Sunday, January 21, 2007

None So Blind (a lament)

“The bigger the lie, therefore, the likelier it is to be believed.”
—Adolph Hitler

Liberal commentators regularly assert they “just can’t,” “won’t” or that they “simply refuse to believe” 9/11 could have been an inside job . Yet such irrational and emotive statements merely confirm the cognitive impairment of their speaker. It is a firm matter of historical record that governments, very much including our own, have planned and executed horrendous, even murderous acts of deceit in the past, including ones against their own people. Denying this would be denying the dynamics of power as they’ve been understood since remote antiquity, and those who decry even the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job (in spite of the vast array of evidence as well as eminent expert, professional, and military opinion clearly indicating it was) are stretching an already tenuous appeal to American Exceptionalism, the fallacy that “it could never happen here.”

Who would deny the Tuskegee experiments against African American prisoners, or the MK ULTRA mind control experiments of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or that the government recently legalized the testing of carcinogenic agents on members of minority communities, to cite just a few examples? What liberal voices reveal in their abjectly anti-intellectual denial that 9/11 might have been a “false flag” intelligence operation intended to trigger public support for the geopolitical aims of the new administration is their own arrogance, specifically their less-than subtle sense of their own privilege and superiority. “The government might dispose of members of social, racial and ethnic minorities,” their reasoning implies, “but it would never kill with such brazen indiscrimination as was the case on 9/11.” It would never, in other words, kill “me!”

Meanwhile, a critical look at the public record reveals that government officials have repeatedly lied about almost every aspect of 9/11, prior to which they a) reorganized the national security apparatus in a way that appears to have facilitated the attacks, b) obstructed field investigations that would have prevented them, and c) issued directives that confused longstanding national security procedures. They have alternately confessed to and denied receiving multiple advance detailed warnings of the attacks from an extensive variety of credible domestic and international sources. And they have sought to obscure their own close and deep historical and financial ties to international forces playing a part in 9/11. They have suppressed and destroyed material evidence pertaining to multiple aspects of the attacks and even reclassified published material supporting the “inside job” argument (meaning that it is no longer admissible in US courts). And they have deliberately contorted the public record to fit the official account of events. Ignoring the testimony of numerous witnesses to various aspects of the 9/11 tragedy that directly contradict the official account, and in manifest conflict of interest, officials have pointedly neglected to investigate 9/11 from any angle other than that presuming the entire government’s absolute innocence; this was the narrow—and given the record incredible—course to which the 9/11 Commission was hog-tied from the outset by the director of its “investigation,” Philip Zelikow, a neo-con close to the White House. (As the Commission concedes, its mandate did not include assigning “blame” for 9/11.) Meanwhile, people in and out of government have been harassed and threatened for speaking out about what they know, while many others (we must presume) remain effectively silenced.

It is not unreasonable but incumbent upon us to suspect that such blatant and determined obfuscation shields the guilty: those with the readiest means and clearest motives to plan, facilitate and effectively cover-up an event on the scale of 9/11, officials whose mentors and forbears leave a documented history of premeditating just such epochal crimes. Especially as it was these officials’ long-announced aim to implement a crusade for central Eurasian resources and global (or “full spectrum”) US military “dominance” (including the militarization of space)—a grand design contingent, in their own words, upon “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat” to the nation such as might be announced in the form of “a new Pearl Harbor.”

Add to this the grotesque anomalies in the physical record pertaining to 9/11. Such as the strangely conflicting body of evidence pertaining to United Flight 93, or the government’s suspicious handling of the Flight 77/Pentagon evidence, or the fact that the virulently “weaponized” post-9/11 anthrax strain was cultured in laboratories at Ft. Dietrich in Maryland, or the several indications that the three towers to plunge from the lower Manhattan skyline at near freefall speed on 9/11 were demolished by controlled demolition. What’s been characterized by a cross-section of credible academic and expert opinion as the “physical impossibility” of the official narrative for these towers’ collapse has sparked bureaucratic battles—not elaborated upon in mainstream press—that have led in one case to the firing of Kevin Ryan, an official from Underwriters Laboratories, the company which certified the steel used in the towers, only days after he’d clearly spelled out, in a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the implausibility of the official narrative of their destruction.

It is clear to anyone following the 9/11 debate that independent researchers skeptical of the official story are carrying the day in a broad variety of arguments against those attempting to shore up a hemorrhaging (if mercurial) official narrative. While those towing a slurring government line neglect to engage their detractors openly, their logistical efforts are clearly aimed at evading and obfuscating the latter’s coherent and devastating critiques. What’s frustrating to those of us following the drama is that, while the truth regarding 9/11 is slowly willing out, no one besides “conspiracy theorists” seems to be paying much attention.

