FOOD FOR THOUGHT 11
(PART FOUR-G):

OUR ENEMIES, THE
LEFT GATEKEEPERS


IN THIS EPISODE:

BOOKS ABOUT 9/11
THAT ALL GATEKEEPERS
SHOULD HAVE READ
(UNLESS THEY ALREADY HAVE
READ THEM
AND ARE LYING ABOUT IT)

INCLUDING THE MOST
IMPORTANT OF ALL
9/11 BOOKS SO FAR,
WEBSTER GRIFFIN TARPLEY'S
SYNTHETIC TERROR:
MADE IN USA

·..........·..........·..........·..........·
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)

ONE

..........I'd thought this would be a relatively quick matter, my Gatekeeper project, which really started here. I thought that I'd simply go about shaming a selection of better-known Gatekeepers for their appalling ignorance of 9/11 and associated matters, or shame them for their malfeasance, ethical guilt, and mendacity—that is, if they did know 9/11 truth but lied, claiming they didn't know.

..........And, after having done that, I'd provide a list of books that the Gatekeepers should have read instead of parading their ignorance, putting on superior airs, and smearing other people—people who knew lots more than they did—and that would be that. Or—and worse—a list of books that the Gatekeepers had read but then went on lying just as if they hadn't read them.

..........But I've come to see that the Gatekeeper syndrome is far more complex, far more dangerous, and far, far more corrupt than I'd ever imagined. Numbered among the Gatekeepers are some who are blissfully ignorant, others who are malevolent liars, still others who are disinformation agents (indeed, working for intelligence agencies) tasked with the putting out of lies, smears, loony-tunes and crackpot "conspiracy theories" intended to cause confusion and thereby "discredit" as equally loony all thinking and all serious research on 9/11 and related questions. Some of the Gatekeepers, true enough, are just simply ninnies and have never been anything but ninnies—for whatever mysterious reasons, the name Jane Smiley comes to mind. Others are utter snoots and snobs, considering themselves above the very notion of 9/11 Truth, people who are not about to lower themselves from the airy realms of finesse, fashion, privilege, high style, fakery, and fine satiric commentary on matters of frothy nothingness—people not about to lower themselves into the mucky gutters of 9/11 Truth, where they'd rub shoulders (or noses) with the repugnantly un-cool, unsophisticated, out-crowd of sweaty, real-life researchers. The thought of utter snoots and poseurs of this sort brings to mind names like Christopher Hitchens, David Corn, and, especially of late, Frank Rich.

..........The ninnies—unless they're in fact being used as patsies by their owners—are ninnies and nothing more. That, of course, makes them no less guilty than any other Gatekeepers. It's simply that, patsies or not, they're in general much less complex than the others.

..........The snobs are far and away the most unbearably obnoxious—the name Walter Kirn comes to mind with something near the speed of light, the very model of one who's equally liar and snob—though, again, the snobs may or may not be patsies, ignorantly controlled by their owners. Either way, they either are utterly ignorant, or their mendacity and hypocrisy are boundless in enabling them to appear no different from the blissfully ignorant ninnies while in fact they may be purposefully or falsely ignorant.

..........Worst of all, though, morally and ethically, and by far the most dangerous, are the true moles (who may also happen to be those emitters of loony-tunes disinformation propaganda). But the true mole—when one thinks of the true mole, the name of Noam Chomsky is the one, this time, that comes up with the speed of light. Certainly Chomsky is the most visible and most widely known of 9/11 Gatekeepers, actually being a hole-plugging and hammer-pounding 9/11 denier. What now appears to be the real case is that Chomsky has been functioning for at least his entire recent career as a mole, so deeply hidden as a spy on behalf of the criminals (see chapter 5, "The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Gatekeepers of the Left," in Barrie Zwicker's Towers of Deception) that he's been lauded all along the way as the left's greatest hero.

..........The best person to read, then, on the particular, and particularly awful, subject of Chomsky, is Zwicker. And the best person to read on the subject of those who are patsies and those who are moles, and on the way each works or is worked, is the very great Webster G. Tarpley.

..........And the best person to read if you want close analysis of the fraud, mendacity, hypocrisy, smear, contumely, and shamelessly twisted logic that are employed by the Gatekeepers in their actual writings—well, so far as I can tell, that person is me.

TWO

..........All of that having been said, on to the books. I'm going to list them more or less in the order that I myself read them, which won't always correspond to the chronology of their publication dates. As is appropriate, however, I'll end with Tarpley.

1)
.......... RUPPERT, MICHAEL C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. (New Society Publishers, 2004).

