With the twenty-fifth anniversary of “9/11” this week, it is important to remember all the warning signs that were evident in the months leading up to the events of that terrible day and the anthrax attacks that followed. Despite their obviousness, the Bush administration, after the fact, denied that they were aware of them. They claimed they were taken by surprise by Al Qaeda terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.
They were lying.
The bitter truth – hard to swallow – is that not only were they aware of the signs but had laid them out like breadcrumbs to create a false trail to those upon whom they would pin the crimes, while claiming it was a surprise attack – “another Pearl Harbor,” as they and their media stenographers shouted from the rooftops in concordance with Pearl Harbor, the action film of that summer.
The phrase “a new Pearl Harbor” was the centerpiece of a neoconservative plan to murder thousands in the United States to create a justification to murder millions more around the world. And there it was in black and white in a 1997 document for all the world to see: that the U.S. could not carry out its imperialist ambitions “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
If another false flag attacks occurs in the future – blamed on barbarians – will it be called “a new 9/11” and be used to justify Trump’s use of nuclear weapons against Iran? Russia?
Will we claim to be taken by complete surprise if we survive?
It’s almost a year since Dick Cheney died. He hadn’t changed his ways since 2001, except to embrace Democratic war-making instead of Republican. Actually, that’s wrong, for as Mr. Neocon, a signer of the bloodthirsty neo-conservative document “The Project for the New American Century,” he always welcomed and got bipartisan support to attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The neo-cons, who are aligned with Israel that owns Trump and the U.S. Congress – Democrats and Republicans alike – and whose document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” contains that phrase “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” still hold great power in Washington. It’s authors have never been shy about concealing their bellicose and nihilistic intentions. That they vocally support the genocide of the Palestinians should not be surprising.
There was no need for these neocons to mention the Palestinians years ago when creating a false flag narrative. Their slaughter was guaranteed and had been ongoing for decades, not only because so many neocons held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, but because of all the Israel Lobby money flowing into the pockets of Congress. As for the Russians, attacking them was pure Americana, for they were always coming to get us, just as those sneaky Chinese who had their eyes on seizing California.
Have you ever noticed how in all the political commentary and debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never seriously discussed? It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true, with minor limited hangouts, such as the Saudi’s financing of some of the alleged hijackers.
It is a third rail of American politics; question it and your goose is cooked.
By September 2001, George Bush, Jr. was in major political trouble in his first year in office. “9/11” saved his skin and made him into a national hero with a bullhorn in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. It allowed him to pursue his endless war on terror and win a second term even while destroying Iraq. Obama, picking up Bush’s baton while offering the usual phony critiques of his policies, quickly bailed out Wall Street and the banks and proceeded to attack seven Muslim countries.
In 2026, Donald Trump is in major political trouble as the mid-term elections approach in his second term. He is caught in a quagmire with his losing war with Iran. His patron and blackmailer Israel has him up against the wall. His corrupt genocidal twin Netanyahu is pressuring him. Russia and China, ruled by far smarter leaders, are confounding him. His popularity has plummeted. All indications are that he is a man at the end of his tether, crazed, fascistic, and desperate. People like him do insane things. Nuclear weapons are at his disposal.
As the daily news of the day makes clear, mentally unstable desperate people do evil things. They take knives, guns, clubs and walk out on an ordinary day and slaughter innocent people, on a street, in a school, on a subway, everywhere and anywhere. Nuclear weapons can kill a few more, and we are ruled by madmen.
I wrote the following article years ago. It is history. I offer it again as a reminder of how devious and sophisticated is the propaganda used to deceive the public. Words matter, as Orwell made clear in Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Politics and the English Language.”
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a non-teaching day for me. I was home when the phone rang at 9 A.M. It was my daughter, who was on a week’s vacation with her future husband. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Tower.”
I turned the TV on and watched a plane crash into the Tower. I said, “They just showed a replay.” She quickly corrected me, “No, that’s another plane.” And we talked as we watched in horror, learning that it was the South Tower this time. Sitting next to my daughter was my future son-in-law; he had not had a day off from work in a year. He had finally taken a week’s vacation so they could go to Cape Cod. He worked on the 100th floor of the South Tower. By chance, he had escaped the death that claimed 176 of his co-workers.
That was my introduction to the attacks. Many years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago.
Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn’t believable; the official story was full of holes.
I am a born and bred New Yorker with a long family history rooted in the NYC Fire and Police Departments, one grandfather having been the Deputy Chief of the Fire Department, the highest ranking uniformed firefighter, and the other a NYPD cop; a niece and her husband were NYPD detectives deeply involved in the response to that day’s attacks; two cousins were cops. Hearing the absurd official explanations and the deaths of so many innocent people, including many hundreds of heroic firefighters, cops, and emergency workers, I felt a suspicious rage. It was a reaction that I couldn’t fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating and teaching a college course on what had come to be called “9/11.”
But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.
By 2004 I had enough solid evidence to convince me that the U.S. government’s claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report) were fictitious. They seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as “the war on terror.” The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the government’s claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.
Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people’s insouciant lack of interest in questioning and researching the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, the cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds were like beds already “made up.” I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. These included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy, such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn, and others, whose defenses of the official government and media explanations (when they even made such defenses; often they just trashed skeptics as “9/11 conspiracy nuts,” to quote Cockburn) totally lacked any scientific or logical rigor or even knowledge of the facts. Now that years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever. There is a long list of leftists who refuse to examine matter to this very day. And most interestingly, they also do the same with the assassination of JFK, the other key seminal event of recent American history.
I kept thinking of the ongoing language and logic used to describe what had happened that terrible day in 2001 and in the weeks to follow with the nonsense proffered about the anthrax attacks that originated from a U.S. bioweapons lab. It all seemed so clichéd and surreal, as if set phrases had it been extracted from some secret manual, phrases that rung with an historical resonance that cast a spell on the public, as if mass hypnosis were involved. People seemed mesmerized as they spoke of the events in the official language that had been presented to them.
So with the promptings of people like Graeme MacQueen, Lance de Haven-Smith, T.H. Meyer, et al., and much study and research, I have concluded that my initial intuitive skepticism was correct and that a process of linguistic mind-control was in place before, during, and after the attacks. As with all good propaganda, the language had to be insinuated over time and introduced through intermediaries. It had to seem “natural” and to flow out of events, not to precede them. And it had to be repeated over and over again.
In summary form, I will list the language I believe “made up the minds” of those who have refused to examine the government’s claims about the September 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
- Pearl Harbor. As pointed out by David Ray Griffin and others, this term was used in September 2000 in The Project for the New American Century’s (PNAC) report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (p.51). Its neo-con authors argued that the U.S. wouldn’t be able to attack Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. “absent some catastrophic event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” Then on January 11, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Space Commission” warned that the U.S. could face a “space Pearl Harbor” if it weren’t careful and didn’t increase space security. Rumsfeld urged support for the proposed U.S. national missile defense system opposed by Russia and China and massive funding for the increased weaponization of space. At the same time he went around handing out and recommending Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962) by Roberta Wohlstetter, who had spent almost two decades working for The Rand Corporation and who claimed that Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack that shocked U.S. leaders. Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor – those words and images dominated public consciousness for many months before 11 September 2001, and of course after. The film Pearl Harbor, made with Pentagon assistance and a massive budget, was released on May 25, 2001 and was a box office hit. It was in the theatres throughout the summer. The thought of the attack on Pearl Harbor (not a surprise to the U.S. government, but presented as such) was in the news all summer despite the fact that the 60thanniversary of that attack was not until December 7, 2001, a more likely release date. So why was it released so early? Once the September 11 attacks occurred, the Pearl Harbor analogy was “plucked out” of the social atmosphere and used constantly, beginning immediately. Another “Day of Infamy,” another surprise attack blared the media and government officials. A New Pearl Harbor! George W. Bush was widely reported to have had the time that night, after a busy day of flying hither and yon to avoid the terrorists who for some reason had forgotten he was in a classroom in Florida, to allegedly use it in his diary, writing that “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century took place today. We think it is Osama bin Laden.” Shortly after the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, Bush then formerly announced, referencing the attacks of September 11, that the U. S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. The examples of this Pearl Harbor/ September 11 analogy are manifold, but I am summarizing, so I will skip giving them. Any casual researcher can confirm this.
- Homeland. This strange un-American term, another WW II word associated with another enemy – Nazi Germany – was also used many times by the neo-con authors of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” I doubt any average American referred to this country by that term before. Of course it became the moniker for The Department of Homeland Security, marrying home with security to form a comforting name that simultaneously and unconsciously suggests a defense against Hitler-like evil coming from the outside. Not coincidentally, Hitler introduced it into the Nazi propaganda vernacular at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Both usages conjured up images of a home besieged by alien forces intent on its destruction; thus preemptive action was in order. Now the Department of Homeland Security with its massive budget is lodged permanently in popular consciousness and in fact.
- Ground Zero. This is a third WWII (“the Good War”) term first used at 11:55 A.M. on September 11 by Mark Walsh (aka “the Harley Guy” because he was wearing a Harley-Davidson tee shirt) in an interview on the street by a Fox News reporter, Rick Leventhal. Identified as a Fox free-lancer, Walsh also explained the Twin Towers’ collapse in a precise, well-rehearsed manner that would be the same illogical and anti-scientific explanation later given by the government: “mostly due to structural failure because the fire was too intense.” Ground zero – a nuclear bomb term first used by U.S. scientists to refer to the spot where they exploded the first nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – became another meme adopted by the media that suggested a nuclear attack had occurred or might in the future if the U.S. didn’t act. The nuclear scare was raised again and again by George W. Bush and U.S. officials in the days and months following the attacks, although nuclear weapons were beside the point in terms of the 11 September attacks, but surely not as a scare tactic and as part of the plan to withdraw from the ABM treaty that would be announced in December. But the conjoining of “nuclear” with “ground zero” served to raise the fear factor dramatically. Ironically, the project to develop the nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was headquartered at 270 Broadway, NYC, a few short blocks north of the World Trade Center.