In his bosom-clutching dereliction of intellectual duty, the liberal intellectual is denying—in curious lockstep with the lunkhead right—that he’s been duped. Snared by conceit, he forbids attribution of any historic event to any catalyst other than that delineated by the regime, no matter how tortured and self-contradictory this official conspiracy theory is proven to be, and no matter how many people of goodwill risk life, reputation and career to set the record straight.

If the liberal’s denial is outright, that of farther “leftist” sentiment manifests as avoidance. In its scurry from critical 9/11 dispute, a voice promoting itself as progressive or even radical asserts that we should just “get over” 9/11 already, even that it “doesn’t matter,” a statement advanced by a self-professed lefty to this writer based on the fact that more people die of AIDS everyday than were killed in the September 2001 catastrophe. The inanity of his reasoning is as obvious as it is prevalent in leftist discourse about 9/11—to the extent there is any—largely guided by the meretricious “blowback” theory of terrorism: by his token AIDS doesn’t matter, and neither does genocide, since more people die of starvation everyday than of the two other scourges combined.

It is not the aim of independent 9/11 researchers to make a fetish the human losses suffered that day , but to honor those slain by exposing their true murderers and deflating the malignant myth that because “they hate our way of life” 19 Arabs armed with box-cutters defeated the United States all on their own that day: a morally indefensible absurdity and singular pretext for a war consuming uncounted innocent lives.

Admittedly, part of the difficulty in pleading truth about 9/11 is that this also, in effect, asks the victims’ loved ones (and the nation overall) to re-enter that devastation, to awaken to it as if for the first time. Resentment is to be expected. But when emotion occludes reason so persistently it’s unhealthy. And as we redress our own grief and betrayal, mere messengers are beset with condescension, suspicion and dismissal.

However protective in intent, strident reactions to these messages are anti-rational, ahistorical and hysterical. Based not in logic but fear, these rationalizations, in an all-too apt analogy, recall those offered by victims of abusive families who refuse to acknowledge—and who secretly even feel they deserve—the abuse. This subconscious guilt is especially apparent in the left’s uncritical adoption of the “blowback” theory of terrorism (which sees the attacks as lucky breaks on the part the oppressed against a bumbling empire in real part responsible for their suffering). Outright dismissal of the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job may be said to indicate the left’s own repressed guilt over the event, a condition reaching its ludicrous apogee in my acquaintance’s statement that 9/11, inside job or not, “doesn’t matter.”

Indicative of the left’s blinkered response to the challenges presented by 9/11 are the reactions to the attacks, and to allegations they were state-sponsored, by Ward Churchill, who after claiming those who died deserved it (as cogs in the Zionist world-order) appeared to step back from this stance on a television program on which he shared a platform with the son of a 9/11 victim. In a tight spot, Churchill proceeded to barter with both the young man and the truth (at least as he saw it) when he offered sui generis that the young man’s father—whom Churchill claimed to have actually met—didn’t deserve it, in exchange for the young man’s conceding that many of those who died so horribly with his dad might have. (The son didn’t bite.) Add to this Churchill’s disgusting implication—voiced on Air America Radio—that doubting the official story is racist, based on his perversely equating the suggestion that Arabs didn’t pull off the attacks (at least by themselves) with saying they lacked the intelligence to.

Never mind that the public record provides ample cause to seriously question almost every aspect of the government’s narrative, not the least of which is that according to reputable press sources many of the alleged hijackers are still alive. This, as well as evidence Mohamed Atta and other “hijackers” were double-agents, is ignored by Churchill, whose dogma appears to dispense with such fussy obligations as consulting the labors of respected intellectuals who’ve actually scrutinized the matter. (Like David Ray Griffin or Nafeez Ahmed, chroniclers of multitudinous deficiencies in an official narrative suffering “death by a thousand cuts,” more than a few lethal.) In his racist defense of Arabs as righteous murderers, Churchill doesn’t pause in lending his leftist bona fides to support of the government’s theory, under whose pretext thousands of perfectly intelligent—not to mention innocent—Arabs are now routinely slaughtered. To Churchill, incarnation of leftist catatonia, Arabs did it because they’re smart and Americans deserve it, facts be damned. With flagellation passing for leftist opinion on 9/11, dare we marvel at rightist triumphs?