..........This is the grandfather of all the 9/11 books—those, that is, written by Americans. For a good length of time, it was the one to read if you were to read only one—that is, until the David Ray Griffin books came around, it offered the broadest, most inclusive overview of 9/11, placing the "attacks" in the context of "peak oil," the term meaning that as of now we've got only a diminishing supply of oil left in the earth, with no more waiting around to be discovered. The result? Not, as it should be, conservation or the seeking of alternative sources of energy—hardly; instead, the result (for Earth's only remaining super power) is a shameless, aggressive, armed power grab to get possession of the remaining oil fields—in the middle east and in the old USSR satellite states. Hence 9/11, an event planned, executed, and perfectly suited as a catalyst or excuse for the launching of the war we're told will last our lifetimes. That war, of course, is the war against the fabricated and invented "enemy" of "Islamo-fascism" or against the equally fabricated and invented enemy, "terrorism," though Ruppert's focus is less on that side—the side coming after—of 9/11 than it is on the side leading up to 9/11 and on the specifics of the attack-day itself. This is the book to read if you want to see Dick Cheney, in the White House bunker, standing at the master controls of the entire event, giving the orders that prevented air interception of the attacking planes, allowed the shooting down of flight 93, permitted the Pentagon attack, and more, illegally being commander in chief while the "president" sat in the famous and indescribably appropriate kindergarten room in Florida.

..........Ruppert, now in exile, in hiding, and allegedly in deteriorating health, began his career as a Los Angeles policeman who, among other things, worked with Gary Webb at the time of Webb's investigations of the CIA's smuggling of crack cocaine into South L.A. in order to raise money for support of the Nicaraguan "contras." As an ex-cop, Ruppert applies the same fastidious methods and standards to his research as he would and did in preparing cases for grand jury presentation. That is, he finds means, motive, and opportunity, and takes it upon himself to prove each of them in a way that's water-tight. If such standards aren't attainable in regard to any given subject, he won't touch it.

..........Listen to him here, for example, talking about Thierry Meyssan's book on Flight 77, published in France in 2002:

....................Flight 77 again: the miracle plane. The one that nobody actually
..........saw hit the Pentagon; the one that left no recognizable debris matching an
..........airliner; the one French author and investigator Thierry Meyssan did a
..........pretty convincing job of proving it never hit the Pentagon because the hole
..........was way too small and the damage pattern (a key forensic technique
..........used by police officers investigating traffic accidents) was totally in-
..........consistent with a mid-sized passenger jet like a 757; the one where
..........the engines melted, disappeared or evaporated, or were trans-
..........ported into space by the Starship Enterprise and never found; the
..........one that flew like a fighter plane or a cruise missile.

....................Meyssan was crucified in the American press, although his book
..........L'Effroyable Imposture, or The Horrifying Fraud, became a runaway best-
..........seller in Europe. This was another lesson for me about what happens in
..........America when one tries to make a conspiracy case in the public arena,
..........based solely upon physical evidence. That approach gave rise to verbal
..........attacks and politically empty debates that merely wasted time and
..........energy. I have never believed that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. I also
..........deliberately chose not to pursue it in my newsletter because I couldn't
..........prove it by the rigorous standards of either the law courts or by peer-
..........reviewed forensic science. Of course, like Meyssan and everyone else,
..........I've been dogged by the big question about the alleged Pentagon
..........plane: where did Flight 77 go, and what happened to the passengers?

....................I was now absolutely convinced that some valuable and highly
..........trained assets were among the so-called hijackers and that those
..........assets could not have accomplished the flying required on 9/11.
..........Their behavior was more consistent with the creation of a detailed
.........."legend" to make the public believe they had done the deed. (p. 351)

..........Ruppert's invaluable pioneering contributions to 9/11 Truth research and scholarship can hardly be given proper honor. It's impossible not to believe that the degree to which he has been persecuted—much like Gary Webb—can be due to anything other than the truth of what he has said and shown, and of the danger those truths pose to his—our—criminal and globalist enemies.


2)
..........GRIFFIN, DAVID RAY. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9-11. (Olive Branch Press, 2004).

..........GRIFFIN, DAVID RAY. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. (Olive Branch Press, 2005).

..........GRIFFIN, DAVID RAY. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action. (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2006).

..........GRIFFIN, DAVID RAY, and Peter Dale Scott. 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out. (Olive Branch Press, 2006).

..........THE NEW PEARL HARBOR
..........A good idea for anyone interested in the immeasurable debt owed to David Ray Griffin by those interested in 9/11 Truth might be for them to read a bit about Griffin before beginning his books. A trained academic, now retired, a Christian advocate of "process theology," a man who began with no suspicions of 9/11 as being anything other than the official story claimed it to be, he is very possibly the least "radical" or "extremist" or "loony" figure imaginable, but, instead, a man of complete poise, unpresuming manner, care in thought, fastidiousness in research—not to mention extraordinary clarity and calm in his writing.

..........Those things said, it can very easily be argued that The New Pearl Harbor is, after Crossing the Rubicon, the second of the "most-important" 9/11 books to have been produced by an American writer. Unlike Ruppert's extremely broad canvas, Griffin sticks closer to the facts of the attacks themselves and of the day of those attacks, not choosing to place his study in a deeper or wider historical context—like the context of, say, peak oil. The result is a much more focused read than the Ruppert book. For that reason, I very often suggest that anyone with a tight budget of time for their reading might begin with The New Pearl Harbor as in introduction equal in quality to Rubicon, albeit narrower and therefore absorbable much more quickly. It is, in any case, indispensable to the lay scholar of 9/11, whether with or without a reading of Rubicon. It pains me to say it, but if you can read only one, read this one.

