010 Yellow Journalists and the Great Debate

 

In the companion article to this one, Yellow Journalism, I introduced readers to the origins of the term yellow journalism, sensationalized news reporting from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, primarily designed to foment wars and sell newspapers. Other than protocols of grammar, journalists are free to wallow in self-serving subjectivism. In other words, only what they write or broadcast can be held to scrutiny and judgement, not what they don’t write or don’t say. It is much easier to develop an argument or make a certain point if you are not required to consider and involve the bigger, interrelated picture.

Withholding important information because of ignorance suggests incompetence, bad for your career, withholding information by design is contrived disinformation—i.e., propaganda, and can be very good for your career.

As I briefly mentioned in Yellow Journalism, people in most other skilled professions are held to objective (measurable) standards; an architect or engineer can exercise creative flare in designing a building, but the physical integrity of the building must meet exacting (measurable) mathematical standards. There are no such standards with journalism.

I have come to grudgingly admit that some on the right were correct when stating after 9/11 that liberals or democrats were “soft on terrorism.” I don’t think “soft on terrorism” applies to the average person claiming to be right or left—that’s just political nonsense, but being soft on domestic terrorism certainly applies to journalists of both stripes. Allow me to explain:

When I set out to write Youtopia: Exploding the Myths and Exposing the Elites Who Are Ruining Paradise on Earth for All of Us, it wasn’t an attempt to reveal the withheld or distorted facts about 9/11 to the world, that had already been done many times by many competent writers, researchers and filmmakers, and yes, a few distortions masquerading as legitimate 9/11 research were produced and thrown in with the crop like rotten apples in the barrel.

Instead I became fascinated by how the granddaddy of all false flag attacks was sold to the public. I began to do a lot of research into psychology and sociology, into public relations and marketing, my research would expand as certain spheres of power and influence overlapped with others, such as banking and military, oil and media, politics and corporate profit, religion and financial ideology. My challenge was to sort it out and look for patterns and geopolitical ramifications. As a former journalist, I also was very agitated at the utter failure of journalists and broadcast journalists to ask pertinent questions that begged asking.  With Dick Cheney insisting FOX News be always on the screen whenever he walked into a room it’s understandable the right wing pundits and writers would be far more inclined to advocate for 19 Muslim hijackers did it than to ever consider the real evidence that proves beyond all doubt that the 19 Muslim hijackers were nothing more than carefully placed and protected patsies.

Anybody who knows me or has read my book or blogs, knows I’m pretty harsh on FOX News, however, Judge Napolitano and Geraldo Rivera simply cannot buy into the official story, at least regarding WTC 7.

 

So even members, or former members of the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes propaganda empire (FOX) can admit there is some explaining due, why would left-leaning journalists not rise up and challenge the utter absurdity of the official 9/11 conspiracy? For years I attributed it to a journalistic Catch-22, that is, any journalist who challenged the official story would quickly be branded a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist and would likely lose his or her job. Also, the immediate aftermath of the trauma and tragedy of 9/11 was not the time to challenge the Commander in Chief. People who tried were quickly labeled terrorist sympathizers or chastised for not supporting the troops.

So I thought I understood why established journalists and academics would hesitate to openly challenge the Muslim-extremists-did-it theory, at least until the public at large had some time to get past the Shock and Awful trauma of 9/11,  but after so many years and mountains of physical evidence, after scores of excellent documentaries and books, after many 9/11 Truth organizations were established and stocked with academics, engineers, statesmen, journalists, first responder, building demolition experts, why haven’t the larger body of progressive, anti-war, pro social justice journalists come out and at least admit there are far too many incongruities and billion-to-one coincidences that were ignored or unchallenged? For a time Thom Hartmann, self-proclaimed as “America’s number one progressive talk show host,”  would at least take calls on the subject and he would always admit we needed a fully independent investigation. But he’s changed his tune, and I don’t know if his capitulation to the official story has anything to do with his moving from Portland, Oregon, to Washington D.C. and he is simply adapting to the environment of corruption, or if there’s another reason.

After all Hartmann, and many of the ones I’m referring to, have done excellent jobs covering the horrors of war, the unjust reasons for going into Iraq, (but not Afghanistan) for crippling income inequality, for the absurd defense budget, global warming, green energy, for all manner of inequities and cruelties associated with the corrupt financial system and the slide toward fascism in the aftermath of 9/11, but none of them will admit the event which changed the world overnight has any explaining to do. They took George W. Bush at his word and obeyed him.

These so-called journalists are called left gatekeepers, and their silence or refusal to dissect the absurdities of the official story are what has enabled the horrors of war and destruction of our democracy—they must be held accountable for emboldening the domestic terrorists.

