By Gordon Duff
Veterans Today HERE...
September 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- When President Ahmadinejad announced, before the United Nations that most people in the world believe that the U.S. government was involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, he told the truth. In America, groups have been popping up for years, not “fringe” types, but military and professional organizations, architects, engineers, pilots, intelligence officers.
There is a vast underground that is never reported, never spoken of in the news and continually threatened. The FBI and Homeland Security have infiltrated these groups, illegal surveillance has been on a massive scale and, as the groups have grown and their reach has touched millions of Americans, the government, in the usual whispers, is talking about mass arrests, “unplugging” the internet, all those things the militia movements of the 90′s said would happen.
Outside the United States, not in the Middle East, but Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Far East, finding people who accept the Bush and Obama administration’s “party line” about “box cutters and hijackers” is difficult. No one wants to risk the public scorn of seeming like an imbecile.
However, back here in the “good ole’ USA,” even comedian Jon Stewart, normally an outspoken critic of government insanity, has agreed to lead a march on Washinton to quell “rumors” about 9/11, rumors of wrongdoing by people he despises.
What is the difference? Why do those outside the United States see things do differently? The answer is freedom of press, the first of the hasty additions to the constitution, a guarantee provided for in the 1st Amendment. There had been assaults on freedom of the press before, particularly during wartime but never anything on the scale seen after 9/11. Across the board, not just the news but even movies and television shows, fiction, censored, propaganda, peddling ignorance, fear and screaming “conspiracy theory” at anyone trying to get word out.
America is a dictatorship.
It isn’t just corporate lobbyists or two broken political parties. Elections are rigged, government agencies meant to provide for national security are now doing little but spying on Americans, our military is spread across the planet, tasked with everything but serving the United States. All the while, the “news” is everything but. Americans, to a one, know something is terribly wrong, totally out of control and, even their attempts to get at some semblance of truth are turned against them. The news is censored. With the country embroiled in two failed wars, obviously illegal, proof of war crimes piling up, financial collapse, citizen’s rights trampled on, nary a word is said about any of it.
“The president is a Muslim.” “Healthcare is socialism.” “The rich need their tax breaks, the same ones that pushed the country into 13.5 trillion in debt.”
The real message is always the same if you listen carefully, “be afraid, trust in government.” What are they really saying? “Greed is good.” How is that working out for you?
Ahmadinejad, as of the count yesterday, had 950 stories condemning his “outrageous” statements at the United Nations. Please note that a total of 27 nations walked out, not the people of those nations but representatives of the governments.
What we fail to note is that 163 nations stayed.
A few years ago, Ahmadinejad had a conference to discuss the holocaust. Scholars from around the world came, some openly hostile to Israel, some because they were scholars. It was called “outrageous” and Israel threatened to break up the meeting with a nuclear attack. What happened there, what were the findings? We will never know. Censorship in the American press, the same censorship that prevented evidence proving Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction from reaching the public, the same censorship that should have told Americans that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, was imposed.
The truth never benefits from censorship. Censorship is dictatorship.
Dictatorship is when those in power no longer trust the people. A government that doesn’t trust its own people can’t serve its people, its people serve it. This is the America of today.
9 years of censorship now clouds 9/11.
When President Bush announced that he saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center, live TV, it was shown once and hidden away. TV never showed that, not real TV, not the kind the public sees. Bush may have watched it, but if he is telling the truth, it means he knew in advance. Does this explain why he simply sat there? When Larry Silverstein said that he ordered one of the World Trade Center buildings, number 7, “pulled,” meaning “blown up” did it mean that explosives had been planted in all the buildings? It sure looked like it to me.
How about when Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, said a missile hit the Pentagon? Oh, did he say that? Well, yes he did, live television, you can find the statement on video all over the internet, any normal person can.
The 9/11 Commission couldn’t, however.
Same with Rumsfeld telling us that Flight 93 was shot down. Did he say that? Yes he did, live TV, all over the internet. They couldn’t find that either.
Nobody told the 9/11 Commission anything about Building 7. It is as though it escaped into another dimension.
It isn’t just these statements or Vice President Cheney’s orders to allow the planes to go unhindered, testified to on the video above, that make Ahmadinejad much less than “outrageous.” It is the hard science, the witness testimony and years of intelligence reports that prove conclusively that “no Muslims were involved in the making of this picture.”
What have we proven “conclusively?” One thing for sure, one thing a vast majority of Americans will now consider, that America is a dictatorship.
What they don’t know is how it happened or who is running things. The propaganda machine has 200 million people chasing their own tails, blaming each other.
Maybe Muslims did it.
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups. Gordon Duff's articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is a regularly on radio and tv.
Showing posts with label 911 Cover-up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 911 Cover-up. Show all posts
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
911, American Exceptionalism and Idolatry
Editor’s NOTE:
A reader of this blog who submitted the piece below is a person who is dedicated to knowing and testifying to the truth but for various reasons is currently unable/unwilling to be identified--a situation in these increasingly dark days which many readers should be able to empathize with.
This essay raises some extremely important issues such as the necessity of discussing who was really behind the 911 attacks and what the conspirator’s wished to accomplish. Americans of good will must not be ostracized for being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. A completely independent re-investigation of 911 is clearly needed.
Some readers of this site may be put-off by the author’s contention that “there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church.” Or that “only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed.” The author is a Roman Catholic and has correctly stated the Traditional Catholic Church teaching. Clearly an attempt is being made to appeal to other Catholics as well as non-Catholics. However, one does not have to be Catholic to appreciate the arguments being made herein. We invite generous but courteous commentary.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
“9/11 Denial” and the Idolatry of American Catholics
Bishop Williamson of the SSPX has not only been called a “holocaust denier,” but also a “9/11 denier,” in that he has said that 9/11 was an “inside-job,” a “false-flag” operation in which the World Trade Center buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition by criminal elements embedded in either the American or Israeli governments, or both. Is there a connection between his two denials? Most certainly. The Holocaust was the Jews’s Golgotha, and 9/11 was America’s Holocaust. Thus, 9/11 and the subsequent American “War on Terror” represent the crucifixion and resurrection of the now divine American Regime. Just like the Jews in Germany under Hitler, America, as the myth goes, was the sacrificial victim of absolute evil. And just like Israel is now justified and even righteous in its “defensive” wars of “survival,” as long as America claims to be fighting against that absolute evil, defending itself against being “wiped off the face of the map;” as long as it attempts to vanquish that evil for Americans’ sake and the sake of the whole world’s “freedom,” then America, like Israel, is not to be judged according to the moral law—for its very actions are what define good and evil—nationalized nominalist theology, as it were. When Israel murders Palestinian children and America murders Iraqi children, it is a good thing; for, Israeli rabbis and American Catholic neoconservative priests say it is.
What Bishop Williamson is saying in his “denial” is that 9/11 was a self-sacrificial act of violence, executed, perhaps, by the Mossad in conspiracy with a covert criminal network embedded in the American and global, new world order government. And those who inflicted this wound knew exactly the psychological and spiritual effects it would have on their victims, and what wonders it would permit them to do afterwards. Jews are now permitted to kill Palestinians en-masse with impunity because of the Holocaust; according to this insane logic, to deny the goodness of Israel’s actions is to implicitly deny the uniqueness and sacredness of the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Analogously, Americans are now permitted to invade and occupy countries that never attacked them because of 9/11—“never again.” And to deny America’s right “to defend itself” is to implicitly deny the sacred status of American suffering in 9/11. In the remainder of this article, I would like to defend Williamson’s “9/11 denial,” and then suggest a reason why most Americans, and almost all Catholics, should be doing the same.
