagan I)

The problem with well intentioned defenders of the US gov. official version like you are is that they are sure that 9/11 was a Muslim conspiracy (I do not deny that they had the motive for a "blowback") and that you accept every argument that is in favor of your case just because it "proves" your case, not because it is a valid one. What most 9/11 truthers claim is that Muslim did not have the means neither the opportunity to perform 9/11, at least 9/11 as we witnessed it. For example, I mean, they could have hijacked planes. That is of course possible. But there no way they could have flight between half and three quarters of an hour off their flight plan.

There is no way they could have brought down building 7 without even touching it. Nobody has ever provided a plausible explanation of what happened to this building, at least one compatible with the official story. So what they do is simply ignore it.

...and one thing you said I could make out and happen to agree with is that there was a technically illegal conspiracy to drive the U.S. into war with Iraq. Very true. The conspiracy is in fact nicely laid out in Elizabeth de la Vega's wonderful book The United States V. George W. Bush (New York: Seven Stories, 2006) and has nothing to do with you and your "truth" comrades' childish fantasies about 9/11.

The NORAD thing is totally and adequately addressed and exposed as childish nonsense in the Popular Mechanics book cited above. Same for you and your comrades' bizarre theories regarding the collapse of the big towers and WTC-7. I was not consulted by the 9/11 commissioners and do not speak for them. Same goes for the JFK Warren Commission.

I do not claim that conspiracies never occur. I think there was an impeachment-worthy conspiracy to deceive the nation into invading Iraq...part of that conspiracy was the administration's determination to link an al Qaeda operation (9/11...a conspiracy BTW...an al Qaeda conspiracy) to Saddam Hussein. Rational arguments against bizarre Holocaust Denial arguments have been imaginarily "refuted over and over again" by idiot Holocaust Denial advocates. Rational arguments against irrational creationism theories have been imaginarily "refuted over and over again" by irrational creationists.

Are you familiar with Leon Festinger's observations regarding people who believed that Space Aliens were going to invade planet Earth on a certain given day in the 1950s? The day came, the invasion never occurred and the true believers just found ways to believe even more in their bizarre prophecies and beliefs. Festinger's observation of these beliefs helped give rise to the important theory of cognitive dissonance.

I have no respect for your thought process but I do find it interesting in a clinical sense.

Because you use arguments against 9/11 truthers that have been refuted over and over again and either you have no knowledge of this , or you are a complete hypocrit.

Arguments like for instance, no conspiracy because impossible to contain leaks. It is amazing : there WAS a conspiracy to drive the US into war with Irak which has nothing to do with 9/11 and there are proofs (Plame ...) and leaks all over the place (Downing street memo) . But guess what : no one is responsible for this and no one is accountable for this. Rumsfeld is only accountable for failing to win the war. So of course it is possible to contain leaks: you have a constructive proof with the Irak mess. And this conspiracy is FAR WORSE than 9/11 regarding the number of victims. But you did not feel personally threatened by this one: am I right ?

Then you have this argument that refuting Arabs/Muslims complicity in 9/11 is a racist point of view, because we deny the capacity to do it ! Orwellian ! Because accusing them of having killed 3000 americans with still no valid proof, this is not racist !

Then you denounce the industry of conspiracy ! Orwellian again ! How much money does the MIC earns from the worldwide Muslim conspiracy on which the "war on terror" is grounded ? Hundred of billions or more ?

You do not want to debate on the facts : what brought down buildings 1, 2 and 7 ? How could Norad+FAA so miserably fail ? Why does the 9/11 commission report not answer any of those question ? Why did they lie for Afghanistan, Irak and not for 9/11 ? etc ... I stop here, you won't read more.

You are only pushing your "understanding" of why 9/11 truthers are what they are and how the conspiracy by the elite against conspiracists is efficient ... Just to justify that you are right to think what you think. I just do not see why you need to do this.

 

Are you just completely out of it or what Dmx? I know exactly what they think. I've been through it; I've been to dozens of web sites and the rest. My blog post was not intended to debate 9/11 conspiracists at all; it was about the use value of conspiracy thinking and data for the power elite. I mean read the post again, for God's sake. You have a very flawed thinking process in my opinion. And it's not blind hate, Dmx; it's highly informed contempt. You are disgracing yourself here. You were given a post with your name on it; you can make use of it.

Here is what I wrote in the first comment to your new 9/11 conspiracy post:

Welcome to the Victor Wood and Dmx 9/11 Conspiracy Post

 

It is YOU who decided to judge what you call "conspiracists" based on zero knowledge of what they think and who they are. And now you also say that you do not want them to be able to reply to you. When I complain about that : I am childish. Bravo ! I am amazed by the intelligence of your response.

If you do not want to be confronted with these "nuts", do not confront them !! Of course I have other place where I can discuss. I am not squatting your blog because I have nowhere else to express these views. This is absurd : 9/11 truth is every where on the Internet, moreover there are books and documentaries ...

But as you blogged a piece about these "nuts", I supposed you invited them to respond. Obviously I was wrong. You did not want to discuss, you just wanted to insult: I do not see what distinguishes you from Bill O'Reilly on the method. I am really appalled !

By the way there is just one thing in common between Holocaust deniers, Creationist and 9/11 truthers : your own blind hate.

 

But Dmx you are free to set up your own 9.11 nutcase blog or web site or whatever. I decide my blog will not be hijacked by obsessive 9/11 conspiracy kooks or by Creationists or by Holocaust Deniers (all three categories are on the same intellectual level in my honest opinion) and I am now an enemy of free speech? Yes, what a big and far-reaching "censor" I am.  Please - this is childish nonsense. Grow up. And I created a posting link for you guys...on ZNet! Bookmark the link and post away. Granted, I initially gave it an inappropriately insulting name - one that accurately reflects my judgement on you and Victor and the rest of you (I honestly believe) kooks....so what I'll do is rename it; I'll take "nuthouse" out of the title and give it something better.  I'm sorry for that name, but I do not apologize for segregating 9/11 conspiracist comments. And I repeat, why don't you get your own blog?  What is the problem with that counsel?  I just don't see what prevents you and/or Victor from setting up your own blog....

Okay here's the ZNet link for you with a new title: "The Victor Wood and Dmx 9/11 Conspiracy Post" 

http://blogs.zmag.org/ee_links/talking_about_the_usa_bad_country_music_will_not_rescue_fortunate_son_dumby#comment-60524

Set up your own blog and advertise it at that link?  If you like I'll advertise it in a future current post.

I just can't be a platform for all the childish 9/11 conspiracy diversion at this point..there's too much relevant stuff happening.

You guys should go knock yourselves out in venues of your own design, but please believe me when I say you are tragically wasting your minds with it all.   