..........THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT: OMISSIONS AND DISTORTIONS
..........Exactly what it says. If you read the actual commission report and then read Griffin's point by point perusal and rebuttal of it, you'll be overwhelmed. Even if you don't read the actual report first, Griffin's effect is very nearly the same, since the care he takes to synopsize wherever necessary or useful, the ease of his pace, and the measured, calm, never sensational quality of his method and his voice all fill you in not only about what is in the report but what isn't. The result overall: Anyone who reads Griffin's book with an open mind and with an empirically based acceptance of commonsense logic—no such person will leave Omissions and Distortions without have been convinced that the "Kean Commission Report" is an enormous, partisan coverup, or, as Griffin himself has said, "a 571-page lie."

..........CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE TRUTH BEHIND 9/11:
..........A CALL TO REFLECTION AND ACTION
..........Highly worth reading, even though the first half will be familiar to those who have read Rubicon and Pearl Harbor. In the second half, however, Griffin addresses his real audience, an audience of believing Christians, in "a call to reflection and action." Even for someone like me, who isn't a sectarian believer in any way, the material is fascinating, the passion fully engaging—even in the sections where Griffin, as theologian and a believer, writes a scholarly history and descriptive analysis of his own adherence to "process theology." A serious book on serious subjects in a serious time—and yet, as with all of Griffin, ever accessible, ever convincing, ever conscientious.

..........With PETER DALE SCOTT: 9/11 AND AMERICAN EMPIRE:
..........INTELLECTUALS SPEAK OUT
..........An anthology of eleven substantive and intelligent essays by trained, respectable, and highly educated authors ranging from Griffin himself and Peter Dale Scott on through Steven E. Jones (on the subject of controlled demolition being what brought the WTC towers down), Kevin Ryan, Richard Falk, and John McMurtry, who contribute extremely powerful and unquestionably persuasive pieces of writing. As does Peter Phillips, in "Parameters of Power in the Global Dominance Group," an essay I quoted from at the conclusion of Food for Thought 6: "Is America No Longer Just Blind, but Insane?"


3)
.......... AHMED, NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. (Olive Branch Press, 2005).
.......... AHMED, NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ. The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001. Tree of Life Publications, 2002).
..........The incredibly gifted Ahmed published The War on Freedom when he was only in his early twenties, and gained high praise from the likes of Gore Vidal, who called it "the best, most balanced report, thus far" in a lengthy review—that I can't find just now. Three years later came The War on Truth, which I myself read first. It's overwhelmingly good. Unlike Ruppert, whose method was to explore the 9/11 story with peak oil as the background and "key" to the whole thing, Ahmed makes use of the simple historical method, providing a chronological narrative beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and continuing on to the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole attack, 9/11 itself, and beyond. Deeply and exhaustively researched and annotated, the book will show you what all those events have in common, how each of them was brought about, where Osama bin Laden was when each occurred, where he "came from" in the first place, what choices the U.S. faced upon the collapse of the USSR, what choices it made—and more. If you're able to read only one of the two best-known Ahmed books, choose The War on Truth: in essence, it's a more rich, full, thorough, and deep treatment than The War on Freedom of the bringing about of 9/11—starting with the creating of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the collapse of the USSR, and carrying on through the complicitous administrations of Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Essential, powerful, deep, basic, indispensable.


4)
.......... CHOSSUDOVSKY, MICHEL. America's "War On Terrorism." (Global Research, 2nd Edition, 2005).
..........Professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, Chossudovsky is also head of the powerfully influential and informative website GlobalResearch.ca—Centre for Research on Globalization. From the start, Chossudovsky has been and is a major voice in 9/11 Truth Research. Well before 9/11, he was immersed in scholarship of the complex economics of the Balkans, and he shows patterns of U.S. involvement both there and elsewhere in the world as it moves toward global hegemony and the creation of a totalitarian state. Essential, profound, all-inclusive, exhaustively informative, enlightening, horrifying.


5)
..........MORGAN, ROWLAND, AND IAN HENSHALL. 9/11 Revealed. (Carroll & Graf, 2005).
..........Another unquestionably worthwhile book, though not as broad in scope or reach as, say, Chossudovsky or Ahmed. Written by two Britishers, the book is useful for its clarity, directness, and for its many photographs and illustrations. It is distinguished, further, by being the only 9/11 book to receive the honor of being panned and declared untrue by the US Government itself. Read the story here of the State Department putting up a special web page just to declare the book a falsehood and nothing but a mishmash of "conspiracy theories." A high honor that suggests the book's having hit home.


