FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Number 9, Part 2
Number 9, Part 2
(NEW SERIES—2007)
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TIME IS RUNNING OUT
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9/11 TRUTH DENIAL SPREADS
POISON THROUGH NATION
9/11 TRUTH DENIAL SPREADS
POISON THROUGH NATION
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ALL IN POWER OR
AUTHORITY SUSPECT OF
COMPLICITY, TREASON
ALL IN POWER OR
AUTHORITY SUSPECT OF
COMPLICITY, TREASON
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RUIN GENERAL THROUGHOUT ARTS,
LETTERS, PUBLISHING
......................................................................Everywhere, on his watch, whether in Rochester, N.Y., or Baghdad, Iraq,
......................................................................there is a spreading underclass of miserable humanity being destroyed
......................................................................by pillage and theft, by a White House that steals their taxes and kills their
......................................................................children. And the pity of it all is that it doesn't have to be. Yeah, I feel bad
......................................................................for Libby's family; I feel worse, though, for millions of others, for the vic-
......................................................................tims being killed, and the victims being robbed to kill them. But that's
......................................................................how it is in the Empire of Lies.
...................................................................... ..............................—Sherwood Ross, "Bush's Crimes in Baghdad Have
....................................................................................................Parallel in U.S., U.K.," Sat, 10 Mar 2007
......................................................................Karen Kwiatkowski, then [i.e., on 9/11] an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
......................................................................employed at the Pentagon, writes of "a strange lack of visible debris on
......................................................................the Pentagon lawn, where I stood only moments after the impact." An-
......................................................................other witness was CNN's Jamie McIntyre, who reported live from the
......................................................................Pentagon that day: "The only pieces left that you can see are small
......................................................................enough that you pick up in your hand." (How does that square with any
......................................................................photos you've ever seen of crashed airliners?)
...................................................................... ..............................—Sherwood Ross, "Did Cheney Allow or Order
....................................................................................................9/11 Plane To Strike Pentagon?" Thu, 01 Mar 2007
......................................................................The sixty years that have brought us the new America have brought us also
......................................................................a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built
......................................................................on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of
....................................................................................................Simplification and Deceit, p. 10
......................................................................Indeed, I wonder when we'll face up to what has really been going on.
....................................................................................................—National columnist in an email to Eric Larsen, Sept. 2006
..........In its issue for January 1-15, 2007, the Progressive Populist filled the top half of its page twenty-two to what I read as two separate columns by Amy Goodman, one called "It's Bigotry That Should be Silenced," the other "Beyond the Nine-Second Sound Bite." Goodman as a columnist was a new thing to me, and the Populist, in fact, in an editor's note, explained that "Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman's column. . . recently started with King Features Syndicate."
..........Fair and fine. Except for one thing: Both columns were packed stem to stern with hypocrisy and lies.
..........The unrelenting and ruthless forces that have successfully suppressed 9/11 truth for the past five years and show no sign of letting up are turning us into an entire nation veritably filled with highly visible hypocrites and liars who, if we avert the totalitarian state and if justice ever does come, will in the end pay dearly indeed.
..........And Amy Goodman, far from alone, is one of them.
..........Let's have a look at the first of these two pieces, "It's Bigotry That Should Be Silenced." Goodman tells the story, first, of Raed Jarrar, "an Iraqi architect and blogger" who was prevented from boarding a plane from New York's JFK to Oakland until he agreed to cover the T-shirt he was wearing with another, blank, one. His own, you see, had the words "We will not be silent" on it, with the same words, in Arabic, above them.
..........As Goodman explains, the "two Transportation Security Administration workers and two JetBlue employees" who'd stopped Jarrar "didn't have a translator" and thus "couldn't be sure" that Jarrar wasn't lying about what the Arabic really said. So much for trust. Anyway, Jarrar put on another shirt on over his own and they put him on the plane.
..........End of that story and on to the next. The next is the one about the six imams at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on November 20th of 2006 who wanted to fly to Phoenix. It was prayer time and, so as not to draw attention, "the six men decided only three of them would pray. Said [Omar] Shahin, [president of the North American Imams Federation,] 'We picked a quiet area. We did not bother anybody. We did our prayer in a very quiet, lower voice.'"
