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Under the Cloak of Questionable Premise

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The official account of the events of September 11, 2001 is the linchpin in the narrative that supports today’s war and surveillance cultures. This story is the premise for the current shape of the world and provides cover for calamitous mischief.

In many corners, fear of a “fascist shift” in America is increasing along with worry about how our thinking is informed. Who tells the truth? Which stories do we believe? How compelling are different drumbeats?

In the annals of propaganda, big lies are landmarks. As part of propagating his own big lies, Hitler complained about them, writing that people “more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.… even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver ….”

Big lies create compliance by hoodwinking the population, which clears the path for despots. The War on “Terror” has replaced the War on Drugs as a broader, more nuanced rationale for anything and everything that abets social control.

Despite a long string of cognitive disconnects in the official 9/11 story, progressive mainstream rarely crosses that line in the sand. Mysteriously, it avoids calling for discovery of what actually happened.

In lieu of knowing the real story, but outside the swamp of conjecture, let’s look at some sources who simply challenge the cardboard assumptions about 9/11 that are made to help devise U.S. domestic and foreign policies.

The Jersey Girls, four suburban widows of victims of the events of 9/11, were upwardly mobile Americans who believed they had every right to know why their husbands died—in depth beyond the prattle of evening news and broad formulas of print journalism. They demanded investigation. After a year of dogged advocacy, they saw President Bush charter a bipartisan, independent, albeit handpicked, 9/11 commission.

Then the Jersey Girls publicly asked the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, to resign because of conflicts of interest. But it took a book , The Commission, by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, released in 2008, to vividly illustrate why Zelikow should have resigned.

Zelikow had close association with Condoleezza Rice, prior to, and Karl Rove during the investigation. He wrote: “I had worked in Harvard's Intelligence and Policy Program, a public research program supported by the CIA, from 1992 to 2002. In that capacity and others I had worked well with many at CIA, including Directors Tenet, Deutch, Woolsey, and Gates.” (In a New York Times op-ed, the chair and vice chair of the commission wrote that its investigation had been obstructed by the CIA.)

The official 9/11 story is defined by the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report and is compromised. A Newsweek editor reviewed The Commission for the New York Times and concluded that the back story of the 9/11 story is that failures of people in high government are just all too human—an excuse that could trickle down to editors’ desks at Newsweek. Michael Parenti long ago quipped: “Of course there’s a conspiracy—the conspiracy of self-interest.”

Google the following folks with “9/11” by each name. You’ll find some right-wing flack, but you’ll also find reasoned concerns and questions that cry for more attention—silent screams in muffled media.

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Robert Johnson has worked blue- and white-collar jobs. He read marketing material for investment banks and corporate law for 20 years. He appreciates OEN's offer to the public to write. It provides venue not defined by career building and not (more...)
 
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