 

I have been shocked that the last two of my responses were obviously censored by Paul Street. He should be ashamed of what he did ! I have never insulted him. I only expressed dissenting views and argued on them. "Shut up" is the mark of extreme rightists like Bill O'Reilly. As Chomsky said :

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

 

While certainly I have an interest in the events of 9/11, I do not consider myself a fanatic by any means over any subject area. I have many other interests covering several fields. Yes, I have questions about it, and I believe they are reasonable questions over all. And if all of you will notice, I only offer them up when the subject of 9/11 comes up. If Paul does not want a discussion on 9/11 (at least with those with who might differ with him), then perhaps he should not bring up the subject. I'm happy with that. I certainly would not have brought the subject up myself, as a true fanatic would have. We have had so many interesting discussions on history, politics, Israel/Palestine, the US Empire, and so many other subjects. I have thoroughly enjoyed them all. But my greater concern is the viciousness with which I was personally attacked over an issue that he himself brought up. Had I known that he would react so violently against me and call me all those names and slander my character and do what he did with my postings, perhaps I would not have even replied in the first place. I think I have contributed in an even and intelligent manner over time here. I have certainly learned a lot and I have seen some really interesting opinions proffered. But this situation has left me without words to properly express my disappointment and hurt, and yes, disgust. So I feel I cannot continue as a participant on these blogs. This will please Paul and a couple others. But it really shouldn't for they have not shown themselves to be honorable people worthy of true leadership, but instead small-minded and vicious and arrogant. Nor should it please yourselves, the other contributors to this blog. One thing common to most Leftists throughout the world and over time is their sense of openness to those who differ with them, the willingness to debate with intellectual fervor and passion on so many subjects without fear of suppression or reprisal. The willingness to come to the aid of those who would deny that most basic right of one to hold his own opinion and to communicate it freely among brothers who also cherish such rights. What you have witnessed these past few days is a travesty of those principles that Leftists have traditionally held. Goodbye to those that I have learned so much from. I wish you well. Certainly there are those I would be happy to communicate with from time to time, if you wish to use email instead. You can reach me at victor_wood@hotmail.com

Mark Marshall raises the moral and intellectual level of this blog system when he says the following (along with much else that makes sense) to conspiracy nuts: "Do you think Arabs are too stupid and/or technologically backward to take advantage of non-existent airport security and hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings? An earlier generation thought that Japanese could not fly airplanes because of their slanted eyes."

Yes! This is something I often want to say and forget to add when dealing with the 9/11 conspiracists.  Why do they find it so unimaginable that the al Qaeda conspirators and criminals might actually have pulled this off without inside help from Dick Cheney et al.? How impossible do they really think the action was? (The U.S. imperial state was simply unprepared for such an internal aviation attack.) Is there some underlying racist assumption (totally absurd) that Arabs couldn't have pulled this off? 

And of course Mark is sadly correct regarding crucial issues of motivation.  To make matter worse, we are inciting Arab and Muslim people yet further...creating remarkable new motivation for bigger and more terrible terror attacks - operations that could well end up making 9/11 look small in retrospect. 

This was a top-drawer comment - on point and well informed. 

Yes Mark their ignorance is shocking - almost as shocking as the sense of entitlement to mouth off on the basis of fantastic and unsubsantiated "information."  

  

Your position is analogous to saying that the US government must have bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941 because - a) the Japanese were technically incapable of doing so, and/or b) the Japanese had no reason to want to attack the USA, and/or c) even if the Japanese were willing and able to carry out the raid, the USS Arizona could not possibly have sunk as a result of the Japanese bombs that struck it. Yes, New York City was bombed on 11 September 2001. But we must not lose perspective: New York is not the only city that has ever been bombed in this world - far from it. Yes, 3,000 people were killed in New York on 9/11, and that was an appalling loss of innocent life. But many, many other cities in this world have been victims of much larger, much more deadly bombing raids. Do you think Arabs are too stupid and/or technologically backward to take advantage of non-existent airport security and hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings? An earlier generation thought that Japanese could not fly airplanes because of their slanted eyes. You can't understand why Arabs would hate the USA enough to want to bomb New York? You reveal a shocking ignorance of history. As far as the Arab masses are concerned, the USA has in effect been at war with the Arab world since 1967, when it joined the Arab-Israel conflict on the side of Israel. Since then it has used its power to facilitate Israel's permanent control over the lands it captured in 1967. This is seen in Arab public opinion as an egregious stance of unprovoked aggression against the Arab people as a whole. Then, to add insult to injury in the minds of the Arab people, the USA sent troops to Saudi Arabia, the Islamic holy land, thereby inflaming Arab and Muslim public opinion still further. If you cannot believe that Arabs hate the USA enough to bomb a US city and kill thousands of US-Americans, then you are not living in the real world. Did you think the USA, alone among the states of the world, was immune to retribution - cruel and criminal as it undeniably was - for harming the interests of other nations?

[laughs] I haven't ever seen something like this on Znet since, since..err I don't think this has ever happened.. Looks like paul is administrating the blogs

Nope - sorry; you clowns will not use this blog as a platform to spread diversionary, discredited and religious 9/11 drivel. You will charge censorship so what I'll do is go find an old blog post and rename it "Victor Wood's 9/11 Nuthouse" and just paste in all your stuff there. I'll put up the URL link in a bit:

http://blogs.zmag.org/ee_links/talking_about_the_usa_bad_country_music_will_not_rescue_fortunate_son_dumby 

This may not work (it's a little tricky from inside the system for some reason), but you can always get to it by googling up my name plus "bad country music." Then just bookmark it and people can look for Victor's baloney pasted in when I get a chance.  If its too consuming (and it may be) it'll just be straight deletion.

Also people can look here at this day's comments section, as there will long periods when I don't look at the blog and Victor will probably (but maybe not) be putting stuff up in all likelihood. My sense is that he's addicted to this blog and can't fathom getting his own and so just keeps posting his stuff. Conspiracy types are often obsessed.  "Dmx" is also showing signs of irrational attachment to this blog and I'll see if I can put his conspiracy notes in under the Victor Wood/ "bad country music" post of August 11, 2005.  

"Dmx," I didn't mean to delete your last - it just got lost in all the different cutting and pasting.  I'm off computers for a while so it's a good time to put it back (good trolls save their comments on a separate file) but next time I check blog I'll put it in the nuthouse, where it belongs.

Turns out I was able to change the title of the post...the URL reflects the original title of a highly dispensable post from August 11, 2005, but the post is now titled "VICTOR WOOD'S 9/11 NUTHOUSE." It can probably be googled up (and then bookmarked) under that title.

I may do this again under the title "UNSUPPORTED CHARGES OF ANTI-SEMITISM" 

and another one titled "BLIND FAITH IN CAPITALISM"

I honestly put all the 9/11 conspiracy nonsense on pretty much the same intellectual level that I put Holocaust Denial and Creationism.

 

 

 

...see [to be filled in] http://blogs.zmag.org/ee_links/talking_about_the_usa_bad_country_music_will_not_rescue_fortunate_son_dumby

VICTOR WOOD'S 9/11 NUTHOUSE

See...[to be filled in]

 

Lenny,  the 9/11 truth movement shows that the right has no monopoly on what the historian Richard Hofstader called “the paranoid style in American politics.”  What's really amusing is the way the movement gauges one's leftism/radicalism in accord  with the extent to which one buys into their kooky 9/11 ideas, which are totally imploded in the Popular Mechanics book .  I think there is Establishment complicity in making them seem to be a relevant Left.

On core misunderstandings beyond  the specific little absurdities of their theories (the moronic seismic claims, the moronic “pod” claims, the moronic “stand down order” claims, the moronic pilot claims, the moronic etc.), I wrote the following in a  June 6 2002 ZNet piece titled “Misunderstanding Power”

 “The idea that the elitist consequences of 9-11 - more wealth and power for the few and less of both for the many - somehow prove that 9-11 was the product of an elite US conspiracy is incredibly naïve. Conspiracy theorists of the sort who sneered at me fail to understand that aristocratic outcomes from crises are basically written into America's economic and sociopolitical structure. Democracy is a political system where each person has an equal vote and equal policy influence. It cannot meaningfully exist in a society structured along the lines of the contemporary US, where 1 percent of the population owns 47 percent of the nation's wealth and considerably more of its politicians, policymakers, and media. It cannot exist where ordinary people lacking cohesive organization, meaningful institutions of autonomous power, popular expression, and democratic organization, and even a sense of common interests face off against highly organized and extremely class-conscious wealthy interests. It cannot exist where such people are worked, commuted, and shopped to the point of exhaustion and must rely on a highly concentrated privately owned media for basic information. It is especially absent from the making of foreign policy, which is even more insulated from popular influence than domestic policy and whose largely hidden conception and execution carries vast consequences for the entire planet without anything but the slightest input from world citizens.”

