http://edwardcurtin.com/589-2/
Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore
Although this article about September 11, 2001 was written five or six years ago, I think it is still pertinent. I have nothing new to add to it, except the link near the end to an excellent new article by Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter. Most people now have little interest in that infamous and key day, but in the years to come history might find such work important in confirming the truths expressed here.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home when the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was my daughter, who was on a week’s vacation with her future husband. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Tower.”
I turned the TV on and watched a plane crash into the Tower. I said, “They just showed a replay.” She quickly corrected me, “No, that’s another plane.” And we talked as we watched in horror, learning that it was the South Tower this time. Sitting next to my daughter was my future son-in-law; he had not had a day off from work in a year. He had finally taken a week’s vacation so they could go to Cape Cod. He worked on the 100th floor of the South Tower. By chance, he had escaped the death that claimed 176 of his co-workers.
That was my introduction to the attacks. Sixteen years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago.
Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn’t believable; the official story was full of holes. It was a reaction that I couldn’t fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin (see How Bush And Cheney Ruined America And The World) and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating a college course on what had come to be called 9/11.
But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.
By 2004 I was convinced that the U.S. government’s claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report) were fictitious. They seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as “the war on terror.” The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the government’s claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.
Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people’s insouciant lack of interest in researching arguably the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds seemed to have been “made up” from the start. I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. This included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy. Now that sixteen years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever.
So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance deHaven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, et al., I have concluded that a process of linguistic mind-control was in place before, during, and after the attacks. As with all good propaganda, the language had to be insinuated over time and introduced through intermediaries. It had to seem “natural” and to flow out of events, not to precede them. And it had to be repeated over and over again.
In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
- Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Coincidentally or not, the film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the air despite the fact that the 60th anniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor comparison was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used innumerable times, beginning immediately. Even George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night to allegedly use it in his diary. The examples of this comparison are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this.
- Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order.
- Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the good war”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
- The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of the very important The 2001 Anthrax Deception. He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.” He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.” This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.” PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.” I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.” Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.” The unthinkable is unthinkable.
- 9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number. Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced this connection the following morning in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.” The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’” By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.
I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively at this time because of the nature of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge. It is why I don’t speak of “9/11” any more. I refer to those events as the attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a mouth-full and not easily digested in the age of Twitter and texting. But I am not sure how to be more succinct or how to undo the damage.
Lance deHaven-Smith puts it well in Conspiracy Theory in America.
The rapidity with which the new language of the war on terror appeared and took hold; the synergy between terms and their mutual connections to WW II nomenclatures; and above all the connections between many terms and the emergency motif of “9/11” and “9-1-1” – any one of these factors alone, but certainly all of them together – raise the possibility that work on this linguistic construct began long before 9/11….It turns out that elite political crime, even treason, may actually be official policy.
Needless to say, his use of the words “possibility” and “may” are in order when one sticks to strict empiricism. However, when one reads his full text, it is apparent to me that he considers these “coincidences” part of a conspiracy. I have also reached that conclusion. As Thoreau put in his underappreciated humorous way, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
The evidence for linguistic mind control, while the subject of this essay, does not stand alone, of course. It underpins the actual attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks that are linked. The official explanations for these events by themselves do not stand up to elementary logic and are patently false, as proven by thousands of well-respected professional researchers from all walks of life – i.e. engineers, pilots, architects, and scholars from many disciplines. (See this excellent September 2002 article by Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter.) To paraphrase the prescient Vince Salandria, who said it long ago concerning the assassination of President Kennedy, the attacks of 2001 are “a false mystery concealing state crimes.” If one objectively studies the 2001 attacks together with the language adopted to explain and preserve them in social memory, the “mystery” emerges from the realm of the unthinkable and becomes utterable. “There is no mystery.” How to communicate this when the corporate mainstream media serve the function of the government’s mockingbird (as in Operation Mockingbird), repeating and repeating and repeating the same narrative in the same language; that is the difficult task we are faced with, but there are signs today that breakthroughs are occurring.
Words have a power to enchant and mesmerize. Linguistic mind-control, especially when linked to traumatic events such as the September 11 and anthrax attacks, can strike people dumb and blind. It often makes some subjects “unthinkable” and “unspeakable” (to quote Jim Douglass quoting Thomas Merton in JFK and the Unspeakable: the unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.”).
We need a new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57234.htm
Dancing with the Politicians
US Foreign policy has become a full-time comedy routine
If the non-stop dancing duo Biden and Blinken is seriously seeking to validate its view that the United States of America is and should be the world’s hegemon, they are going about it the wrong way. They should be taking their lead from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky by turning their press conferences into entertainments with dancing bears and scantily clad chanteuses pirouetting and singing across the stage. They would benefit from recalling how Zelensky rose to power through his performances of comedy routines in which he would be prancing around on high heels with three colleagues who appeared to be mocking what might be construed as gay mannerisms to amuse the audience? Or perhaps the rather more outre performance where Zelensky would play a piano with his penis?
If one can remember all that it would most definitely help to understand the foreign policy that is somehow playing out in Ukraine, where Zelensky has transitioned into a serious, unsmiling guy who is adept at solicitations for money and weapons. His pleading has become a shameless full-time endeavor as he now appears on thousands of screens via video link all over the world, saturating the airwaves and dropping in on both major and minor gatherings. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone recalls how he has appeared on “the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, [while also] having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.”
