9/11: Beyond the Seal of Approval
by David Montoute
“Today’s
mass media… are the foundation of the totalitarian
‘gestalt’ which the privileged impose on the mentality
of the masses…a ‘seal of approval’ that authorizes the
reality of events”.
Din Vantari
Given the impact
of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington five
years ago, and the events that they helped to unleash
–the declaration of a war which “may not end in our
lifetimes” and the acceleration of a global police-state
agenda –it is no easy task to discern or exploit
positive countertrends. One such trend, however, may be
emerging. With a reported 36% of the US population
rejecting the official account of September 11th
2001, something unexpected appears to be taking place.
The collapse in public confidence with respect to the
official “War on Terror” narrative could illustrate the
beginning of a wider breakdown in elite brainwashing and
mass submission to the top-down dictation of reality.
For this new process has affected not only the corporate
media. It has opened up a huge breach between the
comfortable ‘alternative’ media of the traditional US
Left, and a new, more diverse community that pursues the
harder task following where the evidence leads.
With the new
phenomenon of Internet publishing allowing for a surge
of unregulated media, networking, responding instantly
to events, and unconstrained by corporate censorship,
independent researchers have, in the last five years
especially, lifted the lid on the heretofore-suppressed
world of Deep Politics.
Peter Dale Scott
coined this term, defining it as "the constant, everyday
interaction between the constitutionally elected
government and forces of violence, forces of crime,
which appear to be the enemies of that government." (1)
From the revolving door between Wall Street’s financial
institutions and US intelligence agencies, to state
sponsorship of private armies and death squads; to
secret societies such as Skull & Bones and P2, to
election rigging and the private looting of national
treasuries, to government-protected drug trafficking
networks recycling cash into the global banking system,
this is the dark underbelly of our modern ‘rational’
world. But it is as integral to the global economic
system as are the formal institutions that, in theory at
least, are subject to public oversight.
Over time, certain key events
have provided a window onto this world, and these are
precisely the events that are most thoroughly lied
about, protected from exposure by the stigmatization of
those that examine them as ‘conspiracy theorists’. If
scrutiny of this netherworld is off limits to mainstream
news, traditional ‘alternative’ media has been no less
averse to dealing with it. To illustrate, an inestimable
contribution to our early understanding of the events of
9/11/01 was made by Canadian economist Michel
Chossudovsky in his exposés
of CIA-ISI-Taliban collusion. M.I.T. professor Noam
Chomsky had previously written a forward to one of
Chossudovsky’s books and yet “America’s leading
dissident” acted for months as if the findings of
Chossudovsky and others simply didn’t exist. When
finally asked point-blank about their implications,
Chomsky deemed the idea of US complicity “hopelessly
implausible” and not even worthy of discussion. Speaking
of the US anti-war movement’s ongoing partisan support
of the pro-war Democratic Party, activist Charles Shaw
sees such positions as “part of a larger pattern of
"regulated resistance", a system by which dissent is
carefully managed and constrained by self, overt, or
covert censorship; denial-based-psychology; fear of
personal or professional criticism and reprisal; and
pressure from powers above including elected officials
and those establishment foundations which flood millions
into the not-for-profit activist sector.” (2)
Though Chomsky
is famed for his Propaganda Model of the mass media, a
demonstration of how corporate ownership dramatically
influences content, he is also a resolute
anti-conspiracist. In Chomsky’s world, Lee Oswald alone
murdered President Kennedy, Saddam Hussein
‘misunderstood’ the US position on Kuwait in 1990 and
Osama bin Laden broke ties with his patrons following
the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Even as Hollywood
stars speak openly on CNN about self-inflicted US
terrorism, Chomsky and his colleagues have not deviated
from their stance. For them, it is axiomatic of the
current conflict that a) there is an entity known as ‘Al
Qaeda’, international in scope and pursuing its own
goals independent of US policy, b) said entity was
responsible for the attacks of 9/11/01, and c) there
exists a consequent ‘War on Terror’ which, whilst it may
be exploited for ulterior motives, stems from legitimate
security concerns. Exhaustive investigations, sometimes
even by mainstream sources (3) have shown the complete
emptiness of these propositions.