What’s debatable?
There are certain convictions that a traditional Catholic should never question. God is love, for example. No matter how much hatred and evil we encounter and experience in the world, we are never justified in seriously doubting this truth. By divine Faith, we are obliged to believe that every act of hatred and evil will somehow result, by God’s miraculous grace, in more love and good in the world than if these acts had never occurred. God is love, and all that happens, all that happens, are only the various expressions of His love for us. Of course, God does not will our hateful sins, but He transforms them and their effects into good. We might have a thousand difficulties in reconciling our subjective experience with this rather incredible truth, but these can never justify one single doubt.
The set of unquestionable truths includes not only supernatural ones like the aforementioned, but also self-evident, natural truths, as well as those truths directly derived from them, the truths of the natural law, and the truths of man’s universal and particular experience of the world and himself. That things are, and I can know them; that truth exists, and I can discover it; that I have an immortal soul, and that it will be judged; that one must do good and avoid evil; that something cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect; that nothing in this created world can satisfy me; that the United States of America was founded in 1787; that the earth is round (though not necessarily revolving around the sun!—see the pioneering work of Solange Hertz and Robert Sungenis on this).
Then there are those truths that are, in a word, doubtable. Convictions about these matters should be held rather loosely, even when we are convinced of their truth, and they should be perpetually questioned, not because these are necessarily bad or false convictions, but because these are, unlike the self-evident or common sense truths and facts of nature, or the revealed supernatural truths of supernature, inherently debatable. These are the kinds of convictions we have regarding matters of human history, personal actions, and interpretation of particular experiences, such as the precise causes of historical events, the details of scientific theory, judgments of character, and deliberations of prudence. We may indeed have the right opinion on one or more of these sorts of issues, but it must be seen as just that—an opinion. There are simply no non-debatable, unassailable reasons to hold mere opinions to be non-negotiable and indisputably true, unless of course, they are transformed from opinions into knowledge (for the best analysis ever written on how this may occur, read Plato’s Republic). But until then, and some opinions will never make it to the realm of knowledge, there is no unimpeachable authority, including the authority of the opinions themselves, that obliges us to hold any of these opinion-level convictions without some level of epistemological doubt. On the contrary, it would be an act of disobedience and impiety to truth not to place these kinds of convictions under critical scrutiny and subjective doubt.
Unfortunately, it is just these types of convictions about which absolute certainty cannot be possessed, or at least with much more difficulty than one presumes, that are often held with the most intransigence and naïve fidelity by many Americans. In the remainder of this article, I would like to discuss two convictions that most Americans, and far too many Catholics, hold with a misplaced intransigence and naïveté. Though determining whether these convictions are true or false is, I would argue, essential to the welfare and even the very survival of our country, I will not attempt any determination of this here. For, I think the more important question to be asked about them is whether they are debatable?
Taking exception to American exceptionalism
The first conviction I would like to analyze in terms of debatableness is the belief in American exceptionalism. Many Catholics believe that America is special, but not special as all countries are special to their citizens, as my own mother is special because she is my mother, but especially special. Along with Israel, America, according to this idolatrous exceptionalism, has been chosen by God to be a sort of secular church with the mission of bringing peace and prosperity to the world. These maintain that America’s system of government and political culture is intrinsically superior to all others, for America is the nation marked out by God’s providence to bring God’s gift of freedom to the world. In short, not an insignificant number or Catholics hold in their heart of hearts, though they may be unaware of it and may deny it when it is made explicit, that America is, for all intents and purposes, equal in importance to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Now, it is not my intention to determine the truth of these convictions or any other ones in this essay; for, I only want to determine whether they are debatable. As far as I know, there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed. The Church is alone favored and chosen by God, for it is the new Israel it is His own body, and He infallibly brings goodness and truth to the world through her alone. The Church will never lose these divine attributes, and it will continue to display them visibly for all to see to the end of time (though often clouded by human error and sin) in its hierarchical and incarnate body and head This is undeniable and indubitable.
Therefore, it is impossible that any other institution could ever have these attributes in any way, or even approach them, for they are divine. Yet many attribute to the American regime some or all of these divine attributes! It may be an implicit or unconscious attribution, one that materializes itself only in emotional reactions and knee-jerk practical and political attitudes, but it is clear that too many Catholics have adopted to some extent a virtually religious belief in American exceptionalism.
Now, prescinding from the question of whether the American regime[1] is or is not actually “a force for good in the world” (as a certain intransigent Irish talk-show host from New Jersey likes to affirm incessantly) it is certainly the case that this question is debatable. One is, without doubt, morally permitted to demure from the Americanist narrative, to question its veracity, for it is the kind of conviction the truth of which can only be determined by a combination of philosophical and theological analysis and historical interpretation; and the latter, because it deals with changeable and ambiguous subject matter, renders it an intrinsically debatable conviction.
If my abstract arguments have not yet convinced the reader that American exceptionalism is a debatable conviction, then perhaps a little philosophical, theological, and historical analysis may help. The Enlightenment was in essence a secularization of the heresy of private judgment held by the Protestant revolutionaries, with both Protestantism and the Enlightenment a dialectical reaction to fourteenth-century nominalist theology. Not content merely to judge Christian revelation, completely independent of the authority of the Magisterium, the Enlightenment philosophers presumed to adjudicate reality itself, independent of any authority whatsoever, whether the deliverances of nature, the force of law, immemorial custom, or time-tested tradition. These claimed to obey “reason,” but as Nietzsche and the post-modernists have demonstrated (and this is perhaps the one salvageable truth in their otherwise satanic movement), all this talk of reason was just a cover for revolutionary will. The Enlightenment model of the ideal political order was one in which man’s will, disguised as “reason,” would be king.
To make a long historical story short, the most obvious concrete, historical incarnation of this Enlightenment, man-centered political order was the 1789 republic of France. But this wasn’t the first incarnation. The 1787 American Republic holds this dubious honor. It is not my intention here to argue this point against Michael Novakian hagiographers of the Founding Fathers, but I will point out one salient characteristic of the American regime in lieu of an argument. Even though one must accept that the American Founding had some godly influences, that it was pervaded in part by a Christian ethos, one must also recognize that the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found in its official documents, and unwillingness to utter the Holy Name in public is the unmistakable sign of Freemasonry, the archenemy of Catholicism.
Let us jump ahead a couple hundred years to present-day America. Tens of millions of unborn babies are being murdered by American “doctors” hired by the children’s own mothers; an innocent woman is starved to death by her husband in plain sight of everyone, including a “pro-life president,” and no one has the will or the power to stop it; a president and other operatives of an enormous, Leviathanian military-industrial complex conspire to lie to the American citizenry and the international community in order to attack and occupy a country that never attacked it, torturing many innocent citizens and murdering thousands of civilians, including women and children, in the process; the first black U.S. president is in favor of baby-murder—all in the name of God and freedom.