..........Trouble is, their fellow passengers were scared of them anyway and, on the plane, went into a mid-western style "racial-profilers'" panic, with the result that, Goodman says, "airport police swarmed [Goodman's word] onto the plane, and the six imams were herded out [Goodman's word], handcuffed and interrogated for hours." She quotes Shahin as saying that "When I saw the look in the eyes of the other passengers, it became the worst day of my life."
..........I don't doubt it for a moment.
..........What I do doubt, however, is the integrity or honesty of what's going on—or not going on—in what would seem to be the morally corrupt mind of Amy Goodman.
..........After all, having told her two stories, she needs to make application of them to a purpose or point of some kind. So, she first traces the origin of the phrase "We will not be silent" back "to the White Rose collective of World War II. A brother and sister named Hans and Sophie Scholl," Goodman explains, "with other students and professors, decided the best way to resist the Nazis was to disseminate information, so that the Germans would never be able to say, 'We did not know.'"
..........The next, key, paragraph:
..............................The collective distributed a series of pamphlets. On the bottom of one was printed the phrase
....................'We will not be silent.' The Nazis arrested Hans and Sophie as well as other collective members, tried
....................them, found them guilty and beheaded them. But that motto should be the Hippocratic oath of the media
....................today: 'We will not be silent.'"
..........Anyone who's done their 9/11 homework will-or will be able to-feel little other at this point than repugnance and disgust.
..........Look closely, after all, at what's happening. Amy Goodman, who won't speak or allow to be spoken in her presence, on air or off, the least hint of what the actual causes of 9/11 were or where the real culpability for the crimes of 9/11 lie—how can it be that this media person who hides those truths now blithely declares that this "motto should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today: 'We will not be silent.'"
..........I beg your pardon? As a 9/11 truth denier, Goodman here reveals and identifies herself as one of the nation's most absolute hypocrites, a highly visible media person who at this particular moment puts even the putrid and vile Nicholas Lemanns and Frank Riches among us to positive shame.
..........What could be more hypocritical than saying "We will not be silent" at the very same time as the speaker of those words is an adamant and studious maintainer of the cover-up of what was in simple and demonstrable truth the greatest initial—and the initially enabling—crime of what sent on to show itself to be the greatest, most heinous and ruthless and treasonous criminal apparatus ever to hold power in the United States?
..........To cover that up while piggy-backing for significance on the true but here purely diversionary fact that the Nazis were criminal and vile? To cover that up while at the same time saying that "We will not be silent" should be the "Hippocratic oath of the media today"?
..........I beg your pardon yet again, but Goodman, here, as writer and as journalist, is showing herself fraudulent beyond fraud. We can pardon her apparent confusion as to the origins and customary application of the Hippocratic oath-and yet how, on the other hand, can we pardon that fact when even her ignorance only highlights her fraud? The Hippocratic oath as sworn by medical practitioners is, in major part, a sworn oath to do no harm. Goodman's version as she applies it to journalism—the oath not to be silent—is one that she herself demonstrably breaks even as she speaks it. And in breaking it—in remaining silent about the truth of who and what brought about 9/11 and why they did it and what the results were—the harm she's doing, to the republic, to freedom, to the Constitution, to the people, is very nearly immeasurable.
..........Given such a perverted and corrupted situation as Goodman has put herself in so far, what do you imagine she'll do next, in an attempt to bring this truly awful, self-deluding, or reader-deluding (or both) column to some kind of logical conclusion?
..........Let's watch and see. And the answer is—well, that she does not bring it to a conclusion. Exactly like Elmaz Abinader, Robert Olen Butler, Sven Birkerts, Richard Ford, and other writers in the first chapter of A Nation Gone Blind, she doesn't conclude her essay but instead simply ends it—and she does that, just like the writers in A Nation Gone Blind, by abandoning her essay, by jumping ship, by changing the subject, in effect reaching out for any old sort of life raft or Mae West that may happen to be floating by somewhere within reach.
..........Just like the writers in A Nation Gone Blind, Goodman is blind to her real subject; just like them, she's unable to see it, though in her case, admittedly, we don't know for certain whether she's blind to it because she must not see it or because she can not see it.