The Chomskyite
Left’s connivance in the corporate media’s whitewash of
problematic events, and worse, its unremitting hostility
to alternative interpretations, led researcher Bob
Feldman to investigate the sources of ‘alternative’
media’s funding. His discoveries revealed a complex
financial trail originating with huge establishment
foundations. The Ford Foundation, the National Endowment
for Democracy and the Trilateral Commission, George
Soros and many others, were found to be generously
sustaining allegedly ‘alternative’ media in the US. (4)
When aspects of independent 9/11 research threatened to
penetrate mainstream awareness in 2002, these media
cliques signed on to a savage attack of key figures in
the 9/11 Truth Movement. (5) But this gatekeeper Left
was not able to suffocate 9/11 questions except by
amputating a part of their erstwhile collaborators and
alienating much of its audience. Whereas those outside
of its fold (for example Mike Ruppert) could be
subjected to interminable ad hominem attacks,
Professor Chossudovsky’s work would simply be ignored.
Further confirmation of the gatekeepers’ entrenched
interests is the fact that increasing public awareness
and acceptance of a 9/11 ‘inside job’ has not influenced
the gatekeepers’ coverage in the slightest. From recent
firings at (Rockefeller-funded) Pacifica Radio, to
Counterpunch’s excommunication of ‘conspiracy nut’ Kurt
Nimmo, the line has been clearly drawn: ‘responsible’
critique on one side, ‘conspiracy theory’ on the other.
Slipping under
the radar at Counterpunch, Anis Shivani (6) ascribed a
more benign motive to the Left’s rejection of
‘conspiracy’ findings, seeing it as an effort to
preserve its rationalist credentials. But since this
meant giving a pass for the enabling event of the
current war, it was, Shivani observed, a losing move.
The gatekeepers’ response to the Truth Movement’s has
been to emphasize a flawed “structural analysis” of
society, one that would diminish the importance of
individual conspiracies. The value of structural
analysis, as applied to the media, is that it allows us
to identify news corporations as part of the overall
edifice of power, rather than merely another social
actor. Ironically, when structural analysis is applied
to Establishment Left media, the latter are revealed to
be scarcely less compromised than The New York
Times or CNN. But ultimately, any analysis that
ignores the truly determinative structures in today’s
world, i.e. the powerful financial dynasties that
unleash wars and destabilization, make or break
governments at will, is of little use.
It goes without
saying that all of the limits to dialogue with the Left
gatekeepers are multiplied many times over when dealing
with the corporate media. Here self-interest is a bigger
factor, since a career in mass media is at once more
lucrative and provides a much higher personal profile in
the world. The mass media is additionally insulated from
‘Deep Politics’ by decades of depoliticisation and
marginalization of non-mainstream ideas. Ideas that are
plausible to independent researchers frequently sound
like delirious ravings to mainstream journalists.
Robert Fisk is
exemplary in this regard. The UK Independent’s
fearless correspondent has justifiably earned a
widespread respect and admiration for his on the spot,
critical coverage of today’s most terrible conflicts.
Fisk, however, has poured scorn on the ‘childish
conspiracy theories’ of remote-controlled aircraft,
endorsed by many Arabs. Of course, our correspondent
doesn’t share his own theories, so we do not learn
exactly how amateur pilots could steer planes wildly
off-course and, on visual inspection alone, find
individual target buildings in cities they had never
flown to, cutting through a web of civilian air traffic,
whose flight paths they could not possibly have known,
only to enter the world’s most exclusive no-fly zones
without opposition and without incident. But since this
is how an Administration of proven liars describes the
events in question, what else remains but to believe it?
And yet, it must be remembered that Fisk represents the
outer limits of tolerable dissent in the corporate
media.
From the true
origins of the Gulf War to the pre-planned dismemberment
of Yugoslavia and Iraq, from Wall Street money
laundering to the murder of David Kelly, from depleted
uranium to ‘false flag’ terrorism, there is now an
open-ended list of taboo subjects that the mainstream
media and the foundation-funded ‘alternatives’ cannot
address. The limits of Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda
Model are clear. The most serious distortions of today’s
world lie not in the ‘spin’ given to events, but in the
very ‘reality’ of those events. The startling
proliferation in ‘black ops’ does not permit us the
luxury of innocence when assessing a “people’s
revolution” (coup d’etat) such as that orchestrated in
Tbilisi in 2003. Nor can assassinations, such as that of
Rafik Hariri, be automatically assigned to the “obvious”
culprit.
