Wednesday, Jun. 30, 2004 - 2:43 a.m.

The Two Towers

I started writing this post in early January, after I spent three days straight reading 9/11 conspiracy websites. I postponed it due to other stuff going on at the time, but now with the release of Moore’s new flick, I can wait no longer.

A critique of the backwardness of America is implicit in the title; what kind of fools still measure temperature in degrees Fahrenheit? I also thought Fahrenheit 9/11 (or 11/9 for you Europeans reading this) was quite a lot better than the film version of Fahrenheit 451.

Moore can make moving documentaries, but he’s a shitty political analyst. He’s no Chomsky. When Moore accepted the Palme d'Or award at Cannes, he said, "I have this great hope that things are going to change. I want to make sure if I do nothing else for the rest of this year that those who died in Iraq have not died in vain." Did Moore think about what he was saying? If by, “those who died in Iraq,” he meant the Iraqis, then yes, stopping the war and pulling out the Americans would mean that the Iraqi soldiers and militiamen and mujahedeen who died fighting Americans would not have died in vain. However, he meant the American dead (he clarified this in a later comment), so this makes no sense. The only way to justify their deaths is to win the war for America. And I know Moore doesn’t mean that. Face it, Moore, they died in vain big time. They were fighting for the wrong side (not to imply the other side is right, though.) If we’re going to make things any better, the deaths of those Americans need to stay in vain.

And the dead civilians died in vain any way you slice it.

Moore hands Bush his ass on a platter. I don’t believe any of Bush’s supporters would be able to maintain their loyalty after seeing this. However, so much emphasis is put on blaming Bush, that the forces that installed him (he’s not a self-made man) escape criticism. Even the blame is rather light; the implication is that Bush’s divided loyalty between Saudi billionaires and the American people led him to be lax when it came to prosecuting those responsible for 9/11. There was no mention of The Project for a New American Century, no mention of an Air Force stand down, no mention of the disproportionate numbers of put options on American and United airlines (indicating that someone in the stock market had prior knowledge and was trying to profit off the catastrophe). There was so much deeper Moore could have gone, but he constrained the message to, “Bush is bad.” Oh, and of course, “Saudi Arabia is bad.”

I may resent Bush for many things, but I don’t begrudge him for sleeping on, “fine, French linens.”

I gained a deeper understanding of how Gore and the Democrats were complicit in Bush’s usurpation of the presidency. Gore actually presided over his own illegal disenfranchisement, silencing those who would have helped him. I wonder if he did it because he really wanted to help Bush, or maybe because someone threatened his family or something like that.

I was very pleased to see Moore devote a large portion of the movie to the war in Iraq, and impugn war in general. The ruling elite can easily replace Bush with Kerry and continue as before, but a populace unwilling to wage war would be a huge wrench in the gears of the Empire.

Not having a television set, I glimpsed the war for the first time. Reading about it and hearing about it is just not the same. I also saw moving pictures of Cheney for the first time. Man, that guy sure looks creepy.

I take issue with Moore’s assertion that 9/11 was a, “foreign attack on American soil.” Says who?

I make no secret that I’m working from an understanding that the September 11th attacks were intentionally orchestrated by elements within the U.S. government in order to create a pretense for external conquest and domestic repression.

To me it seems like a no-brainer that politicians are more likely to be more loyal to their own lust for power rather than to ethics or concern for human life. I expect them to try to do anything, and to tell any lie, that they think they can get away with, in order to increase their power. Any politician constrained by a conscience isn’t likely to successfully claw their way to the top of the heap. Others prefer to believe that everything is pretty much the way the media says it is.

For some reason, during my Christmas vacation, I thought it would be great to make my father watch the video of the Michael Ruppert lecture, The Truth and Lies of 9/11. After watching Ruppert lay out the evidence that the Air Force did not respond as they normally would have, my father denied (on faith) that it is standard operating procedure for NORAD to send jet fighters to intercept planes that run off course. He insisted I prove it. Well, after much searching, I found the smoking gun. It’s a military policy document. Read pages 7 and 8 of the pdf. The rules say that hijacked planes do have to be intercepted.

Following up on my post about 9/11 stuff on Democracy Now!, I was overjoyed that it got on the show at all (glass half full), while Conspiracy Man was irked (as I was) at the context in which it was presented (glass half empty). The following dialog is long, but highly illuminating about what must be motivating each of these guys, who I take to be champions, respectively, of each of the sides in this larger debate. Chip Berlet makes Griffin out to be credulous, sloppy, and misguided, pointing out flaws in Griffin’s logic, while paradoxically claiming that Griffin must be wrong because some of his sources are right-wingers. Excuse me, but since when did one’s political beliefs determine whether one was factually accurate? David Ray Griffin then responded to most of Berlet’s criticisms, and in my opinion, completely trounced him, point for point, employing sounder logic. I can’t believe Berlet didn’t concede defeat after that. I can only conclude that Berlet’s attacks are self-consciously dishonest. Judge for yourself.