I hope that in light of the preceding, it is at least a little bit clearer now that the belief in America’s intrinsic, essential, and constitutive goodness, exceptionalism, and mission, although not demonstrably an untrue belief, is certainly debatable. Perhaps the American regime is morally superior to all other nations and always will be, but there is no authority, from history, reason or revelation, that morally obliges one to think so. Thus, there is no a-priori reason to judge the American regime, its governmental principles and practices, and its moral and political culture, to be qualitatively better or worse than any other nation. And one is certainly free to judge it qualitatively worse, culturally speaking, than other historical empires, such as the British and the Spanish. Is this out of the question? Is it unpatriotic? Is it un-American? Is it blasphemy? These aren’t the appropriate questions. The appropriate question is whether it is true. Now, whether America is blessed or cursed by God, or simply held in the same esteem that he holds any other created society of sinners, is certainly a pertinent question. But the question one must first ask is whether one’s conviction about the American regime’s moral and spiritual exceptionalism is debatable—and it is.
9/11 denial
We are now ready to discuss the second conviction I would argue is mistakenly considered by many Catholics to be non-debatable: that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were orchestrated and executed by Islamic terrorists from a foreign country. As I will try to show, there is a reasonable, though debatable, alternative explanation that is just as plausible, if not more so, than the explanation the U.S. Government has given us in the official 9/11 Commission report, and the main-stream media has echoed and supported. Before I describe what this alternative view is, and why I think it is plausible, let me explain why I am even bringing this “conspiracy” issue up in the first place.
I think that there has been a massive, concerted effort on the part of the U.S. and Israeli governments, the military-industrial complex, globalist interests, and the mass media, which is overwhelmingly Zionist controlled, to keep Americans in the cave, so to speak, with respect to what truly occurred on September 11, 2001. The Internet, interpersonal conversations, and courageous book and journal publishers are our only life-preservers in this veritable ocean of propaganda. The vast majority of the media, both right and left, are mere puppeteers and shadow-watchers.
Let me offer the reader some evidence that the official story of 9/11 might be a mass-produced delusional myth. How do you react to the idea that 9/11 may not be what you think it is, that it might indeed be an “inside job?” Is it with immediate disdain and disbelief at the mere possibility of a government cover up of this matter? If so, why? Think about your reaction. Is it logical? Is it coherent with your other beliefs? A government that protects the murder of babies and covers it up with propaganda is capable of lying about 3000 murders—don’t you think? Is it not capable of permitting and even orchestrating the murder of adults too, then, isn’t it? Bush sanctioned and permitted Israel’s murdering of innocent Lebanese a few years after 9/11, and Obama had “no comment” about the thousands of innocent Palestinians who were killed and injured by Israel. Is it absolutely unthinkable that powerful elements in our government would kill their own people if it meant securing and preserving their power? No, for they have done so already. That is certain.
There are, of course, many “conspiracy theorists” who think themselves safely out of the clutches of deception, but have only bound themselves more securely in it, through the chains of their fantasies. Nevertheless, false conspiracy theories can also be invented and imposed on society by those in public power, and just because they are de facto publicly authoritative does not make them any more non-conspiratorial and truthful than others. I am suggesting that the official story of 9/11 is just one of these debatable conspiracy theories, with factual and logical holes you can fly a Bowing 767 through.
Though one could marshal hundreds more empirical facts and several persuasive arguments that render the debatable conviction that 9/11 may have been a false-flag operation a plausible one, I will only mention a few here. As many engineers and scientists, such as Dr. Stephen Jones, as well as reputable commentators, such as Paul Craig Roberts, have insisted, the only plausible explanation for both towers collapsing into their footprints at virtually freefall speeds is controlled demolition, a process that would have taken weeks, if not months, to plan. Moreover, a number of the so-called hijackers are alive and have made their aliveness public. World Trade Building Seven was never hit by a plane, yet it collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint shortly after Larry Silverstein, its owner, who just happened to receive billions of dollars in insurance money because of its collapse, gave the order to “pull-it,” clearly meaning demolition (there is a you-tube interview where you can hear him say it clearly). In other words, logic dictates that the complex, time-controlled explosives were already carefully placed inside the building weeks before September 11. See THIS... for a professional quality, highly plausible documentary on the subject).
There is also historical evidence that the U.S. government is capable of massive lying, treachery, and murder. There is the recently declassified document available online called “Operation Northwoods” in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlined a plan in the 1960s to murder Americans and blame it on an “enemy,” Cuba, in order to provoke the public’s enthusiasm for war. Kennedy, in virtue of his Catholic conscience, however ill-formed it might have been, rightfully rejected this plan. Careful consideration of THIS document reveals that it is within the realm of possibility that 9/11 was a “false-flag terrorism” event. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything, but it at least shows that the U.S. government is capable of it. Consider also the fact that a government that allows the mass murder of its most innocent and helpless victims, unborn babies, for the sake of ideological consistency, mammon, and comfort, is capable of planning and executing the murder of a few thousand of its citizens for similar, self-serving motives. Granted, the idea that our own government might have either murdered its own citizens or deliberately permitted them to be murdered by others and covered it up so effectively is tremendously difficult to fathom, it is eminently debatable. If, as we have seen, there is no indisputable reason to consider the American regime intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good, then there is no indisputable reason to consider its government incapable of deliberately permitting or committing a great act of evil.
The attack that occurred on September 11, 2001 was an act of enormous evil. Therefore, the government of the American regime, or at least, criminal, traitorous elements embedded in the U.S. government, being capable of enormous evil, may have deliberately permitted or committed the 9/11 attacks. One cannot deny the conclusion of this syllogism without denying either the major or the minor premise. The minor premise is undeniable, so that leaves only a denial of the major premise as the reason for not accepting the conclusion. For those who can’t or won’t recognize that the American regime may not be what its popular spokesmen claim it to be (the kind of claim one might hear on the Sean Hannity show or in a speech by the former president George W. Bush), it is impossible to recognize that 9/11 may not be what its popular spokesmen have claimed it to be, namely, an attack on America by Islamic terrorists who hate us because of our goodness and freedom. However, for those who can recognize the intrinsic debatableness of the major premise, it is impossible not to admit the intrinsic debatableness of the conviction that 9/11 may have been an “inside job,” what conspiracy theorists call a “false-flag operation.” In other words, it makes no sense to deny the possibility, and no amount of propaganda and political and cultural pressure can change this fact. Personally, I think the empirical data show that it is more than just a mere possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, but I leave that for the reader to discover on his own. My main point is that there is no a-priori rational reason for Catholics to refuse to consider the possibility that 9/11 was orchestrated and executed by criminal elements embedded in the United States government, and possibly in the government of Israel. See the work of Christopher Bollyn on this possibility HERE...
9/11 and the holocaust vs. Christ crucified
In conclusion, I want to explain why I think it is vitally important for Catholics to look at 9/11 with a more skeptical eye. Apart from the fact that if 9/11 were indeed an inside job, it would change drastically how one perceives the political and cultural landscape—it would give a whole new meaning to the “war on terror”—and this is certainly vitally important in itself, I think that if Catholics cannot even accept just the possibility that 9/11 was a self-inflicted wound, or a wound inflicted by “our democratic friends in the Middle East,” they are at risk of losing their Catholic Faith. As I have shown, the only reason one would not consider it a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job is because one does not believe the American government capable of that kind of grave, deliberate evil. And the only reason not to consider it possible that the American government could deliberately permit or commit grave evil is the belief that the American regime is an institution intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good. But only the Catholic Church deserves this attribution.