Webster Griffin Tarpley, quoted here at length, concisely characterizes the theoretical basis of “9 11 Truth’s” argument, which opposes the romantic or “naïve” view that terrorist acts grow “directly out of oppression, economic misery, and political despair,” with the oppressed and exploited supposedly “coming together spontaneously…to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers.” While acknowledging that intelligence agencies draw from among the subjugated in orchestrating “false-flag” or “black” operations such as 9/11, in the Truth Movement we start “from the strong presumption that terrorism is intrinsically an activity which is controlled by a faction of government [through the cooperative involvement of international secret intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, NSA, ISI, MI 5, MI 6 and Mossad], probably acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after 1991… Secret intelligence agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy is at work: as the enjoyment of oligarchical privileges comes inevitably at the expense of the people, covert methods of control become indispensable. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern forms go back to the Republic of Venice…the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history…which was famous for its intelligence directorate, the Council of Ten, and its pervasive network of spies, informers, and provocateurs… Despite their cultural differences all of these secret intelligence agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized tentacles—such as the intelligence community in the United States has had since President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333.”

According to Tarpley’s aptly chilling description, “the world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood, camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery, and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither hope, nor mercy, nor redemption. It is the one area of human life where Hobbes’s maxim holds true—it is the war of all against all.”

Paraphrasing Der Fuhrer, Marshall McLuhan observes, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” Let’s allow for just a moment that there’s something to the vast array of information and evidence offered by so many experts from diverse backgrounds, all clearly combining to indicate that 9/11 was a “false flag” intelligence operation—a clandestine, collaborative procedure carefully orchestrated by Anglo/American intelligence agencies in coordination with powerful figures inside US military, industry and government. In that case each of us remains victim of the incredulity McLuhan notes, of the Hitlerian lie, not to mention the obscene crime it veils. Recall what blame for the attacks has been officially laid to: a failure of the imagination. Ironically, a diagnosis with which “9 11 Truth” researchers would concur, were that failure characterized as a prevailing collective, irrational and anti-historical refusal to imagine that certain of those charged with protecting us may be guilty of the deliberate and ultimate betrayal of the sacred—that is, blood—trust vested in them. The esteemed psychoanalyst Martin S. Bergmann contends that dread of this precise betrayal, of being in essence sacrificed by the parental or protective authority, is the most primal fear—however latent—experienced by human beings. It is precisely this fear that would blind us to the truth about 9/11.

The apparent fact that the crimes of 9/11 have been planned, executed, covered-up and exploited by longstanding clandestine elements within the US military/industrial complex in cooperation with Anglo/American secret intelligence agencies (extending, in this analysis, to the Israeli Mossad) has a subtly pernicious influence on the collective psyche of people in the United States in particular. In part a psychological or “mind-control” operation, the attacks have conditioned the US public for ever-increasing acceptance of lies within our social discourse as well as our very relation to the material world. This condition, which writers from George Orwell to Milan Kundera have recognized as symptomatic of authoritarian regimes, has led to radically diminished accountability on the part of public officials, military authorities and, most ominously, ourselves.

Charles Upton, in his critique of New Age and Postmodern thought, The System of Antichrist, chronicles the corrosive inroads made by irrationality into academic and cultural life. The cerebral anemia according to which 9/11 alternately “doesn’t matter” or its myriad anomalies are swept under the rug is sadly emblematic of this decay of intelligence. Upton notes that “once truth is abandoned, all that’s left is power,” which may explain doctrinaire leftist knee-jerking when it comes to 9/11. It can’t matter that reason and record are on the side of “9 11 Truth,” along with poor facts (as best mere mortals might know them). Hectoring, smug and quick to take offense, the opposition are trapped animals savagely defending any corner they’re narrowed to, with liberals huffing firm and final words on the matter, while to others reality itself founders in a “critique of empiricism” where “evidence” and “truth” being “historically problematic” are simply “not emphasized.” Seems it’s we conspiracy theorists who “just don’t understand.”

The painful irony is that “9 11 Truth” and affiliated groups are forming what leftists purport to advocate: a critical-minded, ecumenical and egalitarian movement whose exponents span the world’s religions, nationalities and ethnicities. Still, much of the left remains chary of the grassroots or any organization that doesn’t carry the imprimatur of institutional authority, especially movements considering that inflexibly taboo subject of “conspiracy.” Yet given the roles of secrecy, assassination and terrorism in authoritarian regimes historically, the unconscionable reluctance of much of the US left wing press to seriously consider evidence of official conspiracy has obscured public understanding of crimes ranging from the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, RFK, MLK, John Lennon and Senator Paul Wellstone to the terror attacks on the WTC in ’93, in Oklahoma City, and in the nation’s cultural and political capitols on 9/11. The evidence indicating official conspiracies in each of the aforementioned murders (not to mention many others) ranges from highly suggestive, as in the case of Lennon, to, as with 9/11, staggering.