Elmo might in fact be coming next as NPR is clearly one of Zelensky’s biggest fans. One also suspects that before the Ukrainian President is finished, he will be addressing a rotary meeting in Sioux Falls South Dakota. And Zelensky has even turned begging into a family affair, with his wife Olena welcomed by the President and First Lady at the White House while also going on to address the US Congress, entreating America’s Solons to provide plenty of cash and things that go bang to thwart the ambitions of one Vladimir Putin. As she put it, she is concerned lest her son and daughter be unable to return to school and university in the fall. She then observed that “We would have answers if we had air defense systems” which would enable a “joint victory in the name of life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.”
Indeed, a high point of the recent antics has to be the unique cover photo shoot by Vogue magazine, in which the lovey-dovey couple Volodymyr and Olena grin and hug before the cameras. Zelensky declares his undying affection . Vogue aside, the entire Zelensky performance, choreographed as it is by neocons inside and outside the administration, is perfectly color and image coordinated. Zelensky has an endless supply of olive drab t-shirts and he entertains in Kiev a steady stream of statesmen and even heads of government from Europe and the US, including the US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has appointed a seasoned Justice Department “Special Investigations”, i.e. “Nazi hunter” investigator, named Eli Rosenbaum to look into possible Russian war crimes.
The Garland/Rosenbaum dynamic duo will not be looking into possible Ukrainian war crimes like the recent assassination of Darya Dugina in Moscow as it is not part of the mandate from Biden/Blinken and besides which the Ukes are America’s friends, just like the Israelis who are such great friends that they also get a pass on whatever they inflict on the Palestinians, including shooting or blowing up civilians. Indeed, Zelensky’s White House approved message is always the same: “give us money and guns and we will defeat the Russkies.” So Honest Joe Biden gives them the cash and the things that go bang in the night and in return they get a hearty hand shake when the bundles of Benjamins get transferred into the trunk of someone’s car. All of which leads one to wonder if Mr Z is the best reliable source for anything having to do with himself and the corrupt toadies that adhere to him, given the recurring reports that some donated weapons are already making their way into the black market just as quickly as the money goes into officials’ pockets. Zelensky has reacted to criticism by shutting down opposition parties and media, assassinating dissident politicians and firing or imprisoning any other official who might be inclined to disagree with him.
Apart from that, there is allegedly a war going on, which may not be evident from all the horse trading taking place at the presidential palace. It also would appear to be counter-intuitive that the Russians, blamed without much in the way of evidence for atrocity after atrocity, have apparently proven willing to let Zelensky entertain all his guests undisturbed. If you are truly committing a lot of war crimes, why not add one more to the list by blowing up the Kiev presidential palace and both killing Zelensky and probably ending the war at a stroke?
There are, in fact, two wars taking place simultaneously. There is, to be sure, fighting going on around Donbas, but the more important conflict is the phony war being waged by the Biden Administration and a number of European Chancelleries in support of whatever is actually taking place in Ukraine. This latter aspect of the war consists of perhaps the most stifling – and effective – propaganda effort the world has ever seen. It includes Joe Biden and his brigade of clowns, but it also has a supporting cast consisting of NATO, a number of European heads of state and virtually the entire western media. Social media has also joined in the struggle, banning Russian originating news stories and opinion, and using algorithms and other forms of manipulation to make reporting favorable to Moscow go away. The allied effort to defeat and destroy Russia relies on lies, half-truths, and out-and-out deception. But why bother to do it? It is because the war was preventable and avoidable, which is what the White House and other governments cannot admit to the public. It makes absolutely no sense and will benefit no one when it is over, and “over” might mean “really over” as nuclear weapons are on the table.
But what about the good old American exceptionalism which Biden-Blinken and that stalwart warrior Merrick Garland are supposed to be defending? Well, that seems to have taken a hit as much of the world, watching the fiasco unfold in Ukraine, apparently doesn’t appreciate the Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. To them, the war in Ukraine would never have started if the US and Europeans had invested in the tiniest effort as mediators to come to a negotiated solution. They have given up on the United States as a “force for good” and have rather concluded that Washington is a global bully and a regular aggressor.
Former US Air Force colonel and PhD Karen Kwiatkowski has an interesting tale to tell about how far the mighty have fallen. She writes “…I saw that the Solomon Islands refused (ignored really, which is even better) a US Coast Guard request to come to port, to buy fuel, like with real American dollars, y’all! Why was the US Coast Guard floating around the South Pacific – were they lost? After getting a fuller picture – they were looking for lawbreaking fishermen and that’s where their mission took them…” So what was the US response to this outrage, which was immediately blamed on interference by the Chinese? We need “a new embassy in the Solomon Islands… along with a new five year engagement plan in the Pacific.”
During the Cold War before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a commonly heard comment was that the country had become economically and politically an “Upper Volta with rockets,” which implied that the USSR spent so much on weapons that the civilian economy was starved of resources. Well, welcome to the former United States of America. As the nation’s decline and fall will no doubt be facilitated due to the millions of mostly Latino “asylum seekers” flowing over America’s southern border, the US as a “Bolivia with nukes” might be more appropriate. The world is tired of Washington and its pretenses and the walls will inevitably come tumbling down when the Biden unsustainable trillions of dollars of added debt-surge brings on bankruptcy Argentina style. A sharp change in course might be able to fix some of the problems, but there is an election coming up which the White House is keen to win by flooding its cherished constituencies with funny money in exchange for votes, a practice which once upon a time would have been seen as corruption. Come to think of it, the US has become a banana republic run by an essentially criminal gang that alternates every few years to pretend to be a democracy. Can’t get much lower than that, but Biden sure is trying!
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