Therefore, if one refuses to consider it even a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, he, at least implicitly, denies the exclusive identity of the Roman Catholic Church as the only infallible and indefectible force for good in the world. I think it is an inescapable conclusion. The Roman Catholic Church—in its divine aspect, of course, and not in its eminently peccable human members—is the only institution incapable of doing any evil, let alone grave evil. America has no divine aspect whatsoever. Not to consider it possible that one’s government could do the unspeakable and murder its own citizens is to implicitly divinize one’s country (as perhaps many German Catholics did during the Hitler regime, leading to his not being stopped much earlier), and insofar as one identifies himself with his country, it is to divinize oneself. "I preach Christ crucified," St. Paul said. And he meant Christ crucified—and nothing else. Catholics must be integrally Pauline in this respect, or be of antichrist.
To get back to Bishop Williamson: The real issue here is the relative historical and spiritual status of the crucifixion of the God-man in relation to the historical suffering of Americans in 9/11 and Jews in the Holocaust. For those Jews and Americans under the spell of the 9/11 and Holocaust idols, however, the crucifixion is to be seen as ultimately irrelevant to history and to spirituality, and should be acknowledged as such by all, indeed, must be acknowledged as such, or else one is "anti-semitic" or “anti-American,” heretics deserving severe punishment. The Holocaust and 9/11 must replace the crucifixion as the dual-centers of historical and spiritual gravity, must be recognized as the loci of all evil and the true revelation of the Jewish and American divine victimhood. Either Jesus is the eternal victim of unrighteous violence, or the Jews and Americans are. There is no third man. The Church, regardless of its sympathy with Jewish and American suffering, and whether or not it accepts the sacred, mystical "six million," or that “the Muslims attacked us because of our freedom,” can never acknowledge the Jewish and Americanist dogma of divine self-victimhood, and so will always be the enemy to the unrepentant Jews and the Americanists, to anyone with an unrepentant, anti-logos, Jewish and Americanist consciousness.
NOTES:
[1] I say “American regime” to distinguish it from America the country or people. Here we are considering the merits of the philosophical and theological principles embedded in America’s government, institutions, and overall ethos and culture, America in a formal, not material, sense.
A reader of this blog who submitted the piece below is a person who is dedicated to knowing and testifying to the truth but for various reasons is currently unable/unwilling to be identified--a situation in these increasingly dark days which many readers should be able to empathize with.
This essay raises some extremely important issues such as the necessity of discussing who was really behind the 911 attacks and what the conspirator’s wished to accomplish. Americans of good will must not be ostracized for being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. A completely independent re-investigation of 911 is clearly needed.
Some readers of this site may be put-off by the author’s contention that “there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church.” Or that “only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed.” The author is a Roman Catholic and has correctly stated the Traditional Catholic Church teaching. Clearly an attempt is being made to appeal to other Catholics as well as non-Catholics. However, one does not have to be Catholic to appreciate the arguments being made herein. We invite generous but courteous commentary.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
“9/11 Denial” and the Idolatry of American Catholics
Bishop Williamson of the SSPX has not only been called a “holocaust denier,” but also a “9/11 denier,” in that he has said that 9/11 was an “inside-job,” a “false-flag” operation in which the World Trade Center buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition by criminal elements embedded in either the American or Israeli governments, or both. Is there a connection between his two denials? Most certainly. The Holocaust was the Jews’s Golgotha, and 9/11 was America’s Holocaust. Thus, 9/11 and the subsequent American “War on Terror” represent the crucifixion and resurrection of the now divine American Regime. Just like the Jews in Germany under Hitler, America, as the myth goes, was the sacrificial victim of absolute evil. And just like Israel is now justified and even righteous in its “defensive” wars of “survival,” as long as America claims to be fighting against that absolute evil, defending itself against being “wiped off the face of the map;” as long as it attempts to vanquish that evil for Americans’ sake and the sake of the whole world’s “freedom,” then America, like Israel, is not to be judged according to the moral law—for its very actions are what define good and evil—nationalized nominalist theology, as it were. When Israel murders Palestinian children and America murders Iraqi children, it is a good thing; for, Israeli rabbis and American Catholic neoconservative priests say it is.
What Bishop Williamson is saying in his “denial” is that 9/11 was a self-sacrificial act of violence, executed, perhaps, by the Mossad in conspiracy with a covert criminal network embedded in the American and global, new world order government. And those who inflicted this wound knew exactly the psychological and spiritual effects it would have on their victims, and what wonders it would permit them to do afterwards. Jews are now permitted to kill Palestinians en-masse with impunity because of the Holocaust; according to this insane logic, to deny the goodness of Israel’s actions is to implicitly deny the uniqueness and sacredness of the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust. Analogously, Americans are now permitted to invade and occupy countries that never attacked them because of 9/11—“never again.” And to deny America’s right “to defend itself” is to implicitly deny the sacred status of American suffering in 9/11. In the remainder of this article, I would like to defend Williamson’s “9/11 denial,” and then suggest a reason why most Americans, and almost all Catholics, should be doing the same.
What’s debatable?
There are certain convictions that a traditional Catholic should never question. God is love, for example. No matter how much hatred and evil we encounter and experience in the world, we are never justified in seriously doubting this truth. By divine Faith, we are obliged to believe that every act of hatred and evil will somehow result, by God’s miraculous grace, in more love and good in the world than if these acts had never occurred. God is love, and all that happens, all that happens, are only the various expressions of His love for us. Of course, God does not will our hateful sins, but He transforms them and their effects into good. We might have a thousand difficulties in reconciling our subjective experience with this rather incredible truth, but these can never justify one single doubt.
The set of unquestionable truths includes not only supernatural ones like the aforementioned, but also self-evident, natural truths, as well as those truths directly derived from them, the truths of the natural law, and the truths of man’s universal and particular experience of the world and himself. That things are, and I can know them; that truth exists, and I can discover it; that I have an immortal soul, and that it will be judged; that one must do good and avoid evil; that something cannot be and not be at the same time in the same respect; that nothing in this created world can satisfy me; that the United States of America was founded in 1787; that the earth is round (though not necessarily revolving around the sun!—see the pioneering work of Solange Hertz and Robert Sungenis on this).
Then there are those truths that are, in a word, doubtable. Convictions about these matters should be held rather loosely, even when we are convinced of their truth, and they should be perpetually questioned, not because these are necessarily bad or false convictions, but because these are, unlike the self-evident or common sense truths and facts of nature, or the revealed supernatural truths of supernature, inherently debatable. These are the kinds of convictions we have regarding matters of human history, personal actions, and interpretation of particular experiences, such as the precise causes of historical events, the details of scientific theory, judgments of character, and deliberations of prudence. We may indeed have the right opinion on one or more of these sorts of issues, but it must be seen as just that—an opinion. There are simply no non-debatable, unassailable reasons to hold mere opinions to be non-negotiable and indisputably true, unless of course, they are transformed from opinions into knowledge (for the best analysis ever written on how this may occur, read Plato’s Republic). But until then, and some opinions will never make it to the realm of knowledge, there is no unimpeachable authority, including the authority of the opinions themselves, that obliges us to hold any of these opinion-level convictions without some level of epistemological doubt. On the contrary, it would be an act of disobedience and impiety to truth not to place these kinds of convictions under critical scrutiny and subjective doubt.