- The Unthinkable. This is another nuclear term whose usage as linguistic mind control and propaganda is brilliantly analyzed by Graeme MacQueen in the penultimate chapter of his very important book, The 2001Anthrax Deception. He notes the patterned use of this term before and after September 11, while saying “the pattern may not signify a grand plan …. It deserves investigation and contemplation.” He then presents a convincing case that the use of this term couldn’t be accidental. He notes how George W. Bush, in a major foreign policy speech on May 1, 2001, “gave informal public notice that the United States intended to withdraw unilaterally from the ABM Treaty”; Bush said the U.S. must be willing to “rethink the unthinkable.” This was necessary because of terrorism and rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction.” PNAC also argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the treaty. A signatory to the treaty could only withdraw after giving six months’ notice and because of “extraordinary events” that “jeopardized its supreme interests.” Once the September 11 attacks occurred, Bush rethought the unthinkable and officially gave formal notice on December 13 to withdraw the U.S. from the ABM Treaty, as previously noted. MacQueen specifies the many times different media used the term “unthinkable” in October 2001 in reference to the anthrax attacks. He explicates its usage in one of the anthrax letters – “The Unthinkabel” [sic]. He explains how the media that used the term so often were at the time unaware of its usage in the anthrax letter since that letter’s content had not yet been revealed, and how the letter writer had mailed the letter before the media started using the word. He makes a rock solid case showing the U.S. government’s complicity in the anthrax attacks and therefore in the Sept 11 attacks. While calling the use of the term “unthinkable” in all its iterations “problematic,” he writes, “The truth is that the employment of ‘the unthinkable’ in this letter, when weight is given both to the meaning of this term in U.S. strategic circles and to the other relevant uses of the term in 2001, points us in the direction of the U.S. military and intelligence communities.” I am reminded of Orwell’s point in 1984: “a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.” Thus the government and media’s use of “unthinkable” becomes a classic case of “doublethink.” The unthinkable is unthinkable.
- 9/11. This is the key usage that has reverberated down the years around which the others revolve. It is an anomalous numerical designation applied to an historical event, and obviously also the emergency telephone number. Try to think of another numerical appellation for an important event in American history. It’s impossible. But if you have a good historical sense, you will remember that the cornerstone for the Pentagon was lain on September 11, 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that the CIA engineered a coup against the Allende government in Chile on Sept 11, 1973. Just strange coincidences? The future editor of The New York Times and Iraq war promoter, Bill Keller, introduced the emergency phone connection on the morning of September 12th in a NY Times op-ed piece, “America’s Emergency Line: 911.” The linkage of the attacks to a permanent national emergency was thus subliminally introduced, as Keller mentioned Israel nine times and seven times compared the U.S. situation to that of Israel as a target for terrorists. His first sentence reads: “An Israeli response to America’s aptly dated wake-up call might well be, ‘Now you know.’” By referring to September 11 as 9/11, an endless national emergency fear became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. Mentioning Israel (“America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world,” George W. Bush would tell the Israeli Knesset) so many times, Keller was not very subtly performing an act of legerdemain with multiple meanings. By comparing the victims of the 11 September attacks to Israeli “victims,” he was implying, among other things, that the Israelis are innocent victims who are not involved in terrorism, but are terrorized by Palestinians, as Americans are terrorized by fanatical Muslims. Palestinians = Al Qaeda. Israel = U.S. Explicit and implicit parallels of the guilty and the innocent. Keller tells us who the real killers are. His use of the term 9/11 is a term that pushes all the right buttons, evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery. It is propaganda at its best. Even well-respected critics of the U.S. government’s explanation use the term that has become a fixture of public consciousness through endless repetition. As George W. Bush would later put it as he connected Saddam Hussein to “9/11” and pushed for the Iraq war, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” All the ingredients for a linguistic mind-control smoothie had been blended.
I have concluded – and this is impossible to prove definitively because of the nature of such propagandistic techniques – that the use of all these words/numbers is part of a highly sophisticated linguistic mind-control campaign waged to create a narrative that has lodged in the minds of hundreds of millions of people and is very hard to dislodge.
It is why I don’t speak of “9/11” any more. I refer to those events as the attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a mouth-full and not easily digested in the age of Twitter and texting. But I am not sure how to be more succinct or how to undo the damage, except by writing what I have written here.
Lance de Haven-Smith puts it well in Conspiracy Theory in America:
The rapidity with which the new language of the war on terror appeared and took hold; the synergy between terms and their mutual connections to WW II nomenclatures; and above all the connections between many terms and the emergency motif of “9/11” and “9-1-1” – any one of these factors alone, but certainly all of them together – raise the possibility that work on this linguistic construct began long before 9/11….It turns out that elite political crime, even treason, may actually be official policy.
Needless to say, his use of the words “possibility” and “may” are in order when one sticks to strict empiricism. However, when one reads his full text, it is apparent to me that he considers these “coincidences” part of a conspiracy. I have also reached that conclusion.
As Thoreau put in his underappreciated humorous way, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
The evidence for linguistic mind control, while the subject of this essay, does not stand alone, of course. It underpins the actual attacks of September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks that are linked. The official explanations for these events by themselves do not stand up to elementary logic and are patently false, as proven by thousands of well-respected professional researchers from all walks of life – i.e. engineers, pilots, scientists, architects, and scholars from many disciplines (see the upcoming 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, to be released September 11, 2018). To paraphrase the prescient Vince Salandria, who said it long ago concerning the government’s assassination of President Kennedy, the attacks of 2001 are “a false mystery concealing state crimes.” If one objectively studies the 2001 attacks together with the language adopted to explain and preserve them in social memory, the “mystery” emerges from the realm of the unthinkable and becomes utterable. “There is no mystery.” The truth becomes obvious.