..........Now, Goodman does appear to think—or does appear to want to think, or does appear to want us to think—that her subject really is "racial profiling." Accordingly, she provides us with these few phrases just before getting into her background talk about the Nazis:
....................Racial profiling does not make us safer. It simply alienates and marginalizes whole populations.
..........Whether it is African Americans driving while black, or Muslims trying to fly home.
..........Now, if the essay were coherent, and if the writer did have an interest in penetrating into her subject past the level of platitude, cliché, and the obvious—what would she do? Think for a moment of a medical researcher. Suppose that this researcher had identified a disease and observed it to be harmful, much as Goodman has here identified "racial profiling" and has observed it to be harmful. What two courses of action could you imagine the medical researcher—and, by analogy, Goodman—taking?
..........The medical researcher might, for example, set out to study exactly how the disease is harmful, the purpose being that with an increased understanding of the precise nature of the disease's harmful progress in an organism, it might become possible to ameliorate, protect against—or even prevent—that harmfulness.
..........On the other hand, the medical researcher might move in a different direction. He or she might choose to study not how the disease is harmful to an organism but, instead, choose to study the cause or etiology of the disease. Once the origin of the disease is understood, it might become possible to eliminate it altogether.
..........Makes sense to me. But does Goodman take a route anything like either of these? Let's take the first one first—and the answer is no, Goodman doesn't take it. Instead, after merely asserting that "racial profiling" is harmful (one, it "marginalizes whole populations," and, two, it "does not make us safer"), she drops the subject like a hot potato and invites us "Back to the T-shirt story." From there, she disappears backward into time with her two paragraphs about the Nazis beheading people who distributed pamphlets with "We will not be silent" on them.
..........So much for any analysis or insight that might actually help reduce the harmfulness of "racial profiling."
..........But there's still hope, am I right? It's still possible—isn't it?—that Goodman will take the other direction and will explore where it is exactly that this harmful "disease" of "racial profiling" originated from? Taking this direction, in fact, in my own view is what a real journalist ought to do, since that's where the story lies that has true potential for significance and for good: If a murder has been committed, say, the feature writer might study the harmful effect of the murder on others—grief in the family of the victim, and so forth—but it's the true reporter who will dig into the roots of the crime, ever in the hopes, of course, of exposing the murderer.
..........But it's quite obvious to all that that is a direction in which Goodman is forbidden to go, whether because she's accepted hush money¹ and is thus sworn to secrecy—has prostituted herself, in other words—or because she's a committed non-reader and non-seer who in actuality knows nothing whatsoever about 9/11: not a reasonable probability in a nationally known "left" journalist.
..........Either way, skip the true story she does. But let me be more forceful: Either way, she skips the one, single, absolutely most significant, unspeakably important, pus-filled, treasonous, oozing, organism-poisoning, disease-spreading, republic-killing, Constitution-destroying, concentration camp-causing, habeas corpus denying, torture-permitting, totalitarian future-creating story that's stinking to high heaven right there in front of her very nose just as it's stinking to high heaven right there in front of the nose of every American in the entire republic who isn't either a blinded moron (please at this point, if you haven't already, pause to read the entirety of Kevin Barrett's Truth Jihad) or isn't in such a powerful state of denial so as to be no longer able to walk, eat, stand up, or breathe.
..........That's the story Goodman skips. That's the story she averts her gaze from. That's the story she ignores, and that's the story she replaces with—diversionary pablum. Incoherent diversionary pablum, at that.
..........Uh, uh, uh, uh—no, no, no, we mustn't say a word about Cheney at the controls on the morning of 9/11, not a word about the long-planned war games going on that morning as one means to keep military interceptors away from the "hijacked" airliners, not a word about the fact that at least seven of the supposed 9/11 hijackers are still alive, not a word about the proven fact that all three huge buildings— WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7—were brought down not by fire, and not by impact, but by controlled demolition, and not a word about the fraud, lies, distortions, and omissions in "The NIST 9/11 Report on the WTC Collapse," and certainly not a word about Larry Silverstein knowing ahead of its collapse that WTC 7 was pre-set with explosives, and just as certainly not a word about boy scout Rudy Giuliani also knowing ahead of time that WTC 1 and WTC 2 were going to collapse, nor even a single word about the BBC-TV announcing on the air that WTC 7 had collapsed —but making that announcement twenty minutes before the building actually did collapse.