6)
..........TARPLEY, WEBSTER GRIFFIN. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. (Progressive Press, 3rd Edition, 2006).
..........Without hyperbole, it can be said that Tarpley's Synthetic Terror is the most significant, knowledgeable, and broadly insightful of all the books we have on 9/11 so far. Take a look here, at the publisher's page devoted to it, browse around for a while and see what you think. Tarpley's long career and unusually broad experience as historian, researcher, and writer take him all the way back into the 1970s, when he was one of the authors of Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo Moro?), which appeared in Italy in 1978. "The main finding," writes Tarpley in Synthetic Terror's Introduction,

....................was that Moro had been killed by NATO intelligence,
..........using the Red Brigades as tool and camouflage at the same
..........time. The cause of the assassination was Moro's determin-
..........ation to give Italy a stable government by bringing the Italian
..........Communist Party into the cabinet and the parliamentary maj-
..........ority. This plan was opposed—as a violation of the Yalta
..........spheres of influence, which made Italy a vassal of the US—
..........by the Henry Kissinger wing of the US foreign policy est-
..........ablishment, as well as by certain faction of the Italian ruling
..........elite grouped around the reactionary P-2 lodge, which was
..........still secret at that time. Accordingly, my study named
..........Kissinger, NATO, and British intelligence as prime sus-
..........pects, and not the Warsaw Pact embassies named
..........by the Italian media. (p. 9)

..........A passage like that one gives you some idea of what to expect from Synthetic Terror: an indisputably powerful intellect broadly experienced and deeply practiced in looking past the surface, past the apparent "reality," of events and things. In this, of course—because A Nation Gone Blind, in its far smaller way, argues for exactly such a looking through the surface of things—Tarpley warms my own heart. Also, the urgency of his mission, and his understanding of the context that gives it its enormity, are undeniable:

....................And so we say to all persons of good will: you would
..........never believe the utterances of Bush & Co. about any issue
..........of importance without independently verifying the facts. Why
..........do you persist in believing Bush on the most central
..........question of our time, 9/11? Are the implications too enorm-
..........ous? That enormity will itself be dwarfed by the consequences
..........of allowing such corruption to triumph unchallenged, as has
..........already occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq, and soon will else-
..........where, even in the US. (p. 58)

..........The origins of 9/11 are far back, its roots deep, and its significance deceptive:

....................A key feature of this study is its approach to the roots
..........of 9/11. I do not see 9/11 as an event growing exclusively
..........or even primarily out of conditions in Afghanistan or the Mid-
..........dle East. Rather, I see 9/11 as the culmination of a decade
..........-long crisis of economics, finance, politics, military affairs,
..........and culture in the United States. In the broadest sense,
..........9/11 is the wages of a disastrous decade of economic
..........globalization, and of the impoverishment and weakening
..........of an entire society. 9/11 does not grow out of US strength,
..........but represents a desperate flight forward in an attempt to
..........mask US weakness. 9/11 fits within the tradition of NATO
..........geopolitical or spheres-of-influence terrorism as it was
..........practiced in Italy and West Germany during the years
..........1965 to 1993. (p. 7)

What happened on the morning of 9/11 is that the pre-existing "rogue network" (and if that sounds simplistic, read Tarpley: believe me, it's in no way whatsoever simplistic) took over the ropes of government explicitly rather than, as may have been the case until then, only implicitly. I'll quote at a some length (note especially Tarpley's mention of an "assassination attempt" against George W. Bush on the morning of 9/11—and what exactly it was that Bush did later in the day, which you can read much more about by reading Tarpley's book):

....................The 9/11 rogue network subsumed some of the
.........."asteroids" of the 1990s, that is to say, the privatized
..........intelligence enterprises operating under Reagan's Exec-
..........utive Order 112333. The September criminals were finan-
..........ciers, top-level bureaucrats, flag-rank military officers,
..........top intelligence officials, and technical specialists; the
..........prime focus of their operations was in all probability a
..........series of private-sector locations, where confidentiality
..........could be best assured by excluding elements loyal to
..........the Constitution. It is therefore probably misleading
..........to think of people like Cheney as the hands-on field
..........commanders of the terrorist forces of 9/11, although
..........Cheney appears to have been complicit in other ways.
..........Bush was expendable enough to undergo an assas-
..........sination attempt that morning; he owes his continued
..........tenure in office to his speedy capitulation to the de-
..........mands of the September criminals. As time has gone
..........on, Bush has undoubtedly learned something more
..........about the invisible government he allowed to take over
..........his administration. By 2004, Bush had to be consid-
..........ered as witting as it was possible for a person of his
..........faculties to be about the basic facts of terrorism. (p. 11)

..........And there you are: The policies and practices now in place in the U.S. are terrorist policies and practices; these, as they're applied and directed by the invisible government that took over on 9/11, explain why, for example, President Bush follows paths and makes decisions that are opposed by every customary voice or counsel in Congress and in Washington itself—the counsel, just for example, of Jim Baker and the Iraq Commission. Conventional good advice from pre-9/11 sources or from pre-9/11 diplomatic viewpoints are—inexplicably, people say, or because of his "incompetence"—ignored by Bush. Everyone in DC, à la Jim Baker, says "do this." But no. Bush does that instead. Fewer troops, pull back, conciliate, compromise, urges the conventional advice. No. Bush goes for more troops, for hitting harder, demolishing more, bringing about more disorder and chaos in Iraq. The powers dictating to Bush, after all, don't want "victory," but what they want, instead, is an ongoing "war on terror," a "war" that will not end "at least in the lifetime of most of us," as Cheney put it all the way back in October 2001. That is to say that what's wanted isn't a war, but instead it's an indefinitely protracted program of international terrorism that will in effect provide a slow attrition, a gradual breaking down of all other—read inferior—nations and governments and states until what's left of them is only chaos and rubble, or at the very least impotence and social disarray, of an extent that will allow the hegemonic forces now governing the hapless George W. Bush to govern whoever it may then be as they order the moving in to those ruined areas of the world and the moving out of the oil.