“The structure of media ownership is especially pivotal in the current era. The owners and managers of the highly globalized corporate media, who have strong linkages with the military and oil industries and the national security-state, possess awesome, structurally encoded power to shape popular perceptions of current events. It does not serve their interests to translate the meaning of events in ways that question elite privilege and the related American imperial project. The outcome - incredibly biased coverage that favors war, imperial expansion, military expenditure, reduced civil liberties at home over critical democratic examination of US foreign policy and its role in making terror attacks on US targets predictable - is itself remarkably predictable, without resort to conspiracy theory.”

“A key consequence of this harsh structural reality is that those who possess highly concentrated wealth and power have remarkable capacity to exploit crises. They act on their special, structurally enabled capacity to turn terrible events and developments, including especially foreign attacks and domestic rebellions, into pretexts for policies that further their own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else.” “Such is the traditional and consistent goal and behavior of those who sit atop society's leading institutions. As Noam Chomsky noted last February, the privileged ‘relentlessly' search for pretexts to advance their standard agenda, summarized in what Adam Smith called "the vile maxim of the masters:  'Everything for me and nothing for everyone else.'  ‘Crises,' Chomsky noted, ‘make it possible to exploit fear and concern to demand that the [people] be submissive, obedient, silent, distracted, while the powerful use the window of opportunity to pursue their own favored programs with even greater intensity.' They are a means for ‘disciplining the population,' which tends to look with disfavor as policies embodying the ‘vile maxim,'and ‘shifting wealth and power even more' into ‘the master's' hands.”

“The aftermath of 9-11, Chomsky noted, is ‘typical' in this regard. As John Pilger has recently noted in his important work, The New Rulers of the World, ‘the attacks of September 11, 2001 did not “change everything,” but accelerated the continuity of events, providing an extraordinary pretext for destroying social democracy.' They have provided the post-Cold War era's most spectacular excuse to date for the ongoing ‘reduction of democracy to electoral ritual: that is, competition between indistinguishable parties for the management of a single-ideology state.'"

“As when applied to other events, conspiracy theories regarding 9-11 reflect two core misunderstandings of power and how it operates in the US. The first, broadly encouraged by the American educational, political, and media establishments, holds that the US is in fact a democracy. People who accept this fairy tale - the Founding Fathers' (most of whom agreed with John Jay that "those who own the country ought to run it") and the modern business class's ultimate shared nightmare - cannot easily grasp policy outcomes that dramatically serve the interests of the few over the many. For them, the temptation is strong to see such outcomes as the product of a dark conspiracy operating behind the back and against the wishes of their elected representatives and other leaders of the society's main institutions.”

“The second misunderstanding is of a different, even opposite nature. It wraps itself in an all-knowing sneer of cynicism yet holds a curiously wide-eyed and fantastic view of the masters or at least some part of the ruling class. Common among those who have been disabused of democratic myths and feel especially powerless in the face of concentrated power, it holds that dastardly elites manipulate the course of history from on high, pretty much in accordance with their own wishes. Little happens in the course of human events, some conspiracy theorists think, without the approval and intervention of an all-powerful but strangely secret elite.”

 “Real understanding of power is found outside these poles of illusion. Those who possess it know that the weight of dominant influence over sociopolitical decision-making and public information (mass persuasion) is rooted in historically developed structures of concentrated power, 'state and private, closely inter-linked'(Chomsky). They do not conclude from this that certain select members or designated operatives of the master class have been granted limitless potency to shape history from above. History, they know, is full of remarkable developments, some inspiring - the early phases of the Russian Revolution, the anti-Vietnam War movement, for example- and others quite horrific (9/11 for example) from a radical-democratic perspective, that took place much to the surprise and against the wishes of the power elite."

“That elite, they are aware, possesses exceptional capacity to make unexpected and initially unwelcome developments into pretexts for the expansion of their wealth and power. In the past, for example, it turned the initially unwelcome (for the privileged) existence of the Soviet Union into a pretext for the (welcome) historically unparalleled expansion of the military-industrial complex. It turned the antiwar movement, urban racial unrest, and antipoverty programs of the 1960s into pretexts for the expansion of a rigidly authoritarian criminal punishment state and workfare regime that enforces harsh class and race inequality in contemporary America. Now, with special assistance from an initially unwelcome and truly historic and evil terror attack last September, it has made the threat of terrorism into a pretext for an endless expansion of imperialism, militarism, and class privilege.”

“To note these outcomes, rooted in structurally encoded inequalities of ideological and policy power, however, is very different from saying that the masters have ‘cooked up' the developments they were able to exploit. The latter conclusion reads history through the rear view mirror and exaggerates the power and foresight of the ruling elite.”

“In truth, ordinary people would be fortunate if the masters of war and wealth needed to work behind or otherwise undermine the United States' leading institutions to achieve regressive and repressive policy results like those we have seen since 9-11. At the same time, we can be thankful that those masters have not become the God-like manipulators of history and consciousness, capable of creating historical events like something out of a bad X-Files episode. History lurches forward, in all its horror and glory, full of possibilities that continue to be chained and tragic consequences that remain predictable unless and until we develop and act upon an
appropriate understanding of power and how it operates.”

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=1963&sectionID=40

So Victor doesn't know that all of the fanatical 9/11 nonsense he spouts was systematically refuted in Popular Mechanics, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts (New York, 2006). The conspiracy twaddle is meticulously exposed, point by point, with in-depth input from more than 300 experts and sources in fields like air traffic control, aviation, civil engineering, fire fighting, geology, structural engineering, metallurgy, air defense, crash analysis, demolition, image analysis, and more.  

I suppose Victor expects me to spend hours breaking all his conspiracy baloney down. No, it's a beautiful day and too much else to do. 

Here's a plan of action for you Victor.  Look up the nearest Borders or Barnes and Noble in your phone directory.  Get the address.  Do a Mapquest.  Drive to the bookstore. Buy the book. Read the book. Apologize for your self-righteous idiocy (sorry but that's what it is) ….and of course you think being called on it in a forthright fashion is overly “emotive.”  (You've been fouling ZNet blogs with your self-righteous faux-radical drivel for too long.  That's my honest opinion, “emotive” or whatever.)  

And then, well, like you say, and then like ebpatton calmly asked you to do …shut up. There's nothing stopping you from setting up the 4001^st conspiracy nutjob blog or website.  

