Today's
Stories
September 9/10, 2006
Weekend Edition
Alexander Cockburn
The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts: How They
Let the Guilty Parties of 9/11 Off the Hook
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Remaking of Cataract Canyon:
In the Footsteps of Vladimir Putin (Part Six)
Greg Grandin
Good Christ, Bad Christ: Testament
of the Death Squads
Peter
Stone Brown
Bob Dylan's Swing Time Waltz in the
Face of the Apocalypse
Ralph Nader
X-Raying Greed
Brian Cloughley
Rumsfeld at the American Legion:
Dead Babies and Nazi Propaganda
Col.
Chet Richards
Crossroads at the Litani
David
Model
Tailoring the Case Against Iran: Cut
from the Same Old Pattern
Dave
Himmelstein
From Bil'in to Birmingham
Ron Jacobs
War and the Power of Words
Fred Gardner
Is Medical Pot Image a Turn-Off to
Teens?
Mike Whitney
America's Economic Meltdown
Josh Gryniewicz
In the Belly of the Bentonville Beast:
Working for Wal-Mart
Daniel Gross /
Joe Tessone
An IWW Story at Starbucks
Joe Bageant
Inside the Iron Theater
Nicole Colson
The Colbert Factor: Some Truthiness,
At Last
Alexander Billet
Thirty Years of "White Riot":
Long Live The Clash!
Poets' Basement
Engel, Louise, Buknatski, Davies, &
Orloski
September
8, 2006
Uri
Avnery
"I'm a Leftist, But ...": the Liberals'
War on Lebanon
Paul
Craig Roberts
Books Are Our Salvation
Bill
Quigley
Judge Says: "No Clowning Around Our WMDs!"
Robert
Jensen
Parallel Purges: Academic Freedom in Iran and
the US
Norman
Solomon
Perception Gap: The War on Terror as Others See It
Keith
Bolin
The Future of the Family Farm
Kristin
S. Schafer
The Global Trade in Deadly Pesticides
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Remaking of Cataract Canyon (Part Five)
Patrick
Cockburn
Gaza is Dying
Website
of the Day
Help the Bismark 3!
September 7, 206
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Bush Really Came Clean About the CIA's Secret
Torture Prisons
Sharon
Smith
Downward Mobility: No Recovery for Workers
René
Drucker Colín
The Fraud in Mexico
Michael
Donnelly
Bush Family Values: About Those Nazi Appeasers
John
Borowski
Scholastic Peddles a Fictitious Path to 9/11 to Kids
Lucinda
Marshall
Bombing Indiana
Charles
Sullivan
Katrina and the New Jim Crow: Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Remaking of Cataract Canyon: Part Four
Jonathan
Cook
How Human Rights Watch Lost Its Way in Lebanon
Website
of the Day
Rasta! Reggae's
Joe Hill
September
6, 2006
Stephen
Soldz
Protecting the Torturers: Bad Faith and Distortions
frm the American Psychological Assocation
Dave
Zirin
Cops vs. Jocks: the Shooting of Steve Foley
Ramzy
Baroud
The Gaza Maze: Who Gained Most from the Fox Reporters' Kidnapping
Noel
Ignatiev
Democrats, Pwogs and the Lesser Evil Folly
Dave
Lindorff
Bombing Without Regrets: The US and Cluster Bombs
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Troop Levels in Iraq
Binoy
Kampmark
The Death of Steve Irwin and the Politics of the Zoo
Jeffrey
St. Clair
A Premature Burial: the Remaking of Cataract Canyon (Part Three)
John
Ross
The Death of Mexican Presidency
Website
of the Day
Flaming Arrows
September
5, 2006
Jonathan Cook
Will Robert Fisk tell us the whole story? Time For A Champion of
Truth to Speak Up
Patrick Cockburn
Better Not Meet at the Casbah
Mike Whitney
The Worst Secretary of Defense in U.S. History? You Be the Judge
Roland Sheppard
The Civil Rights Movement is Dead and So is the Democratic Party
James Petras
As Bush Regime Faces Twilight Slide, How Much Havoc Can Paulson
Wreak?
Alexander Cockburn
Will Bush Bomb Teheran?
September 4, 2006
Clancy Sigal
The Women Who Gave Us Labor Day
Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Remaking of Cataract Canyon: Part 2
Anthony Alessandrini
The
Great Debate about Aroma Coffee: Why I Boycott
Dennis Perrin
The
Great Debate in Tarrytown: Straight Zion, No Chaser
Daniel Cassidy
'S
lom to Slum
Paul Craig Roberts
The
War Is Lost
September 2 / 3,
2006
Uri Avnery
When
Napoleon Won at Waterloo
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Premature Burial: the Remaking of Cataract Canyon
Ralph Nader
The
No-Fault White House
Noam Chomsky
Viewing the World from a Bombsight
Allan Lichtman
Arrested Democracy: Letter from the Baltimore County Jail
Stanley Heller
When Criticism of Cluster Bombs is "Anti-Semitic"
Rana el-Khatib
Invasion's Child: the Making of Issa
Peter Montague
Taking on the Pentagon: Chemical Weapons to Burn
Laura Carlsen
Mexico on a Collision Course
Dr. Susan Block
Bush Hate Rising
Joe Bageant
Roy's People: Why Progressives Need to Listen to Orbison, Not Policy
Wonks
Scott Stedjan / Matt Schaaf
A New Generation of Landmines?