..........Not believable? Well, let me simply ask: What else makes any sense at all not only of 9/11 itself but of what's been going on since 9/11? This very morning in the New York Times, Bob Herbert, with his heart absolutely in the right place, as usual, asks, of the war in Iraq ("Another Thousand Lives"), "How long can this go on?" That one pained interrogative comprises his entire first paragraph. Here's his second one—the one that introduces his own perceived subject, and the one that, sadly, will also introduce us to his consequent missing entirely of the real true subject:

.................... Saddam is dead. The weapons of mass destruction
..........were a mirage. More than 3,000 American G.I.s and scores
..........of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Voters in the United
..........States have made it clear that they no longer support Amer-
..........ican involvement in this exercise in sustained barbarism.
..........Incredibly, the U.S. military itself is turning against the war.

..........All true—except for the one piece of Gatekeeperism (which we'll get to in a minute) that warns us of how Herbert is, again, in fact going to miss the real story. Watch here, as he goes on:

....................And yet the president, against the counsel of
..........his commanders on the ground, apparently is ready to
..........escalate—to send more American lives into the fire
..........he set in Iraq.

Do you see it? In the first paragraph, the Gatekeeperism lies in the sentence saying that "The weapons of mass destruction were a mirage." Now, it lies in the sentence referring to the Iraq war as "the fire [Bush] set."

..........But, in each case, the truth is different. The WMD in Iraq never were in any way what Herbert euphemistically calls a "mirage." No, their existence was then and remains now a plain, bare-faced lie built upon a goodly platform of other lies and upon the destruction—through his committing of perjury in the most public of conceivable places—of a previously and otherwise perfectly honorable but now entirely destroyed man, by name Colin Powell.

..........Again and again, Herbert, misses the true story under the otherwise inexplicable one that's on the surface. Lies are lies, not mirages. Okay. As for the war itself, it is not and never has been a "fire" that George Dubya "set." George W. Bush, by general consensus, lacks the intellectual wherewithal even to set one of his very own and beloved fraternity-boy farts on fire, and certainly it was others, not he, who "set" Iraq on fire. And yet Herbert again and again hits his head against this and other falsehoods—against a brick wall at the dead-end of a blind alley—when what he must do to find the truth is look somewhere else.

..........And where he has to look—where we all have to look—is nowhere other than at (or for) "the invisible government [that Bush] allowed to take over his administration" when he at long last slunk in his absolutely terrified way back into the White House late in the day on September 11, 2001—and when he was made an offer he couldn't refuse.

..........But Bob Herbert won't look there, the New York Times won't look there, NPR won't look there, The Nation, The New Republic, CNN, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books won't look there—no one in the public life of America will look there. And, as a result, no one in the public life of America can make any sense whatsoever of the things that are going on around us, to us, and, presumably, in our name.

..........What's going on, simply put, is otherwise inexplicable. Look at this absolutely typical paragraph of Herbert's:

....................The war has been an exercise in futility and
..........mind-boggling incompetence; and yet our involve-
..........ment continues—with no end in sight, no plans for
..........withdrawal, no idea of where we might be headed—
..........as if the U.S. had fallen into some kind of bizarrely
..........destructive trance from which it is unable to awaken.

The war is "futility" and yet it "continues." Why? Herbert—like virtually every other Gatekeeper pundit in the nation who writes on international affairs—falls back on the huge canard that provides the perfect cover for those who are truly in power and are truly making "policy." That is, Herbert declares that the "Bush administration" is—yes, incompetent.

..........Is it incompetence that makes the "government" utterly unresponsive to popular pressure or even electoral pressure? Is it incompetence that makes Bush continue, unbudging, in policies that Herbert declares to be "insanity"? Is it incompetence that causes an insistence upon perpetuating policies that lead Herbert to say: "There is no way that this can be justified. It is just wrong"? Is it incompetence that makes Herbert write that "we're left with just the mad, mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter"? Herbert writes that "We should end our participation in the feast of death in Iraq." Who can conceivably find a weaker word than "should" in a sentence crying out in a state of such helpless horror as this one is crying out? And can it be incompetence that brings about cause for Herbert to write: "It is criminal to continue feeding our troops into the slaughter"?

..........The answers are, of course, are no, no, no, no, and no. It's not incompetence that's the cause of any such thing, situation, or impasse as those we're face with. And what is it, then? Well, Bob Herbert used exactly the right word and hardly even noticed it, since it's a forbidden word for Gatekeepers. The cause of it all isn't incompetence. The cause of it all, however, is criminality.