Unfortunately, it is just these types of convictions about which absolute certainty cannot be possessed, or at least with much more difficulty than one presumes, that are often held with the most intransigence and naïve fidelity by many Americans. In the remainder of this article, I would like to discuss two convictions that most Americans, and far too many Catholics, hold with a misplaced intransigence and naïveté. Though determining whether these convictions are true or false is, I would argue, essential to the welfare and even the very survival of our country, I will not attempt any determination of this here. For, I think the more important question to be asked about them is whether they are debatable?
Taking exception to American exceptionalism
The first conviction I would like to analyze in terms of debatableness is the belief in American exceptionalism. Many Catholics believe that America is special, but not special as all countries are special to their citizens, as my own mother is special because she is my mother, but especially special. Along with Israel, America, according to this idolatrous exceptionalism, has been chosen by God to be a sort of secular church with the mission of bringing peace and prosperity to the world. These maintain that America’s system of government and political culture is intrinsically superior to all others, for America is the nation marked out by God’s providence to bring God’s gift of freedom to the world. In short, not an insignificant number or Catholics hold in their heart of hearts, though they may be unaware of it and may deny it when it is made explicit, that America is, for all intents and purposes, equal in importance to the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Now, it is not my intention to determine the truth of these convictions or any other ones in this essay; for, I only want to determine whether they are debatable. As far as I know, there is only one institution especially favored by God with an explicit mission for all humanity, only one indispensable and incarnation of divine goodness present now in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Only the Catholic Church has a divine foundation and spirit, which, despite human sin and error, cannot be eradicated or changed. The Church is alone favored and chosen by God, for it is the new Israel it is His own body, and He infallibly brings goodness and truth to the world through her alone. The Church will never lose these divine attributes, and it will continue to display them visibly for all to see to the end of time (though often clouded by human error and sin) in its hierarchical and incarnate body and head This is undeniable and indubitable.
Therefore, it is impossible that any other institution could ever have these attributes in any way, or even approach them, for they are divine. Yet many attribute to the American regime some or all of these divine attributes! It may be an implicit or unconscious attribution, one that materializes itself only in emotional reactions and knee-jerk practical and political attitudes, but it is clear that too many Catholics have adopted to some extent a virtually religious belief in American exceptionalism.
Now, prescinding from the question of whether the American regime[1] is or is not actually “a force for good in the world” (as a certain intransigent Irish talk-show host from New Jersey likes to affirm incessantly) it is certainly the case that this question is debatable. One is, without doubt, morally permitted to demure from the Americanist narrative, to question its veracity, for it is the kind of conviction the truth of which can only be determined by a combination of philosophical and theological analysis and historical interpretation; and the latter, because it deals with changeable and ambiguous subject matter, renders it an intrinsically debatable conviction.
If my abstract arguments have not yet convinced the reader that American exceptionalism is a debatable conviction, then perhaps a little philosophical, theological, and historical analysis may help. The Enlightenment was in essence a secularization of the heresy of private judgment held by the Protestant revolutionaries, with both Protestantism and the Enlightenment a dialectical reaction to fourteenth-century nominalist theology. Not content merely to judge Christian revelation, completely independent of the authority of the Magisterium, the Enlightenment philosophers presumed to adjudicate reality itself, independent of any authority whatsoever, whether the deliverances of nature, the force of law, immemorial custom, or time-tested tradition. These claimed to obey “reason,” but as Nietzsche and the post-modernists have demonstrated (and this is perhaps the one salvageable truth in their otherwise satanic movement), all this talk of reason was just a cover for revolutionary will. The Enlightenment model of the ideal political order was one in which man’s will, disguised as “reason,” would be king.
To make a long historical story short, the most obvious concrete, historical incarnation of this Enlightenment, man-centered political order was the 1789 republic of France. But this wasn’t the first incarnation. The 1787 American Republic holds this dubious honor. It is not my intention here to argue this point against Michael Novakian hagiographers of the Founding Fathers, but I will point out one salient characteristic of the American regime in lieu of an argument. Even though one must accept that the American Founding had some godly influences, that it was pervaded in part by a Christian ethos, one must also recognize that the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found in its official documents, and unwillingness to utter the Holy Name in public is the unmistakable sign of Freemasonry, the archenemy of Catholicism.
Let us jump ahead a couple hundred years to present-day America. Tens of millions of unborn babies are being murdered by American “doctors” hired by the children’s own mothers; an innocent woman is starved to death by her husband in plain sight of everyone, including a “pro-life president,” and no one has the will or the power to stop it; a president and other operatives of an enormous, Leviathanian military-industrial complex conspire to lie to the American citizenry and the international community in order to attack and occupy a country that never attacked it, torturing many innocent citizens and murdering thousands of civilians, including women and children, in the process; the first black U.S. president is in favor of baby-murder—all in the name of God and freedom.
I hope that in light of the preceding, it is at least a little bit clearer now that the belief in America’s intrinsic, essential, and constitutive goodness, exceptionalism, and mission, although not demonstrably an untrue belief, is certainly debatable. Perhaps the American regime is morally superior to all other nations and always will be, but there is no authority, from history, reason or revelation, that morally obliges one to think so. Thus, there is no a-priori reason to judge the American regime, its governmental principles and practices, and its moral and political culture, to be qualitatively better or worse than any other nation. And one is certainly free to judge it qualitatively worse, culturally speaking, than other historical empires, such as the British and the Spanish. Is this out of the question? Is it unpatriotic? Is it un-American? Is it blasphemy? These aren’t the appropriate questions. The appropriate question is whether it is true. Now, whether America is blessed or cursed by God, or simply held in the same esteem that he holds any other created society of sinners, is certainly a pertinent question. But the question one must first ask is whether one’s conviction about the American regime’s moral and spiritual exceptionalism is debatable—and it is.
9/11 denial
We are now ready to discuss the second conviction I would argue is mistakenly considered by many Catholics to be non-debatable: that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were orchestrated and executed by Islamic terrorists from a foreign country. As I will try to show, there is a reasonable, though debatable, alternative explanation that is just as plausible, if not more so, than the explanation the U.S. Government has given us in the official 9/11 Commission report, and the main-stream media has echoed and supported. Before I describe what this alternative view is, and why I think it is plausible, let me explain why I am even bringing this “conspiracy” issue up in the first place.
I think that there has been a massive, concerted effort on the part of the U.S. and Israeli governments, the military-industrial complex, globalist interests, and the mass media, which is overwhelmingly Zionist controlled, to keep Americans in the cave, so to speak, with respect to what truly occurred on September 11, 2001. The Internet, interpersonal conversations, and courageous book and journal publishers are our only life-preservers in this veritable ocean of propaganda. The vast majority of the media, both right and left, are mere puppeteers and shadow-watchers.