How to communicate this when the corporate mainstream media serve the function of the government’s mockingbird (as in Operation Mockingbird), repeating and repeating and repeating the same narrative in the same language; that is the difficult task we are faced with, but there are signs today that breakthroughs are occurring, as growing numbers of international academic scholars are pushing to incorporate the analysis of the official propaganda surrounding 11 September 2001 into their work within the academy, a turnabout from years of general silence. And more and more people are coming to realize that the official lies about 11 September are the biggest example of fake news in this century. Fake news used to justify endless wars and the slaughter of so many innocents around the world.
Words have a power to enchant and mesmerize. Linguistic mind-control, especially when linked to traumatic events such as the September 11th and the anthrax attacks, can strike people dumb and blind. It often makes some subjects “unthinkable” and “unspeakable” (to quote Jim Douglass quoting Thomas Merton in JFK and the Unspeakable: the unspeakable “is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said.”).
We need a new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things. Let us learn, as Chief Joseph said, to speak with a straight tongue, and in language that doesn’t do the enemies work of mind control, but snaps the world awake to the truth of the mass murders of September 11, 2001 that have been used to massacre millions across the world.
Postscript September 2026
| The 11 September 2001 bombings Are Not Acts of War |
||
| The September 2001 bombings Are Crimes Against Humanity | ||
| I prefer law to war under all circumstances…. We have to apply the existing rules. To call them “terrorists” is also a misleading term. There’s no agreement on what terrorism is. One man’s terrorism is another man’s heroism. I’m sure that bin Laden considers himself a saint and so do many of his followers. We try them for mass murder. That’s a crime under every jurisdiction and that’s what’s happened here and that is a crime against humanity.
—Benjamin Ferencz, 19 Sep 2001
|
Our choice now seems to be between a “new war” and a new world. As always, the forces of reaction and wealth are telling us we have no choice but war, and no right or power to decide. They are calling for a secret investigation, a secret conviction, a secret method of execution, and a totally secret war abroad. The American people as a whole are the only ones in the world who have the right to decide on a national response to this tragedy, and it must be one that takes into account the rights of all the other peoples and nations of the world.
—John Judge, 23 September 2001
|
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- Analysis
- Films
- The Implications of 9/11. A conversation with John Judge,
Part 1 & Part 2, 2 Fep 2002 (57:53 & 58:36). - September 11 and Future Wars, 19 Sep 2002 (2:10:55).
- 9/11, Afghanistan, & Iraq: Unanswered Questions of September 11,
Part 1 & Part 2, 10 Oct 2002 (1:21:57 & 1:53:23) .
- The Implications of 9/11. A conversation with John Judge,
- The Pentagon’s B-Movie – Looking Closely at the September 2001 Attacks, Graeme MacQueen, 2023.
- Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, David Ray Griffin, 2011.
- 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed, David Ray Griffin, 2011.
- 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, David Ray Griffin, 2008.
- The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Peter Dale Scott, 2007.
- The Terror Timeline: Year By Year, Day By Day, minute By Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle Of The Road To 9/11 —And America’s Response, Paul Thompson and the Center for Cooperative Research, 2004. See Also: History Commons 9/11 Timeline.
These links will bring readers to a vast interconnected and diverse series of articles, books, and videos about September 11, 2001 (and much more). ratical.org, run by David Ratcliffe, is an extraordinary encyclopedia of online sources unmatched anywhere. I urge readers to explore it. And I wish to thank Dave for his generous and ongoing help in documenting my writing. He is one of our world’s wonderful souls.
In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 25, 1961, President John Kennedy said, “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”
A year later in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis this nearly came to pass. Today the threat is worse than ever. Madness reigns. Only the most naive can fail to recognize the warning signs. This is not hyperbole. Fooled on this score, we will be fooled no more.
Waiting For the Barbarians
By C. P. Cavafy
– What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are to arrive today.
– Why then such inactivity in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit back and do not legislate?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
What sort of laws now can Senators enact?
When the barbarians come, they’ll do the legislating.
– Why is our emperor up so early,
and seated at the grandest gate of our city, upon the throne,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
And the emperor expects to receive their leader.
He has even prepared to present him
with a parchment scroll where he has
invested him with many names and titles.
– Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their purple, embroidered togas;
why did they put on bracelets studded with amethysts,
and rings with resplendent, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying today precious staves
beautifully worked in gold and silver?
Because the barbarians will arrive today
and such things dazzle the barbarians.
– And why don’t our distinguished orators come out as usual
to give their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians will arrive today;
and they are bored by rhetoric and public speeches.
– Why this sudden commotion, this confusion?
(How solemn people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so quickly,
and everyone is returning home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some of our men have arrived from the frontiers,
and say that there are no barbarians anymore.
—And now, what will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
This poem was written in 1898.