·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·
..........What Herbert misses is the clear and well-known (albeit never mentioned in the Gatekeeper New York Times) fact that Bush is a puppet. Herbert misses the clear and well-known (albeit never mentioned in the Gatekeeper New York Times) fact that who pulls Dubya's strings is an "invisible," or "rogue" (Webster Tarpley's words) government—the "government" that's the source of all the ills that drive Herbert mad, of all the terror, all the barbarism, all the murder, all the assassinations, all the unresponsiveness, all the misery, all the crime.

..........Since we're forbidden to think, see, or even say such a thing, however; since those things are taboos, no one is able to figure out the least truth about what's happening. People are being driven quite, quite mad—like good Bob Herbert—but, no matter, they'll continue to be forbidden from looking into the reasons why they're not only being driven mad, but why they—they and millions of others—are being murdered, slain, crushed, starved, ignored, fire-bombed, white phosphorus-ed, drained, wiped out, shot at in ambulances, stolen from, endlessly threatened and endlessly frightened and endlessly made terrified by the most fearsome of prospects, and, not least, are constantly stonewalled, blindfolded, and kept ignorant.

..........Look at the front page of the New York Times the same day of Bob Herbert's despairing, hopeless—and utterly, utterly useless—column. The lead story is "IN SHIFT, DIRECTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE IN STATE DEPT. POST." The subhead goes like this: "Negroponte Is to Be Rice's Deputy—Focus Is on Policy in Iraq." Byline is Mark Mazzetti.

..........So? What's the news? More chair-shuffling, more body-switching, more of nothing at all—if anything whatsoever, more appearance of change, as per usual. After all, remember this and remember it well: Whatever you see happening is in reality not what's happening. How can that be? Well, it can be for the very simple reason that what you don't see are the ones pulling the strings. What you do see are merely the moving hands, eyebrows, knees—the moving up and down of the jaws—of the puppets.

..........Did anyone see the pullers of the strings causing Nancy Pelosi to say, "Impeachment is not on the table"? Did anyone see those who pulled on the strings of poor, suddenly-a-total-coward John Conyers, causing him to say, "Impeachment is not on the table"?

..........Of course not. Read Tarpley and find out why.

..........But don't read the New York Times to find out why, because you won't find it out, and the reason for that is because so very much of what runs in the New York Times are huge packs of falsehoods, omissions, and lies.

..........Let's go back to Mark Mazzetti's lead piece in the Times for Thursday, January 4, 2007. I think we can skip the first paragraph—to wit: after two years at it, Negroponte won't any longer be "director of national intelligence" but instead will become number two at State. Second paragraph, pretty much ditto—to wit: In intelligence, there's been "little continuity at the top since the departure of George J. Tenet in 2004 as director of central intelligence." Okay. But paragraph three deserves a close look:

....................Mr. Negroponte had been brought to the intelligence
..........job to help restore credibility and effectiveness to agencies
..........whose reputations were badly damaged by failures related
..........to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and mistaken prewar ass-
..........essments of Iraq's illicit weapons. He has maintained a low
..........public profile but provides Mr. Bush with a briefing most
..........mornings.

..........And let's add in the first sentence of the next paragraph:

....................President Bush has hailed the establishment of the intell-
..........igence post as an essential step in helping prevent another
..........terrorist attack.

..........Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. First, there weren't any intelligence "failures" on 9/11—if there had been, those "failures" would have screwed up the attacks instead of making them run as astonishingly smoothly as they did. Too, if there really were intelligence "failures," why weren't any intelligence guys fired? Or why wasn't anyone else fired? Why did "slam dunk" Tenet himself and those other two screw-ups, General Tommy Franks and L. Paul Wreck-and-Ruin-Then-Run-and-Hide Bremer actually get Medals of Freedom? Not the kind of thing, it would seem to most folks, that you get for doing bad work and committing "intelligence failures."

..........But it does seem that really big-shot medals are what you do get for making hideous and calamitous intelligence mistakes that end up with massive attacks on your own country—or at least it seems so in the eyes of the New York Times, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc., etc., ad nauseam—even though getting national medals for committing major-league and in fact treasonable screw-ups runs contrary to every known element of plain common sense and isn't even an impropriety hidden, shielded, or veiled, but is a complete and total contradiction stuck right out there in print and on TV screens everywhere and in plain sight for every last soul in the universe to see for him or herself.

..........A Nation Gone Blind, indeed—we may as well go ahead and add deaf, and dumb, and stupid, and numb, and inane, not to mention the gutter-level lowering generally of major national institutions ranging from the press to crapademia—a lowering from what they may once have been down now to a stupifiedly ignominious and shameful and outright despicable bunch of positively shrieking shills and cover-up artists for an enormous gang of liars, criminals, thieves, hypocrites, committers of war crimes, committers of regular crimes, committers of murder, committers of treason, mongerers of war, slayers of civilians, layers-waste of entire cities, demolition-bombers of enormous buildings, and ghastly appliers of white phosphorous onto the flesh of men, women, and children, and target-shooters of them should they run for their poor, suffering, ruined lives.

..........One despises one's country. One despises the editorial board of the New York Times. One despises CNN. One despises NPR. One despises liars. One despises mass murderers. One despises traitors. And one despises even more those who cover up for liars, murderers, traitors, making themselves even worse, if such a thing is conceivable or imaginable, than the original liars, murderers, war-profiteers, and traitors.