Conspiracy theorists attempt to answer the Who Did It? and Why? questions. Good questions, many possible answers - some quite kooky indeed, and some quite cogent and well supported logically. One could spend every moment of one's life trying to answer such questions, I suppose. Without an official and impartial investigation, however, we will likely never know. (Most people do not realize that the events of 9/11 were never officially investigated by law enforcement officials and investigatory agencies) For me, I feel that it was an inside job, based upon what I have read, what I know about the power elite running America and what common sense serves up as a result. But there exists another aspect of 9/11 that truly disturbs me - the physical evidence itself. It is in this area that the official version falls flat on its face, leaving gaping holes and logical inconsistencies. Questions arise all over the place, hundreds of them, that demand answers that are not forthcoming in the official version. Some chief ones in my mind are: 1. How can a building built specifically to withstand both fire, earthquakes and a collision with a Boeing 737 class airplane collapse? 2. How can a building supported by something like 47(?) massive concrete and hardened steel re-enforced vertical columns and an exterior supported by a mesh steel framework weakened to the point collapse neatly upon itself? How could this have happened in 9 seconds free fall time from a gravity perspective. Had the building collapsed purely of its own weight via some sort of pancake fashion, it would have taken far longer to fall as each floor in turn collapsed upon the one below forcing it in turn to give way. 3. If the buildings fell pancake fashion, where did the massive steel and concrete supports go? They were nowhere to be seen. They should have remained standing above the stacks of pancaked flooring. And how come there remained nothing but small bits of concrete and steel afterwards, if the building fell pancake fashion? Whole floors stacked upon each other should have remained afterwards. Where did they go? The remains of these buildings and how they fell and how fast strongly indicated controlled demolition.There was nothing left except still yellow-white molten steel (even weeks after!) and crushed powder remaining of the entire buildings - again consistent with controlled demolition. 4. Isn't it the strangest of coincidences that both buildings hit by planes fell in exactly the same manner with the same aftermath - nothing but bits of rubble and molten steel. 5. What happened to Building 7? It wasn't even hit by a plane, it wasn't close to the buildings hit by the planes (having another building between it and the others) and suffered no visible damage with the exception of some internal office fires. It too fell in place at free fall speed. It too had nothing remaining but bits of crushed concrete and molten steel. All this from office fires!? The official version doesn't even mention the collapse of Building 7! How is this possible? 6. How could novices with a minimum of flight training have possibly (didn't even know how to take off or land a small engined plane, much less a huge passenger jet) have managed the intricate flight maneuvers necessary to guide a massive plane at fast speed into these towers? Anyone who has ever been in the cockpit of a 737 flight simulator will know that it is not an easy thing to guide such a large craft due to its inertia. 7. Where is the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon? What happened to it? Was it vaporized by aviation fuel? Aviation fuel burns hot, but not that hot. We are talking about massive steel constructed engines here. Where were the engines afterward? Where was the frame and the wheel casings and the tires and the black box (built to withstand any air crash)? Where were the bodies of the passengers? The tail on a 767 is higher than the roof of the Pentagon. How come the roof was not damaged by the impact of the plane's tail? Initial photos taken within minutes after the hit, showed an undamaged roof still in tact over the impact hole. After the initial TV shots of the hit, you never saw this scene again in the dominant media. It was a really small hole (the hole was much smaller in diameter than the diameter of a 767), and a roof still in tact above it. Only later did the roof collapse owing to structural damage. And if the heat from the explosion was intense enough to vaporize steel, why were adjacent offices exposed just after the impact not burned to a crisp, but instead were shown to be perfectly unharmed and in some cases with objects still remaining undisturbed on tabletops? And again, how could some with such minimal flight training have successfully guided that massive plane at such low altitude directly into the Pentagon? And again, where is the plane and its passengers afterwards? And what happened to the security films showing the whole crash? We were shown but one film from a considerable distance from the crash and at a poor angle. There were in fact other cameras all along the walls of the Pentagon and almost directly in the path of the plane(?) that would have shown it clearly coming straight at them at them. What happened to the film from those cameras? And why were the security films of stores across the street from the crash scene confiscated by the FBI and never seen again? These are just a few of the questions left entirely unanswered after 9/11. There are so many, many more. The people who are today trying to answer some of these questions include extremely well-credentialed, sincere and extremely intelligent scientists, structural engineers, aeronautics specialists, police investigators, academics, scholars and many of the families of the victims of 9/11. Not kooks. Not stupid people. Honest people. With honest and sincere questions. Concerned people who want to know how and why all this happened to their country and to these 3000 souls who lost their lives because of it. People who NEED to know why such a thing happened. People who earnestly want to know why an official and authoritative investigation was never carried out as it would have been with any other tragedy of much lesser magnitude. Why am I a kook for wanting to know the answers to these questions? Why am I a crazy conspiracy theorist for wanting truth instead of lies? Why am I accused of wasting time and energy by searching for truth and examining evidence? What is so different about my investigations into this conspiracy and those investigations of others on this site into unanswerable questions of conspiracy of the ruling power elite? We all want truth. Why aren't we all free to search for truth? Give me the answers to these questions and I will gladly shut up. But until then, I and many many others will not rest until the truth is brought forward, the people properly informed and those criminally responsible are brought to justice. Yes, there was a conspiracy. We just don't know who or why. A proper, non-politically driven police investigation would answer those questions.

“Trashed” is a strange word choice given your proclaimed anti-imperial perspective, yes? You might want to have a look at Chomsky's 2003 book Hegemony or Survival.

Indeed I have also read this book as well as Imperial Ambitions and Failed States. Perhaps the word "trashed" was not correct : I meant he had violently criticized US foreign policies aimed at providing "full spectrum dominance" to US elites: basically a global empire. May be I sometimes misuse english words.

"You finish by saying "after all it's a question of belief." What an interesting and self-incriminating statement."

I am sad to be treated as stupid, especially because I did not think you could use such argument ... of course it is a question of belief. But it is not about a religious cult or something like this. I am not a religious guy, I do not believe in God. I am a scientist, more specifically a logician.

Everybody has beliefs on which his intellect is founded. It is not possible to live without beliefs. I said I think questioning the US government account on 9/11 is simply too dangerous for the basic beliefs of many people. For others, it may even be questioning the fact that the US is doing good around the world that is mind shaking. I think you can agree on that. I cannot interpret the violence of your reaction another way : there are some beliefs you do not want to shake. Simply mine are different.

And yes I remember reading "Why didn't we attack Sweden ?" But it is not exactly the same to put people at risk, even great risk, and to kill them out of pure cynicism and imperial greed.

Unfortunally, I think the decision to implement 9/11 had some rationality in it. The control of oil is the only way the US can maintain global dominance now and without the dominance, the US economy is bound to collapse as explained by C. Johnson : how much weights 3000 US citizens compared to another Great Depression ? Here lies the inhumane rationality of this decision. Hopefully, the Western economies will be reshaped to something less energy voracious. Otherwise, Western civilization will disappear.

It seems I had the false hope you could get to a more open-minded state.

 

in France but I can assure you that there is very little chance that the left will win in the French elections. Very little. And unfortunately, I am a French leftist ...

because I think exposing this conspiracy is the most important thing to do right now, as we face a global conflict initiated with a strike on Iran, which again would not be possible if 9/11 had not terrified American people down to the bones. The "myth" of 9/11 has convinced the Americans that they can only be safe through global submission of the rest of the world ... of course this will fail. Can we agree on this: that 9/11 is a "myth" (not necessarily a fake myth, but a myth in that it was mortal threat for the USA as a country) and on the goal of this myth ?

I did indeed read the masterful books of C. Johnson ("Sorrows of empire" and "Nemesis"). 9/11 was conceived to trigger new wars to provide wealth in the US economy driven by its "military Keynesianism". Without it, your economy would already have collapsed because you have outsourced too much (outside the national security business) . "Peak Oil" is Nemesis and the USA, the greatest oil consumer in the world, will be its first meal unless the US considerably restrains its energy needs : to paraphrase M. Simmons ("Twilight in the desert"), the biggest new oil field you will ever discover is called "stop your wars".

Victor who knows what telligence other than al-quaida was involved..at this point we can only guess.. the most plausible explanation available is that the islamic world is really pissed and we may not have finished witnessing gratuitous violence.. 9/11 does not upset me more han not seeing more outrage regarding the wars and occupations.. Personally i dream of a left able to win elections in the US.. if u watch the french , the left may probably win.. lets start with small revolutions before starting big ones.

Long time reader, first time poster.

Paul, Great post. I wanted to get your thoughts on some observations I've made. First off let me say that I respect the attitudes and level of involvement that a lot of these movements create, but, I think that they are completely off base and moving in the wrong direction.

I have been somewhat interested in the connection between these "pop-leftist" movements and "revolutionary" type movements in history (Not only 9/11 truth, and the JFK movement, but the Spartacist league, revolutionary Marxists/Leninists..etc.), and how they seem to be almost the only "doctrinally acceptable form" of leftist movements to the institutional/power structure in our society.