..........Well. It must take a lot to keep a journalist silent on every last detail of a story as big as that one. But, whatever it does take to do it, it's been done to a T-shirt on Amy Goodman. Instead of looking into the fraud of 9/11, or into the totally false blaming of the "attacks" on "Islamo-terrorists," or into the resultant, deliberate, and planned national hysteria, fear, and Islamo-phobia that then led inevitably and predictably—and precisely in accordance with the playbook—to the virulent, irrational, near-universal "racial profiling" of Muslims across the gracious plains and mountains of the entire United States, not to mention much, much further afield, as far afield as, say, Iraq, or, as it now seems the Bushiscti want us to fear, as far as Iran.
..........Nah, we couldn't expect Amy Goodman to look into the true etiology of a vile disease that way. Nah, we all understand how it's always better to speak only in clichés—"racial profiling," for example, "marginalizes whole populations." That's much, much better than getting at the truth. Don't you just wish that in place of Jonas Salk being the guilty perpetrator who searched for a vaccine against polio, that it had been Amy Goodman instead? Whoosh! Wow! Gee! Bejabbers! Just think! If it only had been Amy Goodman, hey! we'd be so much better off, because, wow!, she'd never have done anything more than prattle on about how polio is harmful—and now,today, joy to behold, WE'D STILL HAVE POLIO!!!!!
..........Woo hoo! How good! How very, very progressive!
..........Ah, yes, progressive indeed. But back here in "reality," in our unfortunately all-too-unamusing world, we're still faced with the unpleasant but necessary task of looking closely at what it is that Amy Goodman does offer us in place of what ought to be her real subject—that is, the truth she ought to examine but that she ignores instead, the truth that if exposed and accepted could possibly save our republic, restore the Bill of Rights as the law of the land, bring back habeas corpus, bring our nation again under the wing of the Geneva Conventions, rejoin it to the World Court, eliminate torture as state policy, and cause the dismantling of our domestic concentration camps?
..........That's a tall order, I'll grant, and not everybody could be certain of having much success with it. But never fear with Amy Goodman! She aspires high, aims high, and hits high. And therefore, without further ado, let me fill you in on what Amy Goodman actually does give us in place of the truth that could help achieve all the good ends I've just listed. Here's what she offers us in place of the truth that might very well allow us to keep our republic, our freedoms, and, very possibly, our lives:
..........Speaking of media people, those whose "Hippocratic oath" should be "We will not be silent," Goodman at last arrives at her grand, climactic pronouncement:
..............................Our job is to provide a forum for people to speak for themselves, to describe their
....................own experiences. This breaks down stereotypes and bigotry, things that fuel
....................racial profiling, which ultimately endangers us all.
..........To which I, for one, can say only that I have seldom read such a pitch-perfect, dinky little parade of falsehood and cliché, such a prime-quality anti-climax, such a freshman English-worthy example of disunity, evasion, and non sequitur in a piece of writing by an adult human being—especially one who is, presumably, an eminent, nationally known, progressive journalist.
..........If this is what "progressive" means in America, surely we all are doomed to life under fascism.
..........To read such as Amy Goodman wrote, to be cheated so, to be manipulated by such puerile banality as this from a person of considerable "progressive" influence, to see revealed by the quality of the writing what the shallow and traitorous quality of the thought behind it really is—this is an experience incompatible with any hope whatsoever that such leadership or guidance as Amy Goodman—or Pacifica Radio—represents can conceivably help hold out any hope whatsoever for the survival of the United States of America as a free republic.
..........The entirety, in essence, is a pack of lies, and poisonous ones, too, readily acceptable to the enemy while spoken by a putative ally. The entire exercise is diseased, revolting, ruinous, criminal, traitorous, and contemptible.
..........For the moment, who can bear more? Even so, next time, we'll look a yet more such treason, from even higher sources.
..............................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..............................................................................................................—April 4, 2007
¹..........See Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception, p. 223. You'll find there a full page flow-chart under the title "THE GATEKEEPERS: Foundations Fund Phony 'Left' Media." Zwicker provides a quote from TomPaine.com's Executive Director, John Moyers,that explains the power of foundation-derived "hush money": "If they don't like what we're doing, we don't get funded next year." Look closely on p. 233, and you'll find Amy Goodman's name.