To be silent on the subject is one thing, a testing the waters thing, the fear of the Catch-22 reprisal. But the vitriol hurled at 9/11 Truthers, scholars, engineers, first responders, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers of the victims of 9/11 is abusive, cruel and dementedly wrong on so many levels, especially the written excoriation by the likes of Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stones and the video kangaroo court by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. We will get to their frothing-at-the mouth diatribes shortly, but first I’d like to offer a resolution, a way past this endless non-debate and that is to arrange a real debate, not like the political sideshows with the softball questions lobbed by the corporate yellow journalists, but a Great Debate with the whole world watching.

First we must establish the legitimacy and objectives for the debate. This debate is absolutely necessary because as we all know, there are two worlds, the one before 9/11 and the one after. All the killing in the wars, the violation of our Constitutional rights, increased security spending, blowback from real Islamic extremists, etc., are a result of foreign and domestic policy being fashioned around the grand lie of 9/11. We also owe it to our troops, the brave men and women in the military who are called to duty, because they understand, are told over and over, that we must be prepared to fight and die for our freedoms.

The greatest freedom we can exercise is the protection of our life, the freedom of expression i.e., debate, and the pursuit of happiness. I would assume the soldiers who actually fight the rich men’s wars would insist that the pursuit of free and open discussions is exactly the reason they are willing to sacrifice so much. Yet there has been no comprehensive open discussions on 9/11 in the media. There have been obtusely one-sided diatribes, but no real debates. There is no greater insult and dishonor toward our troops by the media than the media’s refusal to allow open debate on controversial subjects such as 9/11, Kennedy, MLK and the various proven false flag events over the years. The reason there has been no real debate on television is because there is no real debate once the facts are presented–people don’t debate 2+2=4, people don’t debate if steel and air have the same physical properties. The media can’t allow the world to see or hear Larry Silverstein admitting, “. . . we made the decision to pull it,” referring to WTC 7.

For sure there are many desperate attempts to explain what Larry meant, but listening to his confession alongside of watching the obvious controlled demolition makes one understand completely why the media, which profits off of war and chaos, cannot allow a real public expose and debate on the airwaves. Silverstein made billions in profit from the tragedy, he wasn’t in his WTC building, conveniently, and the “terrorist attack” solved the problem of Larry Silverstein’s Deadly Dust.

So we have established the right and reason to initiate the mother of all debates, the public would absolutely devour this event because the public has felt lied to by leaders and stifled by the media on this subject and many others. So unless those media darlings, who have inverted the word “truth” or “truther” into something awful, don’t object, we can now move onto setting the stage for the debate, picking the teams and filling out the audience.

It will be a nice big beautiful stage with two teams squaring off against each other. The debate teams will be separated and the audience will also be separated in halves, much like when the president gives an address to Congress where the republicans and democrats are separated down the middle of the room. But this division will not represent partisan divide, because the pursuit of 9/11 truth is non-partisan. Since I am the moderator of this debate, I will put Team Truth, a mix of moderate republicans and democrats at one debate table and other table will have only left  gatekeepers.

The audience will resemble the panel, since truth seekers cut a broad swath, they will align with the Team Truth panel. On the other side of the aisle will be a select mix of mostly republicans, mostly from the GW Bush era. They will align with the left gatekeepers because they are all on the same side, all rooting for validation of the “official” story. This audience will include GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, General Richard Meyers, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powel, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, L. Paul Bremmer, Oliver North, just for good overlap in the Iran/Contra affair, Dov Zakheim, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, Marvin Bush, Neil Bush, GHW Bush, and so on and so forth. This crowd will be screaming support for the left gatekeepers. And their official story will be championed at the table by, Rachel Maddow, Matt Taibbi, Jeremy Scahil, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, Bill Maher with many reserves in the wings.

Team Truth will feature Kevin Ryan, David Ray Griffin, Jim Hoffman, Richard Gage, James Corbett, Peter B. Collins, Sibel Edmonds, Paul Craig Roberts, Abby Martin, Christopher Bollyn, Jesse Ventura and more in reserve. Rachel Maddow, in all insincerity, has lumped her condemnation of anyone who believes the buildings were brought down by controlled demolitions in with people who don’t think we went to the moon, or who believe the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. I have linked the names of Team Truth to their own websites so you the reader can peruse these people and decide for yourself if they are as bat shit crazy as Maddow the corporate voice would lead us to believe.