Throughout these movements, there seems to be a dominant rhetorical/emotional drive behind their sentiment. There is alot of "expository" argumentation, and little "Inductive" argumentation. It seems that these really try to attract the more young, or apathetic/frustrated crowds. Its almost like they maintain/preserve the hierarchical top-down "follow me" structure (Alex Jones and others come to mind, with their media productions), and because of that, they are the only "legitimate" leftist movements in our society.

I was just wondering if you saw any of these parallels and what your thoughts on them might be.

Lenny

As usual, you are the peacemaker. And for that I am, as usual, grateful for you. Perhaps I did over-step a bit with the gatekeeper's remark, and for that I apologize to all concerned.

My 5 cents: The gate keepers comment is definetely misplaced, there is many time I fear for Paul Street life after reading some vitriolic statement on the establisment.. Victor, I sometimes get confused with many things related to 9/11, there are oddities but I dont think it warrant to accuse the bloggers chomsky and street of being gatekeepers.. simply put, you should accept that chomsky, street and al, do not believe. On this particular issue, I doubt that even if chomsky and street did believe that it would change anything to the 9/11 alleged conspiracy; you still need to find proof and the guiltys of the alleges conspiracy.. it is either bin laden and the cia made the plan, and this plan could had originated in the ME, most likely in saudi arabia whose establisment benefit more than the US for the invasion of Iraq and this possibly includes more benefits even for the Bin ladens.. or it is simply a terrorist attack to awaken the west. your choice about what to believe, the truth we possibly will never know,.

I'm afraid I've seen nothing calm or rational about any of your responses either to me, DMX or the events of 9/11. DMX has given an excellent example of a calm and rational response in contrast to your highly emotional outburst. Look at the difference in emotive language and name-calling. I'll neither challenge your abusive language nor your close-mindedness about 9/11. As DMX says, there's really no point after all.

I'm no fanatic. I'm not weird. I'm not looney.

Just a classist.

In effect, this site is clearly as close-minded and bigoted as those on the right you accuse daily.

If you hate it, then leave. You can always read The Nation or listen to NPR. ZNet is radical left-wing propaganda, and doesn't try to hide it or apologize for it. If it's too far left for you, then shut up and go somewhere else.

But there's no confusion between you and Victor, Dominique --- none. There's a response to Victor. Congratulations on the possession of a proper name, but a true conspiracy theorist would not give their name out of fear that Dick Cheney would order their liquidation. This blog's outside comments section has been declared a zone of concentrated moral poverty and intellectual blight. The host will cease commentary immediately and apply for developmental assistance to the proper authorities. The review of comments has been handed over to BoozAllenHamilton and unnamed Defense officials.

And I am not anonymous. My name is Dominique Larchey-Wendling.

Yes Victor it's a "rampage" to calmly and rationally expose your stupidity. Confronted with the absurdity of your comment, you experience cognitive dissonance. The first cognition is "I Victor am a smart and sophisticated man who knows what's what with current events." The second cognition, sparked by my dismantlement of your really bad comment (now your norm...you didn't start out like this, but you have deterioriated rapidly) and perhaps also by my related taking apart of "Dmx," says something very different. It says, "I Victor am a foolish moron who doesn't know his rear end from a hole in the ground and who has been sucked into a fantastic diversion and who now has been reduced to making stupid, groundless attacks and snipey little digs on and at Paul Street. This is shameful, and so I am ashamed." A deeper part of your brain says, "oh no, the tension betweeen cognition 1 and cognition 2 is too intense. This is painful. It must be resolved. I am smart and good." You could invent some sort of new cognition...maybe some sort of conspiracy theory to explain why and how you could be acting so poorly. But nothing comes to mind. So you resolve to simply repeat one of your initial charges, disregarding the fact that it is incorrect and childish. You reiterate an initial groundless and stupid attack on Paul Street. You put up a little smily face to take the edge off but it's too late; you've been discrediting yourself for some time now. The ugly truth is much closer to the second than to the first cognition. Maybe you could think up some sort of semi-anonymous handle to come back as..."Dmz" or something like that. And you could say you're from another country, like France, where 9/11 conspiracy theories were all the rage from the start.

I did not want to insult you. Moreover, there is a wide range of understandings and beliefs on what could have happened on 9/11 and I did not express what I personally think. Only I tried to point out why some people, perhaps you but I am not sure anymore, basically refuse to consider alternative explanations on what happened that day. I wonder how I could have triggered such violence because I did not even accused you of "left gate-keeping."

I will not answer point by point because this will lead us to nowhere ... I will just point you that you accept weak logical arguments to comfort your understanding of 9/11. For example, about Chomsky argument :

"Any fool ought to have been able to figure out that Chomsky was talking about the logistics and likely/possible political consequences of conducting such an operation as is posited by 9/11 nut-jobs. Among other things, I think he's mentioned the impossibility of controlling leaks ..."

This is indeed one of the argument used against alternative explanations of 9/11, especially "inside job". Impossible because a lot of people would have to be involved and then leaks could not have been contained ...

This argument is wrong for two reasons. First, it is possible to implement projects or military operations involving many people without leaks : think of the Manhattan project, the F117 stealth bomber project, the bombing of Cambodia under Nixon, or the Holocaust ...

The second reason is that it is paradoxical to accept as an explanation the government sponsored theory of what happened on 9/11 (19 hijackers alone succeeded in annihilating FAA+NORAD and WTC 1,2 and 7 and of peace of the Pentagon without any outside help) and to explain that the same action implemented by US government insiders (with much greater control on the government and the media) would require hundreds if not thousands of individuals. Why 19 insiders would not be capable of implementing what 19 arabs were able to perform only with box cutters and their blind faith ?

The third problem with the argument of Chomsky : there are leaks ... but people don't listen to them.

I do believe 9/11 was an inside job but I do not believe that the whole Bush admin was aware of it (I am pretty confident on Cheney, based on the Norman Mineta testimony before the Kean-Hamilton commission). I like what Chomsky writes very much but I do not agree with him on 9/11 : I do not say he is a nut because I do not agree with him. I like what you write on this blog but I do not know much more about you. So I will try to inform myself more. English is not my first language : I am French.

 

Rampages... ;-)

Do not apologize to me, Dmx.  Apologize to yourself and others for your willingness to surrender your human capacity for elementary logic. "Look into your [DMX] self to find out why" you falsely equate refusal to drink 9/11 conspiracy Kook Aid with  (a) a refusal to confront what you call the "myth of America;" (b) with a belief that Cheney-Bush have moral objections to the sacrifice of innocent American lives; (c) with the notion that the U.S. is too civilized a nation for its power elite to conduct barbarian policies; (d) with difficulty acknowledging that Bush administration lies to the American people; (e) with acceptance of the official government line on 9/11.

You can't be serious.  And you must read nothing I write outside the blog (this is a problem on the blog I notice....many people here seem to just be blog addicts and so have no idea that the blogs makes up less than a 20th or less of my political writing).  I personally do not see moral inhibitions or concern for innocent U.S. citizens in Bush-Cheney policy; only an idiot or a liar would think I do after reading what I've written over the years..  I've been saying for some time that Chomsky is right: the U.S. power elite is pursuing global dominance over and against the safety of innocent U.S. citizens. This brazenly imperialist foreign policy – quite barbarian in design and consequences – may well be inciting a much bigger terrorist attack than 9/11 – one that will likely involve nuclear materials.  