Yet to the grim rigors of “deep politics”—the academic discipline concerned with the study of conspiratorial networks and tendencies in the contemporary state—the dilettante left, confused and enticed by the apparent inevitability of corporate globalization, swoons over the empire’s seductions (a coquetry ala Hardt and Negrie) rather than bothering with the messy, technicality-laden “truth” about 9/11, especially given “9 11 Truth’s” exposure of the explicit human predation underlying “globalization.”

It’s a truism that there’s a tendency on the part of subscribers to the conspiratorial view of history to “over-determine” the role played by conspiracy historically, particularly at the expense of economic forces (Richard Hofstadter’s position in his famous Harpers essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”). Yet what can be over-determined has been insistently under-determined, along with the tendency among intelligentsia and media figures on the left to essentially side with demonstrably malfeasant state authority on the occasion of certain watershed events for which the record clearly indicates culpability on the part of state. Questioning who benefits from the prevailing cultural bias against intellectual positions—no matter how well-informed—smacking of “conspiracy,” Ralph Schoenman aptly characterizes as Stalinist this antirational bent on the part of “leftist” authorities. Whether they are conscious of it or not, these figures’ function, at the critical historical junctures such watershed crimes as 9/11 mark, is that of gatekeeper of official history, of the lies offered up by a criminalized state to obscure its essentially predatory nature.

Plainly, 9/11 does matter. Not only to those who lost loved ones, but those who sent sons and daughters to fight and die avenging them. It matters to those warriors, and to accruing millions in foreign lands invaded and threatened by the US. It matters to anyone meaningfully concerned about civil liberties, terrorism, honest public discourse, personal integrity and our collective future. And it matters the more to us who study it because of all the ugly, desperate truths it reveals about how our present system—at some macabre if principle level—operates, and because it’s our conviction that those responsible for the attacks are getting away with global murder, rape and pillage as a result of them. It matters because 9/11 marks the wanton increase in lethality of state-sponsored covert intelligence operations. It matters because historically states embarking on policies like those foisted on US bureaucracy by the 9/11 coup fair poorly quickly and bloodily. It matters because the world of decency, openness and nobility that is our birthright is receding under the banner of the official 9/11 myth into twilight, to be followed by what seems certain darkness.

Yet 9/11 cannot matter to anyone who, in their repressed dread and guilt, must deny its true aegis. If 9/11 becomes, as it does for many who part its veils, an obsession, it’s in part due to the unwillingness or inability of others to confront such anguishing data. Abandoning us to the hell which the quality and abundance of the material rips us into, those in denial are so many trite, jabbering goons smugly chirruping pop vernacular, the faux prudence of corporate opinion, or the snotty casuistry of academic chic. And worse than that they don’t know is that they don’t want to. That they’re content as the blatherers to which empire spectacle reduces them, with their participation in such big ol’ confusing matters simply not required, not that it would help anyway. Why it wasn’t them hurled to the meat-grinder of laconic apathy. And why just like the president they’re clever enough not to like (though they regard his idiocy as license), they’re “lucky,” and on that flying carpet to fame, romance, or at least self-fulfillment…

It’s all good. A fireman interviewed for an article about the 9 11 Truth Movement in New York Magazine told the reporter that he believes the government’s story on one basis. “Osama fucking bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone else, then I’d have to do something about it.” Precisely. “And I don’t want to think about what I’d do.” This isn’t belief, but fear of truth and his castration before it, of the ignominy of his betrayal, of having hailed his brothers’ killers… Fear of rage.

Charles Upton again, in elucidating the metaphysical principles upon which the Perennial (or Traditionalist) philosophical school is based, writes that what he calls the “system of antichrist” not only makes reason and truth difficult to ascertain and/or acknowledge, it would make the very search for truth seem vain. Here’s what’s so dispiriting about the left’s overall response to 9/11. Commentator after commentator, person after person, friend after friend, without having confronted the material, begs the question, “yeah but how can you ever really know.” In an exchange with a journalist for a soft-left weekly who’d written a puerile article on the 9 11 Truth Movement, the reporter, in responding to me, adopted an attitude that might be summed, “if I can’t know exactly what happened I’m not going to go around pointing fingers, like you. And you can’t know exactly what happened either.”

As though adult conjecture was out of bounds, even given the surprisingly detailed record on the matter (of which—though he claimed familiarity with a considerable portion—he seemed oddly incurious and un-conversant, begrudging almost, yet at the same time as if waiting for still more to be discovered—not that his article mentioned much that had been—some dramatic breakthrough maybe, almost as if he was still on the job…). As though no one is ever justly held in suspicion, or those serving in government were somehow exempt from misgiving in just this instance, however incriminating the circumstances. As though 9/11 were sacred territory to be guarded from finger-pointing or all but perfect knowledge, a set of mystical circumstances beyond human adjudication.