I have learned not to broach this subject in ‘polite company’ and limit myself to anodyne conversation; no ripples in our beautiful thoughts, please.
I do take exception to the use of the word ‘attack’ as in ‘the attack of September 11’ as I think something along the line of ‘event’ would be more appropriate.
Dear friends, maybe Noam Chomsky was right when he argued that left-wing activists should be careful about spending enormous amounts of emotional, intellectual, and physical energy trying to determine exactly who was responsible for 9/11 or debating every possible theory about how it happened. Was it entirely an external terrorist attack? Was there some element of government negligence or deliberate inaction? Were there explosives involved? Was it a form of “blowback” resulting from American foreign policy? These are legitimate questions to investigate when there is credible evidence, but perhaps they should not become the center of the entire left-wing political struggle.
Regardless of which explanation one ultimately accepts, there is a much larger historical question that deserves attention: **Why did such enormous hostility toward the United States exist in the first place?**
Even if one completely rejects the idea that 9/11 was an inside job and accepts the conventional explanation that it was an attack carried out by Islamist terrorists, that still does not eliminate the question of American imperialism and its consequences. Understanding the political and historical environment in which terrorism develops is not the same thing as justifying terrorism. Explaining why someone becomes radicalized is not the same as approving of the crimes that person commits.
The deeper issue, in my view, is the long history of American power abroad. The United States expanded dramatically during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming an increasingly powerful military, economic, and imperial force. From interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean to wars and military operations in Asia and the Middle East, American foreign policy has repeatedly produced enormous controversy, suffering, resentment, and resistance.
I sometimes think of the United States as having inherited certain characteristics of the old imperial systems of Europe and Rome: enormous military power, economic domination, expansionism, political influence abroad, and a tendency for ruling elites to justify their actions in the name of civilization, security, freedom, or national interest. Obviously, modern America is not literally the Roman Empire, and the historical comparison has limitations. But the analogy can be useful when thinking about how republics can gradually develop imperial characteristics.
And the contradictions existed from the beginning.
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” yet the society that produced it simultaneously permitted racial slavery. Millions of Africans and their descendants were subjected to a brutal system of forced labor, while the political ideals of liberty and equality were denied to them. That contradiction between American democratic ideals and American historical reality is impossible to ignore.
The same contradiction continues to appear in different forms today. The United States presents itself as a champion of democracy and human rights, yet its foreign policy has frequently involved military interventions, sanctions, covert operations, alliances with authoritarian governments, and other actions that critics argue have inflicted enormous suffering on foreign populations.
This does not mean that every person who opposes the United States is justified in using violence. Absolutely not. Civilians should never be treated as legitimate targets simply because of the policies of their government. But it does mean that we should seriously examine the historical causes of international hatred toward the United States instead of pretending that such hostility appeared out of nowhere.
And this is where I think the American left sometimes misses an enormous part of the picture.
The people who suffer under American economic and political structures are not only foreigners. **American workers themselves can be victims of the same system.**
The United States is an extraordinarily wealthy country, yet enormous inequalities exist between the people who produce wealth and those who control capital, corporations, financial institutions, and political power. From a Marxist perspective, this is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: workers create economic value through their labor, while the owners of capital appropriate a portion of the value produced by that labor as profit.
Marxists describe this as exploitation and the extraction of surplus value. Whether one accepts the complete Marxist analysis or not, the underlying question is legitimate: **Who actually benefits from the enormous wealth produced by American workers?**
According to John Hammer’s book *The Falsification of History*, approximately 50 percent of Americans—more than 150 million people—live in what the book describes as “extreme poverty,” while only about 20 percent of the population benefits from the wealth produced by the other 80 percent.
If those figures accurately represent the situation, they reveal an enormous contradiction at the heart of American society: a country that presents itself as the land of opportunity and prosperity, yet where a huge portion of the population allegedly struggles to share in the wealth that its own labor helps create.
It reminds me of George Carlin’s brilliant and brutally cynical observation about the so-called “American Dream”: **it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.**
The American Dream may be constantly advertised as a reality, but for millions of working people, it can feel less like a genuine opportunity and more like an ideological promise designed to keep people believing that their economic struggles are simply the result of personal failure rather than deeper structural inequalities.
The broader point remains powerful: millions of American workers struggle economically while enormous fortunes are concentrated in the hands of a relatively small segment of society. That contradiction should be a central concern of the American left.
And therefore, I believe the American Marxist left should spend less time destroying itself through endless ideological infighting and more time asking how working people can be organized around common economic interests.
Instead of constantly arguing about which faction possesses the purest ideological doctrine, Marxists and socialists should be asking practical questions:
How can workers be organized?
How can unions be strengthened?
How can working people be educated politically?
How can economic inequality be challenged?
How can racial and ethnic divisions be overcome rather than exploited?
How can American workers recognize that their interests are often fundamentally different from those of billionaires, corporate executives, and political elites?
And how can a genuinely internationalist socialist movement be built that recognizes that American workers and workers throughout the rest of the world have far more in common with one another than they do with their respective ruling classes?