Thinking that you and your conspiracy comrades are deluded and  gullible is NOT the same as accepting the government's line on 9/11.  The government's line on 9/11 is that people who “hate freedom” attacked the U.S. without provocation and that this necessitated a massive U.S. intervention against WMD and to advance democracy/freedom …all too protect Americans in the name of a "war on terror."  I have said consistently that the criminal jetliner attacks were in fact incited by barbaric, criminal and imperial U.S. policies (do I have to cite everything I've written on U.S. policy in the ME over the last five years?), that the crime was in many ways quite predictable (I expected a major attack on NYC coming from the ME/al Qaeda since at least 1999), and that subsequent U.S. policy has been about imperial control of ME oil through state terrorism and has nothing to do with advancing democracy and is in fact reducing the security of U.S. citizens…indeed it is increasing the likelihood of bigger terror attacks.

Any fool ought to have been able to figure out that Chomsky was talking about the logistics and likely/possible political consequences of conducting such an operation as is posited by 9/11 nut-jobs.  Among other things, I think he's mentioned the impossibility of controlling leaks – something that would be a real problem in such hypothetical operations as 9/11 conspiracy  kooks obsess over (what a pathetic waste of moral and intellectual energy as the Empire deepens its crimes in Iraq and is perhaps preparing the way for an attack on Iran) . The risks would have been far too high.  Chomsky wasn't saying he thought that Cheney and Bush were too civilized to do barbaric things to their own populace.  I personally see zero moral inhibitions on the part of these and many other U.S policymakers and the notion that I do is without evidence. And one's position on that should not determine whether or not they want to join the conspiracy cargo cult.

You say: “Even tough Noam Chomsky trashes the foreign policy of US elites in every book he has written for at least the last 6 years, he does not believe they can sacrifice the people they are supposed to protect.” So you are entitled to make statements based on open ignorance.  No wonder you hide behind a semi-anonymous Internet name. “Trashed” is a strange word choice given your proclaimed anti-imperial perspective, yes? You might want to have a look at Chomsky's 2003 book Hegemony or Survival. It strikes me as a possibility that you don't actually go inside books past their cover, so here's a comment for you from the dust jacket.  I'm going to highlight some of the most relevant prose : “For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe.  Our leaders have shown themselves willing – as in the Cuban missile crisis – to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward the final frontiers of imperial control, toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and a livable Earth.”  

You say: “At any cost, this is not a pill you are willing to swallow. I can understand this.”

You have not displayed an  impressive capacity for "understanding," “Dmx." 

You finish by saying "after all it's a question of belief."  What an interesting and self-incriminating statement.  Yes, the 9/11 conspiracy thing is a religious cult.  It's a matter of faith...sheer belief. Exactly right.

Your towers have collapsed, "Dmx."  Time to conduct a moral and intellectual self-investigation.

In the meantime, here's something I did on U.S. foreign policy and 9/11 in 2004.  This is some of the unpleasant shit that  "Dmx" can't swallow...or is it can't understand:

  

ZNet | Terror War

Why Didn't We Attack Sweden?

by Paul Street; October 31, 2004

What do Osama bin-Laden and the owners and top editors of the gigantic corporate media outlet the Chicago Tribune have in common? They both want George W. Bush to return for a second term. The Tribune's masters want Bush back because they are Republicans who see the Crawford Chickenhawk and his jingoist, ultra-regressive “posse” as more consistent with their interests and world view than the smarter corporate imperialist from Massachusetts and the (more liberal) people around the second candidate.

Osama wants Bush back because Dubya's imperialist wars on Afghanistan and especially Iraq, initially launched in the name of a “Crusade” (smart, George), have been a recruiting dream for extremist “anti-American” Islam, creating untold masses of enlistees in the war on the West and especially on the US.

My sense is that bin-Laden's speech was distributed at this historical juncture partly with the expectation that it would give Bush a needed boost.

It's pretty absurd that bin-Laden appearing live and healthy and discussing the 2001 jetliner attacks on television works to Bush's advantage. The president refused to do anything while national security operatives gnashed their teeth trying to warn him about the terrible events that were about to occur and did occur on 9/11. Bush very probably missed numerous opportunities to nab ultimate Evil Other Osama as White House attention shifted to the real and longstanding imperial objective: deepening uniltateral US control of Arab oil supplies and global oil markets by toppling the weak Saddam regime and taking over Iraq. Osama bin-Laden became “Osama bin-Forgotten” so the American masses could be instructed that Saddam was the new Global Public Enemy Number One.

But that's the way it is in the infantilized public political culture that has been crafted by and for corporate power in the US --- a culture where large swaths of the electorate vote on the basis of which candidate they'd like to “have a beer with” and which one has the less bitchy wife; where high paid political consultants craft advertisements based on animal fears going back to pre-historic times (appealing to our Stone Age fear of wolves and other beasts), and where a leading elected official holds office partly on the basis of his big shiny biceps and shames those who dare to tell the truth about current U.S. unemployment and poverty as “economic girly men.” It's all quite repitilian, suitably enough in a country whose president rejects the notion of evolution.

Anyway, the convergence of interest between Osama and Chicago's leading newspaper is evident in today's Tribune, where the top story proclaims in big bold letters “BIN LADEN WARNS U.S.” Osama's picture is right above the headline. Right below the headline is a much bigger and regal picture of Bush, speaking behind the presidential seal and in front of Air force One. There's a much smaller picture of Kerry in the middle of the page, under the smaller headline “Bush, Kerry defiant after threat.”

Of course, totalitarian and imperial realities are such that neither of the candidates can even remotely acknowledge that bin-Laden actually made some decent points, as he often does, even if he happens to be a blood-soaked butcher who wants to restore Medieval doctrine and structures (something that hardly disqualified him from receiving US support in a distant and forgotten era called the 1980s).

Listen, for example, to this line from bin-Laden: “Security is an important element of human life, and free people do not give up their security. Unlike what Bush says --- that we hate freedom ---- let him tell us why didn't we attack Sweden, for example.”  

Good point. To get a sense of the basic accuracy of this argument and the general rational intelligence of much of what bin-Laden and his crowd say, I recommend conservative Catholic CIA analyst and Middle Eastern expert “Anonymous”' book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (2004). “Anonymous” has been following bin-Laden's every utterance closely for years and is convinced that OBL is actually quite sharp and that he has achieved legendary status among millions of Muslims because he perceptively articulates their widespread sense that—imagine—the Islamic world is under vicious assault from the imperialist West, led of course by the US, and that this is assault calls for the launching of a purely defensive Muslim jihad against the invaders.

And listen to how Anonymous of the CIA describes US policy in the Middle East, providing some context for the popularity of defensive jihad in the Arab states: “Professor Telhami's accurate depiction of America's non-credibility in the Muslim world encapsulates the consequences of a half century of U.S. Middle Eastern policy that moved America from being the much admired champion of liberty and self-government to the hated and feared advocate of a new imperial order, one that has much the same characteristics as nineteenth-century European imperialism: military garrisons; economic penetration and control; support for leaders, no matter how brutal and undemocratic, as long as they obey the imperial power; and the exploitation and depletion of natural resources.”

See also page 4 of my book Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com), where I write the following: “if bin-Laden and his followers and supporters [are] driven by hatred of American freedom and democracy, why were they on the side of the US in the late 1980s, when America enjoyed at least as much domestic freedom and democracy as in the summer of 2001, if not more? And if bin-Laden and the rest were so angry at the internal freedom and democracy of ‘infidel' Western nations, why were Canada, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland (to name a few non-Islamic democratic states) right to be much less worried about major atacks from al Qaeda...[where] in many respects...democratic institutions were and are healthier and more developed..? The answer, of course, is to be found in American foreign policy.”