Gary Leupp
The Emperor Has Been Exposed
Stephen Fleischman
The Great American Oligarchy
Paul Balles
Has Ahmadinejad Already Checkmated Bush?
Ingmar Lee
Canada's $450 Million Gift to Bush: the Softwood Lumber Slush Fund
Jane Stillwater
Burning Man: the Good, the Bad and the Evil Twin
Ron Jacobs
Dylan Faces the Apocalypse, Again
St. Clair / Bossert
Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Grima, Engel, Orloski and Davies
Website of the Weekend
To New Orleans: a Photo Journal
September 1, 2006
Uri Avnery
Olmert
Agonistes
Paul Craig Roberts
Of
Wolves and Men (and Impotent Democrats)
Bill Ayers
Exclusionary Signs of the Times
Kevin Zeese
The Best War Ever
Xochitl Bervera
The Forgotten Children of New Orleans
Norman Solomon
Bush vs. Ahmadinejad: a TV Debate We'll Never See
Alexander Cockburn
Hezbollah Denounces Nasrallah Interview as a Fake
Richard Neville
Rupert
Murdoch's Victims
Website of the Day
The Uranium Flood
| Weekend
Edition
September 9/10 , 2006
How They Let the Guilty Parties
of 9/11 Slip Off the Hook
The 9/11 Conspiracy
Nuts
By ALEXANDER
COCKBURN
You
trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts --
-- the ones who say Bush and Cheney masterminded the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- in the first paragraph
of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David
Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,”
Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics
of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself…
In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes…
not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone
all three of them.”
The
operative word here is “should”. One characteristic
of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief
in American efficiency, thus many of them start with the racist
premise that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable
of the mission. They believe that military systems work the way
Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.
They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its
radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called
the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing
reverently (this is from high priest Griffin) “the US Air
Force’s own website”, that an F-15 could have intercepted
AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30”.
They
appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because
if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations –
let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency -- screw up with
monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality,
weather and all the other whims of providence.
According
to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an
impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile silos in
North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred
targets. The tiny number of test launches actually attempted all
failed, whereupon SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment,
human incompetence, defense contractor venality or… CONSPIRACY?
(In that case, presumably, a Communist conspiracy, as outlined by
ancestors of the present nuts, ever intent on identifying those
who would stab America in the back.)
Did
the British and French forces in 1940 break and flee a Wehrmacht
capable of only one lunge, because of rotten leadership, terrible
planning, epic cowardice, or … CONSPIRACY? Did the April 24,
1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran
fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters,
because the helicopters were poorly made, because of a lousy plan
or because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National
Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another CONSPIRACY?
Have
the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t
intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely
predictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because
of CONSPIRACY? Is Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the
block hiking his prices because he wants to make a buck, or because
his rent just went up or because the Jews want to take over the
world? August Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools.
These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to become the “socialism”
of the left, and the passe-partout of many libertarians.
It’s
awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs”
of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied
by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing
the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking
me “what I think about 9/11”. What they are actually
trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine
it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a
stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming
casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on
five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.
Indeed,
at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s
book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive
citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human
had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s
tomb, it must beyond the shadow of a doubt have been an angel who
rolled it aside and let Jesus out, so he could astonish the mourners
and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’t admit into his argument
the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that the gospel
writers were making it up.
It’s
the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer what they demurely
call “disturbing questions”, though they disdain all
answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them
into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad
Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos,
torturing the data –- as the old joke goes about economists
-- till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony
and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem
to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that
undermines their theories – like witnesses of a large plane
hitting the Pentagon -- is contemptuously brushed aside.
Anyone
familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense –
I had such an opportunity for a number of years – will know
that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for
and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury
either in the guilt or penalty phase of a trial. Time and again
I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months,
back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain
that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level of creating
“reasonable doubt” in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses
would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as
Texas, the justice system of California is generous in the provision
of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the prosecution’s
forensic evidence. Such challenges weren’t hard to mount.
Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty
in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as regards fingerprints,
landing marks on bullets and so forth.
But
minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link
often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more
than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one
particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected
enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of
the prosecution’s overall case. At least this is what I thought,
hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator. But when, in such
instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw the prosecution’s
whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements,
accused’s own movements and subsequent statements –
it became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that
the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases
had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds
for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by
the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury
member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is
very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually
may well be just that, “cut and dried”.
Anyone who ever looked at the JFK
assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose
ends. Eyewitness testimony – as so often – is conflicting,
forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing.
But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all
essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late
1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook
Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and
the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing.
But of course – as the years roll by, and even though no death
bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios
-- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging
as ever.
Naturally,
there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR
did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific
was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt thought
it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the
final green light to get the US into the war.