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RUIN GENERAL THROUGHOUT ARTS,
LETTERS, PUBLISHING
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TRUST GONE
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TRUST GONE
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......................................................................Everywhere, on his watch, whether in Rochester, N.Y., or Baghdad, Iraq,
......................................................................there is a spreading underclass of miserable humanity being destroyed
......................................................................by pillage and theft, by a White House that steals their taxes and kills their
......................................................................children. And the pity of it all is that it doesn't have to be. Yeah, I feel bad
......................................................................for Libby's family; I feel worse, though, for millions of others, for the vic-
......................................................................tims being killed, and the victims being robbed to kill them. But that's
......................................................................how it is in the Empire of Lies.
...................................................................... ..............................—Sherwood Ross, "Bush's Crimes in Baghdad Have
....................................................................................................Parallel in U.S., U.K.," Sat, 10 Mar 2007
......................................................................Karen Kwiatkowski, then [i.e., on 9/11] an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
......................................................................employed at the Pentagon, writes of "a strange lack of visible debris on
......................................................................the Pentagon lawn, where I stood only moments after the impact." An-
......................................................................other witness was CNN's Jamie McIntyre, who reported live from the
......................................................................Pentagon that day: "The only pieces left that you can see are small
......................................................................enough that you pick up in your hand." (How does that square with any
......................................................................photos you've ever seen of crashed airliners?)
...................................................................... ..............................—Sherwood Ross, "Did Cheney Allow or Order
....................................................................................................9/11 Plane To Strike Pentagon?" Thu, 01 Mar 2007
......................................................................The sixty years that have brought us the new America have brought us also
......................................................................a virtually perfected socio-political culture of lies and lying, a culture built
......................................................................on a foundation of lying, framed by walls of lying, covered by a roof of lying.
....................................................................................................—Eric Larsen, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of
....................................................................................................Simplification and Deceit, p. 10
......................................................................Indeed, I wonder when we'll face up to what has really been going on.
....................................................................................................—National columnist in an email to Eric Larsen, Sept. 2006
AMY GOODMAN: A MIND PROSTITUTED
..........In its issue for January 1-15, 2007, the Progressive Populist filled the top half of its page twenty-two to what I read as two separate columns by Amy Goodman, one called "It's Bigotry That Should be Silenced," the other "Beyond the Nine-Second Sound Bite." Goodman as a columnist was a new thing to me, and the Populist, in fact, in an editor's note, explained that "Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman's column. . . recently started with King Features Syndicate."
..........Fair and fine. Except for one thing: Both columns were packed stem to stern with hypocrisy and lies.
..........The unrelenting and ruthless forces that have successfully suppressed 9/11 truth for the past five years and show no sign of letting up are turning us into an entire nation veritably filled with highly visible hypocrites and liars who, if we avert the totalitarian state and if justice ever does come, will in the end pay dearly indeed.
..........And Amy Goodman, far from alone, is one of them.
..........Let's have a look at the first of these two pieces, "It's Bigotry That Should Be Silenced." Goodman tells the story, first, of Raed Jarrar, "an Iraqi architect and blogger" who was prevented from boarding a plane from New York's JFK to Oakland until he agreed to cover the T-shirt he was wearing with another, blank, one. His own, you see, had the words "We will not be silent" on it, with the same words, in Arabic, above them.
..........As Goodman explains, the "two Transportation Security Administration workers and two JetBlue employees" who'd stopped Jarrar "didn't have a translator" and thus "couldn't be sure" that Jarrar wasn't lying about what the Arabic really said. So much for trust. Anyway, Jarrar put on another shirt on over his own and they put him on the plane.
..........End of that story and on to the next. The next is the one about the six imams at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport on November 20th of 2006 who wanted to fly to Phoenix. It was prayer time and, so as not to draw attention, "the six men decided only three of them would pray. Said [Omar] Shahin, [president of the North American Imams Federation,] 'We picked a quiet area. We did not bother anybody. We did our prayer in a very quiet, lower voice.'"
