Knowledge Is Resistance: A 9/11 Debate Primer

Markets aren't free. Never have been, never will be. At their best, markets are protected by force of arms. At their worst, they're hostage to even bigger forces of arms, and must pay tribute. I was smelling a large rat by 5PM on the evening of 9/11, when the News reports suddenly went lock-step and reported the identities of all the alleged attackers. Before they even knew the identities of the other plane passengers. I kept my thoughts mostly private, but it struck me as very odd.

The more details came out, the odder it got. The idea that you can take a few Cessna lessons, get a copy of Flight Simulator, and elude the FAA and the US Air Force for two hours is a kooky proposition. It was never done because it couldn't be done. For about 30 years, the military has had shoot-down procedures in effect for hijacked flights. And if you actually set out to prove a plane flew into the Pentagon, as I did, you can't--because there's no footage of it. It was all either confiscated or censored. That's what a state does when it tries to keep a secret.

A myth which provides a ready scapegoat and an outside threat to focus anger on fears on is more readily believed than scrutinized. It appeals to our ingrained psychic needs. Yet the day after, when I saw Bush on TV, my worst suspicions were confirmed. I knew we'd all been had, even if it wasn't obvious how it could've possibly been done. Our collective belief systems were overloaded with a new type of pain, and after we convulsed, we believed what we were told. It's the old 'shock and awe' method of breaking horses. Only it works for entire countries, as Noami Klein and Roberto Cuaron explain in the six-minute video above.

I probably know in fairly good detail how 9/11 went down. It was done under the cover of a very large Air Force exercise that day, one which simulated an attack by a dozen hijacked passenger jets. That's why the FAA controllers kept asking, "Is this part of the drill!?" as the off-course planes blipped across their screens toward New York and D.C. These details don't really matter, though. What matters is we've been living for almost seven years under leaders who knowingly killed thousands of US citizens to manufacture consent for long, disastrous wars.

Bruce at the River Blog asked a far more articulate person than me, Chris Floyd (who runs Empire Burlesque) about 9/11. Chris is a very clean thinker, and I wanted to post his response:

"It's really quite simple and, to my mind, self-evident: the "official" story of what happened on September 11, 2001, is not a complete or accurate account. (We should of course speak of official stories, because there have been several shifting, contradictory scenarios offered by the great and the good in the six years since the attack. However, for clarity's sake, we'll stick with the singular for now, and will assume -- as the entire media and political establishment does -- that the report by the Hamilton-Kean 9/11 Commission is the final "official" version.)

To put it plainly, this official account is riddled with holes: unexplained inconsistencies, unprecedented occurrences, astounding coincidences, mysterious lacunae, and deliberate obfuscations. It is, in fact, a more improbable "conspiracy theory" than many of those suggested by the much-derided 9/11 truth movement.
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The profound failures of the Commission report have been amply detailed elsewhere by many hands. For our purposes here it is enough to say that it was not a thorough, independent investigation in any way, and that such a probe is still needed: a genuinely independent, wide-ranging, in-depth investigation, with full subpoena powers and full access to all material, whatever its security classification -- and testimony under oath, and under pain of perjury, from every relevant official, including the president and the vice president."

Show me the confiscated videos of a novice terrorist pilot skimming the rooftops with his 737 for a mile and then slamming into the Pentagon. Please. You can't imagine how much I'd love to be wrong.