Let me offer the reader some evidence that the official story of 9/11 might be a mass-produced delusional myth. How do you react to the idea that 9/11 may not be what you think it is, that it might indeed be an “inside job?” Is it with immediate disdain and disbelief at the mere possibility of a government cover up of this matter? If so, why? Think about your reaction. Is it logical? Is it coherent with your other beliefs? A government that protects the murder of babies and covers it up with propaganda is capable of lying about 3000 murders—don’t you think? Is it not capable of permitting and even orchestrating the murder of adults too, then, isn’t it? Bush sanctioned and permitted Israel’s murdering of innocent Lebanese a few years after 9/11, and Obama had “no comment” about the thousands of innocent Palestinians who were killed and injured by Israel. Is it absolutely unthinkable that powerful elements in our government would kill their own people if it meant securing and preserving their power? No, for they have done so already. That is certain.
There are, of course, many “conspiracy theorists” who think themselves safely out of the clutches of deception, but have only bound themselves more securely in it, through the chains of their fantasies. Nevertheless, false conspiracy theories can also be invented and imposed on society by those in public power, and just because they are de facto publicly authoritative does not make them any more non-conspiratorial and truthful than others. I am suggesting that the official story of 9/11 is just one of these debatable conspiracy theories, with factual and logical holes you can fly a Bowing 767 through.
Though one could marshal hundreds more empirical facts and several persuasive arguments that render the debatable conviction that 9/11 may have been a false-flag operation a plausible one, I will only mention a few here. As many engineers and scientists, such as Dr. Stephen Jones, as well as reputable commentators, such as Paul Craig Roberts, have insisted, the only plausible explanation for both towers collapsing into their footprints at virtually freefall speeds is controlled demolition, a process that would have taken weeks, if not months, to plan. Moreover, a number of the so-called hijackers are alive and have made their aliveness public. World Trade Building Seven was never hit by a plane, yet it collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint shortly after Larry Silverstein, its owner, who just happened to receive billions of dollars in insurance money because of its collapse, gave the order to “pull-it,” clearly meaning demolition (there is a you-tube interview where you can hear him say it clearly). In other words, logic dictates that the complex, time-controlled explosives were already carefully placed inside the building weeks before September 11. See THIS... for a professional quality, highly plausible documentary on the subject).
There is also historical evidence that the U.S. government is capable of massive lying, treachery, and murder. There is the recently declassified document available online called “Operation Northwoods” in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlined a plan in the 1960s to murder Americans and blame it on an “enemy,” Cuba, in order to provoke the public’s enthusiasm for war. Kennedy, in virtue of his Catholic conscience, however ill-formed it might have been, rightfully rejected this plan. Careful consideration of THIS document reveals that it is within the realm of possibility that 9/11 was a “false-flag terrorism” event. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything, but it at least shows that the U.S. government is capable of it. Consider also the fact that a government that allows the mass murder of its most innocent and helpless victims, unborn babies, for the sake of ideological consistency, mammon, and comfort, is capable of planning and executing the murder of a few thousand of its citizens for similar, self-serving motives. Granted, the idea that our own government might have either murdered its own citizens or deliberately permitted them to be murdered by others and covered it up so effectively is tremendously difficult to fathom, it is eminently debatable. If, as we have seen, there is no indisputable reason to consider the American regime intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good, then there is no indisputable reason to consider its government incapable of deliberately permitting or committing a great act of evil.
The attack that occurred on September 11, 2001 was an act of enormous evil. Therefore, the government of the American regime, or at least, criminal, traitorous elements embedded in the U.S. government, being capable of enormous evil, may have deliberately permitted or committed the 9/11 attacks. One cannot deny the conclusion of this syllogism without denying either the major or the minor premise. The minor premise is undeniable, so that leaves only a denial of the major premise as the reason for not accepting the conclusion. For those who can’t or won’t recognize that the American regime may not be what its popular spokesmen claim it to be (the kind of claim one might hear on the Sean Hannity show or in a speech by the former president George W. Bush), it is impossible to recognize that 9/11 may not be what its popular spokesmen have claimed it to be, namely, an attack on America by Islamic terrorists who hate us because of our goodness and freedom. However, for those who can recognize the intrinsic debatableness of the major premise, it is impossible not to admit the intrinsic debatableness of the conviction that 9/11 may have been an “inside job,” what conspiracy theorists call a “false-flag operation.” In other words, it makes no sense to deny the possibility, and no amount of propaganda and political and cultural pressure can change this fact. Personally, I think the empirical data show that it is more than just a mere possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, but I leave that for the reader to discover on his own. My main point is that there is no a-priori rational reason for Catholics to refuse to consider the possibility that 9/11 was orchestrated and executed by criminal elements embedded in the United States government, and possibly in the government of Israel. See the work of Christopher Bollyn on this possibility HERE...
9/11 and the holocaust vs. Christ crucified
In conclusion, I want to explain why I think it is vitally important for Catholics to look at 9/11 with a more skeptical eye. Apart from the fact that if 9/11 were indeed an inside job, it would change drastically how one perceives the political and cultural landscape—it would give a whole new meaning to the “war on terror”—and this is certainly vitally important in itself, I think that if Catholics cannot even accept just the possibility that 9/11 was a self-inflicted wound, or a wound inflicted by “our democratic friends in the Middle East,” they are at risk of losing their Catholic Faith. As I have shown, the only reason one would not consider it a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job is because one does not believe the American government capable of that kind of grave, deliberate evil. And the only reason not to consider it possible that the American government could deliberately permit or commit grave evil is the belief that the American regime is an institution intrinsically, essentially, and constitutively good. But only the Catholic Church deserves this attribution.
Therefore, if one refuses to consider it even a possibility that 9/11 was an inside job, he, at least implicitly, denies the exclusive identity of the Roman Catholic Church as the only infallible and indefectible force for good in the world. I think it is an inescapable conclusion. The Roman Catholic Church—in its divine aspect, of course, and not in its eminently peccable human members—is the only institution incapable of doing any evil, let alone grave evil. America has no divine aspect whatsoever. Not to consider it possible that one’s government could do the unspeakable and murder its own citizens is to implicitly divinize one’s country (as perhaps many German Catholics did during the Hitler regime, leading to his not being stopped much earlier), and insofar as one identifies himself with his country, it is to divinize oneself. "I preach Christ crucified," St. Paul said. And he meant Christ crucified—and nothing else. Catholics must be integrally Pauline in this respect, or be of antichrist.
To get back to Bishop Williamson: The real issue here is the relative historical and spiritual status of the crucifixion of the God-man in relation to the historical suffering of Americans in 9/11 and Jews in the Holocaust. For those Jews and Americans under the spell of the 9/11 and Holocaust idols, however, the crucifixion is to be seen as ultimately irrelevant to history and to spirituality, and should be acknowledged as such by all, indeed, must be acknowledged as such, or else one is "anti-semitic" or “anti-American,” heretics deserving severe punishment. The Holocaust and 9/11 must replace the crucifixion as the dual-centers of historical and spiritual gravity, must be recognized as the loci of all evil and the true revelation of the Jewish and American divine victimhood. Either Jesus is the eternal victim of unrighteous violence, or the Jews and Americans are. There is no third man. The Church, regardless of its sympathy with Jewish and American suffering, and whether or not it accepts the sacred, mystical "six million," or that “the Muslims attacked us because of our freedom,” can never acknowledge the Jewish and Americanist dogma of divine self-victimhood, and so will always be the enemy to the unrepentant Jews and the Americanists, to anyone with an unrepentant, anti-logos, Jewish and Americanist consciousness.