What Maddow and Taibbi do more than anything else is show their ignorance, it’s as if neither one has any concept of the physical properties of steel, this is partly due to the nature of specialization in higher education. Taibbi, grew up as the son of Mike Taibbi, an NBC reporter, so Taibbi has a history of being fed and nourished by the mainstream media and Rolling Stones is gaining a reputation of playing loose with the facts, remember the scandal surrounding their University of Virginia rape story. Taibbi, left the Stones to work at Intercept and is gone from there also. Taibbi did some good work reporting on Goldman Sachs and bubble economies, but lost his way with 9/11. Maddow and Taibbi have never had the opportunity to have actually worked in a real job like most Americans, that is to actually create useful goods and services out of raw resources and intellect, they never had to develop common sense, never had to do any real problem solving.

They, like the politicians they praise and excoriate, are of the parasite class, living off the efforts of others, pretending to be valuable by contributing truth and understanding to world affairs, but regarding 9/11, the opposite is demonstrably true. Maddow,  in particular, has a smug air of intellectual superiority about her, as if her Rhode’s Scholarship ordains her to a position of superior knowledge over all things, even metallurgy–of which she knows absolutely nothing about. In truth the public at large simply doesn’t trust the media and is turning away from televised propaganda and finding their own news sites.

Maddow is on MSNBC, the pseudo-liberal network, the same one that wouldn’t let Dennis Kucinich, a real progressive, debate in the 2008 democratic primaries in Las Vegas hosted by MSNBC, the same network that is plummeting in the ratings because they talk pro-people but act pro-corporate and they think nobody’s noticing. Remember it wasn’t long ago MSNBC was owned by GE, a company that makes the Vulcan Gatling gun on Warthog jets, nuclear weapons, and jet fighter engines. Liberal my ass. It’s another corporate network that aligns with the right whenever war’s need to be promoted, or the Federal Reserve’s dominance over the political system needs protecting. Morning Joe (Scarborough) is right punditry with Trilateral Commission founder, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s daughter, Mikka as co-host. MSNBC also has a show Andrea Mitchell, the wife of former Fed chairman Allan Greenspan. You can see a pattern of global financial rulers in firm control over the American media, covered as well in Mendacious Media and CIA’s Mockingbird News Network.

So Maddow doesn’t owe her exalted position on the Titanic of news organizations because of her superior intellect, but because she’s a corporate propagandist. A far superior broadcast journalist Abby Martin takes Maddow apart in this video.

In a world where people who champion truth and justice are valued more by society than people who accumulate wealth and power,  journalists such as Abby Martin would be at the top level of the profession while phony yellow journalists such as Maddow would be lucky to empty Martin’s trash cans.

Martin is proof that the very best journalists are not allowed to be journalists, perhaps this helps explain the rise in private on-line news and blog sites. Below, Martin exposes Bill Maher as the simpleton fool, intolerant of 9/11 truth. On his show of October 2007, Maher is interrupted by people in the audience holding up 9/11 truth banners and shouting out. His annoyance with the interruptions is understandable, but when he jumps up and threatens to kick their ass, one can only laugh at the Pee Wee Herman-like ferocity. Maher, like Maddow, like Taibbi, like Hartmann, and some of the others, feel it’s ok to conduct a one sided debate about 9/11 with no opponent, they are knockoffs of the time Clint Eastwood debated with the empty chair at the republican national convention in 2012, where he imagined Obama to be sitting. The aforementioned anti-truthers have unblemished record of  victories in debating truthers, the ones sitting in Eastwood’s empty chair. Here again Martin discusses the capitulation and absurdities of Bill Maher.

The debate I have in mind should be held in Maher’s studio, he is already selected to be on the left gatekeepers panel advocating and supporting the chicken hawk neocons. I’d like to see the smugness on his face when he has to explain how steel can offer the same resistance as air. I’m serious, Mr. Maher, please invite me, a virtual nobody, on your show, lets just say I will represent working class common sense. I will pick one or two from my panel to provide additional expertise and you can champion the official story and have Dick Cheney and L Paul Bremmer for your technical experts. What do you say? You’re not scared are you, like you admit at the conclusion of the video above? If you pundits are really so tired of hearing about 9/11 truth then this is your opportunity to put it to rest once and for all.

The rules of the debate dictate it must be broadcast to a national and international audience with lots of advertising of the event, much like the media circus surrounding the Super Bowl. The truth must be exposed to all and those hiding the truth must be exposed to all. The physics will be the jury, the public will be the judge.