..........Trouble is, their fellow passengers were scared of them anyway and, on the plane, went into a mid-western style "racial-profilers'" panic, with the result that, Goodman says, "airport police swarmed [Goodman's word] onto the plane, and the six imams were herded out [Goodman's word], handcuffed and interrogated for hours." She quotes Shahin as saying that "When I saw the look in the eyes of the other passengers, it became the worst day of my life."
..........I don't doubt it for a moment.
..........What I do doubt, however, is the integrity or honesty of what's going on—or not going on—in what would seem to be the morally corrupt mind of Amy Goodman.
..........After all, having told her two stories, she needs to make application of them to a purpose or point of some kind. So, she first traces the origin of the phrase "We will not be silent" back "to the White Rose collective of World War II. A brother and sister named Hans and Sophie Scholl," Goodman explains, "with other students and professors, decided the best way to resist the Nazis was to disseminate information, so that the Germans would never be able to say, 'We did not know.'"
..........The next, key, paragraph:
..............................The collective distributed a series of pamphlets. On the bottom of one was printed the phrase
....................'We will not be silent.' The Nazis arrested Hans and Sophie as well as other collective members, tried
....................them, found them guilty and beheaded them. But that motto should be the Hippocratic oath of the media
....................today: 'We will not be silent.'"
..........Anyone who's done their 9/11 homework will-or will be able to-feel little other at this point than repugnance and disgust.
..........Look closely, after all, at what's happening. Amy Goodman, who won't speak or allow to be spoken in her presence, on air or off, the least hint of what the actual causes of 9/11 were or where the real culpability for the crimes of 9/11 lie—how can it be that this media person who hides those truths now blithely declares that this "motto should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today: 'We will not be silent.'"
..........I beg your pardon? As a 9/11 truth denier, Goodman here reveals and identifies herself as one of the nation's most absolute hypocrites, a highly visible media person who at this particular moment puts even the putrid and vile Nicholas Lemanns and Frank Riches among us to positive shame.
..........What could be more hypocritical than saying "We will not be silent" at the very same time as the speaker of those words is an adamant and studious maintainer of the cover-up of what was in simple and demonstrable truth the greatest initial—and the initially enabling—crime of what sent on to show itself to be the greatest, most heinous and ruthless and treasonous criminal apparatus ever to hold power in the United States?
..........To cover that up while piggy-backing for significance on the true but here purely diversionary fact that the Nazis were criminal and vile? To cover that up while at the same time saying that "We will not be silent" should be the "Hippocratic oath of the media today"?
..........I beg your pardon yet again, but Goodman, here, as writer and as journalist, is showing herself fraudulent beyond fraud. We can pardon her apparent confusion as to the origins and customary application of the Hippocratic oath-and yet how, on the other hand, can we pardon that fact when even her ignorance only highlights her fraud? The Hippocratic oath as sworn by medical practitioners is, in major part, a sworn oath to do no harm. Goodman's version as she applies it to journalism—the oath not to be silent—is one that she herself demonstrably breaks even as she speaks it. And in breaking it—in remaining silent about the truth of who and what brought about 9/11 and why they did it and what the results were—the harm she's doing, to the republic, to freedom, to the Constitution, to the people, is very nearly immeasurable.
..........Given such a perverted and corrupted situation as Goodman has put herself in so far, what do you imagine she'll do next, in an attempt to bring this truly awful, self-deluding, or reader-deluding (or both) column to some kind of logical conclusion?
..........Let's watch and see. And the answer is—well, that she does not bring it to a conclusion. Exactly like Elmaz Abinader, Robert Olen Butler, Sven Birkerts, Richard Ford, and other writers in the first chapter of A Nation Gone Blind, she doesn't conclude her essay but instead simply ends it—and she does that, just like the writers in A Nation Gone Blind, by abandoning her essay, by jumping ship, by changing the subject, in effect reaching out for any old sort of life raft or Mae West that may happen to be floating by somewhere within reach.
..........Just like the writers in A Nation Gone Blind, Goodman is blind to her real subject; just like them, she's unable to see it, though in her case, admittedly, we don't know for certain whether she's blind to it because she must not see it or because she can not see it.
..........Now, Goodman does appear to think—or does appear to want to think, or does appear to want us to think—that her subject really is "racial profiling." Accordingly, she provides us with these few phrases just before getting into her background talk about the Nazis:
....................Racial profiling does not make us safer. It simply alienates and marginalizes whole populations.