Of
course it’s very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence,
even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11
attacks; that intelligence reports – some are already known
– piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to
the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be
carried out.
The
history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of successful
intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence,
along with eagnerness not to compromise the security and future
usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials
by even pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an
undercover agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect
efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in
a position where they can be caught red-handed. In their penetrations
of environmental groups the FBI certainly did this.
Long
before the Yom Kippur war, a CIA analyst noted Egyptian orders from
a German engineering firm, and deduced from the type and size of
equipment thus ordered that Egypt was planning an attack across
the Suez canal. He worked out the probable size of the Egyptian
force and the likely time window for the attack. His superiors at
the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptian army finally attacked
on October 6, 1973 the CIA high command ordered up the long-buried
report, dusted it off and sent it over to the White House, marked
“current intelligence”. Was there a “conspiracy”
by the CIA high command to allow Israel to be taken by surprise?
I doubt it.
Bureaucratic
inertia and caution prevailed, until the moment came for decisive
CYA acitvity. The nuts make dizzying “deductive” leaps.
There is a one particularly vigorous coven which has established
to its own satisfaction that the original NASA moon landing was
faked, and never took place. This “conspiracy” would
have required the complicity of thousands of people , all of whom
have kept their mouths shut. The proponents of the “fake moon
landing” plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11 nuts.
One
notorious “deductive” leap involves flight 77, which
on 9/11 ended up crashing into the Pentagon. There are photos of
the impact of the “object” -- i.e., the Boeing 757,
flight 77 -- that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might
make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it WAS a missile and a 757 didn’t
hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother Andrew -- writing
a book about Rumsfeld and the DoD during his tenure -- has seen
photos taken within 30 minutes of Pentagon impact clearly showing
outline of entire plane including wings. This was visible momentarily
when the smoke blew away
And
if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did the conspirators
shoot it down somewhere else, or force it down and then kill the
passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed explosives
if your conspiracy includes control of the two planes that hit them.
Why bother with the planes at all. Why blame Osama if your fall
guy is Saddam Hussein? Why involve the Israeli “art students”.
The
nuts simultaneously credit their targets – the Bush-Cheney
“conspirators” -- with superhuman ingenuity and grotesque
carelessness. In Webster Griffin Tarpley’s book “9/11
Synthetic Terror Made in USA” he writes that “in an
interview with Parade magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld also
referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a ‘missile’.
Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?”
(And, a nut might add, is it mere coincidence that Webster Griffin
Tarpley shares one of his names with David Ray Griffin?
The
demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. The WTC towers
didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence
of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority,
and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel.
No, they fell because Dick Cheney’s agents methodically planted
demolition charges in the preceding days. It was a conspiracy of
thousands, all of whom –- party to mass murder –- have
held their tongues ever since. The “conspiracy” is always
open-ended as to the number of conspirators, widening steadily to
include all the people involved in the execution and cover-up of
the demolition of the Towers and the onsslaujght on the Pentagon,
from the teams acquiring the explosives and themissile, inserting
the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving
day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11
activating the detonators.
Subsequently
the conspiracy includes the disposers of the steel and rubble, the
waste recyclers in Staten Island and perhaps even the Chinese who
took the salvaged incriminating metal for use in the Three Gorges
dam, where it will submerged in water and concretye for ever. Tens
of thousands of people, all silent as the tomb to this day.
Of
course the buildings didn’t suddenly fall at a speed inexplicable
in terms of physics unless caused by carefully pre-placed explosives,
detonated by the ruthless Bush-Cheney operatives. High grade steel
can bend disastrously under extreme heat. People inside who survived
the collapse didn’t hear a series of explosions. As discussed
in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin’s excellent book Grand
Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed
warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower
might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before
the North Tower’s fall.
What
Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt conspiracies
on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled
the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the
Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic
failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified
emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could
have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily
entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have
been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that
firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday
messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.
That’s
the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never
been held accountable. The nuts disdain the real world because,
like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush,
Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons
of American history, instead of being just one more team running
the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence
(characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy
Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny
Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much
of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally
collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers.
*
Footnote: I should add that one particular conspiracy nut, seeing
that Roosevelt’s grandson Ford – a schoolteacher in
Los Angeles – was for a while, some years ago, on the board
of CounterPunch’s parent non-profit, the Institute for the
Advancement of Journalistic Clarity – wrote an enormous onslaught
on CounterPunch a while ago, “proving” to his own satisfaction
that CounterPunch was a pawn of the Democratic Party, the CIA and
kindred darker forces. I suppose the fact that CounterPunch attacked
the Democratic Party and the CIA on a weekly basis was just one
more example of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from our
true sponsors. The fact that from time to time that we also quite
regularly attacked FDR – and posited his foreknowledge of
Pearl Harbor – should again be taken as evidence of our cunning
in deflecting suspicion away from Ford’s supervisory roile
in our affairs. In fact we’d put Ford on the board in the
hopes (vain, as they turned out to be) that he would persuade film
stars to give CounterPunch money.
A much shorter, earlier version of the column ran in the print
edition of The Nation that went to press last Thursday. |
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