NOTES:
[1] I say “American regime” to distinguish it from America the country or people. Here we are considering the merits of the philosophical and theological principles embedded in America’s government, institutions, and overall ethos and culture, America in a formal, not material, sense.
Friday, August 6, 2010
So Please Tell Me Again: What's The War About?
By William Blum
August 05, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here's Vice-President Joe Biden: "We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred." 1
Here's Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): "This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11." 2
Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. "Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from." 3
Here's President Obama a year ago: "But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." 4
And here is the president, two days after the release of the Wikileaks documents, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned". 5
Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.
Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't Washington bombed those countries?
Indeed, what actually is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.
There are many people in Afghanistan and Pakistan — the ones still living — who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on their houses, their wedding parties, their funerals, their life. As in Iraq, the American "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan regularly, routinely, and conspicuously creates numerous new anti-American terrorists.
The only "war of necessity" that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders will be further enriched?
But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except perhaps by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration tried to do, without success, then get out, and declare "victory". Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech.
US Israel and Iran
If and when the United States and Israel bomb Iran (marking the sixth country so blessed by Barack Obama) and this sad old world has a new daily horror show to look at on their TV sets, and we then discover that Iran was not actually building nuclear weapons after all, the American mainstream media and the benighted American mind will ask: "Why didn't they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?"
The same questions were asked about Iraq following the discovery that Saddam Hussein didn't in fact have any weapons of mass destruction. However, in actuality, before the US invasion Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. I'm reminded of this by the recent news report about Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq. Last week he told the British inquiry into the March 2003 invasion that those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction. 6
In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: "We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons." 7
In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: "The fact is that we don't have weapons of mass destruction. We don't have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry." 8
Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: "These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there." 9
Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq's secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War. 10
There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.
If you don't already have serious doubts about the mainstream media's devotion to questioning the premises and rationales underlying American foreign policy, consider this: Despite the two revelations on Dan Rather's CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:
PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?
PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s, and those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?
PIRO: Yes.
PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade? 11
Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, as did Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire, though it hasn't all worked out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, and tortured.
The result of Bush's Iraqi policy can be summed up by saying that it would be difficult to cite many other historical examples of one nation destroying another so completely, crushing and perverting virtually every aspect of their society and humanity.
Now Israel presses Washington relentlessly to do the same to Iran — not that the US necessarily needs much prodding — primarily because Israel is determined to remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East; this despite Iran telling the United States and the world many times that it is not building nuclear weapons. But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: Is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Does the US and Israel believe that there is not already enough horror and suffering in the news?
In what could be part of the preparation for an attack on Iran, 47 members of the House of Representatives recently put forth a non-binding resolution declaring Iran to be "an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel". To illustrate this threat, the resolution quoted Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on several occasions avowing sentiments like: "God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism" ... calling for "this occupying regime [Israel] to be wiped off the map" ... "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation" ... "I must announce that the Zionist regime, with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion, and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene" ... "Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come, and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started".
Pretty damning stuff, isn't it? N'est-ce pas? Nicht wahr? But there's a lot less here than meets the eye. Notice that it doesn't quote Ahmadinejad in a single specific, explicit threat of an Iranian attack upon Israel or the United States. No mention or indication that "I" or "We" or "Iran" is going to do any of this, carry out any act of violence. And I would say that that's because it's not what he meant. In another quote, which the resolution fails to cite, the Iranian president in December 2006 said: "The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom." 12 Obviously, the man is not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place very peacefully. Furthermore, in June 2006, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated: "We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state.13 Why didn't the authors of the congressional resolution quote that one?
I think that one can derive a better understanding of the Iranian president's statements by seeing them as metaphor, as bragging, as wishful thinking, as well as poor translation (for example: "wiped off the map" 14), coming from a man foolish enough to publicly claim that there are no gays in Iran.
But more significantly, the resolution offers no reason why Iran actually would attack Israel or the United States. What reason would Iran have to use nuclear weapons against either country other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? Indeed, the very same question could have — and should have — been asked before the invasion of Iraq. Of the many lies surrounding that invasion, the biggest one of all was that if, in fact, Saddam Hussein had had those weapons of mass destruction the invasion would have been justified.
With all the lies exposed about the American Iraqi misadventure, I and many others had allowed ourselves the luxury, the hidden pleasure, of believing that the United States government and media had learned a lesson which would last for some time. They'd been caught and exposed. But it's the same all over again with the lies about Iran and Ahmadinejad. (No, he's not even a Holocaust denier.)
In any event, Israel probably doesn't believe its own propaganda. In March of last year, the Washington Post reported: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" has asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." 15 This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.
And earlier this year we could read in the Sunday Times of London: "Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the [Israeli] defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons. The views expressed by the former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission contradict the assessment of Israel's defence establishment and put him at odds with political leaders." 16
If any country in this world is a threat to use nuclear weapons with remarkably little regard for the consequences it's Israel. Martin van Creveld, an Israeli professor of military history, and loyal Israeli citizen, remarked in 2002: "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under." 17 Think of the closing scene of "Dr. Strangelove". That's Israel sitting astride the speeding nuclear missile waving the cowboy hat.
There's no business like show business
She played Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor.
And accompanied the one and only Aretha Franklin.
A gala benefit performance in Philadelphia.
At the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Before 8,000 people.
And they loved it.
How many of them knew that the pianist was a genuine, unindicted war criminal?
Guilty of crimes against humanity.
Defender of torture.
With much blood on her pianist hands.
Whose style in office for years could be characterized as hypocrisy, disinformation, and outright lying.
But what did the audience care?
This is America.
Home of the Good Guys.
She was fighting against the Bad Guys.
And we all know that the show must go on.
So let's hear it, folks ... Let's have a real all-American hand ... Let's hear it for our own darling virtuoso ... Miss Condoleezza Rice!
Notes
State Department Documents and Publications, March 10, 2009 ↩
Face the Nation, CBS, July 4, 2010 ↩
Washington Post, July 27, 2010 ↩
Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009 ↩
White House press release of Obama's remarks of July 27, 2010 ↩
Associated Press, July 28, 2010 ↩
CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002 ↩
ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002 ↩
"60 Minutes II", February 26, 2003 ↩
Washington Post, March 1, 2003 ↩
"60 Minutes", January 27, 2008. See also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] Action Alert, February 1, 2008 ↩
Associated Press, December 12, 2006 ↩
Letter to the Washington Post from M.A. Mohammadi, Press Officer, Iranian Mission to the United Nations, June 12, 2006 ↩
See Anti-Empire Report, October 1, 2008, second part ↩
Washington Post, March 5, 2009 ↩
Sunday Times (London), January 10, 2010 ↩
Originally in the Dutch weekly magazine, Elsevier, April 27, 2002, pages 52-3; picked up in many other international publications ↩
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August 05, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here's Vice-President Joe Biden: "We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred." 1
Here's Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): "This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11." 2
Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. "Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from." 3
Here's President Obama a year ago: "But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." 4
And here is the president, two days after the release of the Wikileaks documents, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned". 5
Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.
Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't Washington bombed those countries?
Indeed, what actually is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.
There are many people in Afghanistan and Pakistan — the ones still living — who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on their houses, their wedding parties, their funerals, their life. As in Iraq, the American "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan regularly, routinely, and conspicuously creates numerous new anti-American terrorists.
The only "war of necessity" that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders will be further enriched?
But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except perhaps by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration tried to do, without success, then get out, and declare "victory". Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech.
US Israel and Iran
If and when the United States and Israel bomb Iran (marking the sixth country so blessed by Barack Obama) and this sad old world has a new daily horror show to look at on their TV sets, and we then discover that Iran was not actually building nuclear weapons after all, the American mainstream media and the benighted American mind will ask: "Why didn't they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?"
The same questions were asked about Iraq following the discovery that Saddam Hussein didn't in fact have any weapons of mass destruction. However, in actuality, before the US invasion Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. I'm reminded of this by the recent news report about Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq. Last week he told the British inquiry into the March 2003 invasion that those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting — as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks — that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction. 6
In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: "We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons." 7
In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: "The fact is that we don't have weapons of mass destruction. We don't have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry." 8
Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: "These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there." 9
Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq's secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War. 10
There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.
If you don't already have serious doubts about the mainstream media's devotion to questioning the premises and rationales underlying American foreign policy, consider this: Despite the two revelations on Dan Rather's CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:
PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?
PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s, and those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?
PIRO: Yes.
PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade? 11
Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, as did Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire, though it hasn't all worked out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, and tortured.
The result of Bush's Iraqi policy can be summed up by saying that it would be difficult to cite many other historical examples of one nation destroying another so completely, crushing and perverting virtually every aspect of their society and humanity.
Now Israel presses Washington relentlessly to do the same to Iran — not that the US necessarily needs much prodding — primarily because Israel is determined to remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East; this despite Iran telling the United States and the world many times that it is not building nuclear weapons. But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: Is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Does the US and Israel believe that there is not already enough horror and suffering in the news?
In what could be part of the preparation for an attack on Iran, 47 members of the House of Representatives recently put forth a non-binding resolution declaring Iran to be "an immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel". To illustrate this threat, the resolution quoted Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on several occasions avowing sentiments like: "God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism" ... calling for "this occupying regime [Israel] to be wiped off the map" ... "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation" ... "I must announce that the Zionist regime, with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion, and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene" ... "Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come, and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started".
Pretty damning stuff, isn't it? N'est-ce pas? Nicht wahr? But there's a lot less here than meets the eye. Notice that it doesn't quote Ahmadinejad in a single specific, explicit threat of an Iranian attack upon Israel or the United States. No mention or indication that "I" or "We" or "Iran" is going to do any of this, carry out any act of violence. And I would say that that's because it's not what he meant. In another quote, which the resolution fails to cite, the Iranian president in December 2006 said: "The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom." 12 Obviously, the man is not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place very peacefully. Furthermore, in June 2006, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated: "We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state.13 Why didn't the authors of the congressional resolution quote that one?
I think that one can derive a better understanding of the Iranian president's statements by seeing them as metaphor, as bragging, as wishful thinking, as well as poor translation (for example: "wiped off the map" 14), coming from a man foolish enough to publicly claim that there are no gays in Iran.
But more significantly, the resolution offers no reason why Iran actually would attack Israel or the United States. What reason would Iran have to use nuclear weapons against either country other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? Indeed, the very same question could have — and should have — been asked before the invasion of Iraq. Of the many lies surrounding that invasion, the biggest one of all was that if, in fact, Saddam Hussein had had those weapons of mass destruction the invasion would have been justified.
With all the lies exposed about the American Iraqi misadventure, I and many others had allowed ourselves the luxury, the hidden pleasure, of believing that the United States government and media had learned a lesson which would last for some time. They'd been caught and exposed. But it's the same all over again with the lies about Iran and Ahmadinejad. (No, he's not even a Holocaust denier.)
In any event, Israel probably doesn't believe its own propaganda. In March of last year, the Washington Post reported: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" has asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." 15 This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.
And earlier this year we could read in the Sunday Times of London: "Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the [Israeli] defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons. The views expressed by the former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission contradict the assessment of Israel's defence establishment and put him at odds with political leaders." 16
If any country in this world is a threat to use nuclear weapons with remarkably little regard for the consequences it's Israel. Martin van Creveld, an Israeli professor of military history, and loyal Israeli citizen, remarked in 2002: "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under." 17 Think of the closing scene of "Dr. Strangelove". That's Israel sitting astride the speeding nuclear missile waving the cowboy hat.
There's no business like show business
She played Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor.
And accompanied the one and only Aretha Franklin.
A gala benefit performance in Philadelphia.
At the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Before 8,000 people.
And they loved it.
How many of them knew that the pianist was a genuine, unindicted war criminal?
Guilty of crimes against humanity.
Defender of torture.
With much blood on her pianist hands.
Whose style in office for years could be characterized as hypocrisy, disinformation, and outright lying.
But what did the audience care?
This is America.
Home of the Good Guys.
She was fighting against the Bad Guys.
And we all know that the show must go on.
So let's hear it, folks ... Let's have a real all-American hand ... Let's hear it for our own darling virtuoso ... Miss Condoleezza Rice!
Notes
State Department Documents and Publications, March 10, 2009 ↩
Face the Nation, CBS, July 4, 2010 ↩
Washington Post, July 27, 2010 ↩
Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009 ↩
White House press release of Obama's remarks of July 27, 2010 ↩
Associated Press, July 28, 2010 ↩
CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002 ↩
ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002 ↩
"60 Minutes II", February 26, 2003 ↩
Washington Post, March 1, 2003 ↩
"60 Minutes", January 27, 2008. See also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] Action Alert, February 1, 2008 ↩
Associated Press, December 12, 2006 ↩
Letter to the Washington Post from M.A. Mohammadi, Press Officer, Iranian Mission to the United Nations, June 12, 2006 ↩
See Anti-Empire Report, October 1, 2008, second part ↩
Washington Post, March 5, 2009 ↩
Sunday Times (London), January 10, 2010 ↩
Originally in the Dutch weekly magazine, Elsevier, April 27, 2002, pages 52-3; picked up in many other international publications ↩
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Monday, July 19, 2010
More from Professor Francis A. Boyle and the US Anthrax Attacks
Dr. Francis A. Boyle and the Anthrax Attacks on Alex Jones
Extensive Alex Jones Interview with Professor Francis A. Boyle:
Dr. Francis A. Boyle Says:
"Neoconservatives are really neo-Nazi's, trained by Leo Strauss who was the protege of Schmidt (a Nazi), influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzche"
"The University of Chicago is steeped in Neoconservatism (Straussian's)"
"Israeli Zionist's have the Straussian view of politics and ironically are more like Nazi's"
Extensive Alex Jones Interview with Professor Francis A. Boyle:
Dr. Francis A. Boyle Says:
"Neoconservatives are really neo-Nazi's, trained by Leo Strauss who was the protege of Schmidt (a Nazi), influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzche"
"The University of Chicago is steeped in Neoconservatism (Straussian's)"
"Israeli Zionist's have the Straussian view of politics and ironically are more like Nazi's"
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