I know the idea of building a socialist organization with millions of members sounds extraordinarily ambitious, and the idea of hundreds of millions of members would be almost unimaginable under present conditions. The United States has decades of powerful anti-socialist and anti-communist traditions, reinforced through political rhetoric, popular culture, television, religious institutions, education, and other social institutions.
But political movements that initially appeared impossible have sometimes grown dramatically when they successfully connected their ideas to the material experiences of ordinary people.
The objective, therefore, should not simply be to convince people to call themselves “Marxists.” The objective should be to demonstrate, through organization and political education, why ordinary working people might have a material interest in challenging a system that concentrates enormous economic and political power in relatively few hands.
The American left should stop treating every disagreement as a reason for permanent division.
The working class is far larger than any individual socialist organization.
The struggle is far larger than any single political party.
And the problems of capitalism are far larger than debates over ideological labels.
For me, the central lesson of 9/11 should therefore not simply be an endless argument over competing conspiracy theories. It should be an examination of history: American imperialism, militarism, economic inequality, colonialism, racism, class power, and the international consequences of American foreign policy.
We should investigate controversial events rigorously, follow evidence wherever it leads, and remain skeptical of official narratives when the evidence warrants skepticism. But we should also avoid allowing one historical event to consume our entire political imagination.
The bigger question is not merely **”Who did 9/11?”**
The bigger question is:
**What kind of political and economic system produces so much power, so much inequality, so much international resentment, and so much suffering—and what can ordinary people do to change it?**
That is the question I believe the Marxist left should be asking.
You think that the towers fell because of the plane hits. Nope. 911 was a mossad/CIA operation-www.vice.com. See book Visas for Al Qaeda, by Michael Springmann where he was forced to let the terrorists in by the CIA.
I fear that it’s only us aging, ailing boomers that still get worked up over the World Trade Center Atrocity. For many of us, it was a pivotal event, an obvious inside job to set the stage for both foreign and domestic mayhem. But for the young, it’s ancient history, akin to what WWIi, even the Civil War, was for us.
So the bad news for the readers of this blog is that the WTC Atrocity and other defining events of our era, like the string of assassinations that began with JFK, are no longer burning issues, understandably take a distant second place to current crises like the wage slavery foisted upon the young by late-stage cancer–strike that, I mean capitalism. But there is some good news intermixed with the bad.
Because of the efforts of perceptive and courageous people like the author of this blog, who over the years have relentlessly shredded the web of official narratives spun to conceal the truth about what our country had become, what it had done itself while blaming others, many of today’s young merely take it for granted that, for example, the WTC Atrocity was an inside job, or that JFK and his brother (and probably Malcolm as well) were shot by a faction within the federal government.
In other words, Ed, while what we care about may no longer be “breaking news”, and while we may still have a maniac in the Oval Office for a couple more years (and God knows what further damage he might do), when it comes to how today’s young will think and feel about the American government during the course of their lifetimes, it looks to me like you prevailed, that your persistent effort paid off. And bless you for it.
Time heels all wounds after training sit, stay & roll over.
I wasn’t, probably —not all memories have retained equal status— aware of the Cavafy poem.
But I did see the movie.
Futility, in the desert.
Like hometown Phoenix, which has been so much more desertified by dessert-seeking deserters from elsewhere since I was born there.
That goes for the whole increasingly waterless Southwest.
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Lie-Brarians
—‘the pen is mightier than the sword, as all successful barbarians know—
of the 1922 S.even-S.tate Compact
((which is where thespians & cunning linguists apply their face-powders from – their compacts))
P.umped & T.rumped & Barnum’d the Colorado River’s flow rate at 16.5 million acre-feet per year.
Not quite, Maxwell Smarts. “Missed it by *that* much.”
But bread & circuses & all the subsidized-free water you can waste —“or” convert into alfalfa for export— is not confined to the Southwest, or even temporality (daylight “savings” or no) is it?
Concepts precede words.
But language lubes the slip-sliding away con/cepts & con/scepter wielding barbarians for whom the position is assumed.
The biggest butt of all tho is that despite Gutenberg pressing* executions of peasants under the glass ceilings-floors of their betters … it does not do & will not hold to indict “linguistic mind control” for all the good/bad cop a plea-se Mr. Postman (who Always Rings Twice) is there a letter (or a vowel, Vanna?) for me? For how so many cons/sceptered people comport themselves.
Free will & agency are just concepts, too.
But necessity mothered the invention that proceeding “as if” free will & agency is true is just as necessary as clean water (& it’s serially measured & adjusted availability) & air are.
Not guilty by reason of dictionaries & cunning linguists doesn’t cut it.
After reading your good work on this silver lining-less anniversary @LRC I read your Thoughts On The Comments …
…and the connection is the Gutenberg pressgang training that insisted upon all that writing is an affirmative action right of audiences to impose their aesthetic & Flesch-Kincaid preferences …
… is the ouroboros trap.
Writing is for the writer.
Coalescing readers —or not— including readers who write posts (for themselves) is beside the point.
If it’s any needed consolation I just ordered At The Lost & Found, from bookshop.org, &, because backordered, a used-like new copy of Seeking Truth In A Country Of Lies from biblio.com.
(Speaking of rivers that need to be diverted out of existence, amazon inmates who aren’t busy living are busy dying.