Behind his posturing I heard the undead scratching. Shy of an impossible or “absolute” knowledge , the left, demanding all or nothing, mires in its veneration of ambiguity, neutered by a creed of uncertainly. Behold the antichrist, installed behind the implacability of our indeterminism, his dominion our doubt of him.

According to God’s biblical Covenant with the lineage of Cain (and in what some consider fair warning to free people) the beast is marked…the devil must tip his hat. (In Upton’s phrase, so apposite the 9/11 conundrum, “true evil always exhibits a tell-tale mixture of diabolical cunning and immense stupidity.”) Considering the glibness of their iniquity, a friend recalls that members of the administration don’t exactly lie (usually). Some have on a number of occasions all but confessed their crimes, acknowledging them with offhand phrases that dwindle to inaudibility. (And whatever else we might think of him, President Bush has been frank, if especially-so in moments we’re instructed by his handlers to discount. ) Accomplished postmodernists, it’s been observed these tricksters regularly offer flatly ambiguous statements that can be read past their face value as acridly ironic indications of truth. Sander Hicks, activist, gubernatorial candidate and author of a very good book on 9/11, tells an interesting story of meeting Vice President Cheney (who any “9 11 Truth-er” knows is a central suspect in the attacks) at a Republican benefit Hicks had finagled an invitation to. The moment comes to shake Cheney’s hand and Hicks, in Republican guise, looks him in the eye: “So Mr. Vice President, how do we respond to all these people who say 9/11 was an inside job?” “It can’t be,” answers Cheney. “Well why not…?” To which Dick replies (with understated candor, considering the illegal obliteration of the 9/11 crime scenes), “All the evidence is on our side.”

Well Dubya does dub ‘im “vice.”

Considering the official story’s blatant contortions, the seething anomalies in the public record, and the shameless cover-up of the scandal , those of us who follow independent 9/11 research often find ourselves shaking our heads: “How stupid do they think we are?” Yet considering the intransigence of so many on the left, practitioners of what Jesuits call “invincible ignorance,” that’s hardly the question…

How stupid are we? Mind-control 101 :

One of the many difficulties in discussing 9/11 critically is the inevitability that other outré topics muffled within postmodern discourse will arise. One is mind control, essentially the fostering and aggravating of schizophrenic mindsets within an individual or populace with the aim of inducing a form of Multiple Personality Disorder (termed by professionals Dissociative Identity Disorder) in persons and/or groups. While psy-ops (psychological operations) are considered within the military to be an essential aspect of any strategy against an enemy, many liberals and progressives again “fail to imagine” that psy-ops could ever be effectively turned on anyone so sophisticated as themselves.

Yet it would seem they have been, against us all, and for some time. Nestled in the just-upstate New York town of Cold Spring and overlooking the Hudson toward a southerly West Point lies the stately-named Tavistock Institute. More than a quaint throwback to the heady acme of Skinnerian psychology, Tavistock describes itself as an organization of “dynamic psychiatry” intended to practice what it calls “societry,” otherwise known as mass perceptual manipulation and management, on the planet as a whole. According to the late maverick researcher Jim Keith, Tavistock was born from “the collaboration of the international moneyed elite, military intelligence, and the materialist psychiatric community.” Keith notes that Kurt Lewin, co-founder of the American Office of Strategic Services (precursor to CIA) “is credited with much of the Original Tavistock research into mass brainwashing, applying the results” of government-sponsored mind-control experiments involving the “repeated traumatizing and torture of individuals to society at large.” Writing in the mid-‘90s, Keith characterized the theory behind Tavistock. “[I]f terror can be induced on a widespread basis then society…reverts to a tabula rasa…situation where control can easily be instituted from an exterior point… By the creation of controlled chaos the populace can be brought to the point where it willingly submits to increasing increments of control… Lewin maintained society must be driven into a state equivalent to an ‘early childhood situation’ which he termed ‘fluidity.’” Tavistock literature reiterates its “global vision,” admits its “military” orientation and makes it clear, according to Keith, “that the Institute intends to practice its long-term ‘societry’ on the world regardless of the wishes of the individuals who inhabit it.”
The awkward fact appears to be this: in the eyes of our oligarchical masters, those generally faceless entities behind the World Trade Organization, World Bank, “globalization,” Council on Foreign Relations, et. al., the human race is a malleable and ultimately controllable commercial material resource. As Plato observed, the sole function of the oligarchy is perpetuation of the oligarchy, which is why the “father of philosophy” also states that “the price of non-involvement in government is to be ruled by evil men.”