A timeline of events related to 9/11.

An extremely detailed timeline.

If terrorists wanted to kill a lot of people, why didn’t they crash into the Indian Point nuclear power plant instead?

Where did the wings and the jet engines go? I was initially enthusiastic about the missing wings, but now I’m ambivalent. The wings just as easily could have disintegrated into shrapnel in the explosion.

Why are 36 passengers unaccounted for on the passenger lists released to the public?

This page argues that the towers may have collapsed because thermite was used to melt sections of the WTC core columns. It’s a strong rebuke to the idea that burning kerosene and paper could melt steel.

The collapse of a skyscraper called World Trade Center Seven at around 5pm on September 11th has never been plausibly explained. Never before in history has a steel-framed building has collapsed due to fire. On one of the videos, you can hear the voice of Dan Rather saying that it looks just like a controlled demolition. In terms of video footage, this one is the convincer.

Here’s an intriguing conspiracy theory involving switching planes in midair. Defying parsimony, it’s the most convoluted explanation I’ve run across. It’s too silly, and too lacking in supporting evidence for me to take seriously.

And how did the passenger-jet-into-the-World-Trade-Center scenario wind up in the pilot episode of an X-Files spinoff aired months before 9/11? Coincidence? I don’t even want to think about what would have been necessary to pull off this little part of the conspiracy. It makes my head hurt. Watch this 4 minute excerpt from the show, and see if you can continue seeing the world as before.

Then I came around to agreeing with Michael Ruppert that the physical evidence doesn’t really matter. It’s not going to convince anyone by itself. And if it isn’t central to the case, then it’s a needless liability in terms of persuading the public: if one of the peripheral parts of the critique turns out to be unfounded, then it’s that much easier for skeptics to dismiss the well-founded central critiques as well. Thus, it doesn’t matter if a 757 really did hit the Pentagon, it doesn’t matter if fires really made the skyscrapers collapse, it doesn’t matter if the folks at Fox television just coincidentally presaged the attacks. It isn’t necessary, it’s superfluous, to advance conspiracy theories about what might have happened on September 11th, to explain how everything transpired. All that is needed is to show how the official story is false. This turns out to be remarkably easy, as there is copious evidence that demolishes the official story.

What seems closest to a smoking gun right now is the fact that at least 5 war game exercises were in progress on September 11th, and these confused the response to the hijackings. Whoever scheduled these drills for that day might as well be wearing a t-shirt proclaiming, “I planned 9/11.” Whoever coordinated those drills is in the highest levels of the Federal government.

Once the official story is discredited, maybe then the process of constructing an alternative chain of events can begin. I think it’s too early to expend energy on the latter until public awareness is raised about the former. The whole public does not need to be convinced, just a critical mass of the kind of people who are going to be motivated enough to do something about it.

The evidence is what’s important. There are diligent 9/11 researchers and sloppy 9/11 researchers. There may even be phony 9/11 researchers concocting fake photographic evidence and flimsy explanations for the express purpose of having it debunked, to discredit the rest of the 9/11 truth movement by association. I even saw one website that purported to have video footage of another aircraft in the vicinity of the towers while the second tower got hit. After several viewings, it became clear to me that the fast-moving blob that changed shape as it moved was just a bird flying in front of the camera.

I’m not eager to believe every theory that comes along. I analyzed the Disclosure Project (a UFO conspiracy theory), and dismissed it for being anecdotal and presenting illogical arguments. David Icke’s stuff looks like disinformation to me. I’ve yet to see compelling evidence for chemtrails.

I follow this 9/11 deception exposure stuff (a more accurate label than “conspiracy theory”) primarily because I find the evidence compelling, and I’m passionate about truth. Secondly, I believe that the United States is showing itself to be the biggest global threat to the lives and well-being of the largest number of people right now. The September 11th attacks were used as the ostensible reason for launching two separate wars. I want to do my little part to help expose the 9/11 ruse, in hopes that this will, in turn, attenuate the destruction.

As an anarchist, I think that any institution based on domination is deleterious to human happiness. And certainly any government. But all states are not equally harmful. While I think that the existence of the governments of, say, Liechtenstein and Tonga are a bad idea, but they’re not in a position to do much damage. The governments of North Korea and Sudan are a grave threat to their own people, but the harm is relatively contained. It’s the United States of America, the government that claims me as one of its subjects, that has nukes, has the most powerful military, and a strong record of past and present aggression. I want to use the issue of 9/11-as-inside-job to undermine the self-confidence of this empire. It won’t pop us into a new paradigm, but it ought to make the old nationalism less viable. I wouldn’t lie to achieve this end, but since I genuinely think there was a coverup, I want to get as much mileage as I can out of it.