Rock hammers hidden in bibles, cheesecake posters on the wall & two sets of books … polish up those walking shoes.)
*See the crushing word”play.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crushing_(execution)
PS No subscription feature on your site?
Dear Edward and friends, hi again. This article is great not only because it sheds light on 9/11, but also because it explores how most average Joes and Janes aren’t truly free individuals. A free person is someone who does whatever they want, even if it means breaking laws or moral codes, and says whatever they please. It’s like the song “Tom Sawyer” by Rush—someone not controlled by any god or government.
I think most people have an internal dictator that pushes them to follow a set behavior script and say whatever it dictates, even against their own will. This kind of slavery-like behavior, driven largely by Christianity and its morality, has been present worldwide for thousands of years. That’s why Nietzsche calls for a transvaluation of all values and the creation of a new, liberated humanity.
Even the fighter pilots who were meant to intercept the two commercial planes that crashed into the Twin Towers were bound by strict rules and moral constraints. If they had been free to act, they might have shot down those planes, sacrificing hundreds of lives to potentially save the 4,000 people inside the towers.
Military systems and the military life also turns people into slaves. My parents sent me to a military academy in Pennsyvalnnia (Carson Long Institute) and I couldn’t be there for than one year because I am too anarchist, too rebellious for the military life. By the way it is worth to mention here that zionist jews bought the buildings of the Carson Long Military Academy in New Bloomfield, PA, in order to turn it into a tool of zionist jewish propaganda. (A Talmud university is going to be built in the former Carson Long buildings which were sold to zionist jewish elites, after Carson Long closed down because The Republican Party and Democratic Party’s administrations have destroyed the buying power of american families. Compared to the 1980s and 1990s, today in the 21st Century, most americans are very poor compared to the americans of the 1980s and 1990s. So only upper class people can afford elite education for their children
After saying all that, and returning to the point about many progressive leftists being wrong on issues like 9/11, the Ukraine-Russia war, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, I believe these leftists are really part of the capitalist-left, the pseudo-left, or progressive talking-head influencers funded by bourgeois elites of the Democratic Party. I think all those bourgeois progressive liberal leftist websites and YouTube channels, such as The Thom Hartmann Show, The Young Turks, David Pakman, Meidas Touch, The Daily Beast with Michael Wolff (who is a staunch right-wing Democratic Party supporter), and many other capitalist-leftists and mainstream bourgeois reformist leftists, only despise one wing of the one-party oligarchic dictatorship in America. They don’t criticize or oppose both wings of our one-party kleptocracy—Democrats and Republicans.
Just like the hypocrite Thom Hartmann, I still join the live chat on his YouTube channel, “The Thom Hartmann Show,” but I think they hate me now because they’ve discovered that I’ve been exposing him as a right-wing Clinton Democrat scammer..
I think, as you mentioned in your article, that most people have a “one-track mind,” meaning that if they’re born into a right-wing family and later realize the flaws of capitalism and right-wing ideology, it’s nearly impossible for them to shift toward the left. Most people are trapped by their surroundings, and if you live among right-wingers, fascists, middle-class bourgeois folks who are pro–U.S. imperialism, pro-Israel, and anti-Putin or anti-Iran, it’s incredibly difficult to have an awakening. A mental and spiritual awakening, in this view, requires moving toward the radical left, and even further toward the impossibilist left—a very radical ultra-left stance claiming that true change in countries with deeply corrupt governments (like the USA) can only happen through violent revolution, not elections. Impossibilists argue that elections are a complete scam—the biggest lie in human history—just like other rigged events such as lotteries, Miss Universe contests, professional wrestling matches, the baseball World Series, and similar spectacles.
I believe fear is the main reason why individuals like Thom Hartmann and the people at Counterpunch.org can’t fully wake up and accept the harsh truth that 9/11 was an inside job with the support and involvement of Mossad Israeli agents. Look what happened to William Cooper (Bill Cooper) after exposing dark crimes and secrets of the US Imperialist government and its evil Deep State. And look what has happened to the UFO scientists, all killed by the dark elements of the US Imperialist evil government. And look what has happpened to 3 members of the Kennedy Family, all killed by dark elements of US government. And maybe these crimes and other crimes is one of the main reasons of why people in USA are not radical enough. And being very radical requires a warrior attitude, and since most people are not warriors, but pacifist moralist slaves. They are literally blocked from supporting and participating in an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialism, anti-Israel revolution against the US government
I’ve come to believe that the root of humanity’s problems is that most people don’t embrace a warrior attitude toward life. Too many lack the spirit needed to break free from loyalties and ties that keep them from acting or speaking according to their own mind and conscience. An internal chain holds many back, preventing them from stepping out of their mental shell and, for example, supporting radical communist movements or adopting an anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. imperialist stance, which I see as vital to saving the USA and the world from destruction.
One of the main reasons I created a blog with a blueprint-style guide is to share the knowledge people need to adopt a warrior mindset, mentality, and attitude in all areas of life. I believe this is essential for everyday Americans to move beyond the Democratic and Republican parties, paving the way for a new USA where the nation’s wealth belongs to all its people, not just a small elite.
https://how-to-become-an-aristocratic-warrior.blogspot.com/2026/08/guideline-on-how-to-become-aristocratic.html
.
