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I strongly suspect you know more about Paris Hilton than you do about 9/11. Not because you are more interested in shallow Hollywood gossip, but because the mainstream media is. Can you remember the last time you heard any actual news? Not a sex scandal, not the thirty-seventh update on the latest white female abductee, not some new legislation to protect us from our neighbor, or the latest political talking point. News; things that happened in the world which you should know about, things that might actually affect your life.
Let me give you an example. On the FBI's national web site (www.fbi.gov) there is a listing for Osama Bin Laden (they spell it "Usama"). If you view the list of crimes for which he is wanted you see that the attacks of 9/11 are not listed. In fact he is wanted for nothing more recent than 1998 and the deaths of "over 200 people." Go ahead and look. I'll wait.
You can call the FBI (I did); their number is on the web site. And if you ask them they will tell you what they told me: "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."
No hard evidence? Whatever evidence there may have been -- which was not sufficient for the FBI -- was sufficient to send us to war in Afghanistan. In fact, on October 3, 2001 National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said publicly that the administration was going to release their evidence that connected bin Laden to 9/11. To date they have released no such information. What's even more eye-opening, we have learned that in 2005 the CIA officially closed "Alec Station," the unit formed to hunt for bin Laden.
This is news. This is the kind of revelation that 10 or 20 years ago 60 Minutes would have devoted all 60 of its minutes to. But not today. Why? There are two big reasons.
The first is the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which was supposed to open the media industry up to greater competition, but in fact allowed a tiny number of giant corporations to own virtually all of America's TV, radio, print, and video outlets. Which means that all across the nation local and national news outlets speak in virtually one voice -- a voice which can be purchased for a few corporate tax cuts. And who makes the tax cuts?
The second reason is fear. It used to be, if you were a good reporter and had a portfolio you could be proud of, you could get a job anywhere. So the more ambitious investigative reporters didn't worry if their sensational exclusive pissed off the sponsors or the top brass -- they could just go to a competing paper which was more than happy to pick up a juicy exclusive. But where do you go when all of the papers are owned by one or two companies? So, unless you're Dan Rather, and have decades of solid reputation under your belt, you keep your nose squeaky clean. And look what happened to Dan Rather.
But if that isn't enough intimidation (and it's enough for about 90% of the mainstream media), there is President Bush himself, actually using his spokesmen (backed by presidential muscle) to threaten the press corps, "suggesting" that if they pursue certain lines of questioning, they will be blackballed. Don't believe me? Ask Helen Thomas.
There are even subtler and deadlier threats out there. Remember the anthrax letters of 2001? Do you remember who got them? Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and the offices of every major network and several minor ones. And two other gentlemen of note.
On October 2nd, the U.S. Patriot Act was introduced in congress. Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Thomas A. Daschle, wanted to delay debate in the Senate until he and others could read the 300+ page bill. Meanwhile Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Democrat Patrick J. Leahy, warned that rushing this bill through would cause lawmakers to overlook serious constitutional flaws.
Within days, identical letters containing lethal doses of anthrax were sent to Daschle and Leahy. The Senate and House of Representative buildings were evacuated and sealed. The Patriot Act was rushed to a vote and passed.
The anthrax cases were never officially solved, but all of the anthrax was traced to a single laboratory in Ames, Iowa, where the FBI allowed the samples to be destroyed.
Fear is a powerful motivator. Remember Homeland Security's color-coded terrorist alert system? Yellow, orange, red. They were like a national siren: "Be afraid, stay afraid, fear everyone." Could something like that be used politically?
Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security Chief who invented the scheme, said he often felt that the evidence was too flimsy to justify raising the threat level, but that his department was overruled.
Interests
"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "
We've all been manipulated by fear -- motivated to vote for one candidate over another, motivated to accept without complaint ideas and laws that work against our own and our nation's self-interest, motivated to accept without complaint the news we are given. Add to that the ceaseless chorus of "conservative" talkers (who magically morphed from shock jocks to pundits without pausing to take a breath). This virtual army speaks in a single voice from every media source, branding any contrary thinker with a scarlet letter that can -- and has -- ended careers. The "liberal media" is as mythical and about as mighty as a frog prince, and anyone claiming to have been impacted by it belongs in the same ward as the Emperor and his new clothes.
There is yet a third reason to distrust the news you've been fed. On February 20, 2002, the Pentagon announced the existence of the Office of Strategic Information, which was "quietly set up after September 11" to plant false stories abroad, send phony e-mails from disguised addresses, and engage in other covert activities to manipulate public opinion. This announcement created such a public outcry that the OSI was declared closed only six days later. Soon thereafter the "temporary" Office of Global Communications was made permanent, taking over all of OSI's functions except (reportedly) the covert manipulation. However when discussing the closing of the OSI, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, "I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."
Do you still wonder if you've heard all the news? Don't -- you haven't. Nobody has. 1984 is only 20 years late.
Then if you accept that there are truths left unspoken by a government with an agenda, it should be a short leap to the hidden truths of 9/11.
And there is a whole underground community to help you take that leap, called simply the 9/11 Truth Movement. This ever-growing movement was started when four 9/11 widows pushed our government to form an independent investigation. These "Jersey Girls" are the same women "pundit" Ann Coulter declared were "enjoying their husbands' deaths." Since 2001 the 9/11 Truth Movement has attracted thousands, many of them former and current U.S. military personnel, university professors, airline pilots, eye-witnesses, photo-journalists, videographers, award-winning investigative researchers and reporters, forensics specialists, and noted experts in every field. Many them have formed web sites and organizations of their own under the umbrella of the Truth Movement, to raise awareness, take action, or share conspiracy theories -- www.911truth.org, www.letsroll.org, www.scholarsfor911truth.org, to list a few.