..........Oh, yes, back to the morning paper, where we read about "mistaken prewar assessments of Iraq's illicit weapons." Ha! As I've said before, there were no mistakes. But there were—oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes—lots and lots and lots of bald-faced, outright, shameless lies.

..........What's wrong with this poor, lost, godforsaken nation? I could very nearly decide to kill myself for having been so hideously right about things in A Nation Gone Blind, infinitely more right than I'd ever imagined. All I thought was that lots and lots of people had gone blind and gotten really dumbed down—I saw it around me, I saw it in my colleagues; I saw it in the willlessly inane and empty-eyed "writing" of Sven Birkerts, Robert Olen Butler, Richard Ford, and the likes of Elmaz Adinader, Julia Alvarez, Naomi Shihab Nye, and others; I saw it in publishing; I saw it in our miserably picayune contemporary so-called literature ("a depleted, imitative, unimpassioned, unoriginal, essentially unthinking literature" [p. 3]). I saw it in "political correctness." I saw it in the gibberish-minded "categories" of "thinking," especially as "expressed" in that infamous but everywhere-present and adhered-to-as-unto-life itself quartet of emptiness, stupidity, and non-think: "race, class, gender, and ethnic identity." I saw it in "victimology studies," I heard it in daily memos, I saw it in classrooms, I heard it on the streets. . .

..........But I never, ever, not in a million years, believed or thought or imagined that the United States of America could have been so much more thoroughly destroyed than I'd ever thought even in my darkest of days, that it could have been made so lily-livered, so passive, so empty, so timid, so scared, so conditioned to banalities and externals, so far gone in its omnipresent and media-induced sickness of always and incessantly thinking that whatever's familiar is in actuality the truth—so diseased, ruined, and destroyed in these and other ways that the very leadership itself of the nation at large—in the media, in journalism, in broadcasting, in crapademia, in publishing, in the arts—that this leadership would itself choose not truth, not freedom, not individual thought, but, instead, would choose to aid and abet and cover up for a traitorous, coup-enacting "government" that's in its essence every bit as vicious, malevolent, unconstrained, cruel, calculating, monstrous, destructive, anti-democratic, and blood-thirsty as any on earth has ever been.

..........Here's one more sentence from the front page of the New York Liar for January 4, 2007:

....................President Bush has hailed the establishment of the
..........intelligence post as an essential step in helping prevent
..........another terrorist attack.

It's hard to say which is the more culpable in sheer mendacity here, the president for lying through his tiny little pearly white teeth about "[preventing] another terrorist attack" when he knows full well exactly where the first one came from and exactly why there hasn't been a second; or the New York Times for covering the president as if he weren't lying through his tiny little puppet's teeth.

..........Bush is the camp commander at Auschwitz. And the Times is his lackey, groveling on all fours, licking delicately the toes of his boots with the flicking tips of their tongues.

..........And those fawning lickers must know who Bush is and what he's responsible for, they must know the truth about 9/11 and all the other lies, treason, and frauds. They must. If they don't know—well, then they're ill-read, incurious, intellectually dead, nothing less than bloody ignorant apes.

..........And if they do know? If they do know and still keep licking, still stay down there on all fours, groveling and licking? Well, then they're liars, criminals, traitors, aiders, abettors, and they deserve prosecution followed by imprisonment for life without any conceivable possibility of parole, ever.

..........Few in history have been more repellent, more unworthy, more despicable, and more disgusting than America and Americans now are. Toward them—including Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, and Dick Cheney, Jason Epstein and Frank Rich and Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski, u.s.w., u.s.w.—toward them I feel precisely as the King of the Brobdingagians did toward the English after hearing them described at length and with enormous exactitude and great care by the tiny Gulliver:

....................I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives
....................to be the most pernicious Race of little odious
....................Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon
....................the Surface of the Earth.

·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·..........·

A NOTE IN CLOSING

..........I end here not because the subject at hand has been dealt with sufficiently—it has not—nor because I think I have accomplished something of practical help in keeping the heart still alive in our rapidly dying nation—I do not and I have not—but I end here for the simple reason that I am tired. And that it is bitter cold and I am sick at heart.

..........I'm tired and I'm sick at heart in great measure because I'm filled with unforgiving hatred, contempt, and disdain for those who refuse to read the books I've written about here; at those who cover up the existence of the books I've written about here; at those who smear, malign, and spread contumely about the books I've written about here; and, above all, at those who do know the truths and facts and accumulations of evidence contained in the books I've written about here and even then continue to lie about them, thus revealing themselves to be living lives of the most vile and repugnant and guilty quislings and traitors and criminals ever to have existed in the entire history of our nation.

..........It's appropriate to let Webster Griffin Tarpley conclude, even if it be a conclusion only for the moment.

..........A Nation Gone Blind argues that Americans have, just as its title says, gone blind. A miserable and sorry lot that makes them.