Since the volume of physical and circumstantial evidence supporting controlled demolition is mountainous and conclusive, we can’t review everything here, but we can lay out the basic contentions of the two sides. The left gatekeepers and Bush/Cheney neocons contend 19, mostly Arab, Muslim extremists overtook four airliners with box cutters and flew the planes into the North Tower, the South Tower, the Pentagon and crashed a jet in Shawshank, Pennsylvania, thereby triggering our invasion into Afghanistan, and pivoting into Iraq, and the wars and destabilization has metastasized into Syria and elsewhere, slowly drawing us into military conflict with Russia and Iran.

The left gatekeepers forget to mention how desperate the neocons from PNAC and their oil tycoon clients were to subdue the Taliban so CENTGAS pipelines from the Caspian Sea could be constructed. Go ahead and repeat the official motive for invading Afghanistan and we can summarize the real motives detailed here in Paul Thompson’s Pipeline Politics.

This oversight can be addressed at the debate, the media will have to come up with excuses as to why the American public, overall, doesn’t know about Building No. 7, the people will be even more agitated to learn about the importance of the pipelines, now called TAPI, for Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, pipelines. They will be ready to kick some mainstream media ass when they learn that the VP of Unocal, John J. Maresca, as a member of Centgas, went before Congress in 1998 to plea for Congress to do something about the Taliban problem. People will rightly feel misled and lied to when they discover that not once, but twice, Houston oil tycoons brought contingents of Taliban to Houston and even Mt. Rushmore in attempt to win them over, and it didn’t work.

They will wonder why the media hasn’t informed them yet about US and British oil companies operating in Iraq, something not possible without the illegal invasion. This is why Dick Cheney held secret Whitehouse energy meetings where it was finally revealed the energy representatives were looking at maps of Iraq, well before 9/11. When the public at large learns of the PNAC document, “Rebuilding Americas Defenses” of 2000 that proclaimed US military/corporate full spectrum dominance of the globe could not be possible “absent a catalyzing and catastrophic event like a New Pearl Harbor,” there will be a united call for real investigations and a complete overhaul of the corporate media.

Researchers of 9/11 know all of this inside and out, but when this information is presented to the general public, with video aides, there will be revolution in the streets the next day and the media/propaganda circus will die and a new media of real reporters will rise to take its place.

Perhaps the best researcher and reporter on the most important subjects today is Kevin Ryan, his website is Dig Within. His story is another one of those amazing sidebars to the 9/11 event that simply needs to be known by all. Ryan has done the Office of the Attorney General’s work for them, the case is ready for court, here is just a tiny sample of his research and writing, exposing yet another member of the Bush crime family, and you have to wonder why none of the left gatekeepers have ever mentioned it.

After the 1993 bombing, a company called Stratesec was responsible for the overall integration of the new WTC security system.  In the few years leading up to 9/11, Stratesec also had contracts to provide security services for United Airlines, which owned two of the planes that were destroyed on 9/11, and Dulles Airport where American Airlines Flight 77 took off.

Stratesec’s board of directors included Marvin Bush, the brother of George W. Bush, and Wirt Dexter Walker III, a distant relative of the Bush brothers.  Marvin Bush joined the board of Stratesec after meeting members of the Al Sabah family on a trip to Kuwait with his father in April 1993.  During this trip, the Kuwaiti royals displayed enormous gratitude to the elder Bush for having saved their country from Saddam Hussein only two years earlier.

But the Bush-Kuwaiti connection went back much farther, to 1959, when the Kuwaitis helped to fund Bush’s start-up company, Zapata Off-Shore.  As a CIA business asset during this time, Bush and his company worked directly with the anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Do you recall anybody in the mainstream news or even alternative news mentioning Marvin Bush? Considering GHW Bush was sitting with Saudis and Bin Ladens at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in DC as members of the war profiteering Carlyle Group exactly one day before 9/11, you’d think at least the left gatekeepers would start to “lean forward,” to borrow MSNBC’s corny catch phrase. Here is a link to the mind-blowing connections between Saudis and the American establishment regarding 9/11

Maddow and Taibbi must have swallowed the Neocon motive, they hate us for our freedoms, or the liberal, Blowback theory, suggesting Muslims attacked us because we left bases in their Holy Land after the first GHW Bush/Kuwaiti oil war. It’s hard to understand how they can make this argument when the result of 9/11 was to have US and British military forces inundate the Middle East and kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims. You don’t poke your finger in a hornets nest, wiggle it around, then step back and declare, “That’ll show ‘em.” Yet, we are to believe the same Muslims who outsmarted our entire defense communities, weren’t smart enough to predict the consequences of attacking some buildings–you mean Osama had no idea we’d invade his adopted country, or didn’t care. Now that can only make sense to someone who thinks you can drop three buildings straight down with two jets. It’s stupid.