Such “non-involvement,” of course, is meticulously cultivated by the oligarchy. Zbignew Brezezinski, senior foreign policy statesman, one-time US Secretary of State, and uncanny prognosticator of oligarchy policy , wrote in 1968 of an information society with an “amusement focus” based on “spectator spectacles (mass sports and TV) providing an opiate for increasingly purposeless masses…” He stated that “new forms of social control may be needed to limit the indiscriminate exercise by the individual of their new powers,” mentioning the “possibility of extensive chemical mind control…” In what he called the “Technotronic Age,” the “nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” Crisply foreshadowing present NSA policy, Brezezinski continues, “At the same time the capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen in addition to the more customary data…These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information.” From the ‘60s Brzezinski looked forward over the next several decades toward “a dictatorship leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them…” He saw no reason why such a “scientific dictatorship” in which the minds of the populace were effectively controlled by a mixture of narcotics, mass entertainment spectacles, and media control in the hands of a few, should ever fail.

As Webster Tarpley observes, the subliminal effects of 9/11 threaten to permanently distort our at-home-ness in reality, in the physical world, which on that day became a place where majestic state-of-the-art buildings, marvels of engineering and modernist architecture’s capstones, monuments (affirmed by cliché) to human ingenuity and spirit…unpeeled so strangely to dust. The question of how the towers fell isn’t merely academic, but in some measure crucial to our psychological health as a people. If, as some contend , they were destroyed by explosives planted in the structures in the week preceding the attacks, then we’ve been compelled to accept a counterfeit view of physical reality, marking the radical intensification of a schizophrenic mindset already endemic in—and increasingly definitive of—Anglo-American culture.

The effect of the Towers’ destruction is tied to the structures’ form as well as the place of the “tower” and “twin” archetypes in legend (whether in Tolkien, the Tarot or the Pentateuch for the former, or astrology, religious esoterism and classical myth for the latter). Anthropomorphic totems, the twin towers connoted a unity of two (or balanced duality), the harmonious couple (thus love, or lovers), or the self and its reflection: in short, completion, with the north tower (with its antennae) the yang to the south’s yin (slightly recessive, as if, from the greater Manhattan perspective, backing the other up). Their destruction, then, was an eidetic inscription, rooted in mortal shock, of the shattering of unity, the failure of love, the death of the iconic companions, God’s wrathful judgement (ala Babel) upon our aspirations (and the futility of endeavor) and the fracture of communion (language, community—or logos, word or idea embodied…meaning). Situated at the millennial cusp, at the crossroads of macrocosmic time and superhuman space, the structures’ spectacularly surreal dematerialization unmistakably declared the triumph of disunity, unreason, separation and loss—in short, the reign of antichrist, which 9/11 would appear to have been intended by certain of its architects to herald.

From tut-tut to sneering contempt, the sad range of knee-jerk responses to critical 9/11 discourse remains, alas, to be expected. For 9/11’s sponsorship by commanding elements within our government would make it, in essence, a human sacrifice —an explicit reassertion of the ancient carnal religion of empire, The Old Worship, defined ineluctably by that signature rite. As such, it is an epochal evolutionary throwback whose nature, in abject defiance of secular progress, must be denied, however irrationally, by those blind to 9/11’s esoteric implications. Only somewhat paradoxically, the same anxiety prevents many religious people from recognizing 9/11’s true nature as a state-sponsored secret intelligence operation, a contingency which subconsciously confronts them with the overthrow of God—or at least His Earthly Dominion—by the anthropologically more ancient deity in opposition to whom monotheism evolved: Moloch, the god of human—specifically child—sacrifice (to whom children were “passed,” according to scripture—and in chilling echo of 9/11—“through fire”).

With our bereavement defiled by vulgar bellicosity, we would rush the immolation behind us. Yet our wound remains unfathomed. Unable to mourn, commemorate and bring it to meaningful closure, we fixate at our initial shock, as our slaughtered are consumed by their butchers. Unavenged and hostage, their souls are doubly mocked in a cacophony we loiter as chattel. The undead.

As activists note, it is hardly out of the question that 9/11’s planners intended to be noticed; hence the conflicting layers of subterfuge, the contradictory elements of the attacks and cover-up. An essential measure of their control would be our knowing they are there, in charge, and that there’s nothing any of us can do. The consuming obsession of 9/11’s planners, this control is consummated in the Enlightenment’s capitulation to the forces of unreason; in its denial of the empire’s nature, the left genuflects before antichrist. In our abusive national family, the lefty is favored of the rapist father and according to profile loyal—however complaining—to the last.