..........Part of the book's argument is that it's now unfashionable (or that it's no longer possible) for Americans to think or perceive or argue by means of or by appeal to any generally accepted lay concept of empiricism, but that instead they either 1) don't think at all, 2) mistake feeling for thinking, or, 3) worst of all, routinely mistake what's on the surface for what's true. These paragraphs talk about the idea:

....................A disconnect—this is the word that comes to mind,
..........in its recently-acquired psychological sense. For the Amer-
..........ican mind does seem to have been unplugged in regard to
..........certain things, unable to see them or, as I've said, even
..........to entertain the possibility of them. The word "junta," for
..........example, can't be used, can't be taken as being even re-
..........motely or conceivably applicable to anything that is hap-
..........pening or has happened in the United States. It's unreal.
..........But what if we define "junta" as a power group that takes
..........office by non-electoral, pseudo-electoral, or extra-electoral
..........means and then passes laws depriving its citizens of
..........liberties and freedoms that were previously guaranteed
..........and that, if such now-curtailed liberties and freedoms
..........were in fact exercised, could be obstructive to the in-
..........terests of that power group?

....................In other words, a definition of the Bush administra-
..........tion. If one uses the word "junta," on the other hand, the
..........idea immediately seems crazy and unbelievable, since
..........the word brings with it powerful connotations and assoc-
..........iations that have nothing to do with the condition, flavor,
..........or atmosphere of daily life in modern America. "Junta?"
..........a person on the street might respond. "No, of course it's
..........not a junta. If it were a junta, things would be weird,
..........strange, extreme, crazy. But everything is normal. Every-
..........thing is regular and familiar. Everything looks the same as
..........always. So it can't be a junta." (pp. 179-180)

..........And that's the way Tarpley sees it, too, the way he sees Americans' blindness being brought about or created—their blindness to the political truths and horrors that they're surrounded by just as surely as they're surrounded by the invisible ocean of air that they breathe. A Nation Gone Blind emphasizes the mass media's role in causing this blindness. Synthetic Terror, on the other hand, emphasizes a different element of the mass media, namely, the enormous role of the omnipresent and all-surrounding intelligence agencies that, it could even be said, essentially "govern" us.

..........Here's a paragraph from Tarpley. Notice especially its ending clause:

....................I reject the naìve or sociological explanation of terror-
..........ism, the assumption that misery, oppression, and despera-
..........tion give rise to terrorist organizations which spontaneously
..........express these underlying moods. But we live in an era in
..........which political and social reality [my emphasis] are inces-
..........santly manipulated by huge and pervasive intelligence
..........agencies—CIA, FBI, MI-6, FSB (KGB), Mossad, BND,
..........SDECE, SISMI and the like—whose cumulative effect is
..........to over-determine or sur-determine [emphasis in original]
..........observed reality. (p. 7)

..........And there you are. Out with "We hold these truths to be self-evident," which meant simply that we consider certain truths to be empirically obvious by any normal observer. Out with that and in with the "creation" or the sur-determination—by the media and by the intelligence agencies—of what's then to be taken as the real, as "observed reality."

..........Until people start reading, until they start seeing what is instead of what's claimed to be, until they start looking at substance rather than only at surface, start looking behind things and through things instead of only at things—until that time comes, Bob Herbert can go on and on and on wailing his agonized heart out; and Keith Olbermann can go on and on and on, waxing wroth through long and impassioned video editorials; and old liberal democrats can go on and on and on dreaming that Nancy Pelosi or any other of the gold-digging corporate lapdogs in their snug positions in Congress will prosecute, impeach, bring root change—they can go on lamenting and waxing and dreaming, and nothing will happen. Until people begin looking at things and naming them for what they really are—until that time, not the slightest thing whatsoever will happen.

..........Or, no, something will happen. And here's what it is: The Caligulas, the Cheney's, the Melvin Bushes, the dry-drunk Dubyas, the General Richard B. Myers's, the General Ralph E. Eberharts, the Rudy Giulianis, the Homeland Security prison-planners and the New Orleans drowners, the murderers of John O'Neill, the Trilateralists, the Bildgerbergers, the NPAC-ers, the population eliminators, the internment camp builders, the professional torturers, the habeas corpus strippers, the dollar-drainers—they'll continue doing exactly what they're doing right now, namely, driving one stake after another through the dying heart of the Republic of the United States of America in order to steal every last vestige of the groaning nation's wealth in order to put in their very own pockets. And, oh, yes, one last thing more: they'll go right on driving stakes, too, through the hearts of each and every one of us who tries, or happens, or wanders, or determines to get into their way.
..............................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..............................................................................................................—January 6, 2007

A RAY OF HOPE?

..........Today is tomorrow—that is, I'm adding these words not on the 6th but on the 7th of January. And I'm adding them because the lead editorial in the New York Times this morning, in its next-to-last paragraph, decries "the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now 'look ahead' rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush's one-party rule."

..........And the final paragraph concludes: "This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration's assault on some of the nation's founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place."

..........Is there hope? Is someone at the Times actually looking? Actually listening? Actually seeing? I pray it be so. Allow me to cite the closing words of the great Michael C. Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon:

....................Let them that have ears listen. Let them that have eyes see.

..................................................................................................................................—EL


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