Osama bin-Laden's tape told the American people in a reasonably matter of fact way that they will continue --- with either Bush or Kerry in the White House --- to face the threat of catastrophic terrorist attack as long as they permit their masters to retain an aggressive imperialist foreign policy vis a vis the Middle East, an imperialism that is openly acknowledged by a mid-level CIA Analyst but which can't be acknowledged by the only two presidential candidates who matter under the American “winner-take-all” elections system. There's nothing mysterious or hard to follow or all that surprising (given US foreign policy) in bin-Laden's statements on US behavior and the American people; there never has been. And the only acceptable response in the “mainstream” political culture, of course, particuarly on the eve of the election is to say in essence that “nobody is going to tell us that we can't occupy their territory and kill their people and support autocratic regimes that help us steal their natural resources. This is freedom, by God and we will kill those who dare to fight back.” We will flex our biceps until we blow ourselves up altogether it seems to me.

(I just pasted this article in instead of just doing the link since some people seem incapable of reading outside the actual blog itself)

 

Here's another excellent example of my alleged refusal to acknowledge that the White House is willing to endanger innocent U.S. civilians:    ZNet | Activism

An American Hiroshima The Goddess of Revenge Awaits and This Time She Means It

by Paul Street; August 12, 2004

You won't often read a more chilling opinion piece than today's commentary by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff. In an editorial titled "An American Hiroshima," Kristoff cites leading establishment academic, intelligence, and policy authorities (including a former Secretary of Defense) to remind us that the explosion of a nuclear device in a major American city by Islamic terrorists is a very real possibility. The former Secretary of Defense (William Perry) "says," Kristoff reports, "there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike within this decade - that is, in the next six years."

Relying on Harvard Professor Graham Allison,'s "terrifying new book, 'Nuclear Terrorism,'" Kristoff tells the story of how in October 2001 George W. Bush learned from "a C.I.A. source code-named Dragonfire...that Al Qaeda had obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and smuggled it into New York City. The C.I.A. found the report plausible," since "the weapon had supposedly been stolen from Russia, which indeed has many 10-kiloton weapons, Russia is reported to have lost some of its nuclear materials, and Al Qaeda has mounted a determined effort to get or make such a weapon. And the C.I.A. had picked up Al Qaeda chatter about an 'American Hiroshima.'"

Bush (who I thought looked pretty shook up in October 2001) sent nuclear arms specialists to New York City to rummage around for the bomb. Dick Cheney and other officials were dispatched from the nation's capital "to ensure the continuity of government in case a weapon exploded in Washington instead." To "avoid panic," incidentally, "the White House told no one in New York City, not even Mayor Rudy Giuliani."

The "Dragonfire" scare was a false alarm, but "similar reports - that Al Qaeda has its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union - have," Kristoff notes, "regularly surfaced in the intelligence community" and "we do know several troubling things: Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, 'We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs.'"

Dr. Allison has bet Kristoff that "a terrorist nuclear strike will occur somewhere in the world in the next 10 years." While doubting that such an event will take place, Kristoff is appalled that the very real threat of a nuclear attack on US soil has not elicited more serious attention from the Bush administration, which "has insisted [instead] on tackling the most peripheral elements of the W.M.D. threat, like Iraq, while largely ignoring the central threat, nuclear proliferation." At the end of his column Kristoff tells us that his next commentary will "explain how we can reduce the risk of an American Hiroshima."

A "Post-Cold War" Recipe For "Homeland" Catastrophe

To which I say, "yes, of course." I personally thought we got off easy with 9/11. I have had been expecting something much worse for quite a while before the terrible jetliner attacks. I have long thought that three core and interrelated US policies were combining to create the essential components for a likely "American Hiroshima": (1) encouraging, aiding, furthering, and reveling in the destruction, humiliation, and bankrupting of state and society in the former Soviet Union, home to thousands of nuclear devices, large numbers of unemployed or under-employed scientists (and teachers, industrial workers and nurses, etc.); (2) the incredibly provocative imperial subjugation and humiliation of the proud, intelligent and armed Islamic world (dramatically accelerated with the decline of the Soviet deterrent to US globalism), home to sophisticated, experienced, spiritually determined, and capable jihad networks and to terror-financing surplus (oil)capital; (3) the advancement of high-speed high volume economic globalization (on the corporate-led model), which overwhelms the capacity of customs, "border patrol" and domestic intelligence and law enforcement officials to protect the American "homeland" from terrorist weapons and personnel.

This is and has been for some time been a three-part recipe for unimaginable catastrophe - the nightmare scenario that led Bush to send nuke-sniffers to NYC and Dick Cheney (who certainly deserves to be the first to be incinerated in any nuclear attack on the US) "out of town" in October 2001 (see below).

You do not have to be a leftist like me to see things this way. I distinctly remember sitting in a bar with a centrist, quasi-Republican friend of mine in the late summer of 2000 (one year before 9/11). Both of us agreed that New York City would be hit - for the three reasons listed above - with a major (we figured nuclear) terror attack within the next year or two.

Survival, Hegemony, and the Goddess of Revenge

Kristoff should consult three sources before writing his next column, "explaining" how we might save ourselves:

(1) CIA Analyst "Anonymous's" recent book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Brasseys, Inc., 2004), which argues that the biggest threat to American security today is US policymakers' lockstep, ideologically mandated insistence that al Qaeda and its expanding ilk and progeny are driven by a blind, inchoate, totalitarian hatred of "WHO WE [the US that is] ARE" (supposedly the "land of freedom," "democracy," and all that). "Anonymous," who is no leftist (there's not many of those working for the CIA), has spent the bulk of his recent professional life closely tracking al Qaeda's history, leaders, and ideas. Imperial Hubris is dedicated to the proposition that al Qaeda and the considerable support it receives in the mainstream Muslim world - dramatically increased by the invasion of Iraq (a true public relations and recruiting windfall for bin-Laden and his grateful and multiplying supporters and allies) - is all about WHAT WE DO TO AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST. And what we do, "Anonymous" readily acknowledges (CIA affiliation be damned), is function as bloody economic, political, cultural, and military imperialists: stealers and controllers of Arab oil, sustainers of Israel's racist occupation state, protectors of corrupt Arab regimes, butchers of Muslim innocents, attackers of Islamic shrines and values, and so on.

(2) Noam Chomsky's book Survival or Hegemony: The American Quest for Global Dominance [The American Empire Project] (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2003) a masterful synthesis on the Bush Doctrine and its venerable and bi-partisan origins. Chomsky argues that "elite" US foreign policy makers routinely privilege the quest for unchallenged global supremacy over the security of the American populace. No, the policymakers don't want terror attacks on US soil (well, a manageable one before the election would help Bush II in the polls), but preventing such attacks - Chomsky argues - just isn't a high priority within the statesmen's Grand Imperial Design for the "post-Cold War era." Their hegemony trumps our survival by their revolting moral calculus - a choice that can be seen in their decision to push patriotic national security operatives like Richard Clarke and "Anonymous" to the policy margins on their march to an incredibly provocative (to Muslims, including the majority who hated Saddam, and others across the plant) invasion of Iraq.

Chomsky, by the way, notes that one of the Bush II administration's earliest acts was to cut a program that was helping reduce the risk of loose Russian nukes slipping into terrorists' hands. Anything to pay for those glorious plutocratic tax cuts to spark us out of that "recession."