As the disconnect between popular
perceptions and ‘responsible’ criticism grows, the surge
in unregulated media could pose a fundamental challenge
to the hierarchical organization of society, since it
allows each and every person to bypass the established
channels of discourse and trespass on the hallowed
grounds of Truth. Meanwhile, the stultifying discourse
of foundation-funded ‘alternative’ media will ultimately
be sidelined as its ineffectualness is laid bare in the
intensifying crisis. Awareness that we have entered a
new historical phase has mandated the emergence of a new
generation of activists. Finger wagging and moral
point-scoring are not the required tools for
understanding our current predicament. As with Thomas
Hardy’s dictum that a full inventory of the worst must
be made in order to clear a path to the better, so the
lid must now be lifted on the most sordid aspects of our
agonizing world.
Whilst false flag operations are
not new (see Operation Gladio) the exigencies of
continuous warfare in the Eurasian energy basin have led
to a rapid acceleration in their use. From Bali to
Madrid to London, nowhere now escapes the dead hand of
intelligence operatives. And despite the trends
previously discussed, progress in understanding is still
slow. Isolated, random outrages may be of infinitely
more use to the promoters of the ‘War on Terror’ than
they are to putative Muslim radicals, but many residents
of Madrid and London who understand the 9/11 montage
will nevertheless vehemently deny that their home town
has experienced the same. It is never explained why
something that worked so well in the US would not be
repeated elsewhere. Here, the essentially a-national
character of the world’s elites must be understood,
because a police state in the US cannot function in
isolation. The rapidly accelerating trends toward
convergence in ‘national security’ go beyond politics in
the usual sense. In the 1970s, urban planner Paul
Virilio examined this convergence, and identified its
consequence as an impending transition to global
military jurisdiction. (7)
At a time when global elites
scramble for diminishing hydrocarbon reserves, terrorise
their populations into submission, and unleash ever more
catastrophic wars, the essential challenge to consensus
reality is more important than ever. Whether global oil
production is peaking right now or does so in 15 or 20
years is not the point. The global capitalist class and
its population-cull-promoters are responding to it now
(8). Whether ‘overshoot’ is an objective reality or just
another Malthusian fantasy, the owners of the world will
act upon the idea regardless.
From Baghdad to
Caracas, the Empire is in retreat. And yet this makes
the recourse to extreme ‘solutions’ more, not less
likely. According to Michael Ruppert, the emerging
American-led global police state is not merely about
private control over the legal system, but is rather “a
crisis-induced transition from a deeply compromised
legal system to a society where force and surveillance
completely supplant that system.” (9)
The seriousness
of current developments cannot be underestimated. But as
the disjuncture between events and their representation
widens further, it impels the broader population to
reorder their mental maps, thus opening new
possibilities for radical alternatives. To exploit and
reinforce this development, the evidence-based community
must avoid turf wars and internal disputes. Now more
than ever, it is necessary to share everything we know
with everyone we know. Practical alternatives cannot
emerge whilst the great mass of people remain
somnambulant, which is why systematic deconstruction and
demythologization of events is the precondition for
liberating and reconstructing our world.
When the mask
finally falls, reality can be what we make it.
The author
can be reached at
gnaoua22@yahoo.co.uk
Notes:
1.
Quoted in:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/061704_conspiracy_union.html
2. “The
Gatekeepers of the So-Called Left” Charles Shaw,
Newtopia Magazine, May 16th, 2005
3. See
Adam Curtis’s “The Power of Nightmares”
The Rise of
the Politics of Fear
BBC Television 2004
4. http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html
5. http://www.insteadofwar.org/site/news_more.php?id=A667_0_2_0_M
6.
“Progressive Irrelevance” Anis Shivani
http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani0829.html
7.
Paul
Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles
and Speed and Politic, Semiotext(e) 1990,
1986
8.
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=626
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/malthsay.htm
“...There are only two possible ways in which a
world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the
current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the
current death rates must go up. ``There is no other way.
``There are, of course, many ways in which the death
rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can
accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and
disease are nature's ancient checks on population
growth, and neither one has disappeared from the
scene.... ``To put it simply: Excessive population
growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic
and social advancement of most of the societies in the
developing world.” --Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979
9. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon
(pg.15) New Society Publishers, 2004