Barbarians indeed. Wearing suits
You were a thousand miles ahead of me. I’m trying to remember when I started reading antiwar.com and discovered ‘the Israeli art students’ file. A very ancient now, old-school (& actual) ‘Bolshevik commie’ from Brooklyn invited me & (then) significant other to a dinner-party and talked about a French author’s investigations. Several people there. I think we mostly stared at each other like iguanas. I attended a public talk by (pretty sure) Michael Ruppert about that September morning.
The Cavafy poem is quite incredible. I’ll have to process how this poem relates to everything you have said. Call me ‘slow.’
I’ve jumped like that proverbial trout in the proverbial milk too many times I think after glittering ‘hooks’ of new information concerning all you have mentioned. God knows where the new information to interpret comes from. Maybe just stick to the basics from now on i.e. the horror-show unrolling in slow motion across decades. Next up: the Amish. PS public hearings on vax-damaged Canadians in Ottawa (capitol of Canada) garnered less legacy media scrutiny than Building 7’s mysterious collapse. Or Lee Harvey Oswald donning a black sweater for his basement-police garage moment in the B&W TV sun.
What a great article Edward and friends. And I liked what you said here:
“Have you ever noticed how in all the political commentary and debates since 2001, the truth about what happened on September 11, 2001 is never seriously discussed? It is just assumed that the government’s version of events is true, with minor limited hangouts, such as the Saudi’s financing of some of the alleged hijackers.”
You are 100% correct about no mention of 9/11 not even in most alternative progressive leftist Youtube channels, websites, and podcasts. And like I mentioned the other day I don’t understand why Thom Hartmann continues with the narrative that Donald Trump won the US elections in 2016, thanks to Putin. And in the Russia vs. Ukraine conflict he sides with Ukraine, I really think that Thom Hartmann is being funded by zionist oligarchs of the Democratic Party. Because that’s the politically correct narrative within The Democratic Party, that Putin is a monster and Zelenzky the victim. And worst of all that Thom Hartmann has thousands of followewrs in his Youtube channel.
The same thing happens with the anti-war progressive site Counterpunch.org. I suspect that it’s funded by liberal Democratic Party bourgeois sectors, like George Soros, Bill Gates, and others from the liberal wing of the U.S. oligarchy.
Many progressive anti-war, anti-Zionist voices—such as Judge Napolitano, Chris Hedges, John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, David Pakman, The Young Turks, and The Daily Beast—are ultimately reformist and focused on electoral politics rather than being impossibilists. In other words, they back elections instead of the violent revolutions that impossibilists advocate. A true radical rejects the electoral process entirely, believing that genuine change can only come through violent, bloody uprisings like the Russian and French Revolutions.
All the people I mentioned are basically clickbait, chasing popularity, followers, and likes. They don’t actually push for a full dismantling and overthrow of the U.S. government, like the Declaration of Independence literally states—that citizens have the responsibility to remove the government if they believe it’s corrupt or abusive. By that logic, it would mean all Americans should take action against the government and its so-called mafia cartels, not because of radical ideologies, but because, according to them, it’s written in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
There is also an anti-Lincoln conspiracy in many of the fake revolutionaries like the progressive anti-war political analyst Col. Douglas Macgregor who was talking negative things against Lincoln, just because Lincoln was a radical revolutionary You see there is exist a sort of mind-control from coming not really from Trump, FOX news or Glenn Beck, but really from the so called leftist and progressive talking heads. Who are just as guilty as Trump is, for not promoting a radical change in USA Because anybody who is supports elections is really part of the enemy
We can apply Bush’s phrase, “Either you are with us, or against us,” to mean that people are either with us in pushing for the overthrow of the entire U.S. oligarchic imperialist system, or they’re against us through their support of the electoral system. We all know that anyone who backs U.S. elections is really supporting oppression, because the biggest enemy of radical change in America is not rebellion but the very act of voting itself.
We live a lie. How can we drink water and eat food and not notice the lie that we live?
Lincoln was in no way a “radical revolutionary” … He was the exact opposite. He wanted to preserve the union, which is a conservative position, no matter what; whether that involved guaranteeing slavery or outlawing it.
Please cease and desist your overlong and tiresome domination of these comments. You’ve been asked courteously to consider starting your own blog , or consider writing a book with your thoughts. We’re here to benefit from Ed’s wisdom and insight. Not yours. Thank you
Each time this happens, from the JFK event to the most recent, it gets more and more brazen and less and less believable. The latest big event, the Oct ‘23 Gaza jail breakout, was obvious as a false flag from the get go; but it has been nevertheless used as the excuse for genocide and ethnic cleansing and now a war for three years.
At some point, they’re just going to stop pretending to excuses and just flat out rule … and would the majority of citizens object even then?
I’ve never – NEVER – needed anyone to explain this shite to me. I knew INSTINCTIVELY (like I knew with the world-wide lockdown) that this was pure bullshite. Of course, ALL MY FRIENDS had been hypnotized by the rhetoric.
I remained silent because I didn’t know why my “friends” would do to such a traitor as myself. Now, of course, my mantra is “Fuck them and Fuck that”.