(3) Chalmers' Johnson's chastening book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic [The American Empire Project] (New York, NY: Metropolitan, 2003), which argues that the institutions of militarism and empire have bested rationality and democracy in US foreign policy. Here - in a passage (worth quoting at length) that came back to me after reading Kristoff's column - is how Johnson concluded a presentation of that book's thesis in the journal Foreign Policy in Focus last winter (note the line about our impending date with Nemesis, Goddess of Revenge): "In my judgment, American imperialism and militarism are so far advanced and obstacles to its further growth have been so completely neutralized that the decline of the U.S. has already begun. The country is following the path already taken by its erstwhile adversary in the cold war, the former Soviet Union. The U.S.'s refusal to dismantle its own empire of military bases when the menace of the Soviet Union disappeared, combined with its inappropriate response to the blowback of September 11, 2001, makes this decline virtually inevitable......John le Carré, the novelist most famous for his books on the role of intelligence services in the cold war, writes, 'America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.' His view is somewhat more optimistic than mine. If it is just a period of madness, like musth in elephants, we might get over it. The U.S. still has a strong civil society that could, at least in theory, overcome the entrenched interests of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. I fear, however, that the U.S. has indeed crossed the Rubicon and that there is no way to restore Constitutional government short of a revolutionary rehabilitation of American democracy. Without root and branch reform, Nemesis awaits. She is the goddess of revenge, the punisher of pride and arrogance, and the United States is on course for a rendezvous with her" (available online at http://www.zmag.org/ content/ showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4587).

Empire as a Way of Death

Note to the American people: Here's a sure-fire way to save a major American metropolitan area from an "even chance" of nuclear annihiliation in the next ten years: let's take our soldiers, bases, guns, ships, helicopters, jets, and other expansionist and racist weaponry out of the Islamic World and stop interacting with the Middle East and the rest of the human community through imperial eyes. Finally getting it that "Empire as a Way of Life" (the title of a book by the interesting New Left revisionist historian William Appleman Williams) is suicidal, let's take control of our nation's foreign policy and quit supporting regimes that evoke mass hatred in the Arab world and beyond. Let's stop advancing a narcissistic and disingenuous concept of "democracy" that is richly tailored to the special interests of our imperial ruling class. The Middle East is not "ours" to patrol and possess and neither is the rest of the world. Let's learn about and focus on the social, economic, democratic, and many died security needs (including protection from foreign attack but also from poverty, racism, sexism, mass incarceration, homophobia, police-state repression, thought-control and general hierarchy) of our own populace - the people whose general welfare government officials are supposed to serve and reflect. Following our great revolutionary, demcoratic, and constitutional charters, let's elevate our people's survival over the "elite's" regressive, elitist, authoritarian, and reactionary quest for global dominance.

That's my take on how to deter the nuclear-terrorist threat. I'll be curious to see Kristoff's.

  

Sorry Paul but as I believe in your intellectual honesty, one day you will have to look into yourself to find out why you so powerfully refused to even consider that the US governmental version of the events was so self contradictory to be completely unbelievable : what would be the psychological consequences of 9/11 being a job inside the US government, on you, on the people of the US, on the very "myth" of the USA ?

Don't you thing your refusal has everything to do with not willing to go down this path ?

I know what you think of US imperialism. But sacrificing 3000 innocents citizens and utterly lying to the others is simply something you cannot accept as a something a "civilized" and democratic government, even an imperial one, can do. So you would have to recognize the US elites as barbaric, and considering their power, this would make the US a barbaric nation. Noam Chomsky said nothing else on Znet :

"I think the Bush administration would have had to be utterly insane to try anything like what is alleged"

Even tough Noam Chomsky trashes the foreign policy of US elites in every book he has written for at least the last 6 years, he does not believe they can sacrifice the people they are supposed to protect.

At any cost, this is not a pill you are willing to swallow. I can understand this. Can you ?

After all, is it not a question of belief ? That is was I think.

Methinks you're a bit of a moron, Victor. Any fool can read the blog piece and see that it's quite dry and matter of fact...so your use of the words "rampages" and "so emotionally wrapped up in" is bizarre. Read the piece again. Strike one. As for "too often," again you're in a bad place; I'd say less than 1 500th (if that) of my ZNet writing has been dedicated to 9/11 conspiracy issues. Strike two. This is not the first time you've badly mischaracterized my tone and content. The notion that you are "not free" to discuss 9/11 conspiracy theories is pathetic. What you mean to say is that ZNet handlers and staff don't buy into 9/11 conspiracy theories and so don't post 9/11 conspiracy theories on ZNet. Guess what, genius, if that's what you mean then you are correct: ZNet handlers and staff don't buy into 9/11 conspiracy theories and so don't post 9/11 conspiracy theories on ZNet. Bad "gatekeepers"! ZNet doesn't post Christian fundamentalist ideas. So should fundamentalists write in and accuse it of being an evil "gatekeeper?" How about sectarian Marxism-Lenninists? Buddhists? Orthodox Jews? Libertarian capitalists? White supremacists? Where does it stop? Yes, ZNet is handled by people who have perspectives, judgments, world views. Yes those human agents filter material in accord with their sense of how the world works. Yes its handlers think the conspiracy thing is a destructive and pointless diversion and for some even a wacky cult. Yes, to be more direct, they (without knowing exactly who you are) honestly think you are full of shit on this. And yes, I agree with them and have explained why on previous occasions. You can't deal with it and so you have childish tantrums. Too bad. Strike three...grab some bench, Victor. And it's not like 9/11 conspiracy thinkers lack outlets on the Web and elsewhere, Victor. It's an industry...one that has gone way beyond the JFK conspiracy cult, with all kinds of dedicated practitioners and numerous organs of dissemination. It's huge. There are probably hundreds of web sites dedicated to the whole thing. And look if you really want to drink the Kook (I mean Kool) Aid you better make it the basic work of the rest of your life. If you want to do the 9/11 conspiracy thing right, you are going to need intensive study in structural engineering, aeronautics, and...I don't know... flight training and maybe geology (the seismic stuff) and you'll really need to get all the details of the workings of the military bureaucracy and much much more. You are going to have follow up on sources the pursuit of whom ought (by the conspiracy view of things) to be getting you killed, right? I mean you and your crazed comrades (sorry, I've read enough from you by now...I guarantee you you are in fact a fanatic) are fooling yourselves if you think you know something about all this spooky stuff because you saw some movie on the Internet. Have a nice life with all that. And lurking behind it all will be the hopelessly childish notion (just incredibly naive) that the power elite needs to pull off grand conspiracies in order to carry out wars of imperial conquest. No, they don't. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. You have no more swings but may come up again in a later inning. (Didn't you denounce competetive sports in an earlier tirade? How foolish..baseball is a wonderful game)

Me thinks you protest too loudly and too often. I truly enjoy your writings on many subjects, but you tend to go on these conspiracy rampages from time to time. I really have to wonder why you are so emotionally wrapped up in this. If you don't want to investigate 9/11, then don't. But why put others down for trying to understand something you have little interest in? OK. Maybe you don't understand what motivates them to spend their time this way. Perhaps they don't understand you as well. So what? It takes a lot of different kinds of people to make up a world this large. We can't all be Streets or Chomskys. Indeed, a lot of us would rather not be. There are extremely valid and to date unanswered questions about that event. I'm no fanatic. I'm not weird. I'm not looney. But I am well-read on some subjects and I'm a concerned American who smells the strong odor of fish. And I don't think I am wasting my time or yours in my personal pursuit of truth. And I believe there are tens of millions of Americans and people across the globe who feel the same way. And I have to wonder why you would so strongly swallow the line given by the neocons and their tools like Booz Allen Hamilton, who really don't want an official investigation to take place, and will go to any length to discourage one by passing off disinformation and implying that anyone who investigates such events are fools and conspiracy theorists who belong in a looney house and not in the world of really intelligent folks like yourself. If I were in their position that is exactly the image I would project. You and Chomsky have certainly fell for it - hook, line and sinker. And I'm sure they smile widely whenever you get on one of these tirades, especially when you are kind enough to quote them as support. Really ironic, isn't it! I have noticed that there are certain things one is not really free to discuss on this site. That's why I refer to it as a gatekeeper site. You are happy to open a subject area by slamming people who believe differently than yourself, but then you never give an opportunity for intelligent and considered rebuttal. In effect, this site is clearly as close-minded and bigoted as those on the right you accuse daily.