The actual 9/11 terrorists are sociopaths; true to form, they desire attention, in fact need, as much as committing the crime, for their power to be discerned, however subconsciously, by their victims. We must sense them, if never all together and without quite being able to “prove” it, the point being very much for us to know they are there, whether or not we are capable of admitting it.

The idea that the empire, to advance its agendas, would sacrifice 3000 of its own sounds strange only to that vast majority of its subjects duped by imperial ritual. Whether consumed by poverty, labor, narcotics, mass entertainment and sports spectacles, or the Punch and Judy farce passing for national politics, the gross of empire subjects work, shop, root their favorite sports team on, ogle the celebrity couple de jour and smugly scan their preferred periodical for the opinions suitable to their own age group, racial, religious or cultural identity and/or sexual predilection, and assume the age in which they live is a secular one defined by market forces, technological advances and globalization, and that any truly major problems will be solved by science.

Meanwhile—and let’s conjure him with a commiserative glance—the conscientious minister of worldly power, as he confronts the chilling exigencies: flagging economies, dwindling resources, and a vulgar, sentimental and inebriated mass whose profligacy has traipsed it past the threshold of the greatest mass-extinction event in the four and a half billion year history of life on Earth… Given the state of material disparity and international factionalism in the immediate term, from the point of view of the cult of empire 3000 is a small price to pay, a drop in the bucket, compared to what might happen should certain feral elements of foreign sentiment be allowed to incubate without the judicious application of martial prophylaxis.

In a declassified State Department memo from 1948, George Kennan, a seminal voice in twentieth-century US state policy, wrote, “We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is…to maintain this position of disparity without positive determent to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming… We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” John Foster Dulles, co-founder of CIA, put it more bluntly, “it is only by eliminating the lower members” of the human race “that a higher average is maintained.”

If leftists are uncomfortable with such language, they have every cause to be. Not the least of which is that it’s precisely this genocidal, eugenics-inspired agenda they license in their pusillanimous acquiescence to what Webster Tarpley calls the “myth of the twenty-first century,” that 19 hijackers working for Osama and Allah took upon themselves to foil the most technically sophisticated and powerful military state in world history. A David-and-Goliath romance playing into lone-wolf fantasies of landing a blow against an impervious system, it’s a nevertheless specious fable whose historical legitimacy dissipates under the critical analysis applied to it by established experts from myriad backgrounds the nation and world over, the self-same analysis the US left by and large cravenly refuses to acknowledge.

It’s clear to the judicious observer that the imperial war for the natural resources of central Eurasia was a fait accompli the moment Bush was installed. And so, as the dispassionate reader of history must recognize sooner or later, was 9/11. Meanwhile the terror state Pollyanna class—blushing moderate, fatuous conservative, meretricious liberal and the theory-fatted poseur who casually squawks “maybe they let it happen”—cower in their mutually-supporting antagonisms, sissy-slapping each other from their prescribed niches in a cultural circle-jerk necessarily excluding forensic analysis of 9/11. For that would confront each with something they simply don’t wish to imagine, an agency whose cold-bloodedness they are not intellectually, emotionally nor spiritually equipped to confront. Thus do our wan Narcissuses parade as skeptics, assuring the fallible conspiracies just don’t happen, that they can’t be covered up, that people aren’t that organized and the world is “more complicated,” that those who think “that way” are foolish really, a bit tardy mentally or not up to snuff…often lonely, perhaps deranged, even dangerous sometimes.

Yet fear of truth is a wish for betrayal. In the case of 9/11 the brutal facts indicate an agency more malevolent than irrational, more focused than accidental, and subtle rather than simple. Vastly sophisticated, it is by far more threatening to our sense of security or identity than any hatred born of anger, envy, material disparity or cultural misunderstanding. Something worse than a well-funded if obscure foreign entity bent on crippling or destroying the empire, and worse than alliances of fanatics, criminals more or less to be eradicated, however distasteful one may find the proposition… These are mere shibboleths dangled before the terror-state faithful. Necessary to the manufacture of an ephemerally multifaceted yet fundamentally uniform social consensus regarding terrorism, they obscure its true aegis, knowledge of which affronts us more deeply than “terror’s” crimes. (One naturally prefers the scene of the murder to the company of the murderer.) Unrestrained by collective acknowledgment or overt suspicion, terrorism's source proves the effect’s viler twin who, like the apparition some spy in the south tower’s plummet, mocks us from the cloud of dust.

The demon banished to the fancy of cranks, the ordained cognoscenti of our postmodern age obsess over the result, assigning it like obedient children to measured combinations of expedient abstractions—zealotry, economic despair, religious, ethnic and cultural antagonism—in order to rescue themselves from confronting terror's precise agency, nature and techniques. Meanwhile, terror-state propaganda frustrates sustained critical examination of the attacks and their circumstances. Before public attention can train on essential matters another crisis, scandal or mere vulgarity ripples the hallucination passing in our “virtual” age for culture.

While researchers identify a number of apparently complicit actors within our government and military, the larger question nevertheless remains: who ultimately did 9/11? That is, precisely who conceived, planned and—perhaps most crucially—gave the go-ahead…? Back in 1987, Hawaii Senator Daniel K. Inouye spoke what might serve as an approximate answer to that question when he observed, as a result of investigating the Iran/Contra Arms-for-Hostages scandal (involving a number of the same figures alleged to have had a hand in 9/11), that there operates in the US “a shadow government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free form all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” We may also find a hint prefigured in a passage from a 1913 letter by Woodrow Wilson, “Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

What we face is a clandestine, sophisticated and ruthless eminence or syndicate, vastly resourceful and international in scope, with ready reach into those highest halls and offices of power we naively regard as our own. We understand instinctively we are not supposed to know, believe or pursue any of this, that the matter in any case is well enough in hand, and that suggesting more than is appropriate to the contrary compromises something, rocks a listing boat, marks one as the crackpot…or a dead man. For to penetrate the labyrinth of the 9/11 conspiracy is to confront an archetypal violation, a truth to which, like Oedipus, we prefer stabbing out our eyes, which have glimpsed the twisting creatures we are in the gaze of our devouring father.

—May/June 2006 (revised Oct. ’06)


Selected Bibliography


Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq, The War on Freedom. Tree of Life Publications, Joshua Tree, CA, 2002.

Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachussetts, 2005.

Arrows, Four & Fetzer, Jim, American Assassination: the Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone. Vox Pop Press, Brooklyn, 2004.

Bergmann, Martin S., In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrifice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. Columbia University Press, New York, 1992.

“Chip Tatum Chronicles, (The): Testimony of Government Drug Running, ”www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/TATUM/tatum.html, 1997.

DeCamp, John W., The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, second edition. AWT, Inc., Lincoln, Nebraska, 1996.

Griffin, David Ray, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, second edition. Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2004.

Griffin, David Ray, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2005.

Hicks, Sander, The Big Wedding: 9/11, the Whistle-blowers, & the Cover-Up. Vox Pop Press, Brooklyn, 2005.

Hufschmid, Eric, Painful Questions: an Analysis of the September 11th Attack. Published by Eric Hufschmid, www.EricHufschmid.net, 2002.

Keith, Jim, Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness. Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, 2001.

Keith, Jim, Mind Control, World Control: the Encyclopedia of Mind Control. Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, 1997.

Keith, Jim, ed., Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History. Feral House, Portland, Oregon, 1993.

Lee, Martin A., The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists, Routledge, New York, 2000.

Madsen, Wayne, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil, the Blood Politics of George Bush & Co. Trine Day, Chicago, 2006

Marrs, Jim, Rule by Secrecy. Perennial/HarperCollins, New York, 2000.

McGowan, David, Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder. IUniverse Inc., New York, 2004.

Millegan, Chris, ed., Fleshing Out Skull & Bones. TrineDay, LLC, Walterville, Oregon, 2003.

Morgan, Roland, Flight 93 Revealed: What Really Happened on the 9/11 “Let’s Roll” Flight? Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 2006.

“9/11: Conspiracy Theorists Run Amok,” Mark Jacobson, New York Magazine, 27 March 2006.

Paul, Don & Hoffman, Jim, Waking Up from Our Nightmare: The 9/11/01 Crimes in New York City. Irresistible/Revolutionary Press, San Francisco, 2004.

“Pegasus File, (The),” parts 1 & 2 by David G. Guyatt. Nexus, April-May & June-July 1997.

Ruppert, Michael C., Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2004

Saussy, F. Tupper, Rulers of Evil, Useful Knowledge about Governing Bodies. HarperCollins, New York, 1999.

Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993.

Tarpley, Webster Griffin, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, Made in USA. Progressive Press, Joshua Tree, California, 2005.

Thomas, Kenn & Keith, Jim, The Octopus, Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Feral House, Los Angeles, 2004.

Thompson, Paul & The Center for Cooperative Research, The Terror Timeline, Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: a Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11—and America’s Response. Regan Books/HarperCollins, New York, 2004.

Upton, Charles, The System of Antichrist: Truth & Falsehood in Postmodernism & the New Age. Sophia Perennis, Ghent, NY, 2001.

Wilson, Edward O., The Future of Life. Vintage, New York, 2002.