..........Whether it is African Americans driving while black, or Muslims trying to fly home.
..........Now, if the essay were coherent, and if the writer did have an interest in penetrating into her subject past the level of platitude, cliché, and the obvious—what would she do? Think for a moment of a medical researcher. Suppose that this researcher had identified a disease and observed it to be harmful, much as Goodman has here identified "racial profiling" and has observed it to be harmful. What two courses of action could you imagine the medical researcher—and, by analogy, Goodman—taking?
..........The medical researcher might, for example, set out to study exactly how the disease is harmful, the purpose being that with an increased understanding of the precise nature of the disease's harmful progress in an organism, it might become possible to ameliorate, protect against—or even prevent—that harmfulness.
..........On the other hand, the medical researcher might move in a different direction. He or she might choose to study not how the disease is harmful to an organism but, instead, choose to study the cause or etiology of the disease. Once the origin of the disease is understood, it might become possible to eliminate it altogether.
..........Makes sense to me. But does Goodman take a route anything like either of these? Let's take the first one first—and the answer is no, Goodman doesn't take it. Instead, after merely asserting that "racial profiling" is harmful (one, it "marginalizes whole populations," and, two, it "does not make us safer"), she drops the subject like a hot potato and invites us "Back to the T-shirt story." From there, she disappears backward into time with her two paragraphs about the Nazis beheading people who distributed pamphlets with "We will not be silent" on them.
..........So much for any analysis or insight that might actually help reduce the harmfulness of "racial profiling."
..........But there's still hope, am I right? It's still possible—isn't it?—that Goodman will take the other direction and will explore where it is exactly that this harmful "disease" of "racial profiling" originated from? Taking this direction, in fact, in my own view is what a real journalist ought to do, since that's where the story lies that has true potential for significance and for good: If a murder has been committed, say, the feature writer might study the harmful effect of the murder on others—grief in the family of the victim, and so forth—but it's the true reporter who will dig into the roots of the crime, ever in the hopes, of course, of exposing the murderer.
..........But it's quite obvious to all that that is a direction in which Goodman is forbidden to go, whether because she's accepted hush money¹ and is thus sworn to secrecy—has prostituted herself, in other words—or because she's a committed non-reader and non-seer who in actuality knows nothing whatsoever about 9/11: not a reasonable probability in a nationally known "left" journalist.
..........Either way, skip the true story she does. But let me be more forceful: Either way, she skips the one, single, absolutely most significant, unspeakably important, pus-filled, treasonous, oozing, organism-poisoning, disease-spreading, republic-killing, Constitution-destroying, concentration camp-causing, habeas corpus denying, torture-permitting, totalitarian future-creating story that's stinking to high heaven right there in front of her very nose just as it's stinking to high heaven right there in front of the nose of every American in the entire republic who isn't either a blinded moron (please at this point, if you haven't already, pause to read the entirety of Kevin Barrett's Truth Jihad) or isn't in such a powerful state of denial so as to be no longer able to walk, eat, stand up, or breathe.
..........That's the story Goodman skips. That's the story she averts her gaze from. That's the story she ignores, and that's the story she replaces with—diversionary pablum. Incoherent diversionary pablum, at that.
..........Uh, uh, uh, uh—no, no, no, we mustn't say a word about Cheney at the controls on the morning of 9/11, not a word about the long-planned war games going on that morning as one means to keep military interceptors away from the "hijacked" airliners, not a word about the fact that at least seven of the supposed 9/11 hijackers are still alive, not a word about the proven fact that all three huge buildings— WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7—were brought down not by fire, and not by impact, but by controlled demolition, and not a word about the fraud, lies, distortions, and omissions in "The NIST 9/11 Report on the WTC Collapse," and certainly not a word about Larry Silverstein knowing ahead of its collapse that WTC 7 was pre-set with explosives, and just as certainly not a word about boy scout Rudy Giuliani also knowing ahead of time that WTC 1 and WTC 2 were going to collapse, nor even a single word about the BBC-TV announcing on the air that WTC 7 had collapsed —but making that announcement twenty minutes before the building actually did collapse.
