Viewpoint: New York Times And Neocons Bury 9/11 Truth Movement

Viewpoint: New York Times and neocons bury 9/11 truth movement

http://www.rockrivertimes.com/index....cat=4&id=13567

By Joe Baker, Senior Editor
6/29/2006

“The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

The truth of the above statement was demonstrated by a recent article in The New York Times that attempted to dismantle the followers of a group known as 911truth.org.

With the 9/11 truth movement, it was a case of walking into a carefully planned and skillfully executed trap. The Times article branded the movement as a group of “conspiracy buffs” and proceeded to ridicule and trash their beliefs. The attack was predicated on a report of a two-day conference in Los Angeles sponsored by the 9/11 movement.

One of the leading 9/11 researchers, publisher Mike Ruppert, who is not a member of the group, said of the Times’ article’s effect: “...the 9/11 truth movement has been virtually consigned to a footnote in the dustbin of history as a result of mainstream media mind control and its own foolish choices.”

Ruppert said the movement failed to consider two key points: when the major media must take note of a story they have failed to report, they try to discredit independent efforts, and independents must avoid the obvious points of ambush.

It is evident now that the only movements challenging the government line and revealing the complicity of the press that will get publicity are those easily discredited in the public eye.

The Times article was a hatchet job that carried a heavy spin and tried to portray the movement as a bunch of kooks. “In colleges and chat rooms on the Internet,” it said, “this band of disbelievers has been trying for years to prove that 9/11 was an inside job.”

The article does not mention the three top-selling books about the 2001 attacks: The New Pearl Harbor, Crossing the Rubicon, Ruppert’s own book, and The Terror Timeline. The assertions and evidence of these books have not been challenged nor disproved.

The Times piece declared of the 9/11 movement: “a group that, in its rank and file, includes professors, chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, college students, a former fringe candidate for the United States Senate and a long-haired fellow named hummux (pronounced who-mook) who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.” Yep, just a lot of wackos.

Sneering at the physical evidence-centered “red flags,” The Times said they “were the meat and potatoes of the keynote speech on Friday night by Alex Jones, who is the William Jennings Bryan of the 9/11 band.”

Alex Jones is a syndicated talk-radio host and documentary film-maker from Austin, Texas. His show airs locally on WLUV-1520, daily, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Listen to him yourself, and see what you think.

What The Times did was to pick someone whom they considered an easily dismissed “leader” of the movement, wrap him up with the screwballs and flush the lot. The real pioneer researchers, such as Michel Chossudovsky, Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Dan Hopsicker and Ruppert were never mentioned because they aren’t easily refuted.

In another spin shot, the newspaper declared: “The controlled demolition theory (that explosive charges brought down the WTC towers) is the sine qua non of the 9/11 movement. Its basic claim and, in some sense, the one upon which all others rest. It is, of course, directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which held that jet-fuel fires distressed the towers’ structure, which eventually collapsed.”

Ruppert retorts: “The sine qua non of 9/11 research—as far as we’re concerned—is the original investigation and exposé that five simultaneous wargame exercises based on hijacked airliners were taking place on the morning of 9-11-01 in the Northeast Air Defense Sector and that these exercises—under the control of Dick Cheney—were what paralyzed air defenses that day. This is the one piece of hard evidence which cannot (and has not) been refuted or even acknowledged by the government.” That statement rests on a thoroughly probed base of means, motive and opportunity.

In addition, anyone with any common sense still asks, “Why did the 47-story building WTC 7 next to the twin towers—which housed the FBI, CIA, SEC, ATF, EEOC, among other agencies—collapse in exactly the same demolition-like-manner when it was never hit by any airplane?”

Then consider a new book by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, The One Percent Doctrine, which relates a panicky CIA officer telling President George W. Bush in the summer of 2001 a huge attack on the U.S. was imminent; to which Bush replied, “O.K. You’ve covered your ass.”

Suskind’s book also shows Cheney as the real power in this administration, and reveals the CIA nickname for Cheney, “Edgar,” as in Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, with his dummy, Charlie McCarthy.

The One Percent Doctrine denotes Cheney’s “default strategy” based on immediate reaction to any perceived threat rather than full analysis, as a result of 9/11. Suskind also shows how much information does not get past Cheney to Bush. Maybe that’s why all those domestic and foreign intelligence warnings about 9/11 were ignored, or were they in the design of “plausible deniability”? Suskind depicts Cheney in control of U.S. foreign policy, and more.

One other instance of where the 9/11 movement stepped into the government’s trap was their acceptance of the claim that no jetliner struck the Pentagon that day. Most of the movement’s members bought that theory, which apparently was crafted by the CIA. Then, this month, the government released a video showing an airliner striking the Pentagon.

The released footage does not clearly show an airliner striking the Pentagon, as the footage from the surveillance camera is too rudimentary to distinguish WHAT hit the Pentagon—only that “something” hit it.

That just gave more credence to The Times’ claim that “...the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts.”

Besides Suskind’s book, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, by the way, and featured on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, don’t expect to hear too much national discussion of the questions surrounding 9/11—whether answered or not—any time soon.