Here is a teaser of the subjects of our debate and you can imagine the left gatekeeper panel squirming as they search for plausible explanations to these incongruities and billion-to-one “coincidences” that all fell neatly in sequence, knowing their side of the aisle, the chicken hawk war mongering, oil tycoon, Halliburton/Blackwater felons, will be cheering them on and urging them to victory. You gotta love the irony.

We will address why zero planes were intercepted, despite standard operating procedure dictating that at least one US war plane would have reached at least one jetliner and showed a wing–nope, nada, nothing.  But the panel will find a reason and Cheney will smile that evil smirking smile of his. Then there’s the fact that no steel framed building has ever suffered such a collapse due to fire anywhere in the world at any time. They will have to explain why the alleged pilots, who couldn’t fly a Cessna, were able to fly at over 600 miles per hour at ground level, something the Pilots for 9/11 truth claim is impossible, but Maddow has a Rhodes Scholar so her superior knowledge trumps that of real, experienced pilots, much to Rumsfeld’s delight. We have Rudy Giuliani and others making announcements the buildings were going to fall, even the BBC announced the demise of the Solomon Building, WTC 7, 20 minutes BEFORE it fell. Nothing unusual here either, let the panel of left gatekeepers explain this while the neocons urge them on.

Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin debate limited aspects of 9/11 in this AlterNet piece from October 2008. I am amazed at the veracity with which Taibbi defends the bullshit official story. Griffin destroys Taibbi’s specious questions and Taibbi simply moves on when Griffin mentions any irrefutable hard evidence. In another interview on the website, the Daily Bantor, Taibbi says this about criticism that alleged Pentagon pilot about Hani Hanjour could not have flown the plane. Hanjour, the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon.

They’re really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn’t have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen.

I’ve ran into this specious argument before. So let’s say I take you outside and show you a hole in a concrete wall about three feet in diameter and I tell you a car crashed into the wall and burned up. Now you know it’s physically impossible for a car to fit in that hole so you challenge the story. So what Taibbi and others are saying is this, since you can’t account for the missing jet, it must be in there, otherwise you’d have a perfectly good explanation for its whereabouts. Yet, there’s not a single picture of the plane that allegedly hit the most protected building in the world, literally festooned with cameras, the FBI confiscated all videos anywhere in the area and have never released the black box they allegedly found.

We heard an announcement on Monday, September 10, 2001 by Donald Rumsfeld that 2.3 trillion dollars are missing or unaccounted for from the Pentagon budget, the next day, instead of ploughing the 757 directly into the center of the Pentagon, or Rumsfeld’s office, the jet makes a 270 degree maneuver that commercial pilots say is impossible at that speed and altitude for the best pilots in the world, and ploughs the jet directly into the accounting wing of the Pentagon. Does anybody recall that 2.3 trillion being found? Mission accomplished, mansions furnished.

Most serious 9/11 researchers prefer to move on from the Pentagon and the dearth of evidence at Shanksville because those events are harder to prove, so I will too, but what is really easy to prove is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to collapse three buildings with two jets. To believe otherwise is to proclaim an embarrassing lack of understanding of basic physics. The art and discipline of bringing down buildings into their own footprint has been learned over many decades and requires the same knowledge to demolish a building as it does to construct it. Blue prints are studied, the core is drilled and fitted with explosives, support columns are fitted with cutter charges in strategic locations, the entire network is connected via radio transmitters to a control panel, the computer sequences the explosions to mimic free fall and then they let gravity do the rest. To think this can randomly occur is to believe you can perform heart surgery on someone by strapping them to a board and throwing knives at them.

The biggest irony of all, is that these left gatekeepers apparently are not as progressive as they pretend, their very approach is racist, they are saying, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, that only dark skinned Muslims could be diabolical enough to commit such a heinous act, no white Christian or Jew could ever stoop so low. Hmm, maybe they’re right, as I search history in my mind I can’t think of any white folk who have ever acted with such evil.

In reality, these same left gatekeeper have all excoriated the neocons– who are rooting for them in the Great Debate–about their lying and fabrication of evidence that led to the invasion of Iraq. The VERY SAME people who are suspect in 9/11, went on to falsify information leading to the incredibly illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq which has resulted in the violent deaths of over 6,ooo American and Coalition troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the left gatekeepers know this and yet they somehow are not able to consider the same cretins are responsible for 9/11.

To be fair, we can only suspect they are coddled city slickers with no real world common sense, and simply don’t understand basic physics, or they know their careers depend on them playing ignorant, in either case, the right wing pundits were correct, left gatekeepers really are soft on terrorism–domestic terrorism.