..........Well. It must take a lot to keep a journalist silent on every last detail of a story as big as that one. But, whatever it does take to do it, it's been done to a T-shirt on Amy Goodman. Instead of looking into the fraud of 9/11, or into the totally false blaming of the "attacks" on "Islamo-terrorists," or into the resultant, deliberate, and planned national hysteria, fear, and Islamo-phobia that then led inevitably and predictably—and precisely in accordance with the playbook—to the virulent, irrational, near-universal "racial profiling" of Muslims across the gracious plains and mountains of the entire United States, not to mention much, much further afield, as far afield as, say, Iraq, or, as it now seems the Bushiscti want us to fear, as far as Iran.
..........Nah, we couldn't expect Amy Goodman to look into the true etiology of a vile disease that way. Nah, we all understand how it's always better to speak only in clichés—"racial profiling," for example, "marginalizes whole populations." That's much, much better than getting at the truth. Don't you just wish that in place of Jonas Salk being the guilty perpetrator who searched for a vaccine against polio, that it had been Amy Goodman instead? Whoosh! Wow! Gee! Bejabbers! Just think! If it only had been Amy Goodman, hey! we'd be so much better off, because, wow!, she'd never have done anything more than prattle on about how polio is harmful—and now,today, joy to behold, WE'D STILL HAVE POLIO!!!!!
..........Woo hoo! How good! How very, very progressive!
..........Ah, yes, progressive indeed. But back here in "reality," in our unfortunately all-too-unamusing world, we're still faced with the unpleasant but necessary task of looking closely at what it is that Amy Goodman does offer us in place of what ought to be her real subject—that is, the truth she ought to examine but that she ignores instead, the truth that if exposed and accepted could possibly save our republic, restore the Bill of Rights as the law of the land, bring back habeas corpus, bring our nation again under the wing of the Geneva Conventions, rejoin it to the World Court, eliminate torture as state policy, and cause the dismantling of our domestic concentration camps?
..........That's a tall order, I'll grant, and not everybody could be certain of having much success with it. But never fear with Amy Goodman! She aspires high, aims high, and hits high. And therefore, without further ado, let me fill you in on what Amy Goodman actually does give us in place of the truth that could help achieve all the good ends I've just listed. Here's what she offers us in place of the truth that might very well allow us to keep our republic, our freedoms, and, very possibly, our lives:
..........Speaking of media people, those whose "Hippocratic oath" should be "We will not be silent," Goodman at last arrives at her grand, climactic pronouncement:
..............................Our job is to provide a forum for people to speak for themselves, to describe their
....................own experiences. This breaks down stereotypes and bigotry, things that fuel
....................racial profiling, which ultimately endangers us all.
..........To which I, for one, can say only that I have seldom read such a pitch-perfect, dinky little parade of falsehood and cliché, such a prime-quality anti-climax, such a freshman English-worthy example of disunity, evasion, and non sequitur in a piece of writing by an adult human being—especially one who is, presumably, an eminent, nationally known, progressive journalist.
..........If this is what "progressive" means in America, surely we all are doomed to life under fascism.
..........To read such as Amy Goodman wrote, to be cheated so, to be manipulated by such puerile banality as this from a person of considerable "progressive" influence, to see revealed by the quality of the writing what the shallow and traitorous quality of the thought behind it really is—this is an experience incompatible with any hope whatsoever that such leadership or guidance as Amy Goodman—or Pacifica Radio—represents can conceivably help hold out any hope whatsoever for the survival of the United States of America as a free republic.
..........The entirety, in essence, is a pack of lies, and poisonous ones, too, readily acceptable to the enemy while spoken by a putative ally. The entire exercise is diseased, revolting, ruinous, criminal, traitorous, and contemptible.
..........For the moment, who can bear more? Even so, next time, we'll look a yet more such treason, from even higher sources.
..............................................................................................................—Eric Larsen
..............................................................................................................—April 4, 2007
¹..........See Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception, p. 223. You'll find there a full page flow-chart under the title "THE GATEKEEPERS: Foundations Fund Phony 'Left' Media." Zwicker provides a quote from TomPaine.com's Executive Director, John Moyers,that explains the power of foundation-derived "hush money": "If they don't like what we're doing, we don't get funded next year." Look closely on p. 233, and you'll find Amy Goodman's name.
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