What I find promising about this, is that a full exposure would probably implicate the real power structure pulling the strings of this government, including (but not limited to) the intertwined relationships between the CIA, Wall Street, and drug smuggling.

Boyz in the Hood

What I want to know is, who sews these hoods? Along with all the other evidence that’s come out, the existence of the hoods themselves indicates a high level of premeditation. I heard that when in Eugene a year ago, when a SWAT team arrived in an armored vehicle to raid a home for growing marijuana (and the cops ended up finding nothing illegal in the house), the residents were arrested and taken away in hoods. The same hood manufacturer, I wonder?

A month ago, I came across this popup ad on a corporate website:

This indicates a huge change to me. People with money consider this an acceptable question now. A big change from 2001.

I saw a similar popup ad questioning support for Bush. Sounds good, right? Well, I’m afraid that Bush may end up playing the role of a sacrificial scapegoat for US imperialism. Those in control of this empire are not about to compromise this empire. And this empire is not going to willingly let go of the second largest proven oil reserve in the world (Iraq). Bush served his purpose in advancing the interests of the Empire, but he and his administration have been too arrogant, too greedy, and too sloppy in covering their trails, so now the Bush administration has become too much of a liability to the interests of the Empire. The public demands someone’s head, and the powers that be are willing to toss them Bush’s to pacify them, so long as every important part of their plan is allowed to continue.

Even when Bush stages a phony capture of Bin Laden (I presume, in my cynicism, that they captured him long ago, or that he’s a willing pawn) shortly before the election, this won’t be enough to save him. The media, concentrated in just a few corporate hands, is allowing Bush to be criticized in a way that was impermissible a few years ago.

That says to me that the powerful are preparing for a Kerry presidency. If they weren’t Kerry would be being lambasted as dangerously liberal, and from what I hear (I don’t have a TV, remember?), that’s not happening. Howard Dean was made into a laughing stock after just a minor screaming fit at one rally.

MoveOn PAC says: “Shut up and obey.”

I attended a public “town meeting” on Monday night, put on by MoveOn PAC, with Michael Moore as the guest speaker. It was billed as a national online interactive meeting. The interface rocked—some kind of dynamically generated Flash updated in real time, with popup windows with photos and input fields and streaming audio. It had a map of the United States blossoming with little circles indicating where each participating meeting was taking place. To me, it seemed like the nuclear war simulation from War Games.

I went there because the flyer made it sound participatory, and I had a point of view to air. I wanted to say something like, “the United States has acted like a belligerent empire for hundreds of years, conquering land after land and committing atrocities. The Iraq war is but the latest episode in this long trend, and the Bush Administration is just a topical symptom of this underlying disease. The United States is now the lone superpower, with a military bases around the world. To undo the Iraq War, and prevent future wars like it will require unmaking the empire itself: closing the bases, destroying the weapons, and fragmenting the “homeland” itself, for we ourselves stand on conquered territory.” I would have had to rephrase that as a question.

Moore only took the time to answer 3 or 4 questions from around the country—and dorky ones at that, such as, “does my one vote make a difference?” My answer: no. Aside from rare instances of close races, everything counts in large amounts. Years ago, I tutored reading to a nearly illiterate psychiatric invalid. He said that he pays no attention to politics, but still votes. He votes for whoever his friend tells him to. Presuming some right-winger was telling him how to vote, my vote would do nothing but cancel out my student’s.

Though there was a microphone set up on stage, it was only used by the MC for a few announcements. There was never any opportunity for dialog in this meeting. Attendees were exhorted to sign up on a list and promise to register people to vote (for Kerry). At the end of Moore’s address, the crowd was dismissed.

We should all sit quietly and listen to Moore. Even if I didn’t have grave concerns about the one-sidedness of this forum, I’d want the masses to listen to someone other than Moore, who is scarcely brighter than the president.

I had to hand it to MoveOn PAC for the efficiency by which they are able to regiment dissent and transubstantiate it into enthusiastic support for the ruling elite.

I can’t understand how these liberals can believe that Bush stole the 2000 election, yet express no concern that he might steal the election again in 2004. It’s straight-up doublethink.

Moore said that since Kerry protested the Vietnam war and knows what war is like, he would never decide to invade a country for no good reason. BUT KERRY VOTED FOR THE IRAQ WAR!!! I don’t use all caps lightly. I can’t call this anything else but very willful ignorance. Steam coming out of my ears, I shouted, “yes he would, he sure would!” in response to Moore’s wishful thinking. This at least sparked an interesting dialog between myself and the couple sitting nearby.

Democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, is not reducible to taking your marching orders from central command (MoveOn PAC). That’s potentially as dangerous as